| author | Alan Dipert
<alan@dipert.org> 2025-10-08 05:55:44 UTC |
| committer | Alan Dipert
<alan@dipert.org> 2025-10-08 05:55:44 UTC |
| parent | bc4c98e2de18f8bac2ab7c16b79d3258dcfc81c2 |
| Makefile | +1 | -1 |
| md/WellReadUndergrad.md | +290 | -22 |
| tpl/style.css | +3 | -0 |
diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile index d6f8488..1e6e0d6 100644 --- a/Makefile +++ b/Makefile @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ HEAD := tpl/head.html FOOT := tpl/foot.html CSS := tpl/style.css MD2HTML ?= /usr/bin/cmark-gfm -CMARK_FLAGS := --to html --extension table --validate-utf8 +CMARK_FLAGS := --to html --extension table --validate-utf8 --unsafe BUILDINFO := tools/buildinfo.sh INDEX_HTML := $(OUT)/Index.html DEPLOY_HOST ?= arsien23i2@dreamhost:tailrecursion.com/~alan diff --git a/md/WellReadUndergrad.md b/md/WellReadUndergrad.md index bb80506..ad6dee4 100644 --- a/md/WellReadUndergrad.md +++ b/md/WellReadUndergrad.md @@ -1,35 +1,303 @@ # WellReadUndergrad Created Tuesday 17 November 2020 -The following is adapted from a Word document titled [What Every Educated Person Should Know about Philosophy](./WellReadUndergrad/phil-lt5.doc). My dad [RandallRDipert](./RandallRDipert.md) created the document in 1998 while he was a philosophy professor at [West Point](https://www.westpoint.edu/). The document was later [available on his web site,](https://web.archive.org/web/20000919054115/http://www.neologic.net/rd/courses.htm) where he described it as: - -*A list of books and articles, concepts, and quotations which I suggest every college graduate should know; also, extended to a graduate who is a philosophy major. A bit grandiose, overreaching, and pompous--but maybe suggestive of something useful.* +The following is adapted from a Word document titled [What Every Educated Person Should Know about Philosophy](./WellReadUndergrad/phil-lt5.doc). My dad [RandallRDipert](./RandallRDipert.md) created the document in 1998 while he was a philosophy professor at [West Point](https://www.westpoint.edu/). The document was later [available on his web site](https://web.archive.org/web/20000919054115/http://www.neologic.net/rd/courses.htm), where he described it as: +> A list of books and articles, concepts, and quotations which I suggest every college graduate should know; also, extended to a graduate who is a philosophy major. A bit grandiose, overreaching, and pompous—but maybe suggestive of something useful. ***** -What Every Educated Person Should Know in Philosophy ----------------------------------------------------- +## I. What Every Educated Person Should Know in Philosophy + +A well-read undergraduate should ideally have read, or at least be somewhat familiar with, many or most of the works in **boldface**. The color guide below highlights introductory difficulty: <span class="level-one">entry paths</span>, <span class="level-two">next steps</span>, and <span class="level-three">challenging introductions</span>. Other works round out a suggested reading list for the aspiring philosophy major. + +### Novels and Other Literature with Philosophical Substance + +- Aristophanes — <em>The Clouds</em> (satire of philosophy and Socrates) +- Alexander Pope — <span class="level-one"><em>Essay on Man</em></span> (long poem wrestling with religious metaphysics) +- Voltaire — <em>Candide</em> (parody of Leibniz) and shorter satires +- J.W. von Goethe — <em>Faust</em> +- Fyodor Dostoevsky — <span class="level-three"><em>Crime and Punishment</em></span> (or <span class="level-three"><em>Notes from the Underground</em></span>); <span class="level-three"><em>The Brothers Karamazov</em></span> (especially “The Grand Inquisitor”) +- Hermann Hesse — <span class="level-one"><em>Siddharta</em></span> (novella) +- Albert Camus — <span class="level-one"><em>The Stranger</em></span>; <em>The Plague</em>; <em>The Myth of Sisyphus</em> (essays on meaning and suicide) +- Ayn Rand — <em>The Fountainhead</em>; <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> +- Jean-Paul Sartre — <span class="level-two"><em>No Exit</em></span> (play) +- Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) — <span class="level-two"><em>Alice in Wonderland</em></span> (best revisited after studying logic); <em>Through the Looking-Glass</em> +- T.S. Eliot — <em>The Waste Land</em>; <em>Four Quartets</em> +- Robert Pirsig — <span class="level-three"><em>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</em></span>; <em>Lila</em> +- Iris Murdoch — novels rich with philosophical dilemmas + +### Semi-Popular or Not Strictly Philosophical Essays + +- Michel de Montaigne — <span class="level-one"><em>Essays</em></span> (“That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” “Of Friendship,” “Of Cannibals,” “Of Custom…,” “Our Feelings Reach Beyond Us”) +- Immanuel Kant — “Perpetual Peace”; “What Is Enlightenment?” +- Ralph Waldo Emerson — <em>Essays</em> (“Friendship,” “Nature,” “Self-Reliance”) +- Henry David Thoreau — <span class="level-one"><em>Walden</em></span>; <span class="level-one"><em>Essay on Civil Disobedience</em></span> +- C.S. Peirce — “The Fixation of Belief”; “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” +- W.K. Clifford — <span class="level-two">“The Ethics of Belief”</span> +- William James — <span class="level-two">“The Will to Believe”</span>; <em>Pragmatism</em>; “The Moral Equivalent of War”; “The Pragmatic Theory of Truth” +- Sigmund Freud — <em>The Interpretation of Dreams</em>; <em>The Future of an Illusion</em>; <em>Civilization and Its Discontents</em>; <em>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</em> +- Bertrand Russell — “A Free Man’s Worship”; selections from <em>Why I Am Not a Christian</em> +- Isaiah Berlin — essays such as “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (in <em>Russian Thinkers</em>) +- Ayn Rand — <em>The Virtue of Selfishness</em>; <em>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</em>; John Galt’s speech in <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> + +### History of Philosophy + +#### Ancient & Medieval + +- Plato — <span class="level-one"><em>Apology</em></span>; <em>Crito</em>; <em>Phaedo</em>; <span class="level-three"><em>Republic</em></span>; <em>Symposium</em>; <em>Phaedrus</em>; <em>Meno</em>; for majors: <em>Euthyphro</em>; <em>Theaetetus</em> +- Aristotle — <span class="level-three"><em>Nicomachean Ethics</em></span>; <span class="level-two"><em>Poetics</em></span>; key portions of the treatises for majors +- Epictetus — <span class="level-two"><em>Enchiridion</em></span> +- Augustine — selections on free will and time; portions of <em>Confessions</em> +- Anselm — <em>Proslogion</em> +- Thomas Aquinas — portions of <em>Summa Theologiae</em> (especially the Five Ways) + +#### Modern + +- René Descartes — <span class="level-one"><em>Meditations</em></span>; <em>Discourse on Method</em>; <em>Principles of Philosophy</em> +- Thomas Hobbes — <em>Leviathan</em> +- Blaise Pascal — selections (including the Wager) +- John Locke — <em>Essay Concerning Human Understanding</em> (portions); <span class="level-two"><em>Second Treatise of Government</em></span> +- Baruch Spinoza — <em>Ethics</em> (presented geometrically) +- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — <em>Discourse on Metaphysics</em> +- George Berkeley — <em>Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous</em>; <em>Principles of Human Knowledge</em> +- David Hume — <em>An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding</em> (parts); <span class="level-two"><em>Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion</em></span> +- Jean-Jacques Rousseau — <em>The Social Contract</em> +- Immanuel Kant — <span class="level-two"><em>Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals</em></span>; “Perpetual Peace”; “What Is Enlightenment?”; <span class="level-two"><em>Critique of Pure Reason</em></span> (or <em>Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics</em>) +- John Stuart Mill — <span class="level-one"><em>On Liberty</em></span>; <span class="level-two"><em>Utilitarianism</em></span> +- Karl Marx — key selections summarizing major views +- Søren Kierkegaard — signature works (e.g., <em>Fear and Trembling</em>) +- William James — <span class="level-two"><em>The Varieties of Religious Experience</em></span> (especially “Mysticism”) +- Friedrich Nietzsche — <span class="level-two"><em>Beyond Good and Evil</em></span> and other mature works +- Bertrand Russell — <span class="level-one"><em>The Problems of Philosophy</em></span>; <em>Logic and Knowledge</em> + +#### General Histories + +- Bertrand Russell — <em>History of Western Philosophy</em> (opinionated but readable) +- Frederick Copleston — multi-volume <em>History of Philosophy</em> +- W.T. Jones — multi-volume <em>History of Western Philosophy</em> +- William Matson — <em>A New History of Philosophy</em> (lively, two volumes) +- Roger Scruton — <em>A Short History of Modern Philosophy</em> +- D.W. Hamlyn — <em>The Penguin History of Philosophy</em> +- Robert C. Solomon & Kathleen Higgins — <em>A Passion for Wisdom</em> +- Robert C. Solomon et al. — <em>A Short History of Philosophy</em> +- Anthony Kenny — <em>The Oxford History of Western Philosophy</em>; <em>The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy</em> +- Samuel Stumpf — <em>Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy</em> +- Matthew Stewart — <em>The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy</em> +- Ben-Ami Sharfstein — <em>A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant</em> +- Mary Warnock — <em>Women Philosophers</em> (anthology) +- A.J. Ayer & Jane O’Grady — <em>A Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations</em> + +### Twentieth-Century Themes + +#### Ethics and Political Philosophy +- John Rawls — <span class="level-three"><em>Justice as Fairness</em></span> +- Martha Nussbaum — <em>The Fragility of Goodness</em> +- Robert Nozick — <em>Anarchy, State, and Utopia</em> +- Alasdair MacIntyre — <em>After Virtue</em> +- Richard Brandt — <span class="level-two"><em>Ethical Theory</em></span> (or comparable survey of metaethics and normative theory) + +#### Existentialism and Continental Thought +- William Barrett — <em>Irrational Man</em> +- Robert C. Solomon — <em>The Passions</em>; <em>The Existentialists</em>; <em>Continental Philosophy Since 1750</em> +- L. Nathan Oaklander — <em>Existentialist Philosophy</em> +- Edmund Husserl — representative phenomenology +- Jean-Paul Sartre — selections from <em>Existentialism Is a Humanism</em> and <em>Being and Nothingness</em> +- Martin Heidegger — essays such as “What Is a Thing?” +- Michel Foucault — <em>The Foucault Reader</em> (ed. Paul Rabinow) +- David H. Richter (ed.) — <span class="level-two"><em>The Critical Tradition</em></span> + +#### Analytic Philosophy +- Gottlob Frege — <span class="level-three">“On Sense and Reference,” introduction to <em>Begriffsschrift</em>, “On Concept and Object,” “On Function and Concept,” “On Russell’s Paradox”</span> +- Bertrand Russell — “On Denoting”; essays on logical atomism in <em>Logic and Knowledge</em> +- G.E. Moore — <span class="level-two"><em>Principia Ethica</em></span> (chapter 1); “The Refutation of Idealism” +- A.J. Ayer — “The Principle of Verification”; “The Elimination of Metaphysics” +- Ludwig Wittgenstein — <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</em>; <em>Blue and Brown Books</em>; <em>Zettel</em>; <em>Philosophical Investigations</em>; <em>On Certainty</em> +- Gilbert Ryle — “Descartes’ Myth” +- J.L. Austin — “A Plea for Excuses”; “Other Minds” +- Alan Turing — <span class="level-one">“Computing Machinery and Intelligence”</span> +- Edmund Gettier — “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” +- W.V.O. Quine — “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”; “On What There Is” +- John Searle — “What Is a Speech Act?” +- Richard Rorty — <em>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</em> +- Thomas Nagel — <span class="level-one">“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”</span> + +#### Science Writing with Philosophical Reach +- Thomas Kuhn — <span class="level-three"><em>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</em></span> +- Paul Feyerabend — <em>Against Method</em> +- Loren Eiseley — <em>The Immense Journey</em> and related essays +- Sherwin Nuland — <em>How We Die</em> +- Lewis Thomas — essays such as “Germs” +- E.O. Wilson — <em>Sociobiology</em>; <em>Consilience</em> + +#### Mathematics, Logic, and AI +- Edwin Abbott — <em>Flatland</em> +- A.K. Dewdney — <em>The (New) Turing Omnibus</em>; <em>The Tinkertoy Computer</em> +- Philip Davis & Reuben Hersh — <em>The Mathematical Experience</em> +- Martin Gardner — classic mathematical recreations +- Douglas Hofstadter — <span class="level-three"><em>Gödel, Escher, Bach</em></span>; <em>Metamagical Themas</em> +- Ivars Peterson — <em>The Mathematical Tourist</em>; <em>Islands of Truth</em> +- George Pólya — <em>How to Solve It</em> +- John Allen Paulos — <em>Innumeracy</em>; <em>Beyond Innumeracy</em> + +#### Biographies and Intellectual Portraits +- Gay Wilson Allen — <em>William James</em> +- Ray Monk — <em>Wittgenstein</em>; <em>Bertrand Russell</em> +- Paul Levy — <em>Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles</em> +- Ved Mehta — <em>The Fly and the Fly Bottle</em> +- Paul Feyerabend — <em>Killing Time</em> (autobiography) + +#### Logic and Philosophical Reasoning +- Nicholas Falletta — <em>Paradoxicon</em> +- Irving Copi & Carl Cohen — <span class="level-one"><em>Introduction to Logic</em></span> +- Irving Copi — <em>Symbolic Logic</em> +- Richard Jeffrey — <em>Formal Logic</em> +- Harry Gensler — <em>Symbolic Logic</em> +- George Boolos & Richard Jeffrey — <em>Computability and Logic</em> + +#### Philosophy of Religion +- Anselm of Canterbury — ontological argument in <em>Proslogion</em> +- Thomas Aquinas — Five Ways in <em>Summa Theologiae</em> +- Blaise Pascal — Pascal’s Wager +- William James & W.K. Clifford — essays cited above +- Søren Kierkegaard & Friedrich Nietzsche — the leap of faith; “God is dead” +- Martin Buber — selections from <em>I and Thou</em> +- Sigmund Freud — <em>The Future of an Illusion</em>; <em>Moses and Monotheism</em> +- Bertrand Russell — skeptical essays noted earlier + +#### Other Branches of Philosophy +Every philosophy major should grapple with the central debates in philosophy of language, mind, science, aesthetics, mathematics, history, logic, and action theory. Series from Prentice-Hall, Oxford, and others provide approachable overviews of each subdiscipline. + +## II. Philosophical Words and Phrases + +A vocabulary list drawn from E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s *Cultural Literacy* with additions highlighted in Dipert’s original. + +| Term | Term | Term | Term | +| --- | --- | --- | --- | +| abduction | <span class="level-one">reductio ad absurdum</span> | ad hoc | ad infinitum | +| aesthetics | affirming the consequent | agnosticism | analogy | +| analytic/synthetic distinction | animism | anthropomorphism | aphorism | +| a priori / a posteriori | <span class="level-one">aretē</span> | Thomas Aquinas | aristocracy | +| atheism | Augustine | autocracy | axiom | +| Barbara (syllogism) | Allegory of the Cave | Chinese room (thought experiment) | Cicero | +| civil disobedience | class struggle | communism | <span class="level-one">Communist Manifesto</span> | +| <span class="level-one">Confessions</span> | <span class="level-two">Copernican Revolution</span> | <span class="level-one">cosmological argument</span> | Confucius | +| cultural relativism | deconstruction | deduction | <span class="level-one"><em>De gustibus non est disputandum</em></span> | +| deism | Delphic oracle | democracy | Cartesian demon | +| denotation | deontology | Descartes, René | determinism | +| dialectic | dialectical materialism | Divided Line | Cartesian dualism | +| Jonathan Edwards | egoism | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | emotivism | +| empiricism | the Enlightenment | Epicureanism | epistemology | +| Erasmus | <em>ergo</em> | ethical relativism | ethics | +| ethos | eudaimonia | extension vs. intension | existentialism | +| fallacy | fideism | Five Ways | Platonic forms | +| gerontocracy | Gestalt psychology | ghost in the machine | golden mean | +| hedonism | Hobbes, Thomas | holism | hypothesis | +| idealism (metaphysics) | individualism | innate ideas | induction | +| inference | intentionality | <em>In vino veritas</em> | James, William | +| <em>je ne sais quoi</em> | Johnson, Samuel | justification by faith / grace / works | justice as fairness | +| Kant, Immanuel | <em>Das Kapital</em> | Lao-tse | Leibniz | +| liar paradox | Lenin, Vladimir | <em>Leviathan</em> | liberalism (classical, American) | +| libertarianism | Locke, John | <em>locus classicus</em> | Machiavelli | +| materialism | “Meaning is use.” | meaning / reference (Frege) | medieval | +| metaphysics | Middle Ages | Mill, John Stuart | monism | +| monotheism | Montaigne | Montesquieu | More, Thomas | +| mysticism | naturalism | natural law | natural rights | +| nature–nurture controversy | Nietzsche, Friedrich | nihilism | “No man is an island.” | +| non sequitur | Occidental philosophy | oligarchy | oligopoly | +| “One is what one eats.” | “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” | ontological argument | ontology | +| pacifism | paradox | paradigm | Pascal, Blaise | +| Pascal’s Wager | Peirce, Charles Sanders | performatives | philistinism | +| philosopher-king | philosopher’s stone | Plato | Platonism | +| pluralism | plutocracy | polytheism | Pope, Alexander | +| positivism | postulate | pragmatism | predestination | +| predicate | <em>The Prince</em> | Procrustean bed | proletariat | +| <em>quod erat demonstrandum</em> (Q.E.D.) | <em>raison d’être</em> | red herring | reductio | +| the Reformation | relativism | the Renaissance | rhetoric | +| Ring of Gyges | Russell, Bertrand | Russell’s paradox | Sartre, Jean-Paul | +| scholasticism | <em>Self-Reliance</em> | semantics | semiotics | +| <em>sine qua non</em> | Socrates | sophist | speech-act theory | +| Spinoza, Baruch | stoicism | subjectivism | syntax | +| <em>tabula rasa</em> | teleological argument | theocracy | Thomism | +| Thoreau, Henry David | totalitarianism | transubstantiation | Turing Test | +| universals | use / mention | utilitarianism | utopia | +| <em>Verstehen</em> | vicious circle | Voltaire | <em>Weltanschauung</em> | +| Wittgenstein, Ludwig | Zeno’s paradox | Zeitgeist | <span class="level-two">Mill’s methods</span> | +| <span class="level-two">Arrow’s theorem</span> | <span class="level-two">Prisoner’s dilemma</span> | | | -A well-read undergraduate should ideally have read, or at least be somewhat familiar with the content of, many or most of the works in **boldface**. (Works that can be read first have one asterisk; works to read next, two asterisks; and the hardest introductory works have three asterisks.) Other works are listed as part of a suggested reading list for a well-read undergraduate major in philosophy. +## III. Famous, Short Quotations from the History of Philosophy -### Novels and other Literature with Philosophical Substance +> “It is not possible to step into the same river twice.” — Heraclitus +> “Nature loves to hide.” — Heraclitus +> “If cattle, horses, or lions had hands, they would draw the forms of gods like cattle, horses, or lions.” — Xenophanes +> “Man is the measure of all things.” — Protagoras +> “Know yourself!” — Delphic maxim (via Socrates) +> “The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates +> “No one does wrong intentionally.” — Socrates +> “Philosophy begins in wonder.” — Plato +> “The true lover of knowledge … soars with undimmed passion until he grasps the essential nature of things.” — Plato +> “I am human; I think of nothing human as foreign to me.” — Terence +> “So the good has been explained as that at which all things aim.” — Aristotle +> “Man is by definition a rational animal.” — Aristotle (echoed by Aquinas) +> “Man is by nature a political animal.” — Aristotle +> “The human good turns out to be the activity of the soul in conformity with excellence.” — Aristotle +> “Plato is dear to me, but the truth is dearer still.” — attributed to Aristotle +> “There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.” — Cicero +> “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; I believe so that I may understand.” — Anselm +> “God is that than which no greater can be thought.” — Anselm +> “It is necessary to assume something … and this all men call God.” — Thomas Aquinas +> “Since we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not…” — Thomas Aquinas +> “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” — William of Ockham (attributed) +> “Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen.” — Montaigne +> “I think, therefore I am.” — René Descartes +> “Common sense is the best-distributed commodity in the world.” — René Descartes +> “… the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” — Thomas Hobbes +> “No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience.” — John Locke +> “To be is to be perceived.” — George Berkeley +> “I refute it thus.” — Samuel Johnson (as recorded by Boswell) +> “’Tis not, therefore, reason, which is the guide of life, but custom.” — David Hume +> “Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.” — David Hume +> “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau +> “I have no need of that hypothesis.” — Pierre-Simon Laplace (about God) +> “Two things fill the mind with ever new awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” — Immanuel Kant +> “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” — Immanuel Kant +> “Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” — Immanuel Kant +> “The greatest happiness for the greatest number.” — Bentham / Mill +> “It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” — John Stuart Mill +> “What experience and history teach is that people never learn anything from history.” — Georg Hegel +> “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson +> “One is what one eats.” — Ludwig Feuerbach +> “Religion is the opiate of the people.” — Karl Marx +> “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” — Karl Marx +> “That government is best which governs least.” — Henry David Thoreau +> “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors.” — Friedrich Nietzsche +> “There are no facts, only interpretations.” — Friedrich Nietzsche +> “Every word is a prejudice.” — Friedrich Nietzsche +> “Consider what effects we conceive the object of our conception to have—that is the whole of our conception of the object.” — C.S. Peirce +> “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton +> “Contrariwise … that’s logic.” — Lewis Carroll +> “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” — Lewis Carroll +> “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana (attributed) +> “All of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.” — Alfred North Whitehead (attributed) +> “The Nothing nothings.” — Martin Heidegger +> “Language is the house of Being.” — Martin Heidegger +> “All metaphysics … speaks the language of Plato.” — Martin Heidegger +> “Insofar as the statements of geometry speak about reality, they are not certain…” — Albert Einstein (paraphrasing Kant) +> “… man is condemned to be free.” — Jean-Paul Sartre +> “Hell is other people.” — Jean-Paul Sartre +> “First comes the grub, then comes morality.” — Bertolt Brecht +> “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein +> “Every sign by itself seems dead; in use it is alive.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein +> “… philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein +> “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” — Noam Chomsky +> “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” — Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) +> “What is there? Everything.” — W.V.O. Quine +> “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” — W.V.O. Quine -| Author | Work | -|:--------------------------------|:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| -| Aristophanes | *The Clouds* (satire of philosophy and Socrates) | -| Alexander Pope | *Essay on Man* (long poem in English, religious metaphysics) | -| Voltaire | *Candide* (parody of Leibniz) and other short works | -| J.W. von Goethe | *Faust* | -| Fyodor Dostoevsky | ***Crime and Punishment (or Notes from the Underground)***, ***The Brothers Karamazov*** (esp. section "Grand Inquisitor") | -| Hermann Hesse | ***Siddharta*** (novella) | -| Albert Camus | **The Stranger**; The Plague (novels)<br>, The Myth of Sisyphus (essays, meaning of life, suicide) | -| Ayn Rand | *The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged* | -| Jean-Paul Sartre | ****No Exit** (drama) | -| Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) | ****Alice in Wonderland** (read as an adult, preferably after<br> studying some logic)<br>, *Through the Looking Glass* (logic) | -| T.S. Eliot | Several works, especially *The Waste Land and Four Quartets* | -| Robert Pirsig | ***Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<br>**, Lila | +## IV. A Note on the Very Idea of a Philosophical Canon +Dipert’s mini-canon tips its hat to Harold Bloom’s *The Western Canon* and to E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s crusade for cultural literacy, but applies the logic to philosophy. That raises perennial debates: Do canons over-celebrate dead Western men? How do we fold in non-Western traditions? Does “classicizing” our reading harden culture or help us think? -TODO +With philosophy the stakes shift. The aim is not merely knowing arguments but cultivating wisdom—an ability to judge what is true or valuable. Reading mountains of philosophy, on its own, is neither necessary nor sufficient. It helps only when paired with conceptual discipline, logical skill, interpretive charity, emotional maturity, worldly experience, methodological self-awareness, tolerance for unpopular ideas, and, most of all, a spark of wonder. +Reciting or memorizing canonical works without that spark is like memorizing music while remaining tone-deaf. Philosophy demands internal motivation and good taste for truth. Dipert’s selections are guideposts, not guarantees: prompts to explore the conversations that built the discipline and invitations to wrestle with them firsthand. diff --git a/tpl/style.css b/tpl/style.css index 5f2fc11..6d90da2 100644 --- a/tpl/style.css +++ b/tpl/style.css @@ -62,6 +62,9 @@ body{ a{color:var(--link);} img[src*="float_right"]{float:right;border-radius:.75em;} img[src*="200px"]{width:200px;} +.level-one{background:#e6f7ff;color:#0b5394;padding:0 .25em;border-radius:.25em;} +.level-two{background:#fff4e6;color:#a45f02;padding:0 .25em;border-radius:.25em;} +.level-three{background:#fde7eb;color:#9c0d38;padding:0 .25em;border-radius:.25em;} .content table{width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;margin:1.5rem 0;box-shadow:inset 0 -1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,.05);} .content th, .content td{padding:.5rem .75rem;border-bottom:1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.08);}