The Perfect Philosophy Course: History of Philosophy

Every now and then I distract myself with devising the perfect philosophy course. I did a joint honours Mathematics and Philosophy degree in my youth, and, well, this is what I'd do if it were me.

For the first two years there would be three strands common to single and joint honours: 1) Logic, Rhetoric and Epistemology; 2) History of Philosophy; 3) Morality, Law and the Good Life.

So here's the History reading list – and this is over two years. It's all the originals – no secondary works. There is no substitute for reading the Masters in the original. It isn't the Big Name Classics from each author (with a couple of exceptions) because those will turn up in the other sections.

The Symposium – Plato; The History of Animals – Aristotle; Dialogues and Essays - Seneca; Confessions – St Augustine; Selected Writings – St Thomas Aquinas; Guide for the Perplexed - Moses Maimonides; Novum Organum – Francis Bacon; The Prince – Machiavelli; In Praise of Folly - Erasmus; Discourse on Method – Descartes; Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money – John Locke; Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime – Immanuel Kant; The World as Will and Representation – Arthur Schopenhauer; The Philosophy of History – G W F Hegel; The Subjection of Women – John Stuart Mill; The Gay Science – Nietzsche; The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic – Henri Bergson; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – Ludwig Wittgenstein; Being and Time – Heidegger; Language, Truth and Logic – A J Ayer; The Effective Executive – Peter F Drucker; The Art of War - Sun-Tzu; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – T S Kuhn; Against Method – Paul Feyerabend; The Meaning of Evil - Jean Baudrillard.