7 Philosophy Books For Beginners (3)

My 7 philosophy books for beginners, along with the back-up reading, is pretty hardcore. It's also definitely Dead White European Male, and none of it is post 1960's except the books on logic and argument.

Why?

The central tenet of Western Philosophy is that human beings have free will, agency, and rationality, and hence that we are responsible for our actions and decisions, and in particular for our decisions about the plausibility and verisimilitude of a theory or the practicality and desirability of a social, political or economic policy.

We cannot lay off those responsibilities to any temporal, spiritual, legal or transcendental authority. Such an authority can impose a decision by legal, physical, social, or economic force, but while that is an excuse for our compliance, it is not a reason. And we may have to behave in accordance with the authority, but whether we choose to accept their propaganda is our decision. Neither does “expert opinion” remove the responsibility: we have to use our experience to decide for ourselves whether the “experts” are credible.

Western Philosophy goes against the natural human tendency to want to form and join in-groups, to work within a cosy consensus, and to lay off as much responsibility as possible on (possibly self-appointed) "authorities". The majority of people prefer to live in that way, and that includes the majority of people working in the philosophy departments of universities. (Academics did not cover themselves with glorious dissent in 2020-2022.) This shows in the way much modern philosophy is written. In Anglo-Saxon (UK, US, Australia and New Zealand) academic philosophy, one does not discuss a problem directly, but indirectly through a rehearsal and criticism of previous philosophers' views. The modest philosopher typically presents their views as a modification or updating of the views of one of a handful of Big Names, or better still, someone quite obscure. It's all a bit... cloistered.

Whereas the foundational works were written by men of the world who often had some expertise in the science and mathematics of the time, as well as sometimes occupying positions of political influence. I have said that "mathematics was created by clever people busy doing something else", and the same was true of philosophy. So I wanted to suggest books of that calibre, not tidy textbooks with a bunch of cute arguments about the existence of God, Free Will, Right and Wrong, the existence and nature of the soul and / or mind, and whether Damien Hirst is really an artist. Philosophers have discussed those questions, and still do. (The only thing more embarrassing than philosophers discussing those questions, is non-philosophers discussing those questions.)

Books with dogmatic intent, that push a single line and vilify all who dare disagree, were never going to get a look in. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an argument for consensus and groupthink - even though Kuhn says he never meant it to be - so it would never be on the list. Neither were books full of clever arguments from dubious principles to even more dubious conclusions (Peter Singer, Practical Ethics), since that sort of sophistry gives philosophy a bad name.