Reddit reviews The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

Being fifteen myself, I've watched your videos coming from a point of someone interested looking for more help and they were disappointing. As a reference, I've watched all your videos offered on logic and some of your videos on metaphysics and ethics. To make this easier I'll group my reasons on why I wasn't able to recommend your videos to my peers into categories.

Ethics -
I think your ethics section is lacking a lot. I do think that your videos on God and the concept of evil is an important part of ethics but I sometimes feel like you're using those videos to debate whether God exists or not, which shouldn't be primarily discussed in a field like ethics. I would also say grouping political philosophy and ethics together was a big mistake and you really should make that it's own section. I wouldn't start people off with Rawls either. Hobbes and Rousseau is a great topic for a video in the category of ethics and political philosophy. That should be an example of something that could be put into an ethics section, the human nature debate.

Structure -
Your videos don't seem to have a defined structure and I think you run the risk of becoming a subject like math to most children, where people don't understand it because it feels like memorization of terms and theories rather then something creative and abstract, which a majority of philosophy is about. You should be teaching all of these categories as it progressed historically. I actually would rather have it setup to learn about a certain philosopher and their thinking instead of just ideas without telling us who even said them, which is what you're currently doing. DK used the format that I've just expressed in their new book, [The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained] (http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Book-Ideas-Simply-Explained/dp/0756668611) and [8-Bit Philosophy] (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLghL9V9QTN0jve4SE0fs33K1VEoXyL-Mn) as well, which is a very popular YouTube series that most redditors in philosophy groups recommend to newcomers. The most popular philosophy podcast on itunes, [The Partially Examined Life] (http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/), also uses this format and is heavily recommended by redditors.

Audience -
I really think that you're videos aren't going to help teenagers (the majority group on Khan Academy) learn anything they find interesting and peek their interest in philosophy. It's going to feel like they're in a subject they don't like, that feels overwhelming to them, and a lot of effort to understand. You really need to start making videos on continental philosophy as well other areas that most teenagers are going to actively be interested in instead of analytic philosophy, which is very important but most teenagers won't care about. Due to this reason alone, I simply can't recommend your videos to anyone of my peers.

The Philosophy Book is great fun for getting your feet wet with both the history and ideas of philosophy. It keeps the topics exciting and informative.

I think my favourite introductory book was Blackburn's Think, which was just a good all-round explanation of lots of areas of philosophy. Another excellent book was The Philosophy Book which goes through the history of philosophy and explains the (or one of the) 'big idea' of the major philosophers. One really nice thing they do is for each of these they do a flow chart of the philosopher's argument for their view, which I found a really useful thing for understanding. Other very good introductory books are the philosophy-related books in the Very Short Introductions series by OUP, for example they have ones on lots of the big philosophers, as well as on ethics, free will, philosophy of science, existentialism, metaphysics, logic, the meaning of life etc.

For non-book stuff, I highly recommend the Philosophy bites podcast. Basically these are reasonably short (10-20 min) highly accessible interviews with professional philosophers. There have been so many now that there's one for practically any topic you find interesting and they are all very high quality philosophy.

What might also be useful to you are the resources on the Routledge site for the UK Philosophy A-Level (i.e. in the last two years of our equivalent of high school we do 3-5 A-Level qualifications, and one of the ones you can choose from is Philosophy) which Routledge publishes a textbook for. There are lots of pdf documents on there written to help students understand the various topics which are worth looking at. N.B. AS refers to the 1st year of A-Level and A2 to the second year, so the AS resources will be simpler than the A2 ones.

I was very annoyed with this in college. I wanted the same as you, and finally my Poli Sci professor told me if I wanted purity, study Philosophy. Politics is more about the gain and use of power than the morality or efficacy of policy.

I got these for my kids (no offense). They are a decent jumping off point to learn about other figures and philosophies.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Book-ebook/dp/B00BZF45N2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368335834&sr=1-1&keywords=the+politics+book

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Book-DK-Publishing/dp/0756698278/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368335834&sr=1-2&keywords=the+politics+book

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Book-Will-Buckingham/dp/0756668611/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368335834&sr=1-4&keywords=the+politics+book

u/lordjuicy here is a starter book that gives an overall view of different works:

The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained https://www.amazon.com/dp/0756668611/

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Book-Ideas-Simply-Explained/dp/0756668611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422561375&sr=8-1&keywords=philosophy+book

This one isn't too bad. It jumps around a bit though, and often makes bizarre choices of what to include or not. Like leaving out Kant's morals altogether despite it being rather one of the more important things to include. Also it's "subtly" anti religion in ways that it doesn't really need to be if that matters.

Correction* "The philosophyBook : Big ideas simply explained. "

Very easy to read. Every known (mostly) philosophers ideas chronologically summed up in a page each with helpful pictures. Will help you to understand some of the bigger ideas and questions the human race has faced and still facing today. Heavily religious in the early years its interesting to see how it has branched away with modern day science answering some of the earlier philosopher's questions.

Check this out: The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained DK Publishing Do... https://www.amazon.com/dp/0756668611/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdo_t1_jsSZBb8V431QT

Honestly... I quite enjoyed DK publishing's 'The Philosophy Book'.

It's a broad overview primer on philosophy as it evolves... and while it doesn't really get deep on philosophy in general, it does do a good job of introducing you to a broad range of ideas and allows you an understanding of how philosophy in general has evolved across the centuries.

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Book-Ideas-Simply-Explained/dp/0756668611

And from there, when you read the books from the philosophers introduced by 'The Philosophy Book', you'll get a much better sense of the context of their works.

I completely understand this. This might be a little different as advice but have you thought about reading philosophy? For me, Philosophy became my cure.

IMO, It should be mandatory in middle and high school.

Here's a book I picked up and read front to back:

Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

It raised points that I've always thought about and beyond.

If it's for world religions, you're going to find a difficult time finding a concise single volume that explains "philosophy" as a whole. What would be most helpful is an anthology, or several anthologies. As suggested here, The Story of Philosophy is a great resource; however, it only covers Western philosophy and they are not all focused specifically on a philosophy of religion.

But if you're looking for something that will just help you remember the heck everyone is talking about, try The Philosophy Book. It won't give you an in-depth look at anyone, and you shouldn't cite it in any papers, but it will help you remember broadly who talked about what.