Reddit Reddit reviews Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

We found 16 Reddit comments about Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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16 Reddit comments about Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy:

u/sinnnnner · 8 pointsr/philosophy

I like to recommend Simon Blackburn's Think as a primer. I would try reading Descartes' Meditations, Aristotle's 'Posterior Analytics', and perhaps G. E. Moore's Philosophical Papers (particularly his essay 'A Defense of Common Sense') alongside Blackburn's book. The recommendations in the sidebar have a few good suggestions (Williams, Blackburn, etc.) for introductory works on ethics.

u/professorboat · 7 pointsr/askphilosophy

I think Oxford's Very Short Introduction series is a pretty good place to start as far as books go. You can pick a part of philosophy you are interested in and find the introduction to that, or just read the general Philosophy intro. My personal favourite is the VSI to Philosophy of Science by Samir Okasha.

Another good introductory book is Think by Simon Blackburn.

I have found these good introductions, they are written by experts, and directed to the general reader, but without dumbing it down.

As far as the classics of philosophy go, someone else suggested Plato's dialogues and I would add Descartes' Meditations to that. It is short and a pretty good example of how modern philosophy operates. In it Descartes tries to find out what we can know for sure. It is reasonably easy to read too.

Of course, books can be quite expensive (if you torrent you can usually find downloads of many VSIs, and Meditations is out of copyright), and you shouldn't feel you have to have read any of these if you can find cheap copies.

u/simism66 · 5 pointsr/askphilosophy

No. Just use r/askphilosophy if you have any questions.

Or, if you're really interested, get an introduction to philosophy book. As introductions, I think the The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law and Think by Simon Blackburn are quite good. For a bit of a more in-depth introduction, The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy is very good.

u/naery · 3 pointsr/C25K

I usually think about the last chapter of this that I read. I try to poke holes in whatever logic I've just been studying. It's pretty awesome. But I only do that in between listening to music.

u/[deleted] · 3 pointsr/AskReddit

There have been some excellent responses here and I suspect my own contribution would pale in comparison to what has already been posted, mainly since I'm already trying to figure out what I think about the issue myself.

All I can say is that you could do worse than try reading some Philosophy. I highly recommend Simon Blackburn's introductory philosophy book. It's fascinating and assumes no prior knowledge: http://www.amazon.com/Think-Compelling-Introduction-Simon-Blackburn/dp/0192100246

u/jez2718 · 2 pointsr/philosophy

I think S. Blackburn's Think is an excellent introduction to some of the major areas in philosophy. You might also what to look at some of the philosophical books in the "Very Short Introduction" series, for example the Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Philosophy of Science and Free Will ones, which as you can guess are good places to start.

A book I quite enjoyed as an introduction to the great philosophers was The Philosophy Book, which not only gave clear descriptions of each of the philosophers' views, but also often gave a clear flowchart summary of their arguments.

u/gnomicarchitecture · 2 pointsr/philosophy

I think the best route is to trick her into being interested in books. I think I just might have a trick for that.

Send her the wikipedia article for "trolley problem", and then send her the wiki article on judith thomson's violinist argument in favor of abortion. Then send her a link to parfit's transporter thought experiment. It's ideal if you can find versions of these online which are easy to read and presented in a cool manner. (blog entries are ideal for this. Here's a blog entry on parfit's teletransporter: http://twophilosoraptors.blogspot.com/2010/07/teletransporter.html)

Then buy her What If...collected thought experiments in philosophy off amazon or ebay. A used one will be cheap, or take it out from the library and renew it online while she uses it. If she got intrigued by the above thought experiments, and is intrigued by strange paradoxes about truth, like the liar paradox, or leibniz's law, then she will absolutely love this book. It's full of one-page, easily consumable versions of thought experiments, and then the page next to that one contains elaboration on the experiment and current work on it. One of my favorites in there is Max Black's two spheres, which seem to violate leibniz's law. A fun alternative to this, with bite sized philosophy things is "plato and a platypus walk into a bar".

If she continues to show interest in these, you can feed her new information about them via blogs like peasoup and thoughts, arguments, and rants, by googling the name of blogs like these next to a particular paradox or thought experiment, e.g. "thoughts arguments and rants moores paradox". This will lead you to new work by contemporary philosophers on the subjects, which may feed her interest into what it is that philosophers actually do. Eventually this may prompt her to want to read a full book on philosophy, to have a more mature understanding of how these paradoxes and TE's work, then you could get her the very interesting Think by simon blackburn, which is a general intro to philosophy, or the shorter very short introduction books. You can work up to more advanced, interesting work from there (like David Lewis' On the plurality of worlds, which opens the trippy possibility that all possibilities are realities).

Hope she enjoys her reading!

u/halvardr · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy
u/Fuzzy_Thoughts · 2 pointsr/mormon

It's truly a whole new world to explore. I read the book Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn last year as a starting point. Great stuff. I'd recommend it if you'd like to dip your toes into philosophy a bit more. It's pretty cheap on used book sites as well.

u/CapBateman · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

If you want a more general introduction into philosophy there's a Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn and the older What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy by Thomas Nagel. A more academic introduction (the last two books are more aimed at a general audience) is Fundamentals of Philosophy edited by John Shand. If you're willing to sit through it there also Russel's classic A History of Western Philosophy, which is a sort of introduction to philosophy through the history of the field (the audiobook is on youtube btw), and there also his Problems of Philosophy

I'm not that familiar with eastern philosophy, but a classic introduction to Existentialism is Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre and it should go nicely with Existentialism is a Humanism.

Hope this helps :)

u/C_M_Burns · 2 pointsr/philosophy

I know I'm tardy to the party, but I found that it's best to start with general surveys of philosophy, so you're exposed to a wide range of thought, then narrowing down your interests.

Personally, I found the following to be the most helpful:

From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest

Think

What Does It All Mean?

The Problems of Philosophy

u/kinematografi · 1 pointr/AskReddit

This is a good start

and so is this!

This is, possibly surprisingly, good too.

If you're looking to jump right into a text and think you have a grip on the language, try Foucault's Madness and Civilization It's great and pretty easy to read.

Another good introduction (or at least, MY introduction to philosophy is Slavoj Zizek. He's pretty easy to read and understand, but makes ties to Lacan, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc in a cohesive manner that makes you want to learn more. Of his work, I'd check out The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Parallax View or watch his movie! (Which is extraordinarily entertaining for how dense it is. He's also kind of amazing in a philosophical rock star kind of way.)

Hope that gets you started!

u/fiskiligr · 1 pointr/booklists

Alan Watts is great - but he's no philosopher. He even claims this himself.
He is more aligned with religion than anything else - maybe best described as a spiritualist. He wasn't exactly going about his work with the same rigor, for example, as St. Aquinas and Anselm.

Though Albert Camus claimed not to be a philosopher as well - but that is the funny thing about continental philosophy - half the time you can't distinguish them from plain authors. :-)

As for recommendations - this is really tough.

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy would be a good one to read - but maybe not for general purposes.
For epistemology, you can't beat Gettier's Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?. It's more like a one page read, however.

Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is great for the section on the problems of induction.

For general purpose though (and I have to give credit to my SO, who has a PhD in philosophy and has taught it for ages), I think Simon Blackburn's Think might be one of the better surveys and general introductions to philosophy.

Hope this helps. :-)

u/Lawen · 1 pointr/philosophy

Sophie's World is a good recommendation. If you don't want fiction, I'd suggest (and have in other, similar threads) Simon Blackburn's Think as a good, high-level overview of Philosophy. I'd also pick up a text specifically about logic and/or critical thinking that covers basic argument structure and the common fallacies (perhaps The Philosopher's Toolkit ). After reading those, you should have a grasp on both how philosophers do their thing as well as an overview of the various topics in philosophy. From there, you can start reading more about the areas that particularly interest you.

u/thetourist74 · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

Well, if you want a concentrated course of study you might consider looking for secondary sources that focus on particular areas of research in philosophy rather than trying to read very few (5-10) authors in real depth. I see Kant has been suggested, for example, and while I would never doubt his importance as a philosopher, if you set out with the intention of reading the bulk of his works as you say you might you would have to tackle a great deal of dry, technical material which I think would prove to be a lot more work than you could expect. Same could be said for Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Descartes, nearly anyone you really might care to list. I don't know if you've read much philosophy, but you might instead look at something like an introduction to philosophy, an intro to ethics, or an intro to the philosophy of mind. These are only some examples, there are books like this for pretty much any area of study that attracts your interest. I'm sure others could provide suggestions as well.

u/Earthtone_Coalition · 1 pointr/AskReddit

1984. I can't remember how old I was, but I must have been a young teenager. I'd say of any book I've read, it's the one that comes to mind most often.

Also Think by Simon Blackburn. A basic introduction to western philosophy, it really sparked my interest at a young age and formed the basis for a love of philosophy, metaphysics, and just taking the time to deeply examine concepts and ideas.