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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Philosophy
Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
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Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
Oxford University Press, USA
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16 Reddit comments about Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy:

u/AnotherMasterMind · 14 pointsr/askphilosophy

Think by Simon Blackburn.

and

Five Dialogues of Plato.

u/NoIntroductionNeeded · 6 pointsr/askphilosophy

From the /r/philosophy sidebar: Think, by Simon Blackburn. I've read it, and it's exactly what you're looking for.

u/Youre_A_Kant · 4 pointsr/askphilosophy

As a follow up, Simon Blackburn's [Think](Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192854259/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_kGZMyb74JTWKH) does a great job at providing a wide landscape of philosophical inquiries and possible solutions.

As well as Bertrand Russell's [Problems Of Philosophy](The Problems of Philosophy https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514341018/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_7GZMyb8QH6M4T) , which does the same.

u/drofdarb72 · 4 pointsr/askphilosophy

Hey man. I am in the same shoes as you. I am going into junior year, and I just started reading Philosophy this summer. I would recommend Simon Blackburn's Think. I am two thirds into it, and its great. He touches on variety of questions and different answers to those questions and arguments for and against those answers, and what effect they have on the world. Here is the link.

u/reversedolphins · 3 pointsr/askphilosophy

I've heard this one is good. Haven't read it though.

Currently reading Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy which I've been told is a good introduction. So far it seems to do a good job of explaining in plain language the more confusing aspects of philosophy, which itself can become confusing. I can only take it in like 10 pages at a time.

Also maybe Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

u/Rope_Dragon · 3 pointsr/samharris

>And I don't pretend that I have anything more than a populist's understanding of these topics. I'm surely just scraping the surface of most topics, misunderstanding things, and I would never think I can be part of an academic conversation because I listen to a couple podcasts.

And I respect you understanding your own ignorance in a topic, because that shows intelligence. Philosophy, interestingly, is the subject that most makes me feel more stupid the more I've studied it, so you're definitely not alone! That being said, many people from the new atheist / "skeptic" community act like this gem

>Yeah, I just say "this is interesting, I'd even like to talk about it with strangers", but I acknowledge the second part of your sentence and am OK realizing my understanding is often limited and quite possibly wrong.


And I think you should use that understanding as motivation to maybe go directly to the sources that these podcasts engage with :) Philosophy is a subject with so many fantastic, but extremely accurate introductory books and I go back to them every now and then to refresh myself on the basics. My favorite example is Prof Simon Blackburn's - Think and another really good piece which goes into a lot of informal logic as well as the jargon: The Philosopher's Toolkit

I find both of those to give an excellent simplification of some of the bigger elements of philosophy without overstretching and misrepresenting their subject matter! :)

u/Themoopanator123 · 3 pointsr/askphilosophy

This is generally the answer I give to anyone who's unsure about specifically what they're interested in. You probably wanna spend a little while doing "general reading" so that you can find out what subjects interest you the most. Here are a few introductory books which are commonly recommended in no particular order:

  • Think by Simon Blackburn
  • A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton
  • An Introduction to Philosophy by Jon Nuttall

    These books all cast a very large net. The Warburton book (from what I remember) gives a more chronological account since it's concerned with the history of the ideas as well as the ideas themselves. Though, this was my first introduction to philosophy and worked just as well as any other.

    Given the authors you've mentioned, you might be particularly interested in the religious philosophy, ethics and political philosophy sections but you sound open to anything new. A tip: if you get your hands on one or two or these books, as you go through them, make notes on authors or particular ideas that you find interesting so that you can branch your reading out independently based on your preferences. These books will very much be discussing the classics of western philosophy like Hume, Descartes, Aquinas, Kant (maybe) etc at least a bit so I would also recommend searching out contemporary writers or 2nd hand sources if you're interested in the ideas of these historical figures. I say this because diving into their original works early on will be intimidating, exhausting and probably uninteresting. You may well find them difficult to interpret without knowing before hand what they're getting at. Having some idea of their historical context also helps. Contemporary writers are usually more approachable and sometimes more relevant.

    ​

    If you're also looking for good introductions to other topics like physics, I could help you out. In the spirit of this sub, I'll recommend you a couple writers that are philosophy literate. Philosophy has gotten a bad rap from popular science icons like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, recently. Lawrence Krauss probably dominates in terms of ignorance but hey that's just my opinion. Nye, on the other hand, has recently changed his tune. Don't let this put you off because there are popular science writers like Sean Carroll and Carlo Rovelli who know their philosophy and understand the historical and conceptual importance of philosophy to their science. Here are my recommendations:

  • The Big Picture by Sean Carroll
  • From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll
  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
  • Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli

    The Big Picture is Sean Carroll's "treatise" on his philosophy, essentially. It covers is views about knowledge, values and science all in one. (Scare quotes because the book is intended for a large audience and the word 'treatise' makes it sound a lot more dense than it really is). In it, he introduces Bayesian epistemology which is quite a popular idea in contemporary philosophy of science.

    From Eternity to Here essentially aims to answer quite metaphysical questions about our experience of time like where it "comes from" and in some parts he aims to resolve paradoxes relating to time travel all from the point of view of our best theories of physics. He also discusses big bang cosmology and, throughout, pays great respect to other philosophical views on the questions he's discussing.

    Seven Brief Lessons is basically what it says on the tin. It's a very short introduction and is probably the best place to start off reading popular physics (at least on this list).

    Reality Is Not What It Seems is a discussion of the history of physics essentially from the ancient greeks up until modern speculation on quantum gravity. Rovelli also pays great respects to the 'physicists of antiquity' by discussing ancient greek ideas about physics and metaphysics within the light of modern physics. He gives credit where credit is due and then some.

    Hope this was helpful.

    Oh, P.S. A few people have recommended the SEP but I'd be careful with it since plenty of the articles on there get pretty damn technical pretty quick and even sometimes they assume knowledge that you may not have. It's usually best used to accompany other reading and when you know what you're looking for (in terms of author, period, topic etc). Going on there and just blindly searching by topic probably isn't a good idea. A similar resource which presents topics in slightly less detail is the IEP.

    Here's a good youtube channel to check out too.
u/NewW0rld · 3 pointsr/philosophy

There have been many threads asking the same question; you should search or you haven't searched well. Anyway, I popular recommendation in another post was Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Blackburn. I downloaded it and it's pretty lay (compared to the Kant and Nietzsche I tried to read xD), but still pretty interesting.

u/jez2718 · 3 pointsr/philosopherproblems

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.

u/MyShitsFuckedDown2 · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

Do you have a specific interest? Otherwise a general introduction like Think, Problems of Philosophy, or Justice are all well regarded. Though, all have their strengths and weaknesses. There are tons of accessible introductions though and depending on your interests it might be better to use one rather than another. All of those are fairly general

u/fiskiligr · 2 pointsr/cscareerquestions

> Not beyond philosophy of science and picking up the occasional book (Singer, Nieztche, some Eastern oriented stuff) and a decent amount of political philosophy.

Ah, OK. You should maybe consider reading Think, an introduction to philosophy by Simon Blackburn. It's a good read, but more importantly, it's short and accessible.
If you want something more focused on ethics, I suggest Blackburn again with Being Good. Also short and accessible.

> The claim that 2 + 2 = 4 seems much more concrete than the claim that 'killing is bad.'

I would agree ("2 + 2 = 4" is a priori, the other is most likely a posteriori), but I am not arguing that killing is bad, I was just demonstrating that something relatively uncontroversial, like "killing is wrong", cannot be applied in a world where ethics is just subjective.

> Can one choose to just not care about right/wrong?

Sure - what one does is separate from the discussion of theory. One could believe 2 + 2 = 60 even! :D

> instead choosing to focus on the result of such behavior and how it ultimately harms oneself.

Sounds a lot like utilitarianism :-) You should read up on ethical theory - I think you would enjoy it.

u/the_real_jones · 2 pointsr/Christianity

hmmm, it depends, do you have any background in philosophy? If so I would recommend some more academic theological work like Kathryn Tanner, Leonardo Boff, Borden Bowne, Edgar Brightman, Jurgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Karl Barth, etc... if not I would recommend a book like this to help you understand the philosophical framework most theologians use.

As for Biblical studies, Michael Coogan has a really good intro to the Hebrew Bible and Mark Powell has a great intro to the New Testament you can supplement those readings with work focused on the historical context like Richard Horsely's work Jesus and Empire I haven't found a good book that offers a comprehensive overview of the context of the Hebrew Bible, mostly because that covers a large span of history. From there you can go on to read people like E.P. Sanders, William Herzog, Richard Bauckham, Jon Levenson, John Collins, Adela Collins, Carol Meyers, etc.

There is a ton of great academic work out there, unfortunately many seem to shy away from it because its 1) intimidating or 2) challenges embedded theological assumptions or 3) they buy into the myth that learning about theology and biblical studies only causes people to lose faith.

u/KingTommenBaratheon · 1 pointr/changemyview

There's a few issues with Peterson's approach to philosophy. The foremost is the extent to which he pretends to be an expert in philosophical issues without actually having well-defended philosophical positions. His pragmatism, for instance, wouldn't pass muster in a graduate class on pragmatism -- and University of Toronto has some leading pragmatist scholars that he could talk to about the subject. This is unfortunately typical of Peterson's approach. His original commentary on Bill C-16 was ignorant and ultimately misled the public. His commentary on dominance hierarchies is also speculative, outside his ken, and misleading.

So while it's great to make philosophy more public there's plenty better people to do it and plenty better ways to do it. Simon Blackburn is a great example of a well-regarded philosopher who offers informed, accurate, work to the public in an accessible way. Dan Dennett is also stand-out example of a great philosopher who does great professional and public work. Or, also from the University of Toronto, there's Joseph Heath, who is now one of Canada's foremost public intellectuals on political and economic subjects.

Contrast that with Peterson's extremely polarizing and error-prone approach. I'd be glad to have fewer Petersons and more Heaths or Nussbaums.

u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Think by Simon Blackburn

u/modenpwning · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

I'll let some of the other people on here direct you where to dig in and answer your questions more directly, but this was by far the most compelling introductory book for me: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Compelling-Introduction-Simon-Blackburn/dp/0192854259.

I can't recommend it enough to begin, and from there you can branch out with what you find enjoyable