Plato what should i read first

It is hard work. But that is part of the reason why I think it is one of the best philosophy books for beginners. Philosophy is hard work. In reading and assimilating a book like this, one is brought to a keen appreciation of what the rewards of that hard work can be. Because it is an autobiography, my students find it less intimidating than some of the other texts we read.

Moreover, because it is an autobiography, it offers a good model for how to take big questions personally. The Confessions is packed with big ideas—God, humanity, sin, vice, providence, reason, revelation, and faith—and it is the sort of book one can grow into. I see more every time I read it. My third suggestion, following the ethical theme, is an old favourite: J. Beauvoir was frustrated with abstract and detached philosophy and instead wanted to explore how philosophy could be lived.

Every living step is a philosophical choice. Other Minds is focused on the strange mentality of octopuses, who have more neurons that the average dog but are descended from molluscs like clams and snails. Godfrey-Smith says that confronting an octopus is tantamount to meeting an alien mind, and he uses their strange psychology to cast light on the nature of intelligence. His follow-up volume, Metazoa the biological term for the whole animal kingdom broadens the canvas and aims to understand the place of consciousness itself in nature.

However, one of her best and less appreciated works is her first novel, She Came to Stay. It presents some of the major ideas that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about in Being and Nothingness much more lucidly than he did. The essays in this collection were all written in the early days of cognitive science.

Ever the maverick, Dennett exposes the weak spots as quickly as he introduces the programme. Probing the differences between people and machines, he makes us puzzle about imagery, learning, consciousness and free will. The article raises key issues about the politicization of language, also highly relevant today. I decided that it would be good to include a history of philosophy on my list.

But I struggled to decide which. So I have opted to cheat for this fourth selection and just say: any history of philosophy. There are plenty to choose from. Each has virtues and attendant vices. Some are much more readable than others, but also much more vulnerable to the accusation of dumbing down. Some are much more even-handed than others, but also much less driven by a strong narrative. And there are two defects from which nearly all of them suffer: an exclusive focus on western thought; and a failure to engage with the most recent trends in philosophy.

Even so, any history of philosophy that you come across in a bookshop or on some website is liable to be instructive and is liable to whet your appetite to go back to the original texts. Having said all of that, I am conscious that you will probably want to know what my own favourite is.

That combines a very high degree of accessibility with an astonishingly high degree of reliability. It is in nine volumes, and it runs to some five thousand pages! True, it might still serve as an excellent encyclopaedic resource for a novice who wants to find out more about this or that specific thinker or about this or that specific epoch, but even then only a novice who already has some idea what it is they want to find out more about.

Spanning lots of different areas of philosophy, if anyone can guide us on the best philosophy books for beginners — it is these brilliant people. Massimo Pigliucci earned a doctorate in genetics from the University of Ferrara, Italy, and then a PhD in biology from the University of Connecticut, and finally a PhD in philosophy of science from the University of Tennessee.

He was formerly a professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University. In , he received the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize and is also a regular contributor to Skeptical Inquirer. Adrian Moore is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, whose main philosophical areas of focus include Kant, Wittgenstein, history of philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of logic.

He is also a prolific writer. You don't have to read Descartes before Spinoza; they all have a tendency to stand on their own. If you like what people have suggested about Nietzsche, then go ahead and read something by him, you don't have to consume Aquinas first.

With many philosophers, the idea of reading their major works in chronological order is a good one; unfortunately, there are no reliable records as to the order of composition of the works of Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, of course, left no writings , so you're completely out of luck in that regard. I'd suggest you begin with a topic that interests you, and work from there.

And, if you have not read them before, I'd definitely suggest using a fair bit of secondary literature to help elucidate; there are many things at play in the works of Plato and Aristotle that may not be obvious on a casual reading. In addition, if you are new to this, I'd recommend starting with some shorter works, as the texts vary in length significantly.

First there is no distinct separation between reading Socrates or Plato since Socrates did not write any books and all his teaching is transferred to us by Plato. Second it is impossible to read Aristotle before reading and I mean reading almost all major books of Plato. The reason is that Aristotle presenting his theories mentions or criticises constantly Plato's teaching Plato was Aristotle's teacher and assumes that the reader is familiar with it.

So without being familiar with Plato's major books most of Aristotle's points and arguments are incomprehensible. There is one additional reason for this order i. Socrates, Plato then Aristotle, besides that it is the only order you can make sense of what is written. Aristotle's work is hard. It has very strict language and is like reading a formal paper in some aspects.

If you start from Aristotle you may get discouraged. Plato's books are in dialogues and actually are in a sense very poetic. Plato was one of the best writers in a sense artist that ever existed. It is easy to start reading Plato due to this format and know the basic concepts. Once you get into it, going to Aristotle, his difficulty will not be discouraging. On page 93 you will find "The Contents of the Great Books There are no surviving works attributed to Socrates, Plato's teacher.

We are left with Plato's memories and development of Socrates ideas in the Dialogues. He can, however, give us cues, or hints. One such passage is in the Laws , where he has the Athenian Visitor describe himself and his two interlocutors as tragedians in their own right, and the conversation they have been having about laws and the city as the finest and best tragedy they could create—one fit to supersede the productions of the poets, which are on notice to prove their own suitability to address the citizens.

Such an inference would certainly chime with what was said in Section VIII about the evident emphasis, in the corpus as a whole, on the need for a change in accepted ideas and behavior. The second exhibit is the long discussion of rhetoric in the second part of the Phaedrus , which distinguishes rhetoric as currently practiced with a new kind, based in understanding both of its audiences and of its subjects.

This new rhetoric will, in particular, know how to adapt itself to the hearers, composing simple speeches for simple—that is, presumably, rational—souls and complex or colorful speeches for complex souls.

Actually, Socrates continues, no author of intelligence will take his own writings seriously: the best and only means of communication is to talk directly to someone who can challenge the speaker about what he is saying.

But frequently he keeps quiet about this, with the result that the arguments he uses can look bizarre. The history of the interpretation of Plato offers us a bewildering variety of Platos: other-worldly metaphysician, skeptic, philosophical primitive or sophisticate, poet or anti-poet, apologist for the political right, the far right, or even the far left. The least stressed aspect has been his ethics 45 ; paradoxically, because it is arguably the area in which he is not only at his most radical but also his most effective.

Platonic metaphysics, that backbone of historical Platonism, also looks comfortably at home in an ethical context, insofar as it places a reconfigured goodness, beauty, and justice within the very structure of things—however it may be that Plato thought that trick could be pulled.

Indeed, without that context and without its inventive elaboration and re-elaboration by successions of Platonists and idealists , it can look as unmotivated as it appeared to an unsympathetic Aristotle. Broadie, Sarah.

Find this resource:. Burnyeat, Myles. Campbell, Lewis, ed. The Sophistes and Politicus of Plato. Oxford: Clarendon. Dixsaut, Monique. Le naturel philosophe: essais sur les dialogues de Platon. Paris: Vrin. Grote, George. Plato and Other Companions of Sokrates 3 vols. London: J. Harte, Verity. McCabe, M. Cordner Ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Penner, Terry.

The Ascent from Nominalism. Dordrecht: Reidel. Rowe, Christopher. Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing. Brancacci, D. Autour de Platon. Sedley, David. Platon und die Schriftlichkeit der Philosophie.

Berlin: de Gruyter. Whiting, Jennifer. Barney, T. Brittain Eds. But the little he has to say about Socrates, and the ways in which he says it, suggest that he was not much impressed by what he heard. She wanted women to become rational and independent beings, whose sense of self came from the development of their mind rather than a mirror.

John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth-century and an advocate of utilitarianism, a theory based on the works of Jeremy Bentham. His book On Liberty made him famous as a defender of human rights.

Mill also believed that happiness was the basis for morality and encouraged any action which maximised the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Mill was the leading liberal feminist of his day. He defended the rights of women on equal terms with men in The Subjection of Women and proposed measures such as votes for women.

Sartre was the best-known twentieth-century exponent of existentialism, and, together with Simone de Beauvoir, had a considerable influence on French intellectual life in the decades following the Second World War. It is an attempt to capture in fictional form the human experience through the lens of Phenomenology and Existentialism. The protagonist comes to realize that he is a free agent and must find his own purpose in a world devoid of meaning. Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, and theorist.

His work showed in particular how nineteenth-century obsessions with classification led to the construction of sexual identity categories and how social, political and economical forces sought to influence and control attitudes towards sex and sexual behaviors.

Featured image credit: Book-covered walls by Eugenio Mazzone. Public Domain via Unsplash. This post was written by the OUP Philosophy team.