Reading list and mapping out philosophy

[Jasaf3]

I'd like to preface this with the fact that I will be studying philosophy in parallel at university, this reading list might be a grandiose pipe dream, and that I expect with quite strong plausibility that I'll get through only a fraction of this list, hence the tier-system. Additionally, I'm already financially secure. Yes, I'm somewhat of a shallow pseudointellectual and my reasoning behind why these philosophers isn't particularly deep, as well as not being bothered with attaining actual truth or rigorous, because I love and like the diverse qualia reading philosophy provides for me, so whether such qualia is fallacious, "fake", or a false illusion or not is not my concern, it's a purely a subjective aesthetic endeavor in especially speculative intellectual thoughts.

I also do not expect to penetrate especially deeply in any of these philosophers, not that I will even get beyond a fraction of the list. It is merely an attempt to map the possible intellectual affordances of the philosophical corpus. 

Please, also, feel free to attack and argue against the rankings I've provided myself. To repeat, they rank my own subjective priority-list of who to dedicate most time on, value most, read first, and so forth. I will be particularly stubborn if you invoke the analytical tradition or would wish me to eliminate any philosopher. However, if my limited reason shall sufficiently be convinced, I may consider appeals to especially the latter.

 

My reading list, tier-ranked by importance to me:
I. Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Stirner
II. Leibniz, Descartes, Husserl, Whitehead, Deleuze, Vuillemin
III. Merleau-Ponty, Debord, Baudrillard
IV. Berkeley, Leibniz, von Hartmann, Aristotle
V. Plato, Plotinus, Aviccena, Averroes, Bergson
VI. Quine, William James, Pierce, Locke, Spinoza, Ravaisson-Mollien
VII. Brandom, Dennett, Zosimos of Panopolis
VIII. Freud, Jung, Lacan, Žižek
IX. Nick Land, Hume, UG Krishnamurti, Kitaro Nishida, Hajime Tanabe, Santayana
X. René Guenon, Hermes Trismegistus, Iamblichus, Poryphyry, Proclus, Boethius, al-Buni, Sohrevardi
XI. Subrawardi, Mulla Sadra, Ficino, Pico, Agrippa
XII. (on) Isaac Luria, Paracelsus, John Dee
XIII. Bruno, al-Hakim, Umayl, Lazzarelli, Ricoeur, Marion, Michel Henry, Gikatilla, Nishitani, Ingarden
XIV. J. J. Valberg, Caspar Hare, Puntel, Laruelle, Zalta
XV. Vyasa, Gaudapadacharya, Shankacharya, Suresvaracharya
XVI. Ge Hong, Lie Yukou, Chuang Tzu, Nagarjuna, Dogen, Kukai, Chinul Longchenpa, Jigme Lingpa
XVII. Satchidanandendra Saraswati, Ramana Maharshi
XVIII. Barry Smith, Althusser, Conrad-Martius, Przywara, Twardowski, Meinong, Stout, von Zimmermann, Wundt, Höfler, Malet Armstrong, Barcan Marcus
XIX. Cavallies, Brunchschvicg, Lavelle, de Biran, Lautmann, René Thom, Hadot, Granger, Hypollite, Diodorus Cronus
 

[Genady]

Freud, Sigmund? Was he a philosopher?

38 minutes ago, Jasaf3 said:

VIII. Freud

 

[studiot]

2 hours ago, Jasaf3 said:

I'd like to preface this with the fact that I will be studying philosophy in parallel at university, this reading list might be a grandiose pipe dream, and that I expect with quite strong plausibility that I'll get through only a fraction of this list, hence the tier-system. Additionally, I'm already financially secure.

You don't say anything about any previous academic or other background, which would be help to make useful comments.

Also you don't say where your 'reading list' came from.

Is it a course prerequisite ?

Finally what are you studying philosophy 'in parallel' with and which is the main subject and which the minor ?

I note a bias towards older philosophy with litle modern input  is this a history of philosophy course ?

 

A couple of suggestions.

1.)  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

This is online and kept up to date.

You can view for free, and download pdfs for the princely membership fee of $10 annually.

https://plato.stanford.edu/

2) An interesting balancing modern viewpoint, including many of your references, will be foundin;

Professor Douglas Hofstadter

Godel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid.

This won a Pullitzer.

 

Go well in you studies and I look forward to some interesting discussion in furure.

[TheVat]

Odd to list Whitehead but not Russell.

And if you are into science, you need McTaggart, Feyerabend, Kuhn, Duhem, Popper, Searle, and Carnap, as well as WVO Quine.  Quine cannot be read in a vacuum.

Your post is hard to interpret, since you offer no overarching scheme or focus for your choices, while offering a lot of humble reminders that you are being subjective and shallow.  I would also warn you that philosophy cannot be....

3 hours ago, Jasaf3 said:

purely a subjective aesthetic endeavor

Almost everyone on your list devoted their life to seeing beyond aesthetics and subjectivity.  

A good starter list, for the historical arc of the major currents of thought up to the 20th century might be Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes,  Kant, Hume, Berkeley, Hegel, Locke, Mill, Bentham, Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Camus.  (these were the major figures covered for me in getting a philosophy minor at undergraduate level)  

[exchemist]

4 hours ago, Jasaf3 said:

I'd like to preface this with the fact that I will be studying philosophy in parallel at university, this reading list might be a grandiose pipe dream, and that I expect with quite strong plausibility that I'll get through only a fraction of this list, hence the tier-system. Additionally, I'm already financially secure. Yes, I'm somewhat of a shallow pseudointellectual and my reasoning behind why these philosophers isn't particularly deep, as well as not being bothered with attaining actual truth or rigorous, because I love and like the diverse qualia reading philosophy provides for me, so whether such qualia is fallacious, "fake", or a false illusion or not is not my concern, it's a purely a subjective aesthetic endeavor in especially speculative intellectual thoughts.

I also do not expect to penetrate especially deeply in any of these philosophers, not that I will even get beyond a fraction of the list. It is merely an attempt to map the possible intellectual affordances of the philosophical corpus. 

Please, also, feel free to attack and argue against the rankings I've provided myself. To repeat, they rank my own subjective priority-list of who to dedicate most time on, value most, read first, and so forth. I will be particularly stubborn if you invoke the analytical tradition or would wish me to eliminate any philosopher. However, if my limited reason shall sufficiently be convinced, I may consider appeals to especially the latter.

 

My reading list, tier-ranked by importance to me:
I. Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Stirner
II. Leibniz, Descartes, Husserl, Whitehead, Deleuze, Vuillemin
III. Merleau-Ponty, Debord, Baudrillard
IV. Berkeley, Leibniz, von Hartmann, Aristotle
V. Plato, Plotinus, Aviccena, Averroes, Bergson
VI. Quine, William James, Pierce, Locke, Spinoza, Ravaisson-Mollien
VII. Brandom, Dennett, Zosimos of Panopolis
VIII. Freud, Jung, Lacan, Žižek
IX. Nick Land, Hume, UG Krishnamurti, Kitaro Nishida, Hajime Tanabe, Santayana
X. René Guenon, Hermes Trismegistus, Iamblichus, Poryphyry, Proclus, Boethius, al-Buni, Sohrevardi
XI. Subrawardi, Mulla Sadra, Ficino, Pico, Agrippa
XII. (on) Isaac Luria, Paracelsus, John Dee
XIII. Bruno, al-Hakim, Umayl, Lazzarelli, Ricoeur, Marion, Michel Henry, Gikatilla, Nishitani, Ingarden
XIV. J. J. Valberg, Caspar Hare, Puntel, Laruelle, Zalta
XV. Vyasa, Gaudapadacharya, Shankacharya, Suresvaracharya
XVI. Ge Hong, Lie Yukou, Chuang Tzu, Nagarjuna, Dogen, Kukai, Chinul Longchenpa, Jigme Lingpa
XVII. Satchidanandendra Saraswati, Ramana Maharshi
XVIII. Barry Smith, Althusser, Conrad-Martius, Przywara, Twardowski, Meinong, Stout, von Zimmermann, Wundt, Höfler, Malet Armstrong, Barcan Marcus
XIX. Cavallies, Brunchschvicg, Lavelle, de Biran, Lautmann, René Thom, Hadot, Granger, Hypollite, Diodorus Cronus
 

I don't see Russell on the list. That seems a curious omission.  @TheVat's list is more the sort of thing I would have expected - though it is Eurocentric, I suppose.

Edited April 5, 2023 by exchemist

[Jasaf3]

Thank you everyone for your responses!

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Odd to list Whitehead but not Russell.

And if you are into science, you need McTaggart, Feyerabend, Kuhn, Duhem, Popper, Searle, and Carnap, as well as WVO Quine.  Quine cannot be read in a vacuum.

Your post is hard to interpret, since you offer no overarching scheme or focus for your choices, while offering a lot of humble reminders that you are being subjective and shallow.  I would also warn you that philosophy cannot be....

Almost everyone on your list devoted their life to seeing beyond aesthetics and subjectivity.  

A good starter list, for the historical arc of the major currents of thought up to the 20th century might be Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes,  Kant, Hume, Berkeley, Hegel, Locke, Mill, Bentham, Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Camus.  (these were the major figures covered for me in getting a philosophy minor at undergraduate level)  

I'm more interested in Whitehead's Process and Reality. Although Whitehead worked on Principia Mathematica, he wasn't an analytical philosopher. Thank you for the Quine Suggestion.

5 hours ago, Genady said:

Freud, Sigmund? Was he a philosopher?

Sigmund Freud was substantially influenced by Eduard von Hartmann, who in turn was substantially influenced by Max Stirner. Freud, although not primarily a philosopher, can then in this light be viewed as the contemporary continuation of German Idealism, and the rest of the psychoanalytic tradition as well as Freud.

2 hours ago, studiot said:

You don't say anything about any previous academic or other background, which would be help to make useful comments.

Also you don't say where your 'reading list' came from.

Is it a course prerequisite ?

Finally what are you studying philosophy 'in parallel' with and which is the main subject and which the minor ?

I note a bias towards older philosophy with litle modern input  is this a history of philosophy course ?

 

A couple of suggestions.

1.)  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

This is online and kept up to date.

You can view for free, and download pdfs for the princely membership fee of $10 annually.

https://plato.stanford.edu/

2) An interesting balancing modern viewpoint, including many of your references, will be foundin;

Professor Douglas Hofstadter

Godel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid.

This won a Pullitzer.

 

Go well in you studies and I look forward to some interesting discussion in furure.

I came up with this reading list.

I'm trying to map what parts of philosophy interest me, so that I have a semi-comprehensive map of all such authors. I've been on a mathematics track since 12 y/o or so. I was initially interested in programming, but then gradually shifted my interest to mathematics, and then to psychology and Shakespeare, then went back to mathematics in the form of statistics(in part to explain). But then I gradually realized that what I was doing, beyond Shakespeare, was somewhat bland and naïve. I did place well in competitions, but it's as if it were shallow, as if something was missing. I didn't want to be a machine automaton and the more creative I got the more I got punished for it. So I decided to do away will all that was holding me back and to fully study for purely subjective aesthetic enrichment. What I mean by aesthetic might differ from the average person, and perhaps even from the etymology. By aesthetic I mean the particular sort of aesthetic present in conceptual ideas. 

Right now I pursue philosophy. I'm deciding whether or not to pursue pure mathematics on top. I fear I don't have the patience to get to a point where creativity is rewarded, if there even is such a point, such that I can return to entertaining my aesthetic sensibilities. I find it quite unlikely algorithmic crunching and the recitation of lists of theorem proofs, definitions, and theorems by heart is what would constitute entertaining of aesthetic sensibilities, and even though I'd heard that this slowly stops being the case, I'm not sufficiently convinced. And even if I would wish to do the proofs and maybe even the theorems on my own, the competitiveness and the time constraints wouldn't allow it and I'd need to learn long lists of definitions regardless. That's at least how the pure maths program looks in my country.

Overall, I'm more interested in metaphysics, which have been quite strongly pushed out by the analytic tradition. Though a large part of it might as well be my own ignorance. I did put a few contemporary philosophers, however. But a magnitude or two of people have ever lived than are alive today.

[studiot]

14 minutes ago, Jasaf3 said:

I came up with this reading list.

I'm trying to map what parts of philosophy interest me, so that I have a semi-comprehensive map of all such authors. I've been on a mathematics track since 12 y/o or so. I was initially interested in programming, but then gradually shifted my interest to mathematics, and then to psychology and Shakespeare, then went back to mathematics in the form of statistics(in part to explain). But then I gradually realized that what I was doing, beyond Shakespeare, was somewhat bland and naïve. I did place well in competitions, but it's as if it were shallow, as if something was missing. I didn't want to be a machine automaton and the more creative I got the more I got punished for it. So I decided to do away will all that was holding me back and to fully study for purely subjective aesthetic enrichment. What I mean by aesthetic might differ from the average person, and perhaps even from the etymology. By aesthetic I mean the particular sort of aesthetic present in conceptual ideas. 

Right now I pursue philosophy. I'm deciding whether or not to pursue pure mathematics on top. I fear I don't have the patience to get to a point where creativity is rewarded, if there even is such a point, such that I can return to entertaining my aesthetic sensibilities. I find it quite unlikely algorithmic crunching and the recitation of lists of theorem proofs, definitions, and theorems by heart is what would constitute entertaining of aesthetic sensibilities, and even though I'd heard that this slowly stops being the case, I'm not sufficiently convinced. And even if I would wish to do the proofs and maybe even the theorems on my own, the competitiveness and the time constraints wouldn't allow it and I'd need to learn long lists of definitions regardless. That's at least how the pure maths program looks in my country.

Overall, I'm more interested in metaphysics, which have been quite strongly pushed out by the analytic tradition. Though a large part of it might as well be my own ignorance. I did put a few contemporary philosophers, however. But a magnitude or two of people have ever lived than are alive today.

Thanks you for the background, very useful apart from the missing answer to, what are you studying in parallel.

Your stated personal history almost mirrors that of Hofstadter, if you substitute Bach for Shakespeare.

He had the same doubts and wider interests but is older than you and 'went all the way'.

The book I referred to is definitely for you. It's absolutely fascinating how he connects Art and Science and Metascience (he has a PhD in Physics).

 

[Genady]

1 hour ago, Jasaf3 said:

Sigmund Freud was substantially influenced by Eduard von Hartmann, who in turn was substantially influenced by Max Stirner. Freud, although not primarily a philosopher, can then in this light be viewed as the contemporary continuation of German Idealism, and the rest of the psychoanalytic tradition as well as Freud.

But the OP is your proposed reading list, IIUC. Aside from being influenced and being a continuation, did Freud develop / write anything philosophical? Or do you rather consider the psychoanalysis a philosophy?

[Jasaf3]

1 hour ago, Genady said:

But the OP is your proposed reading list, IIUC. Aside from being influenced and being a continuation, did Freud develop / write anything philosophical? Or do you rather consider the psychoanalysis a philosophy?

It has influence on authors such as Deleuze and Zizek

[Eise]

And do not forget that Freud from his side was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer. 

And talking about Freud, I miss philosophers from the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Fromm, Habermas) who were also influenced by Freud.

[Jasaf3]

7 hours ago, Eise said:

And do not forget that Freud from his side was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer. 

And talking about Freud, I miss philosophers from the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Fromm, Habermas) who were also influenced by Freud.

Yeah I know I put him on top as Tier I. von Hartmann, like Nietzsche, was synthesizing Schopenhauer with German Idealism in light of Max Stirner, though he was more forthright about it.

16 minutes ago, Jasaf3 said:

Yeah I know I put him on top as Tier I. von Hartmann, like Nietzsche, was synthesizing Schopenhauer with German Idealism in light of Max Stirner, though he was more forthright about it.

(whereas he then had a substantial influence on at least the concept of the unconscious in psychoanalysis)