Scan the list, and say how many you’ve read.
I think most people studying or teaching philosophy have read large parts of what we might call ‘the good stuff’, and we confuse reading that with actually reading the whole of a work.
(I think of myself as having read Berkeley’s Principles, but I really only know the good bit, which is to say the arguments for idealism at the start — God alone knows what’s in the second half of the book.)
Here's a list.
- The Republic, Plato
- Organon, Aristotle
- Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
- City of God, Augustine
- Summa theologiae, Aquinas
- The Prince, Machiavelli
- Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
- Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes
- Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes
- Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
- Ethics, Spinoza
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
- Monadology, Leibniz
- Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley
- A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume
- The Social Contract, Rousseau
- The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham
- Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
- Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel
- Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
- Vindication of the rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
- Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard
- Method of Ethics, Sidgwick
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche
- Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
- Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore
- Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
- Tractatus, Wittgenstein
- Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
- Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Second Sex, de Beauvoir
Well, how many have you read, page by page, cover to cover?
Posted by James Garvey on Talking Philosophy October 8, 2012
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