which philo book has influenced your views the most?

[MorganFreemanlives]

I was wondering which books have influenced us philosophy students the most in undergrad career.  name 3 philosophy books which heavily affected your philosophy views.  for fun name one book which has utterly apalled, made you lose respect for the philosopher/tradition or even think its simply charlattanism.

 

me first

 

top 3 books

 

Appearance and Reality by f.h bradley: i cant express how much this book has influenced me. it made my mostly analytic approach to philosophy go 180 directly into thick metaphysics. it was almost a religious experience. i own 3 copies, one reprint, a  1964 edition and a 1st edition from 1893

 

Ethics according to the geometrical method (aka the ethics) by baruch spinoza: it never fails to amaze me how pure yet rigorous this book is. its way ahead of its time. the first time i read it in continental rationalism class, i breezed through descartes admirable failure but when i read this, i just knew baruch was up to something. its a shame so many  analytic philosopher wants to make a naturalist out of him which is a huge mistake. harold joachim's study of spinoza i think is the best seconary work on him.

 

the philosophy of loyalty by josiah royce : a ery underrated work but reading it made me reconsider my amoralism. Royce's very simple theory of ethics bypasses most of the problems of egoist, utilitarian, deontological and incorporates virtue ethics in a more respectable light. my version of ethics is basically Roycean with a slight hint of Nietsche.(and im not even a big nietsche fan)

 

most hated work

 

Being and Time : OH THE HUMANITY. this is the only work i have ever read which i got absolutely nothing from and let me tell you hegel and whitehead are not easy. everytime i get the slighest bit of interest in tackling it, im immediately repelled by its combination of nonsense and tautological ramblings. at this point, i just view heidegger scholars as an academic cult.

[smg]

Top 3: Being and Time, The German Ideology, Modernity and the Holocaust. 

 

I cant think of any books that were awful off the top of my head.  I did see Charles Taylor speak a year or two ago.  It was bourgeois garbage.   Totally underwhelming.  I was unimpressed with the Birth of Tragedy which I read recently but its not a most hated work by any stretch of the imagination.  

[MorganFreemanlives]

Top 3: Being and Time, The German Ideology, Modernity and the Holocaust. 

 

I cant think of any books that were awful off the top of my head.  I did see Charles Taylor speak a year or two ago.  It was bourgeois garbage.   Totally underwhelming.  I was unimpressed with the Birth of Tragedy which I read recently but its not a most hated work by any stretch of the imagination.  

i see what you did there

[brettmullga]

Good:

 

1. Language, Truth, and Logic by AJ Ayer: While logical positivism is a 'mostly' dead movement and Ayer wasn't the best sport about it, this book captures a powerful mixture of excitement and awe from a group that thought they had solved every problem in philosophy with, more or less, a single move. Though I take issue with much of what Ayer discusses, this book largely pushed me in the Analytic direction. 

 

2. Rational Decisions by Ken Binmore: A brief introduction to game and decision theory from a methodological perspective. It made me reconsider Revealed Preference Theory as not just a bunch of garbage to justify unnecessary mathematics.

 

3. The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper: I have mixed feelings on this one. I wrote my undergrad thesis on Popper's commitments to probabilityin  this text and focused on it for about a year or so. While I find his methodology ultimately flawed, I respect his approach (even moreso in historical context). 

 

Also, the anthology edited by Dan Hausman, The Philosophy of Economics, is a good one. 

 

Bad: 

 

Plantinga on the evolution of the eye. It was/is painful to read. Keep in mind that I've purposefully stayed away from reading the likes of Hegel, Zizek, Heidegger, etc.

[Establishment]

You asked for influential works, so here are my top three:

 

(1) G. A. Cohen's book "Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence" and his article "The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation"

 

I got into philosophy because I was first and foremost a Marxist, and so I was interested in the whole wealth of literature on Marxist philosophy, which lies squarely in the continental tradition. Lenin's remarks on Hegel's Science of Logic, Lukacs' The Ontology of Social Being and History and Defence of Class Consciousness, Marx's Grundrisse and Capital, Ilyenkov, and so on. I felt that I had to do work in this area in order to be a faithful Marxist.

 

However, reading through these works with some professors, I came to split my politics and my career interests very sharply. Philosophy became a scientific endeavor separate from my political beliefs. Cohen showed me foremostly, how to be an analytic philosopher. The reason he was so influential was because he was able to bridge that gap for me. The content of his work interested me while I was still a continentalist, but it introduced me to a new way of doing philosophy.

 

(2) Collected Papers of Gerhard Gentzen.

 

Dummett introduced me to a new way of looking at metaphysical problems, to a wider understanding of the history of analytic philosophy, and most importantly, to proof theory. But I think the most lasting influence on my interest in proof theory would have to be due to reading the very first papers which started it all, those papers by Gentzen.

 

Gentzen was a thinker par excellence, and every time I read and re-read his doctoral dissertation, I find some new appreciation. In his dissertation alone, he revolutionizes logic with the invention of natural deduction as all students are taught today in their introduction to logic courses. Yet, he finds that this invention doesn't suit his needs, so he then invents a another logical system, the sequent calculus, which gets him what he wants. He gives a simple consistency proof for this new system, and a consistency proof for arithmetic without complete induction. And all of this serves as the basis for his later writings where he will then prove the consistency of arithmetic with complete induction, without violating Godel's 2nd Theorem.

 

All of proof theory falls back to Gentzen's doctoral dissertation and subsequent papers. Ordinal analysis on the strength of formal systems. Structural properties of formal systems. Lengths of proofs. Proof-theoretic semantics. Harmony among the logical constants. Proof theory of arithmetic. Etc. There's even a case where people wondered for decades whether a certain result held for natural deduction. We found out that Gentzen had had the answer all the way back then. It was actually a section he removed from his doctoral dissertation. It was much like how it took us centuries to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, where Fermat was saying he had already proved it. Except that Fermat could not have actually had a proof. But Gentzen did.

 

The terrifying thing about it all, is just how clear and simple Gentzen's writing is despite the complexity and significance of the subject matter. I'm not that widely read in logical literature. I know for instance Smullyan is well regarded for his terse style. But Gentzen to me is my inspiration for writing style when it comes to logic.

 

(3) Kierkegaard's "Fear & Trembling"

 

I think "Fear & Trembling" is one of the greatest works ever written. The catch: I think it's one of the greatest works of literature ever written. I love Kierkegaard, but my coming to appreciate him as a writer and not as a philosopher is an additional part of my coming to terms with philosophy as a scientific field.

[dgswaim]

 

Bad: 

 

Plantinga on the evolution of the eye. It was/is painful to read. Keep in mind that I've purposefully stayed away from reading the likes of Hegel, Zizek, Heidegger, etc.

Are you referring to Where the Conflict Really Lies? As I remember he only discusses the eye very briefly in his discussion on Dawkins, and his arguments were pretty modest.

[brettmullga]

Are you referring to Where the Conflict Really Lies? As I remember he only discusses the eye very briefly in his discussion on Dawkins, and his arguments were pretty modest.

 

I don't quite recall the particular article/book. I read it in a Phil Science course some time ago. I believe he was engaging Michael Ruse; however, that could be completely mistaken. From what I do remember, Plantinga argues that the eye could not plausibly have evolved piecemeal as it is a complex system. The problem is that there are evolutionary accounts of the origin of the eye that he did not engage. Stylewise, I find much of Plantinga's work unbearably dry, especially his earlier work in metaphysics.

[dgswaim]

I don't quite recall the particular article/book. I read it in a Phil Science course some time ago. I believe he was engaging Michael Ruse; however, that could be completely mistaken. From what I do remember, Plantinga argues that the eye could not plausibly have evolved piecemeal as it is a complex system. The problem is that there are evolutionary accounts of the origin of the eye that he did not engage. Stylewise, I find much of Plantinga's work unbearably dry, especially his earlier work in metaphysics.

I'm not familiar with his engagement with Ruse. In Where the Conflict Really Lies, he essentially frames the argument in terms of whether or not it's plausible to suppose a stepwise, naturalistic process could get you from an "ancient population of single-celled organisms" all the way to the human eye. His conclusion is that maybe it is (given something like Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker arguments), but that it's not so convincing as to compel anyone who's examined the evidence. If what you're describing is correct, then it sounds like his argument in Conflict is probably made more carefully than the one in his exchange with Ruse.

[wildc4t]

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Dennett

[SamStone]

I'm not sure if these are the two that have been the *most* influential, but these two books really had an impact on me:

Alicia Juarrero's, "Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System"

and

Alva Noë's, "Action in Perception" (however, I like his "Varieties of Presence" better...but the former had more of a direct influence on my thinking)

Edited July 31, 2014 by Muska11

[Weltgeist]

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Schiller, The Aesthetic Education of Man

[dgswaim]

Sort of a difficult question to answer, so I'll give a couple of different versions of an answer.

 

The books that really got me interested in asking and tackling philosophical questions in the first place:

 

(1) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

(2) Levinas, Existence and Existents

(3) Berlin, Against the Current

 

The stuff that is really impacting my current work and thinking:

 

(1) Lowe, Personal Agency

(2) Ladyman and Ross, Every Thing Must Go

(3) Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies

 

 

(Increasingly, Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and other thinkers in the phenomenological tradition are impacting my thinking. At one time I had decided (like many in contemporary Anglo philosophy) to write-off phenomenology altogether, but I now find myself wondering why)

 

Stuff that I disagree with almost word for word and so influences my thought because of it:

 

(1) Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality (I might say this has influenced my work more than anything, though not in the usual sense)

(2) Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

(3) Churchland (Paul), Matter and Consciousness

[MorganFreemanlives]

How interesting that what some posted as bad  others posted as first. FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT.

Edited July 31, 2014 by HegelHatingHegelian

[dgswaim]

 

its so alienating to be a neo-hegelian with only a passing interest in hegel. not to pick on anyone but those that mentioned hegel as a inspiration liked other works i woudnt dare approach either because of unforgivable prose which hegel himself is very guilty of, because i consider charlatans like heidegger or simply because they undermine the objectivity of knowledge which the german idealist where so admirable in trying to ground. ( as to how someone can like hegel and frankurt school stuff i will never understand, but im all ears)

 

this is a quote from Brand Blanshard who himself was  a neo-hegelian which i coudnt agree more with.

It is unjust, I grant, to tear a passage from its context in this way, and the context would undoubtedly help; but if the context is of the same sort, that too will be obscure. Listen to this from a great philosopher. Ieave out only the first word, and ask you to form the best conjecture you can of what he is talking about: “X is the self-restoration of matter in its formlessness, its liquidity; the triumph of its abstract homogeneity over specific definiteness; its abstract, purely self-existing continuity as negation of negation is here set as activity.” You might guess the writer of this – it is Hegel – but I would almost wager the national debt that you don’t have the faintest suggestion of what he is actually talking about. Well, it happens to be heat – the good familiar heat that one feels in the sunshine or around fireplaces. I strongly suspect that this farrago is nonsense, but that is not my point.My point is that even if it is not nonsense, even if a reader, knowing that heat was being talked about, could make out, by dint of a dozen re-readings and much knitting of eyebrows, some application for the words, no one has the right to ask this sort of struggle of his reader

.

 

I never know quite what to make of Hegel. I remember taking a course on Hegel's Phenomenology as an undergraduate and feeling mostly dismayed by what I felt was mostly abstruse and nonsensical theorizing. But then there were these flashes of lucidity in his work that felt so gratifying and that rang so true. As for post-Hegelians, I prefer Ricoeur, Gadamer, Levinas and the like. One thing that I've found about Hegel, generally speaking, is that most of his best insights, it seems to me, were already present in Kant. The one move past Kant that Hegel makes that I really quite like is to move past the idea of person as "substance" and toward the idea of person as "subject."

[The Pedanticist]

The most influential philosophers/works for me have been...

1) Thomas Reid "Principles of Common Sense" 

2) Kierkegaard "Fear and Trembling", "Either/Or" and the rest of it.

3) The late Wittgenstein especially "Philosophical Investigations", "On Certainty" and "Blue Book"

4) Plantinga "Warrant and Proper Function"

5) Davidson in general

[MorganFreemanlives]

I never know quite what to make of Hegel. I remember taking a course on Hegel's Phenomenology as an undergraduate and feeling mostly dismayed by what I felt was mostly abstruse and nonsensical theorizing. But then there were these flashes of lucidity in his work that felt so gratifying and that rang so true. As for post-Hegelians, I prefer Ricoeur, Gadamer, Levinas and the like. One thing that I've found about Hegel, generally speaking, is that most of his best insights, it seems to me, were already present in Kant. The one move past Kant that Hegel makes that I really quite like is to move past the idea of person as "substance" and toward the idea of person as "subject."

i remember a quote from quirkyguard (my affectionate nickname for him) stating that if hegel left his work in the logic as mere conjecture, then he would have regarded it as  one of the greatest works ever written, but on the certainty that hegel swears by , its just charlatanism.

 

my advise on hegel, has always been, if you are not \ willing to work your way up from kant to fichte to schelling and then hegel, dont bother with the chronological approach. you will misinterpret far too much. i started getting Hegel after reading Bradley's Appearance and Reality which is also speculative, but its 1. speculative in such a way as to be friendly to analytic philosophers to comprehend, the first one third of the book is like 12 concise arguments  and 2. many of the ugly parts of hegel like his historicism which is awfully anthropocentric, and the ambiguity of spirit as a substance vs process are not in bradley. once i understood him, hegel was easy.

 

but here is the rub, once i read Bradley, i coudnt take hegel too seriously anymore.  way too much bright eyed theory. im glad i learned analytic philosophy first. it gave me the impatience to always prefer concise an clear argumentation.now that my iterest is thick systematic metaphysics, i coul choose my battles wisely.

Edited August 3, 2014 by HegelHatingHegelian

[Infinite Zest]

Origins of Objectivity - Tburj

 

Consciousness Explained - Big D

 

Being and Time - Heidi

[Nastasya_Filippovna]

i remember a quote from quirkyguard (my affectionate nickname for him) stating that if hegel left his work in the logic as mere conjecture, then he would have regarded it as  one of the greatest works ever written, but on the certainty that hegel swears by , its just charlatanism.

 

my advise on hegel, has always been, if you are not \ willing to work your way up from kant to fichte to schelling and then hegel, dont bother with the chronological approach. you will misinterpret far too much. i started getting Hegel after reading Bradley's Appearance and Reality which is also speculative, but its 1. speculative in such a way as to be friendly to analytic philosophers to comprehend, the first one third of the book is like 12 concise arguments  and 2. many of the ugly parts of hegel like his historicism which is awfully anthropocentric, and the ambiguity of spirit as a substance vs process are not in bradley. once i understood him, hegel was easy.

 

but here is the rub, once i read Bradley, i coudnt take hegel too seriously anymore.  way too much bright eyed theory. im glad i learned analytic philosophy first. it gave me the impatience to always prefer concise an clear argumentation.now that my iterest is thick systematic metaphysics, i coul choose my battles wisely.

It's so interesting what you said in regards to working from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel- when I took my course on German Idealism I had a professor who did just that. He said that there was no way to situate Hegel or understand him unless you had a firm command of these previous philosophers, and that many undergrads missed the opportunity to study the works of Schelling and Fichte in between. I'm so glad I had an introduction to those figures because I now see the necessity of that timeline. Of course there is only so much you can learn in one semester, but it was an essential component to the introduction of Hegel, and I firmly believe that it contributed to the reason that Hegel (right at the end of my undergrad career, given that this was my last semester), struck me with the impact that he did. We only got to read Phenomenology of Spirit and a bit of his work on Religion, but I'm dying to explore him further. The man is simply profound. 

[dgswaim]

It's so interesting what you said in regards to working from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel- when I took my course on German Idealism I had a professor who did just that. He said that there was no way to situate Hegel or understand him unless you had a firm command of these previous philosophers, and that many undergrads missed the opportunity to study the works of Schelling and Fichte in between. I'm so glad I had an introduction to those figures because I now see the necessity of that timeline. Of course there is only so much you can learn in one semester, but it was an essential component to the introduction of Hegel, and I firmly believe that it contributed to the reason that Hegel (right at the end of my undergrad career, given that this was my last semester), struck me with the impact that he did. We only got to read Phenomenology of Spirit and a bit of his work on Religion, but I'm dying to explore him further. The man is simply profound. 

I too had a seminar in Hegel's Phenomenology during my last semester as an undergraduate. We also looked at some of his lectures on art and religion. I had been steeped heavily in Kant by then (in various other undergrad courses we had read most of the 1st Critique, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics). The Hegelian in our department also happened to be the fellow that taught History of Philosophy II (modern philosophy), so Fichte and Schelling were involved in the readings for that. So I too was lucky to have a pretty solid handle on the German Idealist tradition before coming to Hegel. I just prefer Kant. Kant looms heavy in the background of Hegel's thought, but I generally find that I start to lose sympathy once he moves past Kant (and to a lesser extent Fichte). Kant and Fichte are just the right amount of idealism for me. Hegel, too much (Hume, obviously, not enough).

[MorganFreemanlives]

It's so interesting what you said in regards to working from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel- when I took my course on German Idealism I had a professor who did just that. He said that there was no way to situate Hegel or understand him unless you had a firm command of these previous philosophers, and that many undergrads missed the opportunity to study the works of Schelling and Fichte in between. I'm so glad I had an introduction to those figures because I now see the necessity of that timeline. Of course there is only so much you can learn in one semester, but it was an essential component to the introduction of Hegel, and I firmly believe that it contributed to the reason that Hegel (right at the end of my undergrad career, given that this was my last semester), struck me with the impact that he did. We only got to read Phenomenology of Spirit and a bit of his work on Religion, but I'm dying to explore him further. The man is simply profound. 

 

in a very brief incomplete summation, you can say fichte took kant and removed the thing-in-itself in favour of a subjective idealism of the transcendental ego. Schelling who was a roommate and friend of hegel for many years developed an objective idealism which perfected spinoza in its unique romantic style. hegel however found that schelling's absolute as a ground of being was too homogenous.   "the night in which all cows are black" as he said. hegel then saw that speculative philosophy was opposed to two divergent systems emphasizing one part over the other (self vs other) its in a combination of this and religious overtones that his dialectic is empowered.

 

i think its a pity however that Fichte an Schelling despite being given due credit by some scholars are only seen as a stepping stone and not as genuine philosophers who could compete with Hegel. after all we do view as Kant as being at least equal in philosophical consideration, but Kant remains forever more studied because he is historically more radical. to prove this point, Hegel borrowed a lot of of his ideas from Schelling and Fichte when he wrote An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation the authorship of his book was confused as kant  and only after he cleared that it was Fichte who wrote it that Fichte became famous.

Edited August 8, 2014 by HegelHatingHegelian

[overoverover]

On the Plurality of Worlds by David Lewis

Foundations of Arithmetic by Frege (basically everything by Frege is golden in my book)

Philosophical Investigations by W

 

 

A book I found really enjoyable despite it being the antithesis of my interests was Being and Time. 

 

Phenomenology of Spirit is the worst book I've ever tried to read. 

[dgswaim]

On the Plurality of Worlds by David Lewis

Foundations of Arithmetic by Frege (basically everything by Frege is golden in my book)

Philosophical Investigations by W

 

 

A book I found really enjoyable despite it being the antithesis of my interests was Being and Time. 

 

Phenomenology of Spirit is the worst book I've ever tried to read. 

I thought Phenomenology of Spirit was pretty terrible the first time I read it. After having read some of the commentaries published by more analytic types i revisited it and have developed something of a deeper appreciation for what Hegel is up to. It's poorly written, to be sure; but I'm starting to think that he really did have some important ideas.

[overoverover]

I thought Phenomenology of Spirit was pretty terrible the first time I read it. After having read some of the commentaries published by more analytic types i revisited it and have developed something of a deeper appreciation for what Hegel is up to. It's poorly written, to be sure; but I'm starting to think that he really did have some important ideas.

 

I'm not opposed to the idea that something is going on in that book, and I don't want to be one of those types that just complains about Hegel's prose and dismisses. However, even compared to some of his other writings (Encyclopaedia Logic, for example) the Phenomenology is pretty impossible to parse. Maybe if I'd read him before I started specializing I'd get around to reading commentaries—at this point, I don't see much reason to do so, personally. 

[dgswaim]

I'm not opposed to the idea that something is going on in that book, and I don't want to be one of those types that just complains about Hegel's prose and dismisses. However, even compared to some of his other writings (Encyclopaedia Logic, for example) the Phenomenology is pretty impossible to parse. Maybe if I'd read him before I started specializing I'd get around to reading commentaries—at this point, I don't see much reason to do so, personally. 

Yeah, that's fair enough. If you ever do feel like reading a commentary, I highly recommend Terry Pinkard's Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Thorough, clear, and enjoyable.

[overoverover]

Yeah, that's fair enough. If you ever do feel like reading a commentary, I highly recommend Terry Pinkard's Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Thorough, clear, and enjoyable.

 

It's funny: when I took a Hegel seminar, the professor explicitly told us not to read Pinkard, Pippin, or Brandom as they "systematically misinterpret Hegel for the purpose of spoon-feeding Americans." 

 

I did not enjoy that class.