A curated list of philosophy resources | Hacker News Reader

A curated list of philosophy resources

github.com

49 pointsImmune29 comments

I am becoming tired of the word "curated" unless it is being used in a context implying a qualified curator. This could be someone's random list of browser links for all I know. Who are the curators of this list and how are they qualified for me to are about their "curated" list? I don't necessarily mean formal qualifications. Also, curation implies active and personal involvement (as opposed to passive analysis based on statistical measures of relevance or citations). Why in this case would I prefer personal curation?

The list includes The Will to Power as the first entry under Nietzsche. On this basis I'd have to question the degree to which this list was curated at all as this work wasn't actually written by Nietzsche, but rather edited together by his sister whose motives may have been suspect.

This isn't a curated list. This is an empty list. It has almost no content. None of the links do anything. I can't understand why it's posted here when it has so little work done and so much work yet to be done.

I hope it grows, of course, but mostly I hope it grows to include people who aren't a handful of western white men.

Indeed, and the books aren't in any order as far as I can tell. Nor are they categorized by theme.

It's a GitHub hosted shared document, open to all. Feel free to add as many others as you'd like!

I've been enjoying ancient Chinese proverbs lately, such as:

"It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness"

;-)

> It's a GitHub hosted shared document, open to all

So literally the opposite of curated?

Or shared curation, just like Wikipedia. Depends on your view point I guess.

"In order to grow user-curated content, you must first plant seed content."

https://plato.stanford.edu

A great collection of philosophy resources which was indispensable during my undergrad philosophy studies.

Search by philosophers, traditions, what have you!

[edit: I see I was beaten to the punch by a minute! Apologies for the double post]

This list is exclusively of western philosophers.

If you want to step into the world of philosophy at any time period or in any part of the world, I highly recommend the podcast "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps" by Peter Adamson.

Link: https://historyofphilosophy.net

Well, I can imagine a list of, say, physics resources that does not contain any references to the works of ancient thinkers.

"A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps" is a great podcast but... as the name implies it tries to be as exhaustive as possible and as a result progresses extremely slowly through the history of philosophy.

For those interested in getting some basic knowledge about philosophy quickly I'd rather recommend Philosophize This! by Stephen West. The host isn't a philosopher by education but he seems to be very knowledgeable about the subject(at least to a layman such as me, feel free to correct this statement) and more importantly he focuses on the most important points that can be relevant to the average listener.

Also +1 for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which has already been brought up by others ITT.

YES! "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps" is the best place imho for anyone to just into learning philosophy.

I'd also recommend "The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition" on audible. https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Great-Ideas-of-Philosophy-2nd...

Excellent (if exhaustive) suggestion. I'm a happy listener.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the one stop shop for most purposes.

With any one philosopher or topic as a starting point, the additional resources and bibliographies will be about as good as you can get for a curated list.

https://plato.stanford.edu/

Such a list would also benefit from being explicit about translations (particularly in the case of Kant and Nietzsche) for those who can't read them in their original. Unfortunately, the public domain versions tend to have grievous errors that often misconstrue the authors' intentions.

I think that curated list focuses too heavily on modern philosophy. Does Lacan even belong? Kierkegaard is Christian philosophy, which I don't think belongs in a list of general philosophy resources, except as case studies for spotting logical faults and wishful thinking.

Listing Foucault, but not David Hume, says a lot.

A few surveys would probably be more valuable than trying to slog through most of the primary sources of philosophy.

- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

- A.C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy

- Anthony Kenny, New History of Western Philosophy (4 volumes but also published as a combined single volume ebook)

- Adam Peterson, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (3 volumes, 4 later this year, also a podcast[1])

- Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

A common sentiment is that Bertrand Russell is too biased in his presentation, but his survey was a popular classic for many years.

Perhaps also a supplement specific to eastern philosophy, like van Norden, An Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy?

[1] https://historyofphilosophy.net/all-episodes

> A common sentiment is that Bertrand Russell is too biased in his presentation, but his survey was a popular classic for many years.

Since he explicitly comments on his subjects and is quite clear when he's doing so, and lays out up front which sorts of things he'll be focusing on for the whole enterprise, that complaint's never made much sense to me. I'm sure there's some further bias, but that's going to necessarily be true of any shortish treatment of such a broad field.

> - Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

I'd for sure recommend Russell over this. Durant's scope both in philosophers covered, and the portions of their philosophy he focuses on (chiefly ethics, IIRC), is much smaller, and his coverage less insightful and fluent. Russell's is the better single-volume intro to the field of the two, Durant's being so bland and shallow by comparison to make the choice an easy one. Russell's not really any harder to read, either, though the medieval section's kind of a slog (Durant solves that problem by basically skipping all of it).

A curated list of philosophy references:

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1927, 1960) https://www.worldcat.org/title/story-of-philosophy-the-lives... (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Philosophy) Western only.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu

The Basics of Philosophy: https://www.philosophybasics.com

Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy. https://www.worldcat.org/title/little-history-of-philosophy/.... Light, but a good overview.

Peter Adamson, "The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps": https://historyofphilosophy.net. Extremely comprehensive.

Carneades.org on Youtube: https://youtube.com/user/carneadesofcyrene and homepage: https://carneades.org

Allain de Botton's School of Life series s light but often quite good: Western Philosophy: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwxNMb28XmpeypJMHfNbJ4R.... Eastern Philosophy: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwxNMb28XmpeUL1vz9Su7Om...

As others have already mentioned, this is a fairly shallow list of more or less just the most popular Philosophers in a decidely western Germanic tradition (excepting maybe Lacan). I think some diversity as well as inclusion of lesser known thinkers (whose thought is perhaps more specialized to particular branches of philosophy) would improve it.

This is an arbitrary selection of (exclusively western and male) philosophers, ordered by first names(?), listing the titles of some of their works. No attempt at any classification; no links to easily access the listed works. I don't see how this could be of any use to me.

The western and male part shouldn't bother anyone. I'm kind of surprised to see that comment several times in these comments. Most philosophy in English, especially before 1960, is written by western males.

Yet no one points out that these all of these sources are continental (as opposed to analytic) philosophers. I'd think that a "curated" list that omits Russell, Carnap, and Quine—the most preeminent philosophers of the 20th century—would raise a bigger fuss among the HN crowd.

I find modern philosophy papers to be far more interesting, readable and concise than some of these texts, which are often pretty circuitous. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a good site that curates good papers.

You might like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is usually my first stop when digging into a new thinker.

For example, here's the article on Marx: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/

A friend who is pursuing a BA in Philosophy says it's the only online source that they are allowed to cite.

C'mon down to PhilPapers.com!

You might like this: http://www.pgrim.org/philosophersannual/index.html

It's an annual collection of some of the best papers of the year. It's not aimed at the general reader so some of these will be impenetrable if you don't have a background in the specific area, but there's usually a couple of readable things in each year's edition for someone with an ~undergrad level foundation.

philosophy majors use https://plato.stanford.edu/

not sure the motivations behind this list. a nice blurb about it's contents would be nice.

Weird list. Unless you have a PhD in philosophy, good luck reading some of these without some serious help. How about some good commentaries that make some of these books intelligible for the average person? People get PhDs in prestigious philosophy departments for making some kind of sense of just one of these books.

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