Posted: Jan 14, 2014 12:19 am
For an interested layperson with no background, I'd recommend "What Does it All Mean?" by Tom Nagel as an introduction to philosophy, philosophical problems, and philosophical thinking quite generally. It covers the big stuff in an accessible way.
For someone who wants a deeper introduction, perhaps to a particular sub-area, the best thing is to take a college class. But that's not always available for obvious reasons. A second-best can be to find a syllabus from a college class and do the readings on one's own (this is much easier if one has journal access). A good alternative can be to find an anthology which is described in the press materials and reviews as being suitable for an undergraduate course and reading through that; there, the editor's introductions and such will do something to help orient the reader.
Finally, there is always the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Want to learn about the philosophy of probability? Look it up there. The downside is that the articles are generally aimed at a professional audience: people who may not know about the topic, but are probably fairly conversant in academic philosophy. So they can be a bit hard.
In general, for beginners I would not recommend historically famous texts (like The Republic, the Critique, the Treatise, etc.) Most of those works are difficult to parse for experts, let alone beginners, and my own view is that they are of limited interest to non-historians. Much of their content has been rendered parochial and archaic over the intervening centuries. I think a person who was interested in ethics would get more out of reading modern Kantians like Onora O'Niel or Christine Korsgaard then they'd get out of reading the man himself.
For someone who wants a deeper introduction, perhaps to a particular sub-area, the best thing is to take a college class. But that's not always available for obvious reasons. A second-best can be to find a syllabus from a college class and do the readings on one's own (this is much easier if one has journal access). A good alternative can be to find an anthology which is described in the press materials and reviews as being suitable for an undergraduate course and reading through that; there, the editor's introductions and such will do something to help orient the reader.
Finally, there is always the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Want to learn about the philosophy of probability? Look it up there. The downside is that the articles are generally aimed at a professional audience: people who may not know about the topic, but are probably fairly conversant in academic philosophy. So they can be a bit hard.
In general, for beginners I would not recommend historically famous texts (like The Republic, the Critique, the Treatise, etc.) Most of those works are difficult to parse for experts, let alone beginners, and my own view is that they are of limited interest to non-historians. Much of their content has been rendered parochial and archaic over the intervening centuries. I think a person who was interested in ethics would get more out of reading modern Kantians like Onora O'Niel or Christine Korsgaard then they'd get out of reading the man himself.