31 Essential Philosophy Books Explained in 48 Minutes

[00:00:00]my name is Joe Folly and this is unsolicited advice ancient philosophy one Plato's Republic this is arguably Plato's most important work and it's where we get many of his key ideas in their most detailed form put simply it's a dialogue between the character of Socrates and a series of other Athenians about the nature of Justice in order to find out what a just person is Socrates suggests that they design a just City and in doing so Plato constructs a political philosophy a philosophy of mind and an ethical philosophy all in one he discusses the importance of wisdom and reason for living a good life as well as his firm belief that learning should guide governance here we also get Plato's famous theory of forms which holds that our Concepts like man or horse or triangle exist in a non-physical World in this perfect unaltered State While most people today don't describe to this metaphysics it heavily influenced the development of mathematics and it was the mainstate of Christian theology for almost a millennium in a slightly altered form going through platinus and then um St Austine perhaps more important than any specific theory is the general Chain of Thought behind this kind of reasoning Plato placed reason higher than emotion and had confidence in the world of maths and abstract ideas is to make sense of the material plane around us this would arguably Forge the intellectual ethos for much of Western philosophy there's a reason why Alfred North Whitehead once said that philosophy was merely a footnote to Plato while I think that might be overstating things slightly there's no denying the influence of this man and of this work in particular two Aristotle's nicomaki ethics this is Aristotle's most influential ethical treatise and it's the foundation of his theory of virtue ethics rather than just asking what is a good action Aristotle asked what makes a good person and argued that a good person had certain virtues like courage Temperance and generosity he also thought that developing these virtues would lead to udonia which is Greek for roughly speaking human flourishing the first key idea from the nicomaki ethics that I want to hone in on is the golden mean this holds that virtues lie somewhere between two polar extremes of a given property so courage lies between cowardice and recklessness and generosity lies between stinginess and profligacy The Virtue here is not necessarily the midpoint between these poles but is instead a contextually dependent ideal point which might change from person to person and obviously from situation to situation the amount of Bravery required by a soldier on the battlefield might be considered Reckless for anyone else or indeed that person at any other time another key focus of the work is friendship Aristotle thought that friendships of virtue are almost essential to a happy and fulfilling life he contrasts these with friendships of utility where each person is just using the other to get ahead in some ruthless Doggy Dog Rat Race like game and friendships of pleasure which are purely based on enjoying one another's company in today's often brutally individualistic world I think this is a wonderful celebration of the power of friendship three epic titus' discourses epicus is a stoic philosopher who really walked the walk he experienced an absolutely horrible existence as a slave in the Roman Empire and even had his leg broken by his sadistic Master at least according to Legend in this book you will find many key stoic ideas there is the classic separation between what is in your control and what is up to fate and outlines of many of the stoic virtues like wisdom courage and Temperance I always recommend that people start here when it comes to stoic philosophy whereas something like the anidan is just a short guide and Mark celas's meditations is a diary with many repeated thoughts and ideas this is a proper indepth philosophical discourse epicus is also just my favorite stoic philosopher while everyone has their hardships I find advice on bearing suffering that bit more credible when it's comes coming from a genuine EXs slave and you can tell just how much this feeling of helplessness and a loss of control shaped epic titus's worldview and his writings but next let's move from the ancient world to the study of meaning itself you know it you love it it's existentialism but this channel is all about learning and critical thinking which is why I recommend you check out today's very kind sponsor brilliant everyone knows that learning subjects like maths or science can be incredibly difficult these subjects get abstract and dense and sometimes they make you want to tear your hair out but this is where brilliant comes into play they have courses on everything from programming with python to classical mechanics to learning how large language models work and each one is crafted by award-winning research teams the best part is that with brilliant you learn by doing which makes information stick in your mind much more effectively it's also just a great antidote to scrolling since with their app you can complete quick lessons or exercises on the go rather than getting lost in the Quagmire of an Internet argument or Doom scrolling on social media later in the video we'll be discussing some books on logic and if you want to build on some of those Concepts you can check out the logic courses on brilliant which are great tools for aiding your critical thinking and just seeing what logic is about to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org unlisted advice or scan the QR code on screen or you can just click the link in the description I I don't mind which you can also get 20% off an annual premium subscription so please do check that out but anyway back to the video existential philosophy four Fredick NE thus spake zarathustra n considered this his magnum opus it is basically impenetrable without context but if you read it alongside something like the Cambridge companion to Nature you'll notice that it contains many of his key ideas in some form to hone in on just a few we are introduced to the problem of nihilism through the figure of the last man a kind of comfort seeking creature who strives for nothing higher than their own short-term pleasure and who never achieves any kind of Mastery over themselves as a result this represents n's feeling that Humanity could ultimately waste its potential we also get a detailed examination of the Uber mench this was the powerful person who NE thought could overcome nihilism and create new values in a new world without God and without religion finally we get the Eternal recurrence this was n's great thought experiment which asked us to consider how we would react if we found out we would have to repeat this life the one we're living right now over and over again for eternity he thought that our philosophies and our worldviews should let us rejoice at this rather than plunge us into despair this would later become his Criterion for what made a philosophy life affirming as I said this is the most comprehensive of any of n's works but it's also perhaps the least understandable so do proceed with caution five saen ker guards the sickness unto death this is not kicker guard's most well-known work but it is my personal favorite here he gives an emotional philosophical and Theological analysis of Despair he identifies despair specifically as stemming from a flaw in how we relate to ourselves he discusses despairs of possibility where someone either feels trapped in their life with no change or possibility in sight or is weighed down by all of the potential Avenues their life could take and so remain stagnant not ultimately committing to any of them he says that despair can also be brought about by inauthenticity or or an inability to appreciate anything greater than yourself or just running from the realization that you will die one day both here and elsewhere kard concludes that the roote out of Despair is embracing the Christian God he thinks it's in our relationship to God the power that gave us life and sustains us that we can finally see what we are in full a blend of the finite and the infinite of necessity and possibility for kard it is through this deep connection with the higher power that we can put existential despair to rest once and for all but whether you personally are religious or not this book is jam-packed with brilliant philosophical and existential observations and I promise that you will definitely get a lot from it six Alber Camu the myth of Copus Alber kamu wrote The Myth of Copus to tackle the problem of meaning he thought most of us cried out for the universe to give some purpose to our lives but that our cries were in vain there is no objective meaning in the world kamu thought this was an undeniable conclusion and he wanted to know if we could learn to live without meaning altogether or as he puts it without appeal it's worth noting the myth of Copus is not cmu's final answer on the issue here he presents a highly individualist picture of absurdism where a single person learns to break free of social conventions morality and a need for meaning in order to become an absurd hero it's almost nitian in its flavor later kamu would slightly change his tune and instead emphasize resisting the absurdity of life together finding a broad human solidarity in our shared plight nonetheless this book contains a lot of the positive Arguments for absurdism over other existential systems kamu thinks it is the only honest way of confronting a meaningless Universe without resorting to Faith or just collapsing into Despair and speaking of Despair seven Arthur schopenhauer's on the sufferings of the world schopenhauer was one of the most pessimistic thinkers in history he was pretty sure that most of the time life was and in this short essay he gives his specifically psychological Arguments for why he thinks that humans are constantly in a state of Desiring but that when we achieve our desires we don't just stop and think well that's enough now our will creates more and more things to want without an end in sight but this makes our Natural State one of frustration since our desires will grow and grow until we inevitably just can't fulfill them shophow also points out that happiness itself is normally quite hard to notice it often manifests as just a lack of active discomfort but this means that when we're happy this can often pass Us by by contrast unha happiness is extremely noticeable and so characterizes many people's lives to a much greater extent if you want a good introduction to pessimistic philosophy this is fantastic and it's only like 15 pages long so it's a quick read eight Theodore dostoevsky's Notes from Underground speaking of pessimism this is a phenomenal book but it's also quite tricky to get through it's a deeply disturbing monologue and collection of stories written from the perspective of the Underground ground man a spiteful and resentful figure who is tormented by his own hyperconsciousness he tortures himself with his self-destructive worldview until there is nothing left dovi here paints a sympathetic but extremely chilling picture of what a resentful life can do to someone or as he might put it a life without love and he implicitly expresses his own view that a materialistic philosophy will inevitably lead to both misery and disp and so we must in some way seek something higher we see in the underground man the kind of problems dostoevski was highly interested in solving all through his later works we are introduced to one of his key questions can we live in a world without God and we get a taste of what his eventual answer will be which is sort of no but it's complicated and many conceptions of God might not even help that much to simplify things massively dov's conception of God and theology is heavily intertwined with his conception of love and that makes it sort of difficult to give a one sentence summary of what he's going on about he doesn't just posit religious Faith itself as the solution to existential despair it's also tied up with this broader idea of active love and I'm I'm going off on a tangent let's just let's get back to the video there really is no quicker way to get excited about existential philosophy than to read this book and as a bonus you'll probably learn some quite unsettling things about the darker aspects of yourself in the process ethical philosophy John Stewart Mills utilitarianism JS Mill absolutely dominated British philosophy in his lifetime he wrote some of the most influential works on politics logic and ethics of the 19th century and utilitarianism is just one of his most famous books here he expands upon a simple idea that what is morally good is what secures the greatest net happiness that is our moral goal as humans is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain this is how we should decide whether an action is good or whether it's bad utilitarianism as a moral theory was first worked out by Jeremy benam but here Mill both develops and refines it he outlines how some Pleasures might be more valuable than others setting up a more complex view on the human emotional landscape in connection to utilitarian ethics he also argues that although the ultimate justification for any course of action is the utilitarian principle in our everyday lives we should follow predefined moral rules unless we have an exceptionally good reason not to do so as he thinks we are generally quite ill place to judge when we should break moral norms for the greater good this then lays the groundwork for human rights to be incorporated into a utilitarian moral philosophy and so move Beyond being nonsense on stilts as Jeremy wants describe them 10 Emmanuel K's groundwork of the metaphysics of morals or just a summary this is a difficult book to read I would even say that you're probably better off reading a summary rather than the work in full if you're not already at least somewhat familiar with K's philosophy and his very frustrating writing style here K outlines his radical moral philosophy where he attempts to deduce infallible moral laws from Human reason rather than appealing to a deity directly though I should mention God is heavily involved in the final form of K's ethical system K thinks that the most important moral fact about humans is our reasoned agency when we act we act not just as ourselves but as theoretical moral legislators that is when we act we should act only such that we could will that action to become a universal law importantly K's not Consulting our personal opinion here means could in a logical sense can we do it without entailing some kind of contradiction for example he thinks that we can never justify murder because if murder became a universal law we would all be murdering one another and so none of us would exist to do any more murdering he calls his moral law the categorical imperative since he thinks it's a command that does not rest on any prior conditions it always holds it is categorical in addition to the universal law formulation there is also the formulation to not treat people as means but only as ends and the one that suggests we should act in such a way as to bring out a perfect Kingdom of ends where everyone is seen as an end in themselves K thinks these are ultimately all equivalents and will dictate exactly the same actions I obviously can't do justice to the full complexity of K's thought here and to be honest the way I've explained it in this video isn't that good there's only so much you can go into in 200 odd words but I do think that K's ethical philosophy is definitely worth checking out for yourself for it sheer argumentative Beauty if nothing else 11 Peter singer's practical ethics this is often the standard introduction to applied ethics in undergraduate philosophy courses and it's for very good reason singer covers a wide variety of topics from animal rights to economic inequality and examines them from his own utilitarian perspective while also giving background on what other thinkers might make of these issues it's more of an anthology of essays and doesn't give one unified argument but it's a highly compelling read because it brings some of these more theoretical ethical philosophies that you might have already leared down to earth it's all well and good being able to recite ethical theories by heart but now we have to apply them in the messy imperfect world that we inhabit and this book is a fantastic place to start in tackling this problem 12 Elizabeth anum's Modern moral philosophy Elizabeth Anum is eternally underrated witty incisive and razor sharp she made huge waves in ethics philosophy of language and more here she tackles a wide variety of issues in quite a short paper she argues that moral philosophy has become too focused on the concept of an objective and Universal moral ought and should instead take a more nuanced psychological angle rather than just concerning itself with laws around action it should talk about people attributes and characteristics as well eagle-eyed or Eagle eared viewers will notice that this is quite similar to the Aristotelian project we discussed earlier and anam's paper actually ushered in a new enthusiasm for The Virtue ethics approach in the Modern Age she criticizes 20th century utilitarian thought as too narrow and suggests that we widen our idea of ought to include broader matters of human flourishing she thinks this has a chance at restoring the motivational character of ethical statements and ethical claims and just better reflect how many people now conceive of the world as not divinely governed by particular laws interestingly Anam herself was Catholic so she arguably didn't even have this problem but it's nice that she solved it for the rest of us anyway if you've ever felt that modern discussions around ethics are a bit too myopic and obsessed with consequences over character or principle then this paper is for you 13 JL macky's ethics inventing right and wrong okay I'm cheating a bit here because technically this book is about meta ethics macki does not argue for a particular moral theory but instead talks about the nature of ethical claims themselves in this book macki challenges a dearly held belief that there is such a thing as right and such a thing as wrong macki is an error theorist about moral statements which means that he can considers any statement of the form X is morally good or X is morally wrong as false he thinks they are attempting to refer to some objective moral property out in the world but he also thinks no such property is there thus these statements are false and he puts forward one of the most controversial thesis of all time he gives various Arguments for the position that there are no moral facts he argues that the lack of convergence among moral opinions suggests that we are not examining a single set of truths that we can all eventually agree upon he also says that if moral properties do exist they seem very strange you can't see them or touch them or perceive them with any of our normal faculties so they must be accounted for by some other meats of course many of you will probably take great issue with these claims and these arguments and they have been criticized by many other thinkers but of course you'll have to read the whole book to critique it in full philosophy of religion Ed phasers aquinus a beginner's guide I've gone on record as saying that St Thomas ainus is one of the most misunderstood thinkers in history he forced this rather unfortunate intersection between popularity and obscurity that is a lot of people know who he is and a lot of people think that they know what he said but the man himself is writing in a philosophical context that almost seems alien to us now so rather than diving in unprepared it is incredibly helpful to read an introduction to his work and my personal favorite is Ed phasers it is both highly readable and excellent for dispelling many of the myths surrounding aquinus for instance aquinus metaphysics was deeply in meshed with classical Aristotelian philosophy so when he uses a term like motion he does not mean movement in the way that we would use the word today but instead a potential being actualized like how my cup is a potential cup of tea but I actualize it when I add the tea bag and hot water aquinus also draws a crucial distinction between causation per accidents and causation per se whereas the former is sequential causation like dominoes knocking over in a line the latter is more akin to a ladder holding someone up if the ladder Falls the person falls as well it is not only causation but sustenance too the best part is phaser work is very accessible regardless of how much philosophy or theology you have read before so it's fantastic for anyone interested in exploring this fascinating field 15 JL shellenberg Divine hiddenness and human reason you may have heard of the problem of evil this asks why evil exists if there is an all powerful all- knowing and all loving God the problem of divine hiddenness is somewhat similar if God is all loving all powerful and all knowing why does he not make his existence more obvious and why does he not try to convince non-believers shellenberg argument is incredibly complex but these are its broad outlines if God is all loving then he must desire some kind of relationship with us but then why is it that a significant minority of people do not believe in God it's possible that some of these people are resistant to a relationship with God but many will just be lapsed Believers or atheists who desperately want to believe in God but cannot find the requisite convincing evidence shellenberg explores the implications of and potential solutions to this problem and gives a fantastic philosophical backing to the intuition that quite a lot of people have about God if God exists and he wants people to believe in him he wants a loving relationship with them why hasn't he made the path to belief quite a lot clearer and speaking of the problem of evil 16 CS Lewis's the problem of pain CS Lewis is a great starting point for anyone interested in Christianity or the philosophy of religion around Christianity he is highly accessible and also just rigorous enough that it will wet your appetite for other things here Lewis deals with suffering in the world on a Christian framework he gives a good overview of the various Christian responses to the problem of evil he says that God gave us Free Will and as a result we will sometimes do evil things and cause suffering he also appeals to the Book of Genesis saying that we live in a fallen world because we rejected a perfect one out of mere Pride additionally he gives a discussion of Hell which is often left out of debates around evil and suffering but is pretty important considering it is eternal suffering and not just the temporary suffering here on Earth Lewis gives an interesting defense of Hell which I won't spoil here partly because I don't even have the space to but it is worth looking at for both Believers and non-believers for me the problem of Hell seems endlessly theologically fascinating and this will Ely get you pumped to tackle it 17 leev shestov Athens and Jerusalem this is one of the most unique defenses of God I have ever seen rather than give a straightforward reasoned argument for God shestov argues that theological belief is inherently unreasonable and then he defends It Anyway shestov says there are multiple good motivations we might have for believing in something we might have evidence for it but we also might find a belief in it necessary for our survival or our flourishing he thinks theological beliefs fall into this latter category shestov's book argues against what he calls the tyranny of Reason suggesting that we can believe and embrace things on explicitly unreasonable grounds it sounds kind of mad when you're just giving a potted summary like this but the book itself is this odd mix of reasoned argument psychological discussion and emotional appeal and it definitely bears checking out I also like it because defending Faith even if it became unreasonable to believe is historically a pretty significant theological position it's arguably one of the many themes in the Book of Job but unfortunately it just doesn't come up that much in popular debate and even though most people will probably not find shestov convincing they may at the very least find him psychologically and philosophically captivating philosophy of science 18 K Brad Ray's resisting scientific realism what could be more obvious than the statement science searches for truth but this book asks one is this true and two does it matter if science is searching for something else specifically it argues that the progress of science is better conceived as doing a wide Patchwork of jobs such as solving practical problems and predicting observations Rey argues this solves a whole heap of philosophical issues regarding science for example one problem for scientific realists is the pessimistic meta induction that is most scientific theories have been false in the past so why should we believe our current ones are true rather than arguing that science is getting closer to the truth Ry puts forward an anti-realist view of science he says it is getting better at predicting observations and performing certain tasks we value rather than relying on a more nebulous idea of absolute truth not only does this solve the problems with the realist conception of science it also makes untrue but useful assumptions like the assumption that liquid is continuous in fluid dynamics an unpro part of the scientific process it was also the book that got me hooked on the philosophy of science so it has my personal recommendation for that 19 Carl poppers the logic of scientific discovery Carl poer is an absolute giant of 20th century philosophy he wrote about politics language science and much more in this work he gives his famous falsifiability Criterion for science essentially he thinks what separates scientific study from other fields is that it makes falsifiable claims about observations that is a scientific theory will give a series of predictions and if the predictions do not happen then the theory is falsified and we can dismiss it he contrasted this with metaphysical statements which certainly had Arguments for and against them but could not be directly falsified by observations later on this would become the basis for his analysis of pseudo science where he says that pseudoscientific statements pretend to be falsifiable and thus pretend to be science but are not Poppa's thoughts in this book dominate the popular conception of science today if you've ever thought that a given idea seems fishy or that it's pretending to be scientific but you could not put your finger on exactly why then POA will probably give you an argument to explain it there are certainly critiques of Poppa's View and I've even made some of them in my prior videos but he is still a genius and this is still the basis for much modern thinking about scientific knowledge the definition of Science and its place in the world 20 philosophy of pseudo science edited by masimo Puchi and Martin bowry one of the most hot button issues in philosophy of science is pseudo science we want to know what pseudo science is how to spot it and how not to be misled by it this collection of essays brings together leading philosophers of science to tackle key questions about and around pseudoscience some of it is straightforward philosophy but it also touches upon psychology what makes people believe pseudoscientific claims and sociology how do pseudo scientific communities actually operate one of my favorite essays in this volume is B Netta coer who argues that pseudoscientific communities are composed largely of belief bodies who do not subject claims to criticism based on observation but instead whether they cohere to a group Orthodoxy which is itself uncritically supported a number of other thinkers also propose cluster concept definitions of pseudo science where it can't be identified by a single property or a set of necessary and sufficient conditions but instead a cluster of them that are held to greater or lesser degrees this also allows us to not just think in terms of pseudo science and real science but also more scientific and more pseudoscientific it is possible that some Sciences are more rigorous than others say because their subject matter is inherently more predictable and it's also possible that some pseudo Sciences are far more egregious than others these are just a couple of papers in the book it covers far more than this but unfortunately we have to move on logic godob frager's B Griff shrift frager is one of my absolute favorite philosophers he represents a Precision in thought that is almost unmatched by any other thinker he is also one of the key founders of mathematical logic and in his begriff shrift or concept script he provides the most in-depth treatment of logic of anyone that came before him though it doesn't look exactly like modern logic frager takes you through the thought processes behind each of his logical symbols it is such a wonderful blend of philosophy and Mathematics he also uses some logical markers that have since fallen out of fashion but I would argue are still useful for categorizing and characterizing our everyday thought for instance he has an assertion marker to clarify that a statement is being asserted rather than merely entertained or considered this sort of thing doesn't really crop up a lot in modern logic but it does encourage you to think about your relationship to the propositions and statements that you use most importantly bgri shrift Gets You Inside the Mind of an absolutely brilliant thinker and just by systematically going through it you will become more precise and more rigorous in your own thought but if you're going to learn logic a more General introduction can also be helpful 22 Christopher l a friendly introduction to mathematical logic okay this is sort of cheating again because this isn't a philosophy book at all but it is the most entertaining and easyto read introduction to mathematical Logic on the market it takes you through propositional logic predicate logic and hardcore logical findings like girdle's incompleteness theorems in a way that feels downright pleasurable if you have any mathematical background at all this book will be very accessible and you'll probably get through the first half fairly quickly the more technical stuff in the second half may take some time to understand but it is still eminently doable you might just have to read it more at the pace of a an undergraduate math textbook than a an easy or casual read it's still not like those yellow graduate texts and Mathematics that take forever to get through though I think I've even got one on my shelf I've got the The Graduate text and Mathematics for model theory on my shelf and that book while brilliant and a fantastic reference if you ever need to know anything about model theory is also absolute hell to read on the other hand if you don't have too much grounding in maths this book will will be a little challenging you might be better off with some of the introductions on the open logic project as they are incredibly readable on a side note I am personally going to put together some webinars for basic logic that you can sign up and attend but they probably won't be out for a while and hey if you've read any of these books you won't even need to come to them I've probably Cho my sales in the foot there but hey hum philosophy of language 23 Michael Potter's the rise of analytic philosophy philosophy of language was a big Topic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries this was a period of intense logical analysis of our speech not so much to see how our language actually functioned in practice but to clean it up into something a little bit more precise and a little bit more logical this project has since fallen out of fashion considerably because of an increasing appreciation of just how complex language is and all the different purposes it can serve but the way that these thinkers approached their work was so precise and so rigorous that it is valuable to study regardless it will make you consider exactly what you mean when you are using words and making arguments Michael Potter's book is a critically acclaimed study of the key thinkers of this period golob frager lud Vicken Stein Bertram Russell and Frank Ramsey each of them is well worth reading for themselves but Potter gives a detailed overview of their key ideas and places them in their historical context this is especially helpful for Vicken Stein's early work tractatus logico philosophicus as it can be incredibly difficult to read it in isolation I particularly recommend the chapters on Frank Ramsey just because he is one of the most underrated thinkers in history and died tragically young if everyone knew his work I don't know if the world would be a better place but I know it would certainly make me happy 24 Paul Grace's logic and conversation a deeply underrated part of language is implicature this is when we say one thing but we imply another thing because of the context in which we say it for example a professor I knew once had to write an academic reference for an incredibly poor student pressed for things to say he wrote down that the student was very good conversation because it was the only true nice and relevant thing the professor could think of there is nothing about the phrase he is good conversation that directly criticizes the student abilities but it was about what the professor did not say in the the context of an academic reference you are meant to say everything positive you can about a student's academic performance and so this implies that the professor could not think of anything else which incidentally he couldn't in this quite short paper GCE argues that when we talk to one another in ordinary conversation we implicitly agree to a set of maxims like being informative honest relevant and clear in order to encourage cooperation within language use but if someone seems to break these rules it lets us know that they are implying something in my above example the professor broke the rule to be informative because they didn't comment on the academic performance of the student much at all in context this implies that they are a poor student because the professor didn't have anything nice to say likewise the phrase sleeping with the fishes doesn't directly state that someone is dead but it implies it by being obscure you can apply this analysis to jokes political speech and just ordinary conversations and you'll have to take my word for it that this is surprisingly fun 25 ludvig viken Stein's philosophical investigations this is one of Vicken Stein's postumus published works and it completely transformed the way philosophers look at Key aspects of language as we just said philosophers went through a period of considering language primarily in terms of semantic meaning and logical structure but this is only a tiny fraction of how we use it in this work Vicken Stein gives an entirely different view on both language and linguistic behavior and it's one that is still extremely useful and insightful today here viken stein conceives of language in terms of language games these are interactions between people towards certain purposes some language games are incredibly explicit The Language game of a written play has a main objective perform your lines to the best of your ability in order to affect an audience but often language games and practice are much vager for example in a comedy routine you are often allowed to use coarse language to make jokes but you also can't be so coarse that it undermines the comedy or that you lose the audience Vicken Stein also provides a new way of thinking about definitions in terms of family resemblances think about how you label something a sport Sports tend to share some common properties they involve physical excellence and competition and often involve teams but they don't all have all of these properties some purport sports like chess or Esports seem to break the first condition whereas others like dance seem to break the second the term sport isn't neatly defined by necessary and sufficient conditions instead we spot these little similarities between the ways we use the word and then this influences the future usage of the word you can apply this to real world debates in Endless ways almost any time a definition is in dispute this book can help but now let's move from language to knowledge epistemology 26 David Humes an inquiry concerning human understanding David Hume spent a lot of his life telling people the limits on what we can sensibly know and this is no exception here he gives detailed Arguments for empiricism or his belief that apart from a few ways we can manipulate Concepts we gain all of our ideas from sense impressions in other words we learn almost everything from perceiving the world around us and seeing what it is like this sounds pretty straightforward but Hume pushes this idea to its absolute limits arguing that morality and even causation are not in the world but a merely human interpretations of certain sense Impressions he gives one of the first major accounts of morality as merely reflections of emotional sentiments rather than indicating some truth about the world and he also places hard limits on what we can know if we are not either studying a relation of ideas that is examining the definitions in our Concepts or considering a matter of fact which pertains to observational experience then he thinks we are overstepping our epistemic bats he even recommends that any idea not in these two categories should be committed to the Flames 27 WV quines two dogmas of empiricism Willard van Orman Quin effectively founded a whole field of philosophy called naturalized epistemology largely on the back of this paper Quin held that any belief even our most deeply held logical beliefs are subject to Revision in light of further Evidence preempting modern theories of cognitive dissonance he argued that we should conceive of our beliefs as a kind of web with some deeply held beliefs near the center and more peripheral ones towards the edges among other things he thought we desired to keep this web internally consistent and that we do this by adjusting our web of beliefs in accordance with new information he also thought we wanted to minimize the overall disruption to the web meaning that more deeply held ideas would be much harder to dislodge than superficial ones Quin also thinks this means we test our belief structure as a whole rather than individual beliefs in isolation I love this paper because it questions some of our Common Sense assumptions about how we form beliefs and acquire knowledge it also begins to build a bridge between abstract epistemic philosophy and experimental psychology a bridge that remains alive and well to this day and produces an awful lot of Highly interesting research 28 ludvic Vicken Stein's uncertainty this is another extremely controversial text in epistemology it is compiled from Vicken Stein's notebooks and examines the very foundations of our belief structures my favorite part of this book is the analysis of of hinge propositions Vicken Stein argues that in order for one belief to justify another the justifying belief has to be more strongly held and more strongly Justified than the belief it is justifying intuitively this makes sense we can justify the existence of an apple with our perceptions but we cannot say I must be perceiving an apple because I already know that the apple is there in order to doubt a belief the belief that inspires doubt must also be more strongly held than the belief being it I would not doubt the existence of an apple because someone told me that fairies were deceiving my perceptions since I already believe the former but I'm very skeptical of the latter but Vicken Stein points out that this means our most strongly held beliefs cannot be doubted but they also can't really be justified either every one of us no matter how rational or objective we think we are have a set of beliefs that we simply must assume to make the rest of our epistemic framework function it is difficult to overstate just how revolutionary this idea is and it's only one of the many Vicken Stein puts forward in uncertainty even in the stuff he didn't publish himself Vicken Stein is irritatingly brilliant and now some miscellaneous personal favorites 29 Cheryl mizak Cambridge pragmatism long-term viewers of the channel will know that philosophical pragmatism is kind of my hobby horse and this is the best academic history of it out there if I were to sum up pragmatism in a horribly oversimplified statement it is viewing philosophy and philosophical issues from the perspective of actual human people attempting to solve problems it treats humans as naturalistic agents trying to fulfill their own desires and needs in quite a challenging World pragmatist philosophers don't just ask what does this concept mean or is this statement true but instead asks what do these Concepts or ideas do how do they serve the human who is proposing or acting in accordance with them here mizak gives an introduction to some of the greatest pragmatist thinkers in the 20th and late 19th century like CS Pierce William James as well as Frank Ramsey and the later Vicken Stein if you ever thought that philosophy could do with being a bit more down to earth or have a more realistic view on how humans behave and think then this is the book for you if you want to look into more modern pragmatist thought the two thinkers that I would look at are Hugh price and the philosopher of science hok Chang both of their work is exceptionally brilliant and also incredibly clearly laid out now down to the final two 30 stals on love this is perhaps stretching the definition of philosophy but I will die on the hill that stal was a phenomenal philosopher of emotion and particularly of love the actual book is just a collection of observations stal makes of both himself and other people in love but they are just so unflinchingly insightful stal does not even attempt to save face by shying away from Love's more embarrassing aspects but he picks them apart with startling Precision perhaps the most famous idea in on love is crystallization this is where we fixate on our lover so much that the version of that exists in our imagination no longer really resembles them at all but is an a grandis near-perfect version of them that is certain to capture our attention this notion that we can fall in love with the idea of someone rather than the person themselves has been highly influential and was later developed by psychologists into the theory of limerance limerance is a kind of obsessive affection and attraction where our idea of our beloved dominates our thoughts until they become almost unrecognizable and we become tragically hopelessly enamored with them I have a full video on this called why crushes are so painful if you want a more detailed look but there really is no substitute for reading the work for yourself 31 Theodore Doo's the brothers karamazov this is considered by many to be the greatest novel of all time and it is personally my favorite book I wish I had a more obscure one so I could seem cool cooler but this is it I don't want to spoil too much of the plot but essentially it concerns a family the karamazovs and their differing philosophies the father Theodore karamazov is a drunken philanderer Dimitri the eldest is occupied almost entirely by his sensuality emotion and physicality Ivan the middle brother is an intellectual struggling to come to terms with his conclusion that if God does not exist then everything is permitted and his belief that God does not in fact exist and alosha the youngest has an innocent and spiritual disposition though he is plagued by his own doubts about God Evil And Justice in the world dovi explores so many themes in this work it is difficult to lay them all out here there is intense psychological analysis theological questions on the nature of God and Faith philosophical issues of meaning and existential motivation and a hell of a lot more many of these questions are addressed in other books on this list but seeing them in this novel form really animates them both philosophically and emotionally we can sometimes forget that existential philosophy is not just about arguments and critical analysis it is about how to live how to feel and how to find fulfillment and the novel is the perfect way to tackle this side of these vital issues so there is my list I really hope I've persuaded you to give one or more of these books a good go and if you want some more book recommendations then check out my video on some historically banned books right here I hope you enjoyed the video and have a wonderful day