I have been thinking of learning Philosophy without going to a college or enrolling in Philosophy courses for some time now. Philosophy is such a vast topic that the biggest trouble for me was to figure out where to start, what are the major areas of Philosophy that I should focus on, and how to go about it within the limited time I have. Apart from my spiritual quest, I was very intrigued by Jordan B Peterson's mentions of Friedrich Nietzsche in one of the best books I have ever read 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
Some of my early attempts were watching the Philosophy Crash Course in YouTube (and planning to do these 47 videos another go in the next few weeks), reading 50 Philosophy Ideas you really need to know by Ben Dupre, listening in audible 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting, Seeing: Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books by Tom Butler-Bowdon, and reading The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz. It still didn't give me enough courage to undertake a long journey of diving deep into various branches of Philosophy. But finally I couldn't resist myself and woke up 5 AM in the morning today to google for four hours all the world of internet, and come up with the below outline for myself to proceed on what might turn out to be (if Almighty permits) decades journey into learning Philosophy myself.
First I went for identifying major branches of Philosophy to explore. Those are -
- Metaphysics - ultimate nature of reality
- Epistemology - what we know and how we come to know it
- Axiology - study of principles and values which is further divided into two major kinds
- Ethics - the study of morality
- Aesthetics - inquiry about art and beauty
- Logic - the structure of arguments
In addition to these, I have also seen the below few to be included as major branches.
- Ontology - knowing the reality
- Political Philosophy - deals with government, justice, and so on
I also see attempts to refer to Eastern Philosophy as spiritual and Western Philosophy as logical although most people don't even agree on these two broad definitions. For example, where to put Confucianism in this classification?
When it comes to where to start reading, I have seen popular arguments to begin with the history of Philosophy. For that, I am planning to read the paperback reprint A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (895 pages) and listen to the audiobook The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant (19 hours). My friend Ashfaq gave me a book as a birthday gift which I will plan to finish next - A Little History of Philosophy of History by Nigel Warburton.
I plan to proceed then next with The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition by Daniel N. Robinson (30 hours), and then The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. After that, I hope to figure out which of the following books and in which order I will read next.
- Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
- Poetics by Aristotle
- The Republic by Plato
- Meditations by Rene Descartes
- A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
- Candide by Voltaire
- The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
- Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (read it earlier but will read again)
- The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell
- The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Incoherence of the Philosophers by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali
- The Incoherence of the Incoherence by Ibn Rush (Averroes)
- The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History - The Abridged Edition by Ibn Khaldun
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M Pirsig
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
- Free Will by Sam Harris
When stuck with any concept, I plan to use Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Reddit to unblock myself.
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