QUARTERLY REPEAT: CURT, WHAT PHILOSOPHERS ARE WORTH READING REALLY? NONE. BUT IF

QUARTERLY REPEAT: CURT, WHAT PHILOSOPHERS ARE WORTH READING REALLY? NONE. BUT IF YOU MUST….

—“Curt: Which philosophers are worth reading? I take it Hume, Newton and Aristotle are among the ones who avoided engaging in falsehoods?— Alex

You know, to be honest, I don’t think much of philosophers other than to get a feel for how the history of thought evolved into science.

I would suggest reading about philosophers rather than philosophers themselves. I would rather someone read the SEP than any given philosopher. (Seriously. Encyclopedias prevent you from anchoring. )

That said, it is hard to say no to:

1 – Aristotle/Aurelius,

2 – Machiavelli/Durkheim/Pareto/Hayek,

3 – Bacon/Locke/Smith/Hume/Jefferson,

4 – Galileo/Newton/Darwin/Maxwell.

5 – The Greek tragedies, Dostoyevsky, Checkov, and Nietzche.

6 – The Greek and Roman myths, the whole corpus of Christiandom’s myths that survived christianity as folk myths of the hearth. And perhaps most importantly homer, and the entire european (including Russian) great myths that evolved from that set of myths.

And whichever of my followers had the genius bit to add, that it is only through tragedy that we can communicate to all classes, is something that I think bears knowing.