What is the Greatest Work of Philosophy You Have Ever Read?

Please list the great work of philosophy you have ever personally read. Two rules, it must be something you have personally read in its entirety and it must not be a translation (you must have read it in its original language).

Thanks! I'm looking forward to what everybody has to say.

The Republic, the Organon, the Bible, the Way of the Sufi, the Tao, all translations.

So that leaves me with:
Be Here Now - Baba Ram Dass
Stranger In A Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse


There's a few more, but that's a start.

clownboy said:

The Republic, the Organon, the Bible, the Way of the Sufi, the Tao, all translations.

So that leaves me with:
Be Here Now - Baba Ram Dass
Stranger In A Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse


There's a few more, but that's a start.

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Thanks for the response!

I'm afraid Siddhartha was originally in German. I have not read Ram Das, but I did enjoy Stranger in a Strange Land. Have you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?

Guy Incognito said:

Thanks for the response!

I'm afraid Siddhartha was originally in German. I have not read Ram Das, but I did enjoy Stranger in a Strange Land. Have you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?

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Darn! I didn't read it in German. Be Here Now is difficult to find, it was published by some hippie press outfit after Alpert (Leary's buddy) went to India and became Ram Dass.

I love all Heinlein, even the stuff after he went wacky (I think the blocked carotid affected him earlier than it was detected). To this day I curse the name Verhoeven. The bastard destroyed Starship Troopers.

Guy Incognito said:

Please list the great work of philosophy you have ever personally read. Two rules, it must be something you have personally read in its entirety and it must not be a translation (you must have read it in its original language).

Thanks! I'm looking forward to what everybody has to say.

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The second requirement seems bizarre. A person's ability to read the great works of human thought is extremely limited if they have to read it in its original language.

You mean if I read Plato, Aristotle, I had to have read it in Ancient Greek, and if I read Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, I had to have read it in German, if I read Kierkegaard, I had to have done it in Danish, and if I read any of the works of Ancient Chinese philosophy, I had to have done it in Chinese? If I read the philosophical novels of the 19th century Russian authors (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), I need to have done it in Russian, and if I include the Wisdom Books of the Bible, then I have to include Hebrew?

If that's the case I'm pretty sure the deepest philosophy I've read is Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, though I don't think I read it too closely.

clownboy said:

Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

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Great book.

I was going to say the Gita, but since I read a translated version..............:lol:

Guy Incognito said:

Please list the great work of philosophy you have ever personally read. Two rules, it must be something you have personally read in its entirety and it must not be a translation (you must have read it in its original language).

Thanks! I'm looking forward to what everybody has to say.

Click to expand...

clownboy said:

To this day I curse the name Verhoeven. The bastard destroyed Starship Troopers.

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Oh no he didn't.

I can watch all those movies every day for a month.

Maybe a year.

"Come on you apes!!! You wanna live forever!?!"

Guy Incognito said:

and it must not be a translation (you must have read it in its original language).

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Well, that leaves me with about nothing. None of the works I've read that were originally English were all that great. Mark Twain, maybe, but that was just a compilation of his works, and more parable than actual philosophy.

how being is a work, who dare say that but another jerk takin advantage from anything n b by ****tin on else

philosophy is the only discipline of freedom so the more one say the more it is nothing that matter so what even make nothing sound free

while usin words to mean personnal fancies out of putin the sky down as a mistress u possess is enough said about who u r

what is harsh is ur heads kind of choice that insist to b without having to realize first any objective right or existing fact
while ur kind is only one since u are then by destroyin the existence of anything else in concept and matters

words cant mean subjective wills nor means but to who cant b but by killin everything so first by denyin else rights existing

words are obviously always pointing things reality brought to zero freedom for clarity values

Well, since I can't read Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.......I suppose this rules out the Bible?

Guess I'd have to go with The Tao of Pooh then. :shrug:

My top BOOKS would be:

The Hitchhikier's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy (and additional books) by Douglas Adams
Repent Harlequin Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison
The Art of War by Niccollo Machiavelli

Without the caveat of translation, these two would have been topped by:

The Art of War by Sun Zhu

Though probably the most thought-provoking thing I've ever read was a short story in a Science Fiction class I took in college. Time has erased the name of the author and title of the story, but the jist of it was an expedition to a far off world which was destroyed when its sun went supernova. As the story progresses the scientific and religious members of the expedition begin to discuss the moral implications of the society's demise and eventually you find out that the star that went supernova was seen in our world as the Star of Bethlehem; and the whole implications of God destroying an advanced society to light the sky over His Son's birth. I just wish I could find the story again, since it's stuck with me for almost 20 years.

I must admit, I only read the first two, having seen the movie of the third. "Small Gods" introduces the intriguing concept of a god's actual size and power being directly related to the number of believers... Hence the once mighty Om, largely forgotten, is now reduced to a tortoise who can only be heard by one person.

Manc Skipper said:

I must admit, I only read the first two, having seen the movie of the third. "Small Gods" introduces the intriguing concept of a god's actual size and power being directly related to the number of believers... Hence the once mighty Om, largely forgotten, is now reduced to a tortoise who can only be heard by one person.

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On a similar note, the Incarnations of Immortality books (there are 8 of them) by Piers Anthony are pretty interesting....

In each book some lucky soul has been chosen to replace a current Incarnation (Death for instance in "To Ride a Pale Horse") and must learn their new job through On the Job Training.

Cosmos - Carl Sagan

Nuff said.


Tim-

Various books by Christopher Hitchens like "Mortality," "Hitch-22," and "God is not Great."

I've read "Menschliches, allzumenschliches" and "Also sprach Zarathustra" by Nietzsche in German, some Kant, some Hegel, some Schopenhauer (but none of it in its entirety) und "Das Kapital, Band 1" by Marx (if that counts). And I read some of Hannah Arendt's work in German (I'm not sure whether she originally wrote it in German or English). Excerpts from Adorno & Horkheimer and Habermas too.

In English, I read excerpts from Hobbes, Locke and "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek. And parts of Rawl's "Justice as Fairness".

Not sure I'd say any of it was "the greatest work of philosophy" I have read so far, and probably I didn't understand all of it either.

Hicup said:

Cosmos - Carl Sagan

Nuff said.


Tim-

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On the same note Contact - Carl Sagan I have to say though the movie is a joke, they entirely removed Carl Sagan's story telling from the story and showed us some fluffy bull**** plot line instead. ANd as it was the surface story was changed so much that it was stupid.

Yeah, the "no translation" requirement cuts down my list pretty substantially. Here is a top-twenty list, ranked off-the-cuff by my estimation of importance:


1) David Hume "A Treatise of Human Nature."

2) Plato: Timaeos

3) Plato: Hipparchos

4) George Berkeley: Principles of Human Understanding

5) F.H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality

6) C.S. Peirce: How to Make Our Ideas Clear

7) William James: Varieties of Religious Experience

8) W.V. Quine: Two Dogmas of Empiricism

9) Saul Kripke: Naming and Necessity

10) David Chalmers: The Conscious Mind

11) John Rawles: A Theory of Justice

12) David Lewis: Possible Worlds

13) Ian Hacking: The Taming of Chance

14) Hillary Putnam: Representation and Reality

15) Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

16) Bertrand Russell: On Denoting

17) G.E. Moore: Is Goodness a Quality?

18) A.N. Whitehead: Process and Reality

19) Nancy Cartwright: How the Laws of Physics Lie

20) Edmund Gettier: Is Knowledge Justified True Belief?



Now, here's the list if I didn't have to abide by the translation rule:



1) Lao Tzu: The Lao Tzu

2) Rene Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy

3) Imanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

4) Gottlob Frege: Begriffschriff

5) G.F.W. Liebniz: New Principles of Human Knowledge

6) David Hume: Treatise of Human Nature

7) Plato: Everything he wrote
8) Aristotle: Everything he wrote
9) The Tripitika and the Dhamapada
10) Friedrich Nietzche: Genealogy of Morals

11) George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
12) The Questions of King Milinda
13) Ibn Sinna: The Commentaries
14) F.H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality
15) C.S. Peirce: How to Make our Ideas Clear
16) William James: Varieties of Religious Experience
17) Saul Kripke: Naming and Necessity
18) Isa: Isa Upanishad
19) George Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit
20) Hillary Putnam: Representation and Reality

In this list, I would love to have included the Precepts of Patanjali, The Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross, The Spiritual Guide by Molinos, The World as Will and Representation by Schopenhaur, the Hsuin Tzu, and plenty of other stuff, but there's just too much cool stuff out there.

Anyway, the spread between #1 and #20 in the first list is fairly large. Not nearly so large in the second list--all the works I listed are very nearly on the same level, for me. Also, since I am a professional philosopher, I'm expected to have read a lot of philosophy. I'm not trying to show off...if this had been a list about great literature, or great books of history, or etc. I'd have much less to add.

samsmart said:

Oh no he didn't.

I can watch all those movies every day for a month.

Maybe a year.

"Come on you apes!!! You wanna live forever!?!"

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the first one (Denise Richards, Michael Ironside) was very good. It was a fascist wet dream and all that was missing was Carl saying

BUG VEE HAVE VAYS TO MAKE YOU TALK

the second one was AWFUL-sort of a rip off of John Carpenter's "THE THING"

the third one was OK with the traitorous sky marshall. I also recall some hot bimbo in a mini who was a "Jesus Freak"

the requirement of original language is just plain silly. It is arguable that the King James Bible wouldn't qualify even though that version was in English. Fear and Trembling wouldn't qualify either.

Probably my favorite of all time WRITTEN IN AMERICAN ENGLISH would be Marc "animal" MacYoung's tome, "CHEAP SHOTS AMBUSHES AND OTHER LESSONS" and its related work, KNIVES, KNIFE FIGHTING AND RELATED HASSLES"

it is about human nature and philosophy.

The Stranger by Albert Camus (read it in French class first, then again in English).

it is funny how u love to assume that philosophy is words or sentences about words

philosophy is about conscious existence so its reality is life ways or means, how could ever a book b a work, it is silly letters are always same u cant work them out

absols said:

it is funny how u love to assume that philosophy is words or sentences about words

philosophy is about conscious existence so its reality is life ways or means, how could ever a book b a work, it is silly letters are always same u cant work them out

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I'm sorry but I couldn't follow that. It seems interesting though, so could you try to rephrase it?