Nathan Nobis's Top “Introductory” Readings in Philosophy

 

People sometimes ask me for advice on what to read in philosophy. Below is a short list of books that I think are excellent in many ways: they are clear, straightforward, well-argued and concise. I highly recommend these books to people who would like to develop their skills at doing philosophy. They are what I learned from and keep learning from.

 

Logic / Argument Identification and Analysis

·         Richard Feldman's Reason and Argument (Prentice Hall) is simply the best book for learning how to better identify and evaluate arguments: it's a model of clarity and precision. Everyone should read this book and absorb these methods, especially if one wants to do more philosophy since this book really teaches effective critical thinking methods. I can't say enough good about this book.

·         I had troubles initially learning “symbolic” logic (in part because, unfortunately, the importance and practical value of it was not impressed on me: the truth is that learning the basics of symbolic logic is useful for everyone, not just people interested in graduate school). I eventually found Paul Teller's A Modern Formal Logic Primer, Volumes I and II (Prentice Hall) to be a book that I could really learn from. It's out of print (but is available used) but he kindly has put the book online here: http://tellerprimer.ucdavis.edu/ There's also a “solutions manual” to check your work and for help when you get stuck.

·         Antony Weston's Rulebook for Arguments is good: short, cheap, and full of good stuff. I am writing a book to rival his called Why Think That? A Guide to Making Moral Progress (www.WhyThinkThat.com ).

 

Intro Books

·         Peg Tittle’s What If....Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy is a neat book: all the fun thought experiments from philosophy collected in one place. Here it is for cheap used on Amazon.

·         Tom Nagel’s What Does it All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy.

·         Rachels Problems from Philosophy and The Truth about the World. Not as good as his Elements of Moral Philosophy, but still good.

 

Ethical Theory

·         James (and now also Stuart) Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 5th Edition (see also The Right Thing to Do, 4th Edition. A classic. The newer, 5th, edition, with Stuart Rachels is be even better; here’s Stuart’s page on the book.

·         Mark Timmons Moral Theory. An ideal mid-level text. More details and subtlety than Rachels, and highly readable. Of special interest is his discussion of pluralistic consequentialisms, moral pluralism, virtue ethics, and moral particularism. One thing missing is a discussion of moral rights, which seem important to many people’s moral thinking.

·         Fred Feldman's Introductory Ethics. (The price for a new copy is totally outrageous, but cheap used copies can be found). This book is really good for those who want to go on in analytic philosophy: Fred Feldman’s style of doing philosophy should be emulated. This book might not be the best for more introductory students, however, since he pretty much “refutes” every view he discusses: the problem is that this might lead students to an unwarranted pessimism about philosophy/ethics. The other books, I think, do a better job at acknowledging what’s plausible in many views and worthy of building on. Fred Feldman’s other books and articles are fantastic.

·         Shelly Kagan's Normative Ethics. This book is really great for folks who find the standard distinctions in ethics to not make as much sense as they should: there is a lot of nuance and subtly here. However, it’s not a very introductory book, as the Dec. 27th reviewer rightly points out.

·         Russ Shafer-Landau’s Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? does a good job at addressing philosophical arguments for and against various kinds of moral relativism, subjectivism and nihilism. Chapter 16s “Where do moral standards come from?” and 17 “Values in a Scientific World” do a good job at spelling out a positive position about the nature of moral reality. However, I suspect that very few people actually are relativists, subjectivists or nihilists: their expressions of positions like these are best interpreted as forms of what’s called “student relativism.” Below a short bibliography of articles on “student relativism” that students (and non-philosophy faculty) would find interesting.

 

Practical Ethics / Applied Ethics / Moral Issues

·         Joel Marks’ Moral Moments: Short Essays on Ethics is a neat, short book by a good person. See this page also: http://moralandothermoments.blogspot.com/ and http://ethicsessays.blogspot.com/  

·         Peter Singer's Writings on An Ethical Life is a collection of well-worth reading selections from his work.

·         Tom Regan’s Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights is an excellent work in “popular” philosophy – i.e., a work written for the general reader; The Animal Rights Debate (with Carl Cohen) and Animal Rights, Human Wrongs: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (which is just The Animal Rights Debate minus Cohen’s section, which was very poorly argued, but it’s worthwhile to see why his arguments were so poor) are great introductions to how to do philosophy. And his The Case for Animal Rights was recently reissued as a 20th anniversary edition: the main “philosophy” chapters there are excellent.

·         Dale Jamieson’s Morality's Progress : Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature I have found to be a very edifying book. Very readable and accessible also on a wide range of topics.

·         Andrew Light has progressive thoughts about environmental ethics and what philosophers interested in environmental issues should be doing. His Environmental Ethics: An Anthology is very good.

·         Mark Rowlands Animals Like Us is a neat book; very amusing writing style.

·         Colin McGinn’s Moral Literacy: Or How to Do the Right Thing is a short, clever book on ethics.

·         Greg Pence’s Re-Creating Medicine has an essay “Re-Creating Bioethics” that makes interesting observations about the sociology of bioethics. I found his distinction between “inside bioethics” and “outside bioethics” very illuminating. His new Elements of Bioethics is very good also: a good (and rare) mix of cases and theory.

·         James Rachels’ Can Ethics Provide Answers? is another great collection, full of insight and wisdom.

 

Epistemology & Metaphysics

·         Richard Feldman's Epistemology textbook is the ideal introduction to the field. Although not introductory (but accessible nevertheless) Feldman’s and Earl Conee’s Evidentialism is a collection of great papers that have influenced the field.

·         Earl Conee and Ted Sider's new Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics is fantastic. Very fun.

·         Clifford William’s Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue is one I’ve liked for a long time. Often these dialogues don’t work out too well, but this is very good.

 

Philosophy of Religion

·         Steven Cahn's God, Reason and Religion is a fun, opinionated intro to philosophy of religion.

 

Writing & Speaking

·         Jonathan Bennett's article "Improving Academic Writing", Teaching Philosophy, 20/2, 1997, 105-120 (a summary here) is very helpful.

·         Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is essential for improving your writing. There is a new, fun illustrated version of this book also! This is one of the most important and valuable sections, I think:

ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION

9.      Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic

10.  As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end it in conformity with the beginning

11.  Use the active voice

12.  Put statements in positive form

13.  Omit needless words

14.  Avoid a succession of loose sentences

15.  Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form

16.  Keep related words together

17.  In summaries, keep to one tense

18.  Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end

·         Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is a very useful book.

·         Anthony Weston’s A Practical Companion to Ethics has lots of good stuff in it also. My book in progress -- Why Think That? A Guide to Making Moral Progress (www.WhyThinkThat.com) has some overlap with this.

 

History of Philosophy

·         Jonathan Bennett’s translations of early modern texts are great: http://EarlyModernTexts.com (My greatest [and only!] contribution to studies in the history of philosophy has been to be the first one to suggest that he put these online; indeed I helped him first put these online by converting them to HTML, years ago.)

o       His explanation of why this is worth doing is relevant to many philosophical contexts where the readings are just beyond readers’ comprehension.

 

Near the End

·         If you have any suggestions for what else should be on this list, please let me know! aphilosopher@gmail.com

·         More information on these books is available off their publishers’ pages.

·         Also, while Amazon has lots of used books, www.Abebooks.com has many also. If Amazon doesn’t have it used, ABE will often have it.

·         And Google’s Book Search is useful for peering into books: http://books.google.com/

 

“Student Relativism,” a phenomena that students should find interesting and likely have insights into:

 

 

In Database: The Philosopher's Index 1940-2005/09.

2

TI:

Teaching Ethics to Student Relativists

 

AU:

Momeyer,-Richard

 

SO:

Teaching-Philosophy. D 95; 18(4): 301-311

 

IS:

0145-5788

 

AB:

Student relativism (SR) is a maddeningly adaptable and elusive phenomenon in philosophy classrooms, most troublesome in ethics classes. I analyze six ways pronouncements of SR function in the classroom. These range from intellectual laziness to protest against absolutism to simple good manners. I then suggest six pedagogical strategies teachers can use to deal with these varieties of SR. These range from direct confrontation to ignoring SR and getting on with demonstrating how moral reasoning is done; from presuming the best of our students to teachers practicing reasoned advocacy of moral positions.

 

DE:

EDUCATION-; ETHICS-; MORALITY-; RELATIVISM-; TEACHING-

 

LA:

English

 

DT:

Journal-Article

 

 

 

3

TI:

The Natural History of Student Relativism

 

AU:

Paden,-Roger-K

 

SO:

Journal-of-Thought. Sum 94; 29(2): 47-58

 

IS:

0022-5231

 

AB:

This paper argues that in order to deal effectively with the debilitating kind of ethical relativism that is often espoused by students in Introductory Philosophy classes, it is necessary to understand its origins. Several explanations of this phenomenon are discussed in this article including, psycho-sexual development, problems with "moral sainthood", misunderstood libertarianism and multi-culturalism, and anti-intellectualism. Following this explanatory discussion, several pedagogical responses are suggested.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

TI:

Using the Fact/Value Problem to Teach Ethical Theory

 

AU:

Birsch,-Douglas

 

SO:

Teaching-Philosophy. S 92; 15(3): 217-230

 

IS:

0145-5788

 

AB:

The teaching strategy discussed in this essay centers around the fact/value problem, and uses it to make ethical theories more interesting, easier to understand, and to deal with the problem of "student relativism." The method builds on the common student belief that ethics is a matter of opinion. It helps the students transform their idea into something more philosophically interesting, shows them important problems with it, and presents ethical theories as alternatives to their view.

 

DE:

EDUCATION-; ETHICS-; FACT-; TEACHING-; VALUE-

 

LA:

 

 

DT:

HOW NEUTRAL IS DISCUSSION?

 

AN:

ESQUITH,-STEPHEN

 

 

Teaching-Philosophy. S 88; 11: 193-208

 

 

0145-5788

 

 

WHEN DISCUSSION IS MODELED ON DEBATE AND WHEN IT IS COUPLED WITH ADVOCACY AS AN ANTIDOTE FOR STUDENT RELATIVISM, SOME STUDENTS CAN BE COERCED INTO TAKING A POSITION PREMATURELY AND MISUNDERSTANDING THE MORAL AND POLITICAL ISSUES IN QUESTION. THIS IS A DANGER WHICH ADVOCATES OF ADVOCACY IN THE CLASSROOM HAVE NOT PAID ENOUGH ATTENTION TO.

 

 

ADVOCACY-; COERCION-; DISCUSSION-; EDUCATION-; EXCHANGE-; NEUTRAL-; TEACHING-

 

LA:

 

 

DT:

THE STUDENT RELATIVIST AS PHILOSOPHER.

 

AN:

PADEN,-ROGER

 

 

Teaching-Philosophy. JE 87; 10: 97-101

 

 

0145-5788

 

 

ALTHOUGH THE MORAL RELATIVISM WHICH IS OFTEN EXPRESSED BY STUDENTS IS USUALLY THOUGHT TO BE AN UNINFORMED BELIEF WHICH MUST BE OVERCOME TO MAKE PROGRESS IN INTRODUCTORY ETHICS CLASSES, THIS PAPER TREATS "STUDENT RELATIVISM" AS A RESULT OF AN UNCONSCIOUSLY HELD MORAL ARGUMENT. THE ARTICLE URGES TEACHERS TO TREAT THIS BELIF AS A PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION AND TO TREAT STUDENTS AS YOUNG PHILOSOPHERS. SEVERAL METHODS ARE DISCUSSED FOR DOING THIS, TRANSFORMING THIS PEDAGOGICAL 'PROBLEM' INTO A PHILOSOPHICAL OPPORTUNITY.

 

 

EDUCATION-; OPINION-; PHILOSOPHER-; RELATIVISM-; STUDENT-

 

 

 

 

STUDENT RELATIVISM.

 

 

SATRIS,-STEPHEN

6

TI:

Teaching-Philosophy. S 86; 9: 193-205

 

AU:

0145-5788

 

SO:

IN THIS PAPER I OFFER AN ANALYSIS OF, AND SUGGEST SOME METHODS FOR DEALING WITH, A QUITE PARTICULAR AND PECULIAR PROBLEM IN TEACHING PHILOSOPHY. IT IS, PERHAPS, NOT A PROBLEM ESSENTIAL TO THE DISCIPLINE OR TO ITS TEACHING, BUT IT IS NEVERTHELESS ONE OF THE MOST SERIOUS, PERVASIVE, AND FRUSTRATING PROBLEMS CONFRONTING MOST PHILOSOPHY TEACHERS TODAY. I SPEAK OF THE PROBLEM OF STUDENT RELATIVISM--OR, SR FOR SHORT.

 

IS:

METAPHYSICS-; PROFESSOR-; RELATIVISM-; STUDENT-; TEACHING-

 

AB:

ENGLISH

 

DE:

Journal-Article