I never received formal education in the subject and I want to learn about it so that I may have a better understanding of the philosophy of our political tradition. I’d appreciate any suggestions on materials to get an introduction to the topic.
I never received formal education in the subject and I want to learn about it so that I may have a better understanding of the philosophy of our political tradition. I’d appreciate any suggestions on materials to get an introduction to the topic.
https://plato.stanford.edu/
This ressource carried me through my BA It’s like wikipedia for philosophy but made by actual professors, they know all about the nuances and implications of the texts.
Its almost impossible to “get” most of these authors if you don’t have a massive dose of context (which mostly means reading a ton of other texts to understand the ideological context of the philosopher you’re reading) and this page helps a lot with it.
If you want to be linear, start with the presocratics (the poem of Parmenides is a great start as it poses the ontological problem or being/non being that is still around today), then Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, then you got the boring medieval part with Aquinas and Augustine. Then it’s Descartes, Kant, Hume, Locke for the modern philosophy period (Idealism/Empiricism) it pretty much ends with Hegel.
From Kant on there’s what we call the Analytic/Continental split and you’ll notice that we are heavily slanted towards the analytic tradition here in the anglo-saxon part of the west. Frege, Wittgenstein and Russel would be analytic philosophers whereas Nietzsche, Foucault and Sartre would be on the other side.
Hope that helps if you got questions lmk.