>>7482442

>falling for the chronological meme

Starting with the greeks is fine advice but wanting to read every single philosophical work in chronological order is a ridiculous idea. You don't gotta study Aristotle to understand, say, Descarte's Meditation, or Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. Of course it's nice to know how past philosophers' influence whatever work you're reading, but doing a little research with, say Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or just reading the introduction if it's a good edition should be sufficient.

>>7482471
yeah for sure a lot can be read independently.. descarte and camus and sartre are all pretty good, but if you want to read say nietzsche, in my optinion, this requires reading of socrates/plato/aristotle/descarte/kant and schopenhauer

and aristotle needs plato who needs socrates

kant you need hume, hume you should probably read locke and berkely...

>>7482442
I wanted to read this guide, but the formatting is so god-damned awful that I think I'm gonna pass...

>>7482442
I don't see the problem in getting a general philosophy book, as long as it's not shit and you use it as a summation not a substitute.
>Also is it necessary to read the iliad/odyssey? And greek myth?
In the US, most schools instill the absolute basics of the Iliad and Odyssey and greek myth from earlier on. You can get by with these knowledge and general summary/footnotes. You should read them because they're good and they're interesting, but they aren't as necessary as reading Plato for Aristotle or Aristotle for Aquinas

>>7482477
>descarte and camus and sartre are all pretty good
hahahahah no

>>7482512
good as in easy reading for someone reading without a philosophical background

>>7482515
Sartre's non-fiction isn't easy, though, just contrived, fallacious trash.

>>7482442
So when I was in high school I also wanted to begin chronologically, so I picked up homer and hesiod, then herodotus, moved on to plato, etc.

What I realized is that there are people who spend their entire life studying a specific book from the Iliad, or a few of Plato's dialogues. So right off the bat I had to re-calibrate what I meant by "understand," as clearly I wasn't going to spend my life reading about how to construct chariots and other boring shit in Hesiod.

The fact is, however, that basically everyone (in the West) has been riffing off the Greeks (and then the Romans) ever since - and not just philosophy, but classical Comedy (Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence), Tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), History (Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Sallust, Dio Cassius, Tacitus etc etc), and of course poetry (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, etc). So a general idea of what all these figures were up to will lay a good foundation from which you can approach Medieval philosophy and historiography, then into Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern, etc.

But this is all centered around you. What are you interested in? Philosophy? Then focus on the history of philosophy - my advice is to use Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy as a sourcebook. Read his chapters on the Greeks, but just use that as a beginning. If you feel like you're really interested in Parmenides, then look up the extant fragments and read them for yourself. If Epictetus piques your interest, read the Enchiridion.

Some people think of the philosophical tradition as unilineal and cumulative - as if we begin with Plato, then people expand on him, and we keep expanding through the 19th century, and somehow Hegel is further along than Aristotle, and Nietszche than Hegel, and so on. But in my opinion pretty much all of the questions were already asked in the Athenian golden age. We've been having the same conversations ever since. It's not cumulative, and it's not unilineal. Philosophical disposition is more of an aesthetic matter that different types expand on in different ways.

That being said, though the Greeks lay a solid foundation, there's no reason an intelligent person can't just pick up Hegel's Phenomenology, or Sartres Being and Nothingness, and not get it right away. However, depending on your own character, you might never get Hegel (no matter how much of a philosophical background you have), or maybe Hegel will seem totally natural to you and you'll wonder what the fuck Nietzsche is talking about.

>>7482442

http://4chanlit.wikia.com/wiki/Philosophy

>>7483873
>That being said, though the Greeks lay a solid foundation, there's no reason an intelligent person can't just pick up Hegel's Phenomenology, or Sartres Being and Nothingness, and not get it right away. However, depending on your own character, you might never get Hegel (no matter how much of a philosophical background you have), or maybe Hegel will seem totally natural to you and you'll wonder what the fuck Nietzsche is talking about.

The problem with reading those texts without a background in philosophy, regardless of how smart you are, will be the completely unfamiliar terminology. How are you meant to understand Hegel if you don't know what he means by maybe 1/4 of all the words he uses?

That and a reasonable amount of philosophy is dialectic, so that engaging a text may prove problematic if one isn't engage in the general debate. It would be like skipping the first three books by MacIntyre and moving right onto Dependent Rational Animals.

>>7482496
>>7482471
>>7482442
I don't think it's accurate to lump Greek myths in with philosophy even if they were written at a similar point in time. They're two completely separate genres.

I think you'd be best off reading a general overview first like History of Western Philosophy by Russell and some pages on Stanford Encyclopedia. When you have an overview then read specific books on the areas that interest you.

>>7483873
>But in my opinion pretty much all of the questions were already asked in the Athenian golden age
this should be said more

Started from the bottom now we are here.