Nietzsche, that's my short list.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6556...it-s-my-job-to

Further reading: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/03/16/...of-philosophy/

Thread starting to remind me of the Action Philosophers graphic novels I had a while back.

Asking to choose just one is a neat trick.

To be clear, the first phrase was my short list of philosophers worse than Kant.

Probably Voltaire.

Bertrand Russell has one of the clearest/most common sense views of philosophy ever. He'd be my first choice for reading. But perhaps he's a little advanced/dry for a child. Russell is for taming the wilder passions and digging out stubborn irrationality.

Voltaire's energy and strength of opinion is enjoyable however, and might be more engaging for a younger person. Whereas Russell is simply correct nearly all the time, Voltaire is someone with whom you can strongly agree, be suspicious about, grudgingly like, violently disagree with, which is what you want for a child, in my opinion. You want to create passion and engagement with philosophy, and Voltaire is good for that.

Kant, Nietzsche, et al are nutcases or fools. The more modern philosophers are dry or self absorbed or overly cautious. So I think Voltaire is a good pick.

I disagree. For one, philosophy is very valuable for knowing the limits of scientific models, most of which are a lot more limited than modern society would have you believe.

For two, it's a valuable part of education to watch people intelligent flounder around and theorize about things which are now known to be false, or that are now unfashionable.

For the most part, people in history were no different to today in terms of morality or anything else. They just had different underlying philosophies, choices about what life should be, and beliefs about the nature of the world. That's a valuable thing for putting modern minds and attitudes in perspective (who are in many ways just as wrong/arbitrary as our forbears and just as fooled into thinking they have the final truth or morality on their side).

This is not the exact wording I would use about Kant. Guy is a legend, in a positive sense.

I couldn't disagree with this more. Science only attempts to answer empirical questions that can be tested through empirical means. As such it is limited to a tiny facet of human experience. Philosophy governs all the smaller academic fields, if only to classify and help to understand them in context. Aristotle and Karl Popper were philosophers who helped create the scientific method as we know it today.

Philosophy should be taught as a means to teach people how to think for themselves, how to have an open mind and think critically. As opposed to the way children learn today, there are no 'correct' answers in philosophy, no multiple choice, true or false, and there is never an end to questioning.

Socrates (Plato) would be a good start to learn how a philosopher should go about asking questions.

Herman Hesse's Siddhartha is a great book for a young person starting out since Siddhartha sets out to find wisdom and that is what philosophy is (the love of wisdom, literally). It might be technically considered literature but I'd consider it a work of philosophy.

Oh really, so science doesnt know or anticipate its own limits? Science doesnt want to answer eventually everything? To do proper philosophy you need to be founded on what has been established (with high probability). Even when you question what is established you need to know why you question it. So philosophy without science (and math) has poor foundation, it is excessively speculative most of the time. Take that to mean that most arguments will be very weak not trustworthy. This is why reading old philosophers is very frustrating as they lack the knowledge that came later that would make their arguments not strong anymore and even stupid, certainly instantly invalidating entire topics due to modern perspectives that are now seen as essential to the old discussion but were impossible to recognize back then.

There is nothing (or little to not appear so absolute) philosophy tells me that science doesnt which i can trust with significant confidence. And even trust in science comes with some surviving skepticism anticipating a greater eventual synthesis. As a result Philosophy is nearly worthless to me without the science enabling the discussion. But the questions it tries to answer although the conclusion without science cannot be properly trusted, offer additional guidance to science to what to look for. Can you prove through philosophy that human life is to be respected without using any science in the argument? Can you talk about ethics without realizing the implications of actions as science predicts or analyzes them? It would seem your ethics get better (more comprehensive) with more science supporting your arguments.

To do proper philosophy you need to know some science. Otherwise you are speculating on thin air. Based on that science you can then do more speculative and imaginative philosophy to probe questions that science has yet to convincingly answer. This can potentially guide/motivate science to do things to get the answers. Eg we can speak about the ethics of creating artificial intelligence and this forces science to do it carefully by being alert to the questions of merit emerging, not just to do it without caring for the general implications. When we speculate about AI we do not do it in a totally trusted manner because a lot of it is philosophically argued and very speculative (eg see discussions by Bostrom).

When you talk about what social organization system can improve on capitalism its partially philosophy and partially science. To make a sound proposal you use philosophy to speculate what is universally important to humans and then you use science to verify these arguments to prove they are important indeed to people and also use science to propose how to deliver the system to be stable and sustainable.

In a way any great thinker/scientist is already a philosopher as they desire to think about all kinds of complex issues and feel the need for further wisdom recognizing the limits of science and the desires of wisdom and clarity still left to be met. If they let themselves to think in a broader sense acquiring education from other areas they will get better at it too.

The more educated you are the better philosopher you can be because you have access to many areas of knowledge that can improve the strength of the arguments/speculations and imagination and enable them to be more thorough (not being as naive i mean-this is why old philosophers appear hard to read because they are often naive in many areas that would have impacted their arguments and a modern scientist is not patient about such things anymore- they have a greater purpose than studying the paths of human naivete).

Philosophy has the additional role to keep science (honest) questioning even established knowledge or requiring deeper understanding in order to argue things more safely (do we know what we really think we know etc and have we fallen victims to our own condition?). In that regard many scientists may be too busy with their particular topics to have taken certain things for granted more than they may deserve. Good healthy philosophy can alert them to that possibility. Of course good careful science may find such alerts less necessary because it has already considered them. But it will never deny the possibility that such alerts serve a strengthening purpose to the effort in general and their presence matters because a Philosopher locally may be liberated by the desire to be very thorough on some technical level and focus instead on a greater picture the scientist has yet to appreciate while working on something specialized at the time. Of course truly strong science, a real synthesis, appears more potent when the scientist has already approached the issue from many angles, proving already a philosopher in a way, arriving at the synthesis in a manner that demonstrates profound long term concern for fundamental issues. These issues, important also to good Philosophy, previously taken for granted or not properly appreciated for their universal character or greater importance are now examined motivated by desire to understand the world deeper, spotting previously unrecognized connections, which itself shows a healthy concern for the limits of current paradigms. In other words the scientist is already depressed by current established scientific trends/status which is impossible if you blindly trust everything and remain blissfully happy. Science is not arrogant and good science is always uplifting that way.


I will link again an old interview by Bertrand Russell to see his own words on it. I do have good company indeed here. You are free of course to have your own opinions and eventually further science will settle it better.

Changing my vote to Lucretius.

The OP i guess wanted to collect the best suggestions so that the kid can have all of them eventually as they should. This can only happen of course if you force yourself to pick 1 or 2 but a separate thread might then be needed like in what order to present to a kid philosophers or world literature, do you start with mythology and world religions at very young age and then follow with kids literature progressively getting to more complex topics until they are ready say by 10-12 maybe for stronger material?

And i will add to it in what way one can remove from the older ones the frustration that comes with them talking about issues that the perspective has changed enough to be unhappy reading their arguments? What topics do you select even to make them appear extremely intuitive to predict things that are correct before science got there properly? That still is important if you study how thoughts evolve but as a younger person its different. There is value in seeing how a strong mind can argue with limited means to produce potent results that in modern times is hard to experience because we kind of live in a world (very advanced too) that is all available to us and we do not force ourselves to derive tough/original (even only to us) results with limited means which is how you force your brain to reach greatness.

I think when very young you need to be exposed to many and then focus on your core studies unless they are Philosophy itself and read them again much later after 30 when you have formed your own opinions based on science. Only then your own opinions will be original. That is risky of course in the sense that you culturally gain also by being exposed to many of them during that time (say 20-40). But its a little hard to own your ideas when you are constantly bombarded by the ideas of others. If you let instead form your ideas based on what modern science tells you and supplement these ideas by studying world culture and history you become a clean observer of the world and may form original ideas that way that you force to prove to yourself why you have them instead of accepting what others say. If this happens then you can read the work of others and not be affected by that in a punishing manner to your own originality. That is a very delicate balance it seems as both are needed.

Saw thread title, clicked link to post "Dr. Seuss," saw Zeno beat me to the punch by [ageofthread-1minute].

Its kind of unclear to me, when people say these kinds of things, exactly what they mean. When I think of science, the essential framework I have in mind is, for hypothesis A, how would the world be different if A were true than if it were not true? If the answer is "it wouldnt" or "I dont know" then it is not a scientific question. If the answer is "It would differ in ways X, Y and Z" then it is a scientific question. Now, plenty of things fall into the category of "scientific question" that we cannot currently, or maybe not even theoretically, ACTUALLY test for. But if it can be framed that way, then it is in the realm of science.

And this is my personal bias here, but if it falls in the former category, i.e. "the world would not be noticeably different if A were true vs. not-true" then honestly...why would anyone care about it? It is an impotent idea. Believe in it or dont, but you've said yourself it doesnt MATTER. Is that the role you see philosophy taking?

I'd prefer to view philosophy as a way to order our thoughts in cases of the latter category that we cannot CURRENTLY actually collect evidence for. Somewhat of a noble god of the gaps.

The former category seems to me the last bastion for religion.

I think it was Hegel who said science can explain the how but not the why. That seems to me to explain the difference well. Science is an excellent tool for learning about the empirical world. Philosophy is a way of looking at that world.

I don't wish to be insulting but in my experience, people who argue heavy for science are a little myopic and only care about seeing results. People who can think philosophically look at the bigger picture and realize maybe that the value of science comes from what we do with that science, which is a philosophical question. Science unguided by philosophical questions is a dangerous thing.

I see the various areas of knowledge as kind of like a band. Sure you can play any of the instruments alone, but you can't do that and match the sound of the band all playing together.

You know, perhaps asking which one philosopher you would choose for your child to read is the wrong question. How about what one topic would you choose? Logic, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics?

Metaphysics. Could make her/him think.

why is your child destiny?

marcus auerelius and its not even close, for me

Nice one. Whose the 'had-a-bit-too-much-last-night, every-night' drummer?

Ditto, and it's not even close.