My Philosophy Reading List

Now that I have done the Portuguese exam and there's only the Maths one to go (on Thursday), it is time to start thinking of other, more interesting things.

A few months ago, I was sent a reading list for Philosophy, which I found tremendously exciting. I had never been sent a Reading List before, and it made me feel I was stepping into a bright future of discussion and learning. Besides, I was very glad to have an excuse to buy (and read) more philosophy books.

This is the list:

• A.J. Ayer The Central Questions of Philosophy (Penguin)
• Simon Blackburn Think (Oxford University Press)
• Martin Hollis Invitation to Philosophy (Blackwell)
• Thomas Nagel What Does It All Mean? (Oxford University Press)
• Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford University Press)
• Roger Scruton An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy (Duckworth)
• Peter Singer How Are We to Live? (Prometheus)
• Gottlob Frege Foundations of Arithmetic (Blackwell)
• Mark Sainsbury Logical Forms (Blackwell), especially Chapter 1
• Douglas Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach (Penguin)
• Stuart Shapiro Thinking About Mathematics (Oxford University Press)
• AW Moore The Infinite (Routledge)

I have already read a few of them  (slowly and carefully: taking notes, re-reading harder passages, extracting the main concepts, trying to draw connections between different authors' ideas, making up my own mind, building my own arguments...) and I will read the rest throughout the summer.

To help me take some more from the texts (you can always take more from books!), I will start a sort of blog series of reflections inspired by each of the books. This may include summarizing ideas, reviewing and comparing them, exposing arguments, or whatever I feel inspired to do and think helpful in preparing me for University. My aim is also to show how beautiful and fascinating the open questions and non-dogmatic, fiercely rational approach of philosophy are, so that hopefully you will also feel motivated to read some of these (or others) and to think philosophically.