Reading Philosophy : Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners

A key introductory philosophy textbook, making use of an innovative, interactive technique for reading philosophical texts

Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners, Second Edition, provides a unique approach to reading philosophy, requiring students to engage with material as they read. It contains carefully selected texts, commentaries on those texts, and questions for the reader to think about as they read. It serves as starting points for both classroom discussion and independent study. The texts cover a wide range of topics drawn from diverse areas of philosophical investigation, ranging over ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, political philosophy.

This edition has been updated and expanded. New chapters discuss the moral significance of friendship and love, the subjective nature of consciousness and the ways that science might explore conscious experience. And there are new texts and commentary in chapters on doubt, self and moral dilemmas.

• Guides readers through the experience of active, engaged philosophical reading
• Presents significant texts, contextualized for newcomers to philosophy
• Includes writings by philosophers from antiquity to the late 20th-century
• Contains commentary that provides the context and background necessary for discussion and argument
• Prompts readers to think through specific questions and to reach their own conclusions

This bookis an ideal resource for beginning students in philosophy, as well as for anyone wishing to engage with the subject on their own.

Samuel Guttenplan is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, retiring after nearly 35 years in Birkbeck's philosophy department. Professor Guttenplan was the founding Executive Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Mind & Languagein 1986 and he served in that capacity for five and then sixteen years from 2000, continuing now as an Editor. His research interests include the philosophies of mind, language, philosophical logic, and ethics.

Jennifer Hornsby is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, of the British Academy, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He is general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer, and has published widely in the history of philosophy, particularly on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and in aesthetics.

John Schwenkler is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of Anscombe's 'Intention': A Guide. Professor Schwenkler's research is in the philosophy of mind and action, ethics, epistemology, and cognitive science.