Answer a question before recommending: In what order should we read Introduction to Philosophy?
The first step is to read three books: introduction to philosophy, philosophical methods and philosophical history. The introduction of philosophy tells you what philosophy studies, the method of philosophy tells you what philosophy is, and the history of philosophy tells you what classical theories you have.
The second step is to read some special introductions about specific fields, periods, schools or people, and try to read some friendly original works.
The third step is to read more difficult introductions, original works and even research monographs and papers after a certain accumulation.
This article mainly recommends the books to be read in the first two steps.
I. Introduction to Philosophy
In Introduction to Philosophy, the well-deserved classic is the big topic, which is your first philosophy book.
However, these two books are relatively old, so it's better to read a newer one, such as "Think It Over".
Because there are many overlaps in the contents of Introduction to Philosophy, it is enough to choose one of them. )
Second, the philosophical method.
When recommending introductory books, I seldom see books on philosophical methods recommended by others, but they are actually very meaningful. Although many people have read many philosophy books, they still don't know what learning philosophy is. They only retell other people's ideas in their own words, and their thinking level is very low when they think independently. Reading books about philosophical methods helps to avoid this situation.
As far as philosophical methods are concerned, a classic work is When Philosophy is Going on. It introduces the basic skills of philosophical thinking, reading and writing.
Another book is also very useful. It was originally called "philosopher's toolkit", and its Chinese translation was divided into two books, namely "simple philosophy" and "useful philosophy", one about argumentation skills and the other about important concepts.
Dennett's Intuition Pump and Other Thinking Tools introduces how to use thinking experiments to promote philosophical thinking with rich examples. The language of this book is simple, vivid and insightful, and it is my favorite bedtime book I have ever read.
Finally, how philosophy is tempered by Williamson is a recent classic, which not only introduces basic philosophical skills such as argumentation, conceptual analysis and thought experiment, but also introduces interdisciplinary research, the relationship between philosophy and philosophy history, and novel philosophical modeling methods.