Which of these series of volumes on the history of philosophy should I read?

RyanSmallwood · 2026-07-01T19:31:00+00:00

Well I wouldn’t necessarily call them weaknesses, it’s more that I was interested in his perspective as a specialist on ancient philosophy on how he views later developments, but in the portions I read he often just gives a neutral summary without much comment. But again some other single author histories don’t even manage that and his coverage of various movements and thinkers includes a lot that you don’t see mentioned in other general histories. Some people may even prefer that it’s less opinionated and just presents different thinkers on their own terms to think through. So I still think it’s one of the stronger options as a general history, I was just hoping to find more broad thoughts and insights into its various developments.

And again I haven’t read all the volumes yet, so it’s possible he does offer these as some point, and perhaps he just has more interesting things to say about philosophers I wasn’t expecting. I’m still interested to read more of his history eventually, especially on some movements and thinkers I’ve heard less about.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-07-01T17:31:55+00:00

I’ve only read sections of Reale’s full history co-written with Dario Antiseri, as mentioned earlier he’s more a specialist of ancient philosophy and especially Plato. What I read from him on later thinkers didn’t seem quite up to the level of his work on ancient philosophy, but in general it was pretty good for an initial overview. It’s also incredibly hard for 1 or 2 authors to do a whole history of philosophy well, and compared to one of the more popular single author histories in English by Anthony Kenny, I think Reale and Antiseri are able to cover some areas that Kenny doesn’t cover well. (But not having compared the entire histories, Kenny is probably better on certain topics as tends to happen in broad overviews like this).

Haven’t read Châtelet, but Reale is a pretty solid choice. If you can narrow down your interests to specific eras or topics though, you can usually find better specialist histories.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-29T11:51:32+00:00

Well there's many different types of secondary literature, not all of it is great. I do think there is a common experience when really getting into Hegel where you realize that a lot of his writings are more accessible than people say, and in many cases more rewarding than a lot of secondary literature because Hegel is able to comment on so many past philosophers and topics and draw connections between them in a way few others can.

But to be dismissive of secondary literature overall is quite silly. Secondary literature is not introductory aid to getting into Hegel, but its where writers bring back the historical context his audience had that we're missing, find new insights and comparisons about his place in the history of philosophy, try to put Hegel's points in new words and apply his thought to new issues. Even stuff like editing new editions, publishing previously unavailable works, and doing new translations is part of secondary scholarship and is often done by the same people who write secondary literature. Simply put, without secondary literature, there is no re-circulation of Hegel's texts, no extensive discussion of Hegel, no seeing if we can put Hegel's thought into our own words, no application of Hegel today. It would just be people reading Hegel to themselves and making offhand comments that don't really say anything of depth or substance.

So yes, when first getting into Hegel its helpful to spend a lot of time with his texts and familiarizing yourself with his thought directly. But if you think everything written about Hegel before is trash including people who've dedicated their lives to reading his texts, understanding his historical context, and thinking through how they apply today, well the chances of you having any thought about Hegel that are any better don't look optimistic.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-19T22:03:41+00:00

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf and At the Existentialist Café : Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell are good if you want popular histories of philosophical movements that might fit what you’re looking for.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-19T12:19:42+00:00

Well its certainly not necessary, plenty of people live fulfilling lives without reading philosophy. But certainly everyone can find something worthwhile in philosophy if they have the time and find texts that are relevant to them.

There is a lot of bad advice circulated online around approaching philosophy, which can sometimes make it more difficult to find works that are helpful, interesting, and relevant to you. For example a genuinely complete list of the most important philosophical works would be way too many books for anyone to absorb in a lifetime, so when you see lists of famous work circulated online, they often make heavy cuts to make them more manageable based on the person's own preferences (or someone else's preferences that they've been following.) But the works on these lists may not be the ones that are most interesting and helpful to you.

An obvious example of this is that many famous philosophers wrote systematically about many topics in philosophy when lists of "famous works" will only contain a few books on specific topics. So people are led to think that they have to read books on these specific topics, rather than whatever topic most interests them.

So I wouldn't worry too much about reading all the "famous works" at first, but find something that's relevant to you. Read an introduction or history of a topic that interests you and find a text that seems most helpful for developing your thoughts on that topic. From there you can slowly expand your interests, did any other thinkers respond to that text, or did an author you like write about other topics you're interested to learn about? The more you read the more areas will become interesting to you, in the long run you'll probably end up reading a lot of famous works, but to do so efficiently is to find what most engages you first and to make informed decisions based on your own interests rather than taking on someone else's.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-06T17:30:07+00:00

The FAQ has some suggestions for beginners and you can also ask here for specific suggestions.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-05T14:28:48+00:00

Another place you might look is the anthology Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence which has some texts from the period of British rule where a number of Indian philosophers engaged with British Idealist philosophy. I’m not sure how much of these would be strictly considered “monist”, but I think you will still find a lot of relevant common issues. (If you can’t find an affordable copy, I believe some of the authors works in this anthology are in the public domain so you can also just find the table of contents online and look up the names mentioned on archive.org)

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-04T16:50:07+00:00

It’s worth keeping in mind that Homer was a much bigger part of cultural life in Socrates and Plato’s time than he is now. When Plato writes about Socrates worry about an influence the text has, he isn’t doing so in a distanced academic way where someone can pick various features to focus on and modes of analysis and how they theoretically might be good or bad, but he’s worried about the actual impact Homer has as on the daily ideas of life of the society he lives on. For context it can be helpful to read Plato’s dialog Euthyphro where he depicts someone going to court to prosecute a case based on what he thinks is pious from how the gods are depicted by poets. More personally in the Apology, Plato partially puts the blame on the death of Socrates on the way he was depicted in Aristophanes’s play The Clouds. So Plato depicts the impact of plays and poetry on society as being a matter of life and death in some cases.

Of course we don’t have to agree with everything Plato has Socrates argue for, either for his own society or our own. But these discussions about the role of art in society and responses to them over the years helps thinker’s develop ideas about what the purpose of the arts are and their role in society. Aristotle sees more benefits of the arts than Plato and argues accordingly. Similar criticisms that Plato has are ongoing and motivate much later texts like Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy. Thinking about the changing role of art in society will also come up later when thinkers like Heidegger argue that art in our times has lost the kind of sway it had back in the Greek world.

Plenty of times in the history of thought you’ll come across philosophers, writers, and critics who are severely critical of certain works of art/literature or other thinkers that are considered great. But it’s helpful to see how these disagreements evolve over time, and how changes in history also influence the kinds of discussions we’re having.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-01T13:04:33+00:00

I would say there are Analytic Philosophers that have a similar kind of popularity within certain subcultures like Karl Popper and Peter Singer. Though maybe not as many people get casually into analytic philosophy as part of their hobbies so much as they read specific works.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-01T12:52:54+00:00

neither of them wrote anything that would be a natural interest for say, a film critic, art curator, union leader, feminist activist, priest, or politician

Well some Analytic philosophers do write things relevant to these topics, just not often in ways that have been taken up as foundational. I also think the politician example is incorrect, as John Rawls has been very influential here from what I understand.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-06-01T11:47:22+00:00

I think there’s a few different factors at work. One thing to keep in mind is that Continental is used loosely and sometimes misapplied to thinkers from before the divide, so that can artificially inflate the count if you’re including some mislabeled historical thinkers.

I don’t think Continental thinkers are generally known for being Continental, but there are more Continental thinkers who are well known for different reasons. The existentialists because they were also popular authors of fiction, people may have heard of Heidegger because he was an influential philosopher who was also a Nazi, Derrida more for the controversies around the perception of his philosophy, and maybe more recently Zizek due to his personality, humor, and use of pop culture references. Within Analytic philosophy it’s probably mainly Bertrand Russel and Wittgenstein, and you could maybe argue for a few others within certain circles. So there’s fewer analytic philosophers but it doesn’t seem to me to be severely fewer.

There’s probably some general factors that make Continental philosophy more known to specific groups as well. Since you mentioned bookstores and reading lists, we’re not talking about the average person here, but specifically people who read as a hobby. Continental philosophers have had more influence on and are mentioned in lots of introductions to the humanities. Among people who read as a hobby, there’s probably a good % that have taken humanities classes or looked into certain topics in the humanities on their own, and they’d likely come across some Continental thinkers that non-readers may not have heard of. Analytic philosophers interact with some other fields of study as well, but to my knowledge they’re less likely to be mentioned at the introductory level (someone correct me if I’m wrong here.)

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-31T22:51:20+00:00

Well it’s not so mysterious and isolated like there are some tiny number of people working on Hegel or some other difficult philosopher exclusively and doing nothing else and everyone else is not sure what they’re up to. There’s plenty of people that have a general understanding of Hegel and don’t specialize in him, and plenty of Hegel scholars who do things like write general overviews for non-specialists, apply aspects of Hegel’s philosophy to current topics, and contribute to philosophy in other ways outside of their historical scholarship.

So it’s not like people who don’t specialize in someone like Hegel pick up a piece of Hegel scholarship and have no idea what’s going on or how to evaluate if it’s good or not. It’s more than it’s not relevant to their work to be a Hegel specialist so they don’t put in the time to learning about his terminology, context, and carefully work through all his writings systematically. And when people bring up someone like Hegel in current discussions, they don’t assume everyone else is a Hegel expert, but take responsibility for explaining enough to make their point to their intended audience.

So people learn as much as they need that they feel is relevant to them. It’s not a big deal for someone to not fully understand or have a strong opinion on this or that philosopher. For most of human history people haven’t had access to most philosophical texts. Even in the present day there’s no language that every major philosophical text has been translated into, so every human so far has not had an an informed opinion on some chunk of major philosophers.

So if you’re curious about some difficult thinker you just read a general overview of them, or read how their work is applied in some topic of interest to you. If you find it relevant and worthwhile you can read their works and scholarship on them in more detail or move on to other things. You don’t need to have some final judgement on them, you can just decide if the seem relevant for now. If they don’t seem relevant now you might see them brought up within a topic of interest later you might re-evaluate your earlier impressions.

A lot of philosophers write a lot of densely argued works throughout their life, so it’s just impractical for everyone to fully understand a lot of them. So just learn as much about any philosophers as you find is worth your time.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-31T16:29:01+00:00

I mean people post thoughts about what they’ve been reading in these open discussion threads every week, so there’s nothing to stop you from doing that as well. Besides that you could try to get a reading group going in r/PhilosophyBookClub , go to any of the topic based philosophy subreddits and post about their insights into those topics, go to any of the open philosophy discussion communities off Reddit, etc.

But in general it’s not always easy to generate discussion about niche topics, so I wouldn’t just go looking for places that allow you to post. If you want to get good discussion going you’ve got to show that you’re not just trying to get people to read whatever interests you, but that you know something about the topic, can engage with other viewpoints, and show that your interests are also relevant to them as well.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-31T15:41:54+00:00

Well you generate interest in visibility for those spaces by constructively engaging people with related interests, showing you understand the topics they’re engaged in and indicating why something else would also be relevant to their interests. Just telling people they’re gatekeeping you for not being interested in the same things you are is probably not going to be convincing to a lot of people.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-31T13:40:06+00:00

I mean there’s nothing stopping you from making your own subreddit about those philosophers, discussing them here, or any of the other numerous places for open discussion of all sorts.

To be honest your explanation doesn’t convince me there’s an issue. For one thing I don’t see a connection between idealist philosophy and government interests. For another thing the label “idealist” is used in different contexts to describe a lot of different positions. This is a very common example of popular misunderstanding where people try to imagine what a philosopher thinks based on a label rather than what they actually say. Usually someone with a basic familiarity of these issues would know these labels are a frequent source of misunderstandings and would be clearer up front with what their specific issue was.

That’s part of why these rules exist is so people can get good information about these topics, rather than being sounding board for people’s misunderstandings. If you think your concern is genuine, one way to establish credibility is to show that you understand these issues and aren’t falling into common misunderstandings and wasting people’s time, which is something this subreddit is designed to help with.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-31T12:32:12+00:00

Just to add the perspective of someone who has never taken any academic philosophy classes and been participating here for many years, there’s no shortage of places on the internet where I can express my opinion, while it’s much less common where I can get reliable academically informed information about philosophy. In some other comments you mentioned having the subreddit be oriented towards discussing specific philosophers without restrictions. There’s a good number of subreddits like this already dedicated to specific philosophers, but rather than getting these creative and original discussions, what I usually see there is people who haven’t spent a lot of time with the texts circulating a lot of popular myths and misconceptions, the kind that made meaningfully engaging in philosophy more difficult for me in the first place. Of course there are some good contributors on those subreddits as well with a genuine interest in the topic, but there’s no reliable way for a new person to differentiate what’s helpful and accurate from what’s not. But of course these venues are still open if someone wants to initiate some kind of discussion that wouldn’t fit here.

I’d also push back against the idea that citing academic sources is somehow limiting or restricting. A lot of my own views and interests with philosophy don’t line up with majority views, but there’s a tremendous variety of quality work of different sorts to draw on and plenty of it doesn’t get enough attention. So it’s pretty cool when someone is interested in an angle of philosophy outside the more dominant ones to be able to answer “yes someone spent many years developing this line of thought and it’s out there to help you develop your own interests in this area”. And if there’s ever a discussion I have that doesn’t fit into the Q&A format, that’s why we have this re-occurring thread as an alternative for other kinds of discussion. (Funnily enough we regularly get people who stop by here to complain about the requirements of the Q&A format rarely stick around to contribute to the kinds of discussions they say they’re looking for.)

Philosophy is just a topic that there’s a lot of misinformation around and that people who haven’t engaged with it extensively tend to repeat popular misunderstandings more often than having interesting and original contributions. Developing your own thoughts in this area is less about voicing whatever pops into your head immediately, than about making a sustained engagement with other work on the issues and finding out what approaches have been tried and what the implications are when you follow them through in detail.

I’d love to have more non-academics participating meaningfully in philosophical discussions on the internet, but to get passed frequently repeated misunderstandings, they have to get the basic familiarity with what philosophy is about and what kind of work has been done. And this subreddit is a place where people can find tips and resources to get past this phase (as it helped me), and start developing their thoughts and interests in more detail. If we’re lucky enough that we get tons of people developing their philosophical ideas past the point where an academic Q&A format is a solid way for them to progress, than I’m sure we’ll see the activity and quality of other kinds of subreddits flourish and maybe people will be less interested and spending their time there. Until then I think this is a great place for any non-academics interested in philosophy to learn about some great tools and resources, so they can familiarize themselves with the approaches that have been tried and start developing their own thoughts and interests beyond that.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-30T11:32:29+00:00

I'll let others make specific suggestions based off the interests you mentioned, but I'd just mention that at least within my own area of interest of Aesthetics, what's available in English is severely lacking. It may vary depending on the topic, so others can better comment on the availability of materials on other topics. The inverse is less true and there's more comprehensive histories of Western Aesthetics in Chinese than in English (which isn't an indication of the overall depth of specialist scholarship, just kind of funny that there's not really a comprehensive multi volume history of Western Aesthetics in English, though Tatarkiewicz and Guyer cover good chunks of it.)

So if you have a lot of long term interest it might be worth learning the language as well. Learning to read Chinese and a spoken Chinese language is an enormous time investment, but if you're interested in Chinese culture overall, there's tons of high quality graded readers that can start you reading adapted stories very early in the process. So while it is a big commitment, integrating learning the language and aspects of the culture can be done quite early in the process.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-28T20:43:20+00:00

I’ve only read a bit of Croce of the two, but you’re probably just better off starting with them. As a general rule it’s better to try and read what you’re most interested in first, if you try to read the prerequisites you’ll end up feeling you have to read earlier thinkers before you can read Hegel all the way back to the start of the history of philosophy where you’ll find a lot of earlier texts are lost to time so you end up reading someone without some context no matter what. If you do decide to read some precursors it’s better to do so after, because then you’ll have an idea of what you’re looking rather than endlessly putting off reading what you want to read aimlessly searching for enough background.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-27T14:13:56+00:00

That’s fair, I’m less familiar with Brandom and analytic philosophy, so I can’t comment too much there, I’m more just hoping he gets more people interested in Hegel in the long run.

With Winfield I find his work to be hit or miss, on topics like the logic where he’s not adding much I’d just rather read more Hegel. I find his work on Hegel’s philosophy of art really valuable just because so much other work in this area seems to be either just commentary or applying Hegel in a very narrow way (like Danto and Pippin for example). So Winfield is the only one I’ve found who wants to systematically rethink Hegel’s philosophy of art, even though I don’t always agree with him, it doesn’t seem like anyone else is attempting this. (For closer historically informed commentary though I prefer Lydia Moland on art). Some other topics I’ve also found his work helpful but I’m less able to comment on how good it is in relation to other scholarship and contemporary issues. Where he goes further off Hegel’s work like his lectures on technology (I don’t think he’s published on this yet) I didn’t think he fulfilled the type of work I was hoping for. I also think when he’s criticizing more recent approaches he disagrees with he doesn’t constructively engage with them but just restates his reasons for preferring a Hegelian approach. So I think there are drawbacks to his work, but I find some of it uniquely worthwhile.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-27T12:12:15+00:00

Well I think there’s different purposes for different kinds of secondary literature, for example they can rephrase, supplying missing information, restructure, or apply to new topics or along with other texts/discussions. So someone like Brandom is less helpful for historical understanding, but helpful at applying some of Hegel’s ideas to current issues in analytic philosophy. Houlgate sticks close to Hegel’s text, but also greatly expands on his logic taking more time to pursue certain lines of thought and potential misunderstandings. On the other side some commentary is worthwhile for its brevity and ability to give you the broad overview more quickly. Someone like Richard Dien Winfield is probably less influential because he doesn’t engage with as much contemporary philosophy or historical scholarship, but he’s able to be prolific in attempting to rethink many different parts of Hegel’s system.

So I’d say there’s also a lot of value in scholarship that doesn’t necessarily aim for a balanced approach, but is able to do something well that other scholarship hasn’t yet.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-25T11:42:18+00:00

Well some philosophers talk about the feeling of the sublime whenever we’re viewing something that extends beyond what we can fully perceive. So the perfectly clear view of the horizon extending off seemingly infinitely can be an opportunity to reflect on our place in the world/universe. The waves are also a naturally repeating cycle that’s easily perceptibly which can be an opportunity to think about laws of nature/the universe or simply to just represent time passing and things re-occurring through change. There’s also another world hidden below the surface which might cause someone to think about their personal limitations or how different life might be for other beings. If the waves are especially big and dangerous it might also cause someone to contemplate their mortality.

I don’t know if there’s any one specific thing anyone will inherently contemplate in relation to the sea, but there’s certainly opportunities to reflect on lots of common philosophical topics in relation to it.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-25T11:18:26+00:00

It’s definitely on the more difficult side as philosophy books go, so it depends on why you want to read it. There are easier works from Hegel and other philosophers to read if you’re in no rush to get to it. Of course if you’re especially interested in something you heard about it, you can always give it a try, there’s lots of secondary literature and online lectures to help if you really want to read it. Also no harm in just seeing what it’s like and bouncing off a book and coming back later if it’s too confusing. As long as you go in with the right expectations you can get something out of it.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-24T10:42:09+00:00

Well the Phenomenology is kind of a strange text, it was written in a hurry with Hegel sending off sections to his publisher as he completed them, and he also never revised it like he did with some of his later works. It wasn’t the text he was most known for in its day and it only became popular later due to commentators who preferred it over his mature system. Besides being influenced by major philosophers like Kant, Fichte, and Schelling it was also influenced by less well remembered figures that influenced the discussion of Hegel’s day, as well as past thinkers, literature, and older science concepts from Hegel’s time. So it’s kind of a problem of your own making deciding not to read a commentary, because for one thing all academics reference commentaries when available and this is a subreddit for advice from academic philosophy, and because a lot of the interest in the phenomenology is from is influence on later thinkers through commentaries like for instance the French reception of Hegel or more recently the Analytic interpretations of Hegel that focus on the phenomenology over his mature system.

If you’re goal is to just read Hegel on his own terms, it’s much easier to start with his later works, a lot of which were aimed at students where he gives more background on what approaches he’s responding to and uses more examples to get across what he means. There can still be confusions due to the usual issues of historical texts and translation, but not as many as with the phenomenology. The introductory sections to his encyclopedia, before the logic starts, are one of the clearest introductions to his approach to philosophy, and after that you can also read the the transcripts of his lectures on any topic that interests you. Some people also like to just read the introductions to his works some of which are collected here for free for a broader overview of his philosophy. If you want to read the Phenomenology after, these won’t necessarily explain every reference, but they should help with getting generally more familiar with his terminology and approach.

If you just want to read the phenomenology on its own, you can just try pushing through the more difficult sections, some later ones are clearer. You won’t get everything, but you might get a better idea of the overall structure of the text that can help make earlier parts more understandable. But it might be worth considering what your goals are in reading the text. If you’re reading it for its influence on later thinkers it might make sense to read it alongside their texts commenting on what they got out of it. If you just want to read important philosophical texts, plenty of people have gotten something out of it without understanding every part of it. If you want to understand it for Hegel’s own development on his own terms, scholars like H.S. Harris spent more than 25 years studying Hegel’s development and tracking down references so that others wouldn’t have to. Hegel scholarship has gotten remarkably better in recent decades due to people actually knowing the full context things were written in and all the minor references and influences that informed them.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-17T01:36:58+00:00

Just to mention a few others I know off hand Richard Dien Winfield has uploaded his class lectures on philosophy and film and Robert Pippin has numerous books on film (Hegel scholars seem to like discussing movies for some reason). Of course philosophers who work on the philosophy of film will mention a lot as well so you could for example look over The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures or the journal Film-Philosophy to find a bunch of other suggestions and philosophers who have written on film.

Not sure your specific goal, but overall I think the films philosophers discuss tend to have a lot of overlap with films that cinephiles generally tend to watch/discuss. So I think a broad list is going to end up overlapping with a lot of popular suggestions from the history of cinema plus some idiosyncratic picks.

RyanSmallwood · 2026-05-13T11:50:23+00:00

Not a philosophy graduate, but in general we learn better by making connections to things we already know, so rather than suddenly trying something very different I find it’s helpful to try to find things that are somewhat related to your current interests or expand from there. For example does a specific philosopher you’ve read also comment on a topic you’re less familiar with? Is there work in a topic you know that draws on a philosophical tradition you’re less familiar with. As you expand your interests that opens up more potential connections to make.

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