Being and Time

Plato - Meno, Symposium, Parmenides, Gorgias, Protagoras Plotinus -Enneads Markus Aurelius - Meditations Descartes - On method Descartes - Meditations Spinoza - On the improvement of Understanding Leibniz - Monadology Leibniz - Grace Voltaire - Candid Diderot - D'Alembert's Dream Kant - How to orient oneself in thinking Kant - Critique of Pure Reason Kant - Critique of Judgment Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel - Logic von Kleist - Marionette Theatre Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death Heidegger - Being and Time Sartre - Being and Nothingness Sartre - Flies Sartre - Nausea Deleuze - Difference and Repetition Kafka - Metamorphosis Kafka - The Castle Lem - Magellan Nebula Lem - His Master's Voice Cioran - A Short History of Decay Pessoa - Book Of Despair Wolfe - New Sun tetralogy

Heidegger: Sein und Zeit https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21477742-martin-heidegge... (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21477742-martin-heidegger) (translation: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92307.Being_and_Time ). Great philosophy, and, alas, nazi author. But you can't choose your family either.

"Will to Power" by Friedrich Nietzsche, who you'll probably love if you like Rand. "A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze & Guattari. A psychedelic philosophy of complexity. Not exactly an airtight philosophical system, but it will blow your mind several times per page. "Being & Time" by Martin Heidegger. An intense, logical investigation of individual existence. A deeply nuanced philosophical take on death, being, and temporality. This is the book to grapple with your inevitable annihilation.

I think the quality of advice you're getting on this thread is very mixed. Some of the books mentioned are absolutely great-- like "Being and Time", or Husserl's "Logical Investigations"-- but incredibly difficult to read unprepared. If you were ready to be reading them, you wouldn't be asking the question here. The two books you mention in the question (Common Sense and "On the Fourfold Root") are both quite readable, as are a few of the primary texts mentioned in the responses ("Existentialism is a Humanism", "Thus Spoke Zarathustra") but in general, I'd have to suggest you stay away from primary texts at first. In other words, begin by reading works about philosophy, rather than works of philosophy. A single-volume work on the history of philosophy will give you the broad scope (for example, Durant, or Russell, or "Sophie's World" if you prefer fiction), but will tend to turn the philosophers discussed into caricatures of themselves. You mention that you are in school; I'd suggest you take a philosophy course or two, if you are interested in the field. Having an experienced guide will definitely help.

being and time - Martin Heidegger

Without a doubt, Heidegger's explanation of readiness-to-hand in Being and Time has done more for my usability and process inefficiency evaluating skills than even Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things or any HCI book I've ever read. While Norman's book comes in a strong second, the benefit of the first few chapters of Being and Time is the incredibly low-level cognitive access it gives you to the work your brain does when engaged in a task. (If you're interested and don't mind slogging through some tough writing, pick up the hardcover version and Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World and read them together. Reading a Wikipedia article or some other summary fails to deliver the same degree of low-level access.) I'll also mention Ayn Rand as someone who wrote inspiringly about the entrepreneur as a (potentially) heroic figure, but hasten to add that her sociology of looters and movers is way too simplistic to ground some of her views on ethics. John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" was my first assigned reading in a political philosophy class, and remains my favorite.…