The Republic

I re-read Plato's The Republic. It's a must read for 0.001% of the population.

The Old Man and the sea - Hemmingway - so many things, with every reread I find something new. The Heart of the Buddhas Teaching - Thich Nhat Hanh, useful prayers, concepts for understanding and dealing with life and a moral compass for going through it. The Way of Zen - Alan Watts, opened my eyes to different forms of religious experience Also a lot of psychology and philosophy books in undergrad were foundational to my thinking. The Moral Animal, the Moral Landscape, The Blank Slate, The Republic and Plato’s writings on Socrates, Tao te Ching, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Tanakh and parts of the Talmud, but many of these were more academic, still holistically they have shaped my thinking and moral compass.

I read Plato's Republic -- even as a youth. It is very readable and free from fancy prose. It is also dramatic in parts and written in dialogue form.

My field of study (what I really like to think and learn about) isn't my field of work, but I like the question so I'll spill some thoughts. I spend a lot of time thinking about philosophical-ish stuff, so here are some books that have had the strongest residual effects (whether that's changing how I think, changing what I think about, changing my values, or simply getting the thought ball rolling faster): Ishmael (Daniel Quinn) 1984 (George Orwell) Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) The Republic [imp. "the allegory of the cave"] (Plato) The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche) The Social Construction of Reality (Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (L. Wittgenstein) Dissemination [imp. "The Pharmakon"] (Jacques Derrida) The Quest for Reality (Barry Stroud) Languages of Art (Nelson Goodman) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn) Concepts (Jerry Fodor) The Web of Life (Fritjof Capra) Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco) Naming and Necessity (Saul Kripke) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)…

Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault) Not my field of study or existence, but what happened in a bare hundred years to make public execution private, and prisons into factories into schools? It's a great book, you should read it. The Republic (Plato) How do you get someone to listen to you? (first answer: threaten them with violence). "Footnotes to" etc.

Economics: - The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith - Das Kapital, Karl Marx - That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, Frederic Bastiat Philosophy / Politics: - The Republic, Plato - Second Treatise on Government, John Locke - The Law, Frederic Bastiat - Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes - Meditations, Marcus Aurelius - Democracy in America, Alexis de Toqueville - On Liberty, John Stuart Mill Fiction: - The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Mark Twain - The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin - Metamorphoses, Franz Kafka - Candide, Voltaire - The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

Older Stuff: The Bible/Quran, The Republic (Plato), The Social Contract (Rousseau), Tao Te Ching (Laozi), Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson) All of these books are well written and have given me some perspective on interesting people/situations/ways of thinking.

Some titles I've recently read or at least have placed on my reading list. -------------------- Philosohpy Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium - Seneca Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (must read) The Republic - Plato -------------------- History Five Chimneys - Olga Lengyel The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (must read) The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank -------------------- Fiction (particularly dystopian) 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451 (crime/action) Child 44, The Secret Speech, Agent 6 - Tom Rob Smith -------------------- Economics Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty - Banerjee, Duflo Why Nations Fail - Robinson -------------------- Economics/Decision making/Psychology Undercover Economist, Freakonomics, Nudge, Thinking Fast and Slow -------------------- Random titles The Selfish Gene, Self-Reliance, The Elements of Style (about writing), Slaughterhouse-Five -------------------- Some links to inspire your reading (though you may want to checkout the websites first to get an idea of the topics they cover) http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books…

Man's search for meaning, by Viktor Frankel The Republic, by Plato. It introduced me to a whole new way of thinking. The Gita. I later came to know about the chariot allegory in the Kathopanishad (http://www.atmajyoti.org/up_katha_upanishad_17.asp), and thought that the writer's depiction of the charioteer as Krishna and the rider as Arjuna was just brilliant.

It really depends on what you're looking for, but Philosophy is a field where one philosopher's work is built on top of the other's going all the way back to the ancient Greek's. Its important (I think anyways) to read the raw texts before you read philosophical commentary so that you have a chance to form your own opinions. That being said, here's some recommendations of mine that cover a breadth of philosophical subjects and time periods. Its always good to see someone else want to learn more philsophy, especially if its of their own volition. Plato. Strangely enough, Plato is probably one of the best introductions to philosophy, not only because he was one of the first whose writings survive to modern time, but also because its relatively simple to read and understand. Some of my personal favorite are 'The Apology', 'The Symposium', and 'The Phaedrus', and of course 'The Republic'. The weird thing with Plato is you'll never know how much of his writings are his thinking as opposed to Socrates teaching. I still reread Plato because the stories (most of his writing is in narrative form) are so damn entertaining.…

Asking for "Best Philosophical Books" is pretty much like asking for an opinion, everyone will have a very different view. That being said, here's my view! John Stuart Mill - "Utilitarianism" (Kant be damned.) Thomas Nagel - "Moral Luck" David Lewis - "On the Plurality of Worlds" Plato - "The Republic" Aristotle - "The Metaphysics"