Chapter 3 Further Reading: The Map of Philosophy

These recommendations are organized by category and include a frank note on what each is like to read. Not every book is appropriate for every reader right now — some are demanding, some are light. The asterisk (*) marks the most accessible starting points for someone new to philosophy.

Essential Starting Points

For the Big Picture: Why Non-Western Philosophy Belongs in the Conversation

Bryan Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (2017) Short, accessible, urgent. Van Norden, one of the leading scholars of Chinese philosophy in the West, makes the argument — with specifics and rigor — that the exclusion of non-Western philosophy from most Western academic departments is intellectually indefensible. He's not polite about it, in the best way. This is the book to read if you want to understand why the survey in this chapter is important, not just interesting.

Bryan Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (2011) * More demanding than Taking Back Philosophy but still very accessible. A systematic and fair-minded introduction to Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and other Chinese schools. Excellent for going deeper on East Asian philosophy without requiring Chinese.

Primary Sources: The Shortest Route to the Originals

These are short enough that there is no reason not to read them.

Daoism

Laozi, Tao Te Ching * (any good translation) Eighty-one short poems or chapters. Probably thirty to forty-five minutes to read through once, though it rewards indefinite rereading. Stephen Mitchell's translation is poetic and accessible; Ursula K. Le Guin's is brilliant and explicitly feminist. D.C. Lau's Penguin Classics version is more scholarly. Read any of them.

What it's like: Cryptic in the best sense. You will feel like you almost understand it and then it slips away. That's appropriate — the slipping is part of the point.

Stoicism

Epictetus, Enchiridion * (also called The Handbook) Fifty-three short chapters. One afternoon. The most direct and practical Stoic text. Epictetus was a freed slave who became one of the most influential philosophers in the Western tradition. The Enchiridion opens with the distinction between what is and is not in your control and develops it with bracing consistency.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations * A private journal, not a treatise. The emperor of Rome reminding himself, over and over, to do his job well and care about the right things. Beautifully translated by Gregory Hays (Modern Library). Warm, practical, and surprisingly intimate.

Buddhist Philosophy

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching (1998) * The most accessible entry point to Buddhist philosophy in English. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Zen master who writes with extraordinary clarity and compassion. This book explains the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and Buddhist concepts of suffering and liberation without requiring any prior knowledge and without being simplistic.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975) * Even shorter and more accessible than the above. A practical introduction to present-moment awareness as a philosophical practice, not just a technique.

Confucianism

The Analects of Confucius (any translation) Short passages — conversations between Confucius and his students. Not organized thematically, which makes it feel a bit like dipping into someone's notebook, but the passages are short enough to engage with one by one. Edward Slingerland's translation (with extensive commentary) is excellent if you want to go deep. Simon Leys's translation is elegant and more accessible.

African Philosophy

Kwasi Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Philosophy (2004) The definitive scholarly reference — twenty-nine essays by leading African philosophers covering historical, contemporary, and regional traditions. Dense but authoritative. Not a cover-to-cover read; use it to explore the traditions you find most interesting.

Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (1999) * Not a philosophy textbook but a profound philosophical memoir. Tutu, who chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, thinks through Ubuntu in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. What does forgiveness mean when the harm was systematic and enormous? What does reconciliation require? Essential reading.

Thaddeus Metz, A Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa (article, freely available online) A scholarly but readable article that unpacks Ubuntu as a formal philosophical theory and compares it to Western ethical frameworks. Good for those who want to understand the technical philosophical arguments.

Indigenous Philosophy

Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies (1995) Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) challenges Western scientific accounts of Indigenous peoples' arrival in the Americas and critiques the colonialism embedded in mainstream archaeology. Not primarily a philosophy text, but philosophically important for its challenge to whose knowledge counts as legitimate.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013) * A botanist who is also Potawatomi explores the relationship between Western scientific knowledge of plants and Indigenous relational knowledge. This book is where Indigenous philosophy is most accessible and most beautiful for a general audience. It does not sacrifice rigor for accessibility.

Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (2001) A philosophical examination of Indigenous epistemologies and their implications for education. Challenging and worth it.

Western Philosophy

Accessible Surveys

Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (1999) * A clear, engaging survey of the major areas of Western philosophy — knowledge, mind, free will, ethics, politics, religion — by a Cambridge philosopher. A very good companion to this chapter for deepening your understanding of Western traditions.

A.C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy (2019) A comprehensive single-volume history, accessible to non-specialists. More detailed than this chapter's survey. Good for anyone who wants to understand the development of Western philosophy in sequence.

Existentialism

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) * Camus's philosophical essay on the absurd — the gap between our hunger for meaning and the universe's silence. Accessible, elegant, and life-altering for many readers. Begins with the line: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." He means: why live? What follows is a sustained and beautiful answer.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) More directly philosophical than de Beauvoir's more famous The Second Sex. An existentialist ethics: what does it mean to be responsible for one's freedom in a world where others' freedom also matters? Accessible and rigorous.

Virtue Ethics

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (any translation) The foundation of virtue ethics. Book I and Book X are the most essential (the nature of happiness and the contemplative life); Book II (virtue as habit) and Books VIII-IX (friendship) are directly practical. Not as hard to read as reputation suggests if you go slowly.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981) The 20th-century revival of virtue ethics. MacIntyre argues that modern ethical discourse is incoherent because it lost its Aristotelian context. Demanding but enormously influential.

Cross-Cultural and Comparative Philosophy

David Loy, The World Is Made of Stories (2010) * A Buddhist philosopher explores the role of narrative in constructing the self and world. Draws on Buddhist, Western, and other traditions. Accessible and thought-provoking.

Graham Priest, One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness (2014) A rigorous analytic philosopher takes Buddhist and Daoist philosophy seriously as formal philosophical positions and examines them with the tools of contemporary logic. For those who want to see what rigorous cross-cultural philosophical dialogue looks like.

Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden, "If Philosophy Won't Diversify, Let's Call It What It Is" (New York Times, 2016) A short, free op-ed that sparked an enormous conversation in academic philosophy. Worth reading for context on why this chapter's approach is still somewhat controversial in mainstream academic philosophy.

For Going Deep on Specific Traditions

A Note on Reading Philosophy

Philosophy is not read the way novels are read. You do not coast through it; you work with it. Here is a method that helps:

1. Read once for the overall argument. What is the author trying to say? What question are they answering?

2. Read again with a pencil. Mark every claim you do not understand. Mark every claim you disagree with. Mark every claim that surprises or excites you.

3. Try to reconstruct the argument in your own words. If you cannot explain what an author means without looking at the text, you have not yet understood it.

4. Find your objection. Every philosophical position has a strong objection. Find it. See if the philosopher answers it (they often do, somewhere). If they do not, you have found a genuinely interesting philosophical problem.

Even fifteen minutes a day with one of the primary sources above will, over a semester, make you a more careful and philosophically literate thinker. That is not an overstatement.