The 3 best philosophy books

It is curious how the humanities are recovering their preferential place in education as technology advances and Artificial Intelligence looms (or rather lurks) like something come to supplant us as productive individuals in many areas. And I am not only referring to the humanistic as an academic agenda, where the issue is now at stake. It is also a matter of work. Because many are the large technology companies that yearn for workers capable of reaching where machines only dream (nod to Philip K. Dick and his androids dreaming of electric sheep).

We are left with creativity and subjective thinking, the critical notion of things and the wandering or the projection of ideas as a space unreachable by the machine (Ay si Asimov or other more remote like Wells they will see these days ...). Hence, the differential fact, the spark and philosophy as such is a necessary refuge today. The robot will never wonder where it comes from and where it is going. We do.

Philosophy, philosophy… And me quoting science fiction writers. Why will it be? Probably because we associate philosophy with Thales of Miletus or with Nietzsche as we evoke the replicant of Blade Runner earning his piece of soul, explaining to the human everything he has seen and that it will be lost in his memory of bytes like tears in the rain ...

Here I am going to bring a few books by great thinkers (now we are going to the philosophers). Not all who are will not be all who are. Many of you will miss the classics, the basis of everything. But philosophy is like everything, a matter of taste. There are those to whom Kant seems unattainable sophistication (I sign up) and who believes that Plato's zote could not be the most advantageous of Socrates' pupils. Let's go there then, freethinkers ...

Top 3 recommended books of philosophy

Thus spoke Zaratrusta, by Nietzsche

Sorry, I am a devoted believer in Nietzsche and I understand that this work should be read by anyone who dares to look at the metaphysical, the epistemiological or even to remember where the keys have been left. Any process of minimally transcendental doubt must drag the chains of an ego adorned with perception as a condemnation, circumstances as an anchor and the conditioning of being as a premise. Then the superman that we all have inside can aspire to find the key. And then no one will believe us. We will be a new Ecce homo crying out with our truth as absolute as it is empty.

I have to confess that when I had this first book by Nietzsche in my hands, something like a kind of respect assailed me, as if I had another sacred book before me, which bibilia for agnostics determined to stop being so. That of the superman struck me, grounded, credible, motivating ..., but sometimes it also sounded to me like excuses of the defeated man, unable to escape into the void.

Summary: Where he collects in the form of an aphorism the essential of his philosophy, destined to the creation of the superman. It has been said that Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be considered as the counter-figure of the Bible, and constitutes a bedside book for those who seek Truth, Good and Evil. One of the fundamental works within the philosophy of the nineteenth century.

This is how Zarathustra spoke

Discourse on method, by René Descartes

Not bringing Descartes to a selection of philosophy books is like making a potato omelette without onion, a sacrilege. If Descartes presented us with the essence of thinking as the axiom of existence, we can assure that Descartes began at the beginning with a scientific pragmatism. Light years away from Nietzsche, in Descartes there is a friendly philosophy, trusting in the intelligence to face any approach from here and there, from this world or from the field of ideas ...

Cartesianism is long dead. The thought of Descartes, however, survives and will survive as long as the freedom to think exists as a guide for reflection. This principle constitutes the most delicious fable that man could invent, and that is due to humanity, in large part, to Descartes and, especially, to the two works that the reader has in his hands. Reading Descartes is one of the best exercises to keep alive the most important impulse of modern philosophy: an absolute prior doubt, a skepticism as the starting point of genuine knowledge.

However, the main merit of what happens to be the first official rationalist in the history of philosophy has been his nuanced critique of dogmatic thought. Nothing, indeed, can be accepted by virtue of any authority whatsoever. This hero of modern thought, in the words of Hegel, has led philosophy down ways barely perceived before, daring, to put it in Dalembert's words, to teach good heads to shake off the yoke of scholasticism, of opinion, of The authority; in a word, of prejudice and barbarism and, with this rebellion whose fruits we gather today, it has made philosophy more essential perhaps than all that it owes to the illustrious successors of Descartes.

Method Discourse

Capital by Karl Marx

Due to its sociological significance, I believe that Kant's thought points to the most relevant philosophy of our current civilization. The social class system is a signed agreement that allows us to avoid the conflict under the guise of democracy, equality and all those lies. And it is that Marx acted of good will at the head of the proletariat. But the ambush was served. The ultimate plan was to make everyone happy to go through the hoop ...

Considered as the masterpiece of Marx. To face your enemy, it is imperative to know him ... And that's why this book is understood with the intention of complete dissection of political economy, with all the meaning that this intention has that politics and economics always go hand in hand.

The invisible hand of Adam Smith needs the other hand of a government father who knows how to redirect the excesses of a capricious son such as the market. It is a work written for two years but completed by Engels through a compilation that took him 9 years after the death of Marx.

The truth is that this work on the diabolical capitalist system in front of which the figure of Marx appeared happens to be one of the best Treatises on the prevailing capitalism in any productive system, on speculation and the only final interest in satisfying ambition.

Of great technical rigor, however, it also provides the brilliance of detail, the observation of the underground of the capitalist system ...

Capital, Marx

Other interesting philosophy books ...

Beyond this podium of world philosophical works, there is a philosophy that slides towards fiction and that addresses the existential about the characters and the transcendental about the narrative proposals. And it is also good to enjoy that philosophy turned into a metaphor. I have come up, we go there with three good novels of philosophy ...

Diary of a Seducer, by Soren Kierkegaard

This novel can be considered the precursor of so many writers determined to offer in their characters those glimpses of humanity that is deep down to the visceral, even the psychosomatic.

And for that alone, in addition to its inherent worth, I highlight it in the first place. Behind this title with the appearance of a rose novel, there is a powerful story about the subjective fact of love, passion, and its ability to transform reality. And of course, nothing better for a thinker of the depth of Kierkegaard than to take off with a personal lack of love from which to compose the narrative. Because everything starts from one of those true loves and their wounds.

Juan and Cordelia are the lovers of this story. Juan's passion disguised as love hides all the philosophical intention of the plot, while Cordelia is relegated to that almost romantic suffering, an expression already abandoned by the new writers of the time. Juan and his passage through the world without major questions than his most passionate needs. Juan and the drives that move him through his days. Perhaps happiness but certainly ignorance. The weight of going through the scene like nothing or trying to understand what is true beyond the stage of life.

Diary of a seducer

Sofia's World by Jostein Gaarder

With that connotation of being a turning point in the consideration of children's or youth narrative as a mere introduction to reading, this novel became a bestseller at the same time in which its enduring nature, its notion of classic, was guessed at. at the height of The Little Prince or The endless story.

Each of them from its revolutionary prism of literature for younger ages converted into the basis of a history of literature understood from the sustenance of the world's first learning. The unforgettable Sofía appears as the human open without conditions to knowledge, to knowledge. The letter that ends up moving her towards the knowledge of the world is the same letter that we all find at some point in our lives, with similar questions about the ultimate truth of everything.

The novel's touch of mystery was an undeniable claim for young readers, the symbology of its scenes captivated many other open adults in that rescue of the first self exposed to the world with which we suffered a magical mimicry to return to those old questions that we never got respond fully. Thinking about what we are and our end is a continual starting over. And Sofia, that etymological symbol of wisdom, we are all.

Sofia's world

Nausea, by Jean Paul Sartre

Taking off a novel from this title already anticipates a somatized malaise, a visceral irruption of disenchantment. To exist, to be, what are we? These are not questions thrown at the stars on a fantastic clear night.

The question goes inwards, towards what we ourselves can look for in the dark sky of the soul. Antoine Roquetin, the protagonist of this novel does not know that it harbors this latent question, compelling to pronounce itself with its heavy questions. Antoine continues with his life, his vicissitudes as a writer and researcher. Nausea is that critical moment in which the question arises as to whether we are fundamentally something, beyond our routines and tendencies.

Antoine writer then becomes Antoine the philosopher who seeks the answer and whose feelings of limitation but of infinity, melancholy and the need for happiness.

Vomiting can be controlled before the dizziness of living, but its effects always remain ... This being his first novel, but already in his thirties, it is understood that thematic maturity, the philosopher was growing, social disenchantment also increased, the existence seemed simply doom. A certain aftertaste of Nietzsche emerges from this reading.

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