Reading philosophy is an activity that can benefit all people. I enjoy this pasttime so much that I spent many years in university developing my skill in it. Along the way, I learned a few things, not just about the world and the mind, but also how to learn.

Reading philosophy is important, not because it gives us values and truths to accept, but because it exposes us to the process of developing understanding. Difficult works that develop our abstract reasoning help us to understand complex issues that arise in the course of daily life - and can also help us explain our reasoning to others when facing complex issues.

It is unfortunately necessary to be somewhat well-read in philosophy to keep up in more formal philosophical discourse. What follows is my attempt to collect noteworthy classical, modern, and contempotary works on a number of topics, with special focuses on the nature of mind, reality, the limits of knowledge, & moral teachings in a roughly chronological order. When reading philosophy like this, you can follow chains of thought through the centuries. After reading the texts I suggest, you should be able to begin participating in more serious philosophical discussion - not to mention developing more nuanced positions - and it shouldn't be hard to find people or resources to help understand the texts along the way.

After my list of suggested texts, more general notes on actually reading philosopy follow.

• Plato - Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium, Apology
• Aristotle - Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics, Physics
• Aurelius - Meditations
• Buddha - Dhammapada
• Aquinas - Summa Theologica
• Hobbes - Leviathan
• Descartes - Discourse on the Method, Meditations on First Philosophy
• Spinoza - Ethics
• Berkeley - Treatise Human Knowledge
• Hume - Enquiry Human Understanding, Dialogs Natural Religion, Treatise Human Nature
• Kant - Logic, Critique Pure Reason
• Schopenhauer - World Will Idea, Parerga and Paralipomena
• Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil

• Wittgenstein - Tractatus, Investigations
• Kripke - Naming and Necessity
• Russell - Problems of Philosophy, History of Western Philosophy
• Whitehead - Process and Reality
• Carnap - Meaning and Necessity
• Searle - Intentionality, Speech Acts, Mind
• Moore - Principia Ethica, Philosophical Studies
• Rawls - Theory of Justice
• Scanlon - What We Owe to Each Other
• Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The list is roughly split in two between texts that are uncopyrighted and others that may be more difficult to acquire legally, free of charge.

Begin reading philosophy shortly after waking, after the mind has began to focus: caffeine or nicotine may help here. It's better to read on an empty stomach, after a light meal, or after exercise. Read slowly and mindfully, but not so slowly as to lose track of the argument. Print is best but ebooks come second -- especially epub formatted -- using a gamepad for heavy e-reading sessions is encouraged for ergonomic reasons. Don't read in a place that's too loud, too hot, or too cold -- and read as sober as you can make yourself. Meditating after a reading session can also help to make sense of the information.

When reading a heavier text, I recommend the following technique: after you read a sentence or come across an argument that sticks out to you in some way, hand-write it into a journal with the title of the work and the page number. After reading through a text the first time, if you're left puzzled, read through it again, reviewing these notes and possibly adding more. In one sense, remarkable quotes represent the distillation of a work, and are likely what will stick with you after finishing a text -- handwriting is an easy way to help commit arguments to memory.

Read a work with friends. Just a chapter a week is enough. Seeing what passages appeal to the group can open up really good discussions - or seeing what aspects of a work puzzle or frustrate people. Your hilights can serve as great conversation starters. Something you miss out on may be easy for others to understand and vice versa -- or maybe everyone can agree a point is stupid or overly confusing.

Don't feel bad if a work confuses you. Some authors, notably Kant are notorious for their dense writing. After finishing a work for the first time, you should feel somewhat familiar with the big ideas -- rereading can help you understand how the pieces work together.

If you get 100 pages into a work and you still feel confused, start consulting secondary resources. If you get halfway through a work and you feel it's a waste of time, just drop it and move onto a new one.