New and Old World Philosophy: Introductory Readings

Rating:
Summary: A Perfect Introduction to Philosophy
Review: This is the text I wish I had in my introductory philosophy course . New and Old World Philosophy makes philosophy interesting and readable, the way it should be. It's sort of a Reader's Digest of philosophy, and you can get a lot out of it just spending a few minutes at a time with it. There are nice short readings (sometimes just a page) by major philosophers and each one has a brief and helpful introduction by the editors. It opened my eyes to the fact that America made a major contribution to world philosophy with pragmatism. Each chapter starts out with a short selection by the major pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams) and by the end of the text you know what they had to say about all the major areas of philosophy - reality, knowledge, ethics, religion, art, politics, and philosophy itself. It goes great with Louis Menand's new The Metaphysical Club, which is about the beginnings of pragmatism, since it lets you read for yourself some of the works that Menand just talks about. The other thing I like is that New and Old World Philosophy includes all the great "Old World" philosophers you'd want to read like Plato and Aristotle as well as a lot of "New World" thinkers, like the Native Americans, that usually get left out, as if they're not "legitimate" philosophers.