I realize it is easy to pick on philosphy, but if you're going to write off one of our oldest disciplines it should at least come from an informed place: "I think therefore I am" is not Descartes' premise, but one of his conclusions. Even as a conclusion, it is mostly misunderstood. The point is not that it is the thinking that brings one into being, but that there is something there that must exist in order to do the thinking. Other translations I have read have it "I am deceived, therefore I am," again the point being that something must first exist in order to be deceived. His original "arbitary premise" is that he must first discard everything he thinks he already knows.
Still, he dodges the question as to what it means that something exists. But I admit I haven't really read him. It is just that whenever I pick up a philosophy book (very rarely), I tend to hit upon false premises immediately.
Whenever I pick up a maths book, I read all these symbols that have no explanation whatsoever - it's obviously self-indulgent wanking. I admit I don't actually read the book, though, I just open it. But I can tell the symbols aren't english, or any other language I learned before my mind closed, so I can tell it's dross.
To jump in with the others, I think you'd enjoy Bartley's The Retreat to Commitment, where he raises similar sort of criticisms to the ones you talk about, but in a much more systematic way.
Generally speaking, people who were lucky enough to be born later in time have the advantage over people born earlier, since they can learn from those who come before. This isn't something you have to remember when looking at science since science in the news is if anything too focused on speculation or the latest result over what has been well confirmed - but philosophy has the opposite problem. People still talk about philosophers with ancient names, heavy with dignity even though their ideas have been challenged or extended since their time.
Really, nobody talking about truth should be failing to make a distinction between what is true and what is know since Godel did his work, but Descartes had the disadvantage of being born to early to know about that. In particular, his justifications fall afoul of the third horn of the Münchhausen Trilemma, by resorting to assuming some things as axiomatic. In particular, on reflection I'm baffled that Laplace can take "I think" as axiomatic but not "I am". Existence without though isn't hard to imagine (and some Laplacian demon might be imposing its thoughts on us), but thoughts without existence is. Perhaps if Laplace hadn't set out to prove the existence of God he wouldn't have had to make such odd assumptions.
Well, meditations wouldn't be a bad place to start. And philosophers differ a lot in their views of teh significance of philosophy. I regard it as self-indulgent, but interesting to those so inclined. Like Mathematics, it's an a priori subject anyone can do from an armchair. Unlike Mathematics, it isn't that useful for science. But unlike mathematics, it will help you achieve understanding about the structure of how you ordinarily think about the world (if not the world itself).
You can construe the cogito as an argument:
P1 I think.
P2 If I think, then I exist
C1 I exist.
P1 and P2 are premises, C1 is derived.
The interesting point is that P1 is not arbitrary, in the sense that if one grasps it, then it is true.
That's a really interesting property for a claim to have - especially for a contingent claim to have (e.g. 2+2=4 is necessarily true, and so if one grasps it, trivially it is true, but that's not interesting in the same way).
Further, D thinks that if one grasps it, then one knows one grasps it, (and that it is true).
So for D we have a priori certain knowledge of a contingent claim.
If course, you can question 2, and some people have. Quine is one person to read on that.
Re 'what does it mean to exist' - what do you mean by that? Your criticism demonstrates some ignorance of Descartes, as Descartes makes substantive claims about the nature of his existence as revealed by the reasonining in Mediations. For example D would say he knows that he exists as a thinking subject - a substantive claim about his nature. He goes on to make lots of controversial claims about his nature (some of which get us to Cartesian Dualism).
Given your comments, I'm would recommend W.V. Quine (staunchly realist, writes wonderfully clearly, very rigorous, a logician at heart). A good collection of basic essays is Quintessence, and a good first essay might be 'On What There Is'[1][2]. (Arguably his most important book-length work is Word and Object, but I wouldn't recommend starting there.) Here's the first paragraph (complete) to give you a sense of how well he writes:
>> A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.
Gotta side with Tichy on this one. That sounds exactly like self-indulgent nonsense. Talk around the question, sound cute, but don't answer anything or even inform how you plan to proceed.
Don't think in terms of sides. I'm not "against" Tichy. He asked for reading recommendations, and I gave him one. I wasn't trying to prove him wrong about anything. I suggested Quine because he often appeals to mathematically minded realists, and I think he's very smart and writes well.
As for the article, try the whole thing before you judge it (it's not very long at all). Quine is not being frivolous, and he takes pains to explain exactly what he means as the piece goes on.
> Well name a philosophy book that is worth reading.
Plato's Dialogues and the Pre-Socratics, written 2500 years ago. By reading the above works you'll see that they contained all the important questions.
"Well name a philosophy book that is worth reading."
Asking what philosophy book to read is sort of like asking which math book to read.
The answer really depends on what you already know. You're probably not going to recommend that someone completely unfamiliar with math read a calculus textbook, much less an advanced math monogram.
Likewise, it's probably not a good idea to recommend that someone unfamiliar with philosophy read Heidegger. You're probably going to get some very basic recommendations.
Even then, you probably won't get much out of reading them without taking a class on the subject in which someone with vastly more experience and understanding than you can guide you and your peers to gain a greater appreciation of what you read, and to stimulate critical thought and discussion about the books you are reading. That's really the ideal setting for getting introduced to philosophy: as part of a class led by a talented teacher, and with some intelligent peers open to talking about the issues.
That said, you should not allow yourself to be misled in to thinking the toe that you dip in to the ocean of philosophy is going to be in any way representative, much less the "best" that philosophy has to offer.
Even were you to read a "great" book when you just start out, you're probably not going to understand much of it or get much out of it on your first go. Even professional philosophers go back again and again to classics, as they get more out of them each time, with the benefit of greater understanding, and being able to apply the insight and methods they've gained in the meantime to the books they've already read.
What I'm trying to say is that reading philosophy in a way that does justice to the topic is a lifetime endeavor. A one-time bite at any philosophy book just isn't going to give you even an inkling of an idea of what it's about.
Still, for an introduction to Western philosophy, you probably won't be able to do better than starting with the Socratic Dialogues. They are the source and the foundation of much of Western philosophy that's come afterwards, and you really can't properly understand most of the rest without reading this source.
I would strongly encourage you to read them as part of an Ancient Philosophy class at a university, for the reasons mentioned a few paragraphs earlier. Unfortunately, the philosophy departments of universities in the English speaking world tend to be dominated by the Analytic school of philosophy. So what you'll get from class will probably be biased in that direction. Just keep in mind that there are other ways of approaching and understanding the issues you read about than the ones you are exposed to in class.
