No doubt like many others I have over the years acquired a number of texts that seemed so fundamental or important that I could hardly justify passing by them (usually in a used book store). Many of them of course sit and collect dust as other requirements and demands remained on my reading. Here is my reading outline for getting through all those books I should (and want) to read. Many of these books will not be justified with a close reading but will hopefully leave traces of their structure and contribution in my mind. They are listed chronologically but will probably not all be read in order.
* completed reading
497-406 BCE – Sophocles – Oedipus the King / Oedipus at Colonus / Antigone
428-348 BCE – Plato – Apology / Phaedo / Cratylus / Symposium / Republic / Timaeus
300 BCE – 70 AD – The Apocrypha
390 CE – Gregory of Nyssa – The Life of Moses
415 CE – Augustine of Hippo – City of God
1532 – Machiavell – The Prince
1651 – Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
1662 – Blaise Pascal – Pensees
1689 – John Locke – Two Treaties of Government
1762 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau – The Social Contract
1781 – Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason
1807 – GWF Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit
1867 – Karl Marx – Capital Vol. 1
1887 – Friedrich Nietzsche – The Geneology of Morals
1886- Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil
1896 – Henri Bergson – Matter and Memory
1900/1905/1916-17 – Sigmund Freud – Interpretation of Dreams * / Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality * / Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
1919 – Franz Rosenzweig – The Star of Redemption
1921 – Ludwig Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
1927 – Martin Heidegger – Being and Time*
1936 – Edmund Husserl – The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy*
1943 – Jean Paul Sartre – Being and Nothingness
1944 – Max Horkeimer & Theodor Adorno – Dialectic of Enlightenment
1945 – Maurice Merleau-Ponty – Phenomenology of Perception
1951 – Hannah Arendt – Imperialism
1955 – Walter Benjamin – Illuminations
1955 – Herbert Marcuse – Eros and Civilization
1961 (trans. 1970) – Paul Ricoeur – Freud and Philosophy
1966 – Michel Foucault – The Order of Things
1967 – Jacques Derrida – Of Grammatology
1968 – Paulo Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressed
1970 – Mary Douglas – Natural Symbols
1972 – Deleuze and Guattari -Anti-Oedipus
1973 – Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures
1974 – Luce Irigaray – Speculum of the Other Woman
1975 – M. M. Bakhtin – The Dialogic Imagination
1978 – Rene Girard – Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
1978-1979 – Michel Foucault – The Birth of Biopolitics
1980 – Deleuze and Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus
1980 – Julia Kristeva – Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection *
1988 – D.W. Winnicott – Human Nature
1981-1992 – Emmanuel Levinas – Is it Righteous to Be? *
1989 – Jean-Luc Marion – Reduction and Givenness *
1990 – Judith Butler – Gender Trouble*
1995 – Bruce Fink – The Lacanian Subject
2000- Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri – Empire
2002 – Noam Chomsky – Understanding Power
2009 (1st ed. 1973) – David Harvey – Social Justice and the City
2009 – Ruth Marshall – Political Spiritualities
2009 – Philip Goodchild – Theology of Money *
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If you’re going to read Wittgenstein you must read some of his later work as well (i.e. The Philosophical Investigations). It is significantly different in style than the Tractatus, though not a break in his thought but an important illuminating extension.
Yah, like I alluded to many of these were just cheap buys over the years, though I did hesitate with my Wittgenstein choice. I think some of his later stuff is available online so I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it (which may be a while!).