I am currently reading Descartes Discourse on Method and was wondering if anyone has some suggestions to books they thought were interesting/enlightening philosophically.

e: Misspelled the damn title -.-

This post was edited by Funkymonk93 on Nov 6 2010 01:05am

Love - Leo Buscaglia

If you want classics,

A great sequence to read would be Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. If you want more modern, try Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

I second the suggestion for Camus and Kafka. As a contrast you may want to look into Kierkegaard, he has some nice literary work that isn't too complicated, language-wise.

I've also heard Nietzsche has some wonderful writing (writing style that is, you may or may not think his ideas are wonderful), but all his work sits on my shelves unread.

You'll get a lot more out of Nietzsche if you read him in context with some of his precursors. I'd recommend at the very least reading Kant, Hegel, then Marx first. That way you can see some of the progression of German philosophy and make more sense out of where Nietzsche is coming from.

Machiavelli. U might want to read a critic work about some of his works since the originals might get a bit boring at some points while if u read a good critic on it it might be a lot easier, its ur choice though to read the original, he describes well the political issues of the renaissance, after the end of the middle ages.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are now a lot of scholars who believe The Prince was actually written as a satirical letter to Lorenzo di Medici and was not meant to be viewed as a serious work.

I did not know about that, it makes sense though, since he was believed to be a republican, and u can see that in many of his writtings. But that(the prince) is not the most interesting of his works imo.