The Blue and Brown Books

10 best books like The Blue and Brown Books (Ludwig Wittgenstein): Ethics, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, The Concept of Mind, The Gay Science, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition, Word and Object, The View from Nowhere, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Naming and Necessity

Ethics

Author	Baruch Spinoza
ISBN	0140435719

Published shortly after his death, the Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza's greatest work - an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines...

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Author	Immanuel Kant
ISBN	0521626951

Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ranks alongside Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as one of the most profound and influential works in moral philosophy ever written. In Kant's own words its aim is to search for and establish the supreme principle of morality,...

The Concept of Mind

Author	Gilbert Ryle
ISBN	0226732967

This now-classic work challenges what Ryle calls philosophy's "official theory," the Cartesians "myth" of the separation of mind and matter. Ryle's linguistic analysis remaps the conceptual geography of mind, not so much solving traditional philosophical problems as dissolving them into the...

The Gay Science

Author	Friedrich Nietzsche
ISBN	0394719859

If you read Nietzsche while not in the midst of some variety of emo existential crisis, Nietzsche is hilarious and insightful. If, however, you choose to read Nietzsche in high school in order to be counter-culture, odds are good Nietzsche will temporarily turn you into a horrible, pompous ass. Nietzsche...

Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition

Author	Saul A. Kripke
ISBN	0674954017

Kripke is brilliant, and I only regret that it took me until now to read and to appreciate him. He gives an amazing exegesis of Wittgenstein, who was also brilliant, but obfuscated the fact by making his case with rhetorical questions. Kripke has figured out the answers to the rhetorical questions, and...

Word and Object

Author	Willard Van Orman Quine
ISBN	0262670011

Language consists of dispositions, socially instilled, to respond observably to socially observable stimuli. Such is the point of view from which a noted philosopher and logician examines the notion of meaning and the linguistic mechanisms of objective reference. In the course of the discussion,...

The View from Nowhere

Author	Thomas Nagel
ISBN	0195056442

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular." At the same time, each of us is a particular person...

Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays

Author	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
ISBN	0872201325

Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays contains complete translations of the two essays that constitute the best introduction to Leibniz's complete thought: 'Discourse on Metaphysics', a short course in his metaphysics, written in 1686 at the time his mature thought was just crystalising and...

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

Author	George Berkeley
ISBN	0915144611

--Hylas: I say, Philonous, can I talk to you about something? I have just read a bizarre, horrible book by George Berkeley, where he argues all sorts of nonsense.

--Philonous: Is that so, Hylas? Pray, what was this book?

--Hylas: Why, it was none other than Three Dialogues Between Hylas...

Naming and Necessity

Author	Saul A. Kripke
ISBN	0674598466

If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics or in philosophy of language, this is it.

Ever since the publication of its original version, "Naming and Necessity" has had great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural...

Language, Truth, and Logic

Author	A.J. Ayer
ISBN	0486200108

Classic introduction to objectives & methods of schools of empiricism & linguistic analysis, especially of the logical positivism derived from the Vienna Circle. Topics: elimination of metaphysics, function of philosophy, nature of philosophical analysis, the a priori, truth &...