You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: I'm a tenured philosophy professor

in #philosophy8 years ago

Thanks, I'll take a look at that book.

As for my specific interests? That's a good question. As a person I have a strong belief in fairness, equality, and justice. I also think topics like "what do you need to be happy?", "what defines success?" also interesting. So I suppose those are good places to start.

Sort:  

For "fairness, equality, and justice", you can't go wrong with John Rawls' seminal Theory of Justice (which is not public domain, though Rawls probably would have made it so if he reasonably could have in his day). This book incidentally provides a powerful counterpoint to libertarianism, if you happen to lean in that direction.

There's also this free online course at Harvard. I haven't seen it myself, but I hear it's very good, and the teacher is a big name among us philosophers.

I just realized I never answered your question about philosophy on "what do you need to be happy?"! This understandably may be of higher priority for you. I'm sadly not an expert here, but I would say on this question the classic (and free!) place to start is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.