About This Book

This textbook was created through Connecting the Pipeline: Libraries, OER, and Dual Enrollment from Secondary to Postsecondary, a $1.3 million project funded by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network and the Institute of Library and Museum Services. This project supports the extension of access to high-quality post-secondary opportunities to high school students across Louisiana and beyond by creating materials that can be adopted for dual enrollment environments. Dual enrollment is the opportunity for a student to be enrolled in high school and college at the same time.

The cohort-developed OER course materials are released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification and sharing with others. This includes a corresponding course available in Moodle and Canvas that can be imported to other platforms. For access/questions, contact Affordable Learning Louisiana.

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Cover Image

The cover image is “bliss” by Igor Spasic and licensed under a Creative Common Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Readings in Western Philosophy for Louisiana Learners

By: Jeff McLaughlin

Edited by: Marco Altamarino, Ryland Johnson, Peter Klubek, and Michael Martin

It is important for students not only to get an appreciation and understanding of philosophy but also to be exposed to the very words and ideas of those who have shaped our thinking over the centuries. Accordingly, the title of this collection hints at the fact that these readings are from the original sources and that these philosophers were the originators of many of the issues we still discuss today.

Major areas of philosophy covered here are Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science and Technology, Ethics, Socio-Political Philosophy, and finally, Aesthetics.

Although we have chosen copyright-free pieces that would be used in a typical Introduction to Philosophy class, you may wish to personalize it (or modernize it) with supplementary readings. Furthermore, while you can obviously choose whatever texts you want to examine and in any order, each chapter is directly or indirectly connected to the next one. For example, we move from the basic issues in chapter 1 regarding knowledge and how one can know to consider claims about what we know to exist in chapter 2. Then, when students are familiar with those topics, we move on to consider the “big question” that many students have (or at least often associate with philosophy)—namely, “Does God exist?” Since religious beliefs are often tied to how one lives one’s life, Ethics is the focus of the next chapter. We move from talking about the individual doing the right thing or good thing to presenting works regarding collective behavior and the good of society. Lastly, we examine the good as beauty.

The selections herein within these six fields are presented in chronological order so that a very rough timeline of intellectual thought is captured. Add to this that some of the philosophers are included more than once, and you can also order your selections under the themes of “Some Great thinkers in Western Philosophy” or “An Incomplete History of Philosophy.”

Before jumping into the main chapters, both Russell’s “The Value of Philosophy” and Plato’s “Apology” are useful for students to get a good sense of what philosophy is and why we do it. Reading Plato may be a bit of a challenge for newcomers, so I recommend you have the students read “How to Do Philosophy.” It has been copied and used all over the world at various universities and libraries since I posted it online many years ago.