I Love Books

My long-term reading project is to read--or at least seriously grapple with--the most important work by each of the major figures of the history of philosophy. My undergraduate education exposed me to Plato and Aristotle, and the major early moderns through Hume. While I know I didn't get as much as I should have out of these philosophers, I figure I should branch out before going back and doing them right. On my own, I've read: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; Foucault's Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, and The Birth of Tragedy; Some of Kierkegaard's Either/Or; Wittgenstein's Tractatus; and now I'm working on Heidegger's Being and Time. I also have been reading in Louis Menand's Pragmatism: A Reader. I'm liking William James.

What's most important to do next? I'm thinking I should do Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, as that looks like one of the top two or three books of the twentieth century, in terms of influence. After that, i'll probably check out Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, as he relies on W. and H., both of whom I will have just read. After that--I'm not sure. I've got Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but smarter people than I have told me it's impossible. Maybe I'll give it a try anyways. I'm also interested in doing more with the Pragmatists, and reading some of Habermas. And then there's all the legal philosophy I want to get familiar with. Hopefully I'll get to it all eventually...Vita Brevis, Libri Longi!