Russell ended The Problems of Philosophy with a “Bibliographical Note.” Here the whole thing:
The student who wishes to acquire an elementary knowledge of philosophy will find it both easier and more profitable to read some of the works of the great philosophers than to attempt to derive an all-round view from handbooks. The following are specially recommended:
Plato: Republic, especially Books VI and VII.
Descartes: Meditations.
Spinoza: Ethics.
Leibniz: The Monadology.
Berkeley: Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.
Hume: Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Kant: Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.
Kant says something similar in the Prolegomena.
There are scholarly men to whom the history of philosophy (both ancient and modern) is philosophy itself; for these the present Prolegomena are not written.
The common idea: You can see philosophy as a history of a literature. In that sense a scholar knows what has been said about some of the common problems we humans face in thinking about the world. But that’s not the same as being struck by a problem and investigating it yourself — or investigating it with an original thinker.
• Sources: Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy. This was first published in 1912, and there are many editions. Standard Ebooks has one at https://standardebooks.org.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950, p. 3.
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