Great recommendations! I'd pick The Genealogy of Morality as a better intro to Nietzsche, tho my favorite is far and away The Gay Science. I wouldn't pick Medi

Great recommendations! I'd pick The Genealogy of Morality as a better intro to Nietzsche, tho my favorite is far and away The Gay Science. I wouldn't pick Meditations as being a intro classical philosophy tho, the Stoics were very much their own school of thought, and not the primary one that carried forward into later eras. It's a fascinating school of thought, but more also a diversion in getting up to speed (another great side-path from the same era is Pyrrhonian Skepticism!). Aurelius is also really late chronologically (and frankly not a philosopher at all... The modern equivalent would be a celebrity publishing a self-help book, still an extremely fascinating historical document tho). I'm a huge fan of the Alan Bloom version of Plato's Republic. But if we're getting specifically into Plato, I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention the Euthyphro too. There is also a _lot_ to be said in favor of reading the history of philosophy in rough order. It's a conversation through the millennia, and you can't truly understand what an author is saying unless you understand the context they are replying to. Eg. Kant is frankly unintelligible (and subject to wild misinterpretation) unless he is read as a rebuttal to Hume's continuation of Descartes's protect (as Kant himself says in the intro to the first critique). Re analytic philosophy: In the words of my thesis advisor "breaking philosophy down into the categories of analytic and continental is like breaking down cars into the categories of those-with-four-wheel-drive and those-made-in-Europe".