Here you go

Here you go — StreetlightX

I've run into the following search result, somewhere at the top: The Best Philosophy Books. I haven't read many of the books listed in that page, but I did read parts of:

• The Dialogues (Gorgias, Meno, Theatetus, Sophist, Symposium, Phaedrus, Timaeus, The Republic) – Plato.
• Physics, Ethics, Poetics, Metaphysics, Categories, On Logic, On the Soul – Aristotle.

I have only read the parts that have epistemic significance.

• Critique of Pure Reason – Emmanuel Kant --> superb but dense
• The Prince – Niccolò Machiavelli --> incredibly funny
• The Art of War – Sun Tzu --> good read
• Analects – Confuscius --> very bad stuff with an ugly hidden agenda

I hate the Analects. The following sentence is my summary of what it is about:

The sky is high and the sun is hot, and there are numerous fish swimming in the sea, but most of all, the subjects of the empire should obey to the emperor like children obey to their parents.

Confucius is obnoxiously and very uncritically statist. Even though I do acknowledge the necessity of having a government reduce gang violence inside the territorial perimeter of its authority, I believe that people should be highly skeptical about what else such goverment should be sticking its nose into. Furthermore, if the regime or its ruling elite misbehave, there should be no hesitation whatsoever to replace it. Hence, I utterly dislike Confucius' message of unconditional obedience to the (Chinese) emperor and his naive idea that the emperor would to his subjects some kind of good father to his children. The emperor very often isn't, and there should be no expectation that he would be. Better safe than sorry.

You might like the Tao Te Ching better. Or the traditional split: Daoism in the sheets, Confucianism in the streets.

You might like the Tao Te Ching better. Or the traditional split: Daoism in the sheets, Confucianism in the streets. — StreetlightX

And you can read the Tao Te Ching in an hour.

Can anyone post a more or less comprehensive list in chronological order, of the most important works to read in philosophy? — MichaelJYoo

To understand philosophy, take an arts degree and also read a lot of history and history of ideas. Context is so important in interpreting philosophy, and it’s just the kind of thing that doesn’t come across from trying to boil the subject down to a list.

I just came across this blog post from a philosophy lecturer, who says that he has practically given up on trying to deliver his Introduction to Philosophy course, or at any rate, that will have to drastically change his approach, because:

it has become quite clear that the students, overwhelmingly, are not doing the reading and that in good part, this is because they are no longer capable of reading these texts on their own. Conversations with students about this suggests that it is due to a number of factors: (a) their high school educations no longer prepare them for extended, difficult reading; (b) they lack the most rudimentary historical knowledge required to situate these texts in the ways necessary for them to make sense; (c) they are incapable of reading older forms of English of the sort that one finds in, say, Hobbes or John Locke.

Students also have begun to plagiarize at an alarming rate, and for the most part, their cheating involves copying material from Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias. They are easy to catch, because inevitably the material copied is inapt in some way or is so obviously not written by an introductory level student that it begs for a quick Google search, which inevitably finds the source. Discussions with those whom I’ve caught (and to whom I am inclined to be kind, so long as they are honest and remorseful, which virtually all of them are) indicate that the reason is intimately connected to what we’ve just discussed: students are incapable of reading the material on their own and have almost as much difficulty making anything out of my oral presentation of it. Furthermore, students’ thinking has become shortened and fragmented, so it is very difficult for them to follow extended lines of argument, consisting of multiple parts, and the result of all of this put together is panic, of which the rampant plagiarism is an expression.

I took philosophy in university in the eighties, started as a general arts student. My first year philosophy professor called me to his office, and was very critical of the questions I was asking in class, but said that he was quite impressed that I had actually read the required readings, while the vast majority of his first year students never do. He recommended that I continue in philosophy.

MichaelJYoo. If I am correct, it seems that you are interested in philosophical text books which can be used on an introductory level of the subject. I can mention a few titles which might be useful to you. These are books that I used myself and found very useful. I still refer to them quite often when reading anything philosophical. Of course this list is based on personal preferences.
1) Copi, I - Introduction to Logic
2) Wilson, J - Thinking with Concepts
3) Van Peursen, CA - The Strategy of Culture
4) Flew, A (Ed) - Body, Mind and Death
5) Kaufmann, W - Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
6) Ryle, G - Dilemmas
And then you require a good reference work. There are quite a few you can use, but the one I still use after many years and is always useful when I struggle with a problem is: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy - Ted Honderich (Ed)

You might like the Tao Te Ching better. Or the traditional split: Daoism in the sheets, Confucianism in the streets. — StreetlightX

So you mean going as long as possible but withholding your spunk right?