If you're interested in learning more about philosophy, you may be overwhelmed by the number of books there are to read. This is where this Hub topic will be useful to you: below is an overview of where you can dive into philosophy and begin to read at your leisure.

Do you want to think about the meaning of life? Or are you interested in how science gives us knowledge? Maybe you're curious about how your brain and mind make thoughts. Perhaps you want to think about whether God exists, and what religion is about.

If any of these questions interest you, read on for a guide about where you can start!

Generally speaking, there are a few major divisions of philosophy which you may want to learn about:

1. Metaphysics - this is the study of what the world is made out of, what kind of "stuff" exists. It asks questions about how time works, how people's selves exist, what it means for things to have properties, and so on.

2. Epistemology - this asks the question, "How do we know?" and tries to determine what counts as "knowledge" and how we obtain it. What about when we're right by chance? What are reliable ways of getting knowledge? Our senses? Our reasoning? Other people's testimony?

3. Ethics - how do we figure out what right actions are? Is there even a foundation for distinguishing between right and wrong? Do we use reason or observation to determine what's good?

4. Language/Logic - how does our language get at what's in the world? What makes a statement true? This area of philosophy asks questions about names, about parts of language, about error and truth. Logic asks about what good reasoning looks like, and includes descriptions of fallacies, or errors in reasoning.

5. Aesthetics - this topic tries to discern what it is to say that art is "beautiful" or "good", and studies music, visual arts, architecture, poetry, etc.

There are many other ways to divide philosophy into topics and many of the groups above can be divided into smaller subsets. As well, studies of particular questions often span across the groups above.

For example, "bioethics" is a relatively modern topic within ethics that asks about the ethical nature of decisions pertaining to medicine and life. "Philosophy of mind" investigates the relationship between the mind and body (metaphysics) as well as how the mind knows (epistemology).

In addition to the distinctions listed above, there are other ways to carve up the history of philosophy as a discipline.

One major distinction is between Continental and Analytic philosophy. This distinction arose in the twentieth century as certain philosophers in the U.S. and Great Britain, primarily, began to focus extensively on the question of how language represents the world. Thinkers such as W.V.O. Quine and Bertrand Russell worked on analyzing concepts and using rigorous logic to investigate questions.

The Continental approach is usually understood as being part of the "continent" (hence its name) of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche (Germany) and Edmund Husserl (Moravia, Czechoslovakia) are considered Continentalists. It's difficult to define such a large group of philosophers, but they are very focused upon history, experience, and making broader claims than the Analytic group (which generally tries to make narrow claims).

In addition to the Analytic-Continental distinction, there is also a larger geographic distinction between Eastern and Western philosophy. The topic of Eastern philosophy will be treated in a future post.