Alphabetical by Author or Topic
Thomas Aquinas, “Whether it is lawful to kill sinners?” and “Whether heretics ought to be tolerated?” From Summa Theologica (1265-1274).
Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education” (1954).
Aristotle, Books 1-4 of Nicomachean Ethics (c. 335 BCE). Poetics (after 335 BCE). Excerpts from Book 7 of Politics (350 BCE).
Augustine, on “Righteous Persecution” (c. 397-418 CE). HTML version.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Books I and II. (167 C.E.).
Francis Bacon, Epistle, Preface, and Plan for The Great Instauration (1620). Excerpts from The New Organon (1620).
Alain Badiou, “The Adventure of French Philosophy” (2004).
Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871).
Frédéric Bastiat, “A Petition from the Candlemakers about Unfair Competition from the Sun” (1845). The Law (1850).
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934).
Derrick Bell, “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review 24:2 (1992).
Ruth Benedict, excerpts from Patterns of Culture (1934) on moral relativism.
William Bennett and Milton Friedman, Open Letters on the War on Drugs, from The Wall Street Journal (1989).
General Friedrich von Bernhardi, excerpts from Germany and the Next War (1911).
Tom Beauchamp: “McAleer v. AT&T”. “Manufacture and Regulation of Laetrile”, “The FCC’s ‘Fairness Doctrine'”. “Putting the Squeeze on Citrus Hill Orange Juice”. “Hooker Chemical and Love Canal”. “Venture Capital for Rubbernex”.
Bible, “Sodom and Gomorrah” and “Lot and His Daughters,” Genesis 19:1-38 (c. 500s-400s BCE). Genesis 17-22 on Abraham, Lot, Sarah, Isaac, Hagar, and Ishmael (c. 500s BCE).
Cesare Bonesana, “Torture” (1764).
Nathaniel Branden, “Self-Esteem in the Information Age” (1997).
Justice Brennan, excerpt from Furman v. Georgia (1972), and Justice Stewart, excerpt from Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Both on capital punishment.
James M. Buchanan, “Public Choice: Politics without Romance,“ Policy Magazine (2003). “Saving the Soul of Classical Liberalism,” The Wall Street Journal (2000).
Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942). Excerpt from “Return to Tipasa” (1952).
Auguste Comte, Catechism of Positive Religion, Conversations I-V (1852).
Condorcet, “Reflections on Negro Slavery” (1781). Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794).
William Cooney, “The Philosophical Attitude and the Gift of Existence.” Excerpted from Chapter 1 of The Quest for Meaning (2000).
E. K. Daniel, “Two Proofs of God’s Existence” (1994).
Charles Darwin, “On Evolution” (1859). Darwin summarizes the evidence for evolution by natural selection.
Daniel Dennett, “Where Am I?” (1978).
Jacques Derrida, “Cogito & The History of Madness” (1963).
Alan M. Dershowitz, “Shouting ‘Fire!’”, The Atlantic (1989).
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
John Dewey, excerpts from Democracy in Education (1916). “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (1909).
Otto Dietrich, “The Philosophical Foundations of National-Socialism: A Call to Arms of the German Mind” (1934).
Fyodor Dostoyevsky “The Grand Inquisitor,” excerpted from The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Notes from the Underground (1864).
Dualism or Naturalism of Human Nature, quotations from Martin Luther, St. Paul, and Lucretius.
Alexander Dugin, “Fascism—Borderless and Red” (1997).
Max Forrester Eastman (1883-1969), excerpt from Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955).
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Identity, the State and Sacrifice” [on self-sacrifice in war] (1991).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841).
Epictetus, Enchiridion (c. 135 C.E.). Twelve excerpts.
Faith: Quotations on Faith.
Gottfried Feder, Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money (1919).
Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (1985).
Antony Flew, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, “Three Accounts of Faith,” from “Theology and Falsification: A Symposium” (1971).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (1976).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Excerpt: “Man is a wolf to man” (1930).
Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” from The Politics of Reality (1983).
Suzi Gablik, “Individualism: Art for Art’s Sake, or Art for Society’s Sake?” From Has Modernism Failed? (1984).
Galileo Galilei, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (1615).
Henry Giroux, excerpt from Border Pedagogy as Postmodern Resistance (1991).
Joseph Goebbels, Those Damned Nazis (1932).
Stephen Jay Gould, “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs” (1985).
Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor” (1974).
F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945).
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (1946).
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820). Excerpt from Philosophy of History (1822).
Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929).
“Reunion Speech” (1934).
Robert Heilbroner, “What Is Socialism?”, Dissent Magazine (1978). “Who Predicted Socialism’s Failure?” excerpt from Dissent (1990). “Socialism” (1993).
Carl Hempel, “Semmelweis and Childbed Fever” (1966). How Dr. Semmelweis discovered the cause of childbed fever.
Stephen Hicks, “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” (2009) (SSRN source). “Would Immortality Be Worth It?” (1992). “Ethics for a Democratic Republic” (2015).
Heinrich Himmler, “Speech at Posen” (1943).
Hippocrates, The Hippocratic Oath (c. 400 BCE).
Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Difference of Manners,” from Leviathan (1651).
John Hospers, “Justice versus Social Justice” (1985).
Irving Howe, “The Culture of Modernism” (1967).
Elbert Hubbard, “A Message to Garcia” (1914).
David Hume, “Moral Distinctions Not Derived from Reason,” from A Treatise of Human Nature (1738). “Of the Liberty of the Press” (1742).
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928).
William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896). “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1906). “What Makes a Life Significant?” (1900).
Immanuel Kant, excerpts from Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787, Second Preface). On Education (1803). Excerpts from Critique of Judgment (1790). Excerpts from Sections 23, 26, and 28. From Lectures on Ethics: “Duties towards the Body in Respect of Sexual Impulse” (1775-1780). Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals (1785).
John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926).
Søren Kierkegaard, excerpts from Either-Or (1843). “A Panegyric Upon Abraham,” from Fear and Trembling (1843).
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Address at the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall,” 1963. [His first “I have a dream” speech.]
Osama bin Laden, “Letter to the Americans” (2002).
Michael Levin, “On Torture” (1982).
C. S. Lewis. “Social Morality,” Book 3, Chapter 3 of Mere Christianity (1952).
Chien-An Lin and Timothy C. Bates, “Each Is to Count for One and None for More Than One: Predictors of Support for Economic Redistribution” (2021).
John Locke, excerpts from A Letter concerning Toleration (1689). Excerpt from Some Thoughts concerning Education (1692). Book 4 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” Chapter 7 of The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991).
Niccolò Machiavelli, “On Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared,” The Prince (1513).
James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance (1785; on separating religion and state).
Herbert Marcuse, “The New Forms of Control,” Chapter One of One-Dimensional Man (1964). “Repressive Tolerance” (1965).
Karl Marx, Quotations on materialism, religion, exploitation, and violence. Excerpts from The Communist Manifesto (1848).
The Meaning of Life — Selected Quotations (from Psalms, Shakespeare, Brooke, Marvell, Thoreau, and others).
John Stuart Mill, Chapters 1 and 2 of On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1863), “The Contagious Diseases Acts — Testimony” (1871).
Stanley Milgram, excerpt from Obedience to Authority (1974).
John Milton, Aeropagitica (1644).
Ludwig von Mises, Review of J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, Ideas on the Unification of Private and Social Economy (1927). “The Myth of the Failure of Capitalism” (1932).
Charles Murray, from Losing Ground: American Social Policy (1984).
Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932).
Sergey Nechayev, The Revolutionary Catechism (1869).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface and First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). “Prologue” to Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1886). “The Greek State” (1871).
Constant Nieuwenhuys, Manifesto (1948). [A neo-Marxist art manifesto]
Robert Nozick, “The Tale of the Slave,” from Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). [HTML]
Michael Oakeshott, “A Place of Learning” (1982).
Charles Ogletree, “The Case for Affirmative Action” (2015).
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). “What about Socialism?” (excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937). “Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau” (1940) [on whether National Socialism is socialism and its power-seeking].
William Paley, “The Watch and the Watchmaker” (1802).
Tom G. Palmer, “Myths of Individualism” (1996).
Murdoch Pencil, “Salt Passage Research: The State of the Art” (1976). A lampooning of social science research.
Plato, excerpts from The Republic: excerpt from Book 2 on “The Myth of Gyges” [PDF] [HTML].
Excerpt from Book 7 on “The Allegory of the Cave” [PDF] [HTML].
Excerpt from Book 10 on censoring art. [PDF] [HTML].
Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations” (1962).
W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951).
James Rachels, “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism” (1999).
Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It” (1974). “The Objectivist Ethics” (1961). Excerpt from John Galt’s Speech, Atlas Shrugged (1957). “The Comprachicos” (1970).
Russell Roberts, “If You’re Paying, I’ll Have Top Sirloin” (1995).
Maximilien Robespierre, The Cult of the Supreme Being (1794).
Alfredo Rocco, The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1926).
David Ross, “The London Plague of 1665” (no date).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, excerpts from Émile (1762): Books I and II, “Children Should Not Be Reasoned With,” “The Creed of a Savoyard Priest.”
Bertrand Russell, “The Value of Philosophy” (1912). “How I Write” (1956).
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology” (1939). “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946).
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (1841/1860).
Max Shulman, “Love Is a Fallacy” (1951).
Peter Singer, “The Duty to Give to the World’s Poor” (1979).
B. F. Skinner, excerpt from Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).
Adam Smith, “Of the Division of Labour,” Chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations (1776).
Tara Smith, “Money Can Buy Happiness” [pdf at Reason Papers] (2003).
Thomas Sowell, excerpts from “Affirmative Action: A Worldwide Disaster” (2004). “Blame the Welfare State, Not Racism, for Poor Blacks’ Problems” (2015).
Werner Sombart, Chapter 1 of Merchants and Heroes (1915).
Oswald Spengler, “Introduction” to The Decline of the West (1918). HTML.
Walter T. Stace, “Man Against Darkness”, The Atlantic Monthly (1948).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Speech to Women’s Suffrage Convention, Washington, D.C.” (1868) [HTML].
John Stossel, Notes on ABC News Special “Greed” (1999).
Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism” (1941).
Mother Teresa, excerpt “On Prayer” from No Greater Love (1987).
Thucydides, “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” from History of the Peloponnesian War (c.400 BCE).
Alexis de Tocqueville, “Origin of the Anglo-Americans,” excerpt from Chapter 2, Part 2 of Democracy in America (1835).
Tristan Tzara, “Dadaism,” from “Dada Manifesto” (1918) and “Lecture on Dada” (1922).
United States Supreme Court, Excerpts from University of California Regents v. Bakke 438 U.S. 265 (1978).
Voltaire, Letters on England (1733).
Kurt Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron” (1961).
Richard Wagner, “Art and Revolution” (1849).
George Walsh, “Defining Religion: The Supernatural as Personal/Impersonal” (1998). Excerpt from The Role of Religion in History.
Max Weber, excerpt from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
Alfred North Whitehead, “Religion and Science” (1925).
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” from Leaves of Grass (1855).
John Henry Wigmore, “The Borden Case” (1893). Professor Wigmore summarizes the evidence presented in the notorious Lizzie Borden double-murder trial. (PDF version, Word version).
E. O. Wilson, on his military-style education (excerpt from Naturalist, 1994).
Woodrow Wilson, “Socialism and Democracy” (1887).
Sam Zell, excerpt from Am I Being Too Subtle? (2017).
Slavoj Žižek, “Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan” (1997). “Robespierre or the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror” (2006).
Art Funding: Four articles from the 1989 debate sparked by federal funding for works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano:
Jesse Helms, “Amendment 420: The NEA Should Not Fund Obscenity” [pdf].
Robert Hughes, “A Loony Parody of Cultural Democracy” [pdf].
Robert Samuelson, “Highbrow Pork Barrel” [pdf].
Steven Durland, “Censorship, Multiculturalism, and Symbols” [pdf].
All four articles in one file [pdf].
Abortion: Six arguments on the abortion issue:
Baruch Brody, “Fetal Humanity and Brain Function” (1975).
John Noonan, “An Almost Absolute Value in History” (1970).
Ronald Reagan, “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation” (1983).
Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion” (1971).
Laurence H. Tribe, “Opposition to Abortion Is Not Based on Alleged Rights to Life” (1990).
Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” (1973).
Return to the Intellectual History page, the Courses page, or the StephenHicks.org main page.
Hey, Mr.Hicks. I am a student from Brazil and I’ve been reading some of your articles, but I can’t agree with your opinion about natural resources, Can you explain better why the resources aren’t limited and why is possible the economy continues growing?
Hi Rodrigo:
Good question. Here are a couple of short, helpful follow-up resources:
http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/are-we-running-out-of-resources/.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NaturalResources.html.
Professor Hicks,
I’m a huge fan of yours. I’m currently working through Understanding Postmodernism and attempting to internalize all the major points. I can’t begin to express my gratitude for thinkers like you who fight the good fight against bad ideas. I’ve been the US Military for 12 years now, and I’m more concerned about the proliferation of Neo-marxism and post-modernism then any external threat I can name. You’re fighting a much more important war then I ever will. Bad ideas bring down great civilizations.
I have a question about Kant’s philosophy…
From your summary of Kantian philosophy, it seems to me that Kant didn’t actually show that we can’t know noumenally reality. From what I gather, he only showed that we can’t be sure that we have a perfectly accurate conception of it in all cases: that sense-perception frequently tweaks (more or less) our conception of reality across the spectrum of our experience. Ok, fair enough, but I don’t see how from this you can assume that it’s inevitable that we’ll have totally unreliable interpretation of reality.
And, even if mathematical truths are a priori, we still need the results of sense experience to formulate these truths. For example, you can’t get an a priori truth like 2 + 2 = 4 until you’ve internalized the language needed to express truth and been taught the mathematical rules that enable us to add accurately. All this learning is facilitated by your senses (i.e., hearing the math teacher, learning the symbols, etc.).
Did Kant actually….prove, that we can’t know Truth because our senses sometime get it wrong? Imperfect instruments can still yield good results if we learn to correct for their imperfections.
All the best,
Matt
Dear Matthew: Thank you for that, and I agree entirely about the battle of ideas.
About Kant: His arguments do reach more radically skeptical conclusions. The positions you sketch are an arguable and more modest form of skepticism than the one he aims for.
As the semester is on, I don’t have time for more; but you are working the correct territory in your comment.
Best,
Stephen
Dr. Hicks,
I see that the hardcover edition is now available on Amazon for $20. Perhaps you would want to place a banner announcement on the appropriate pages to that effect, eh? (That’s my polite Canadian tone of voice, lol.) I’m ready to order it for my students in my PHL 101, Intro to Philosophy class, and came to your site to see if the book is now available–which it is.
Thank you for your work.
You can find my dissertation on Philosophy of Education at academia.com, by searching for my name and the title “Christian Education Viewed As Initiation into Christianity As A Practice.” FYI.
Bruce
Dr. Bruce Charles Meyer
Arlington, MA 02476
Thanks, Bruce!
Hello
http://www.the-rathouse.com/AnythingGoes.html
Do you consider the above link a balanced discussion of Stove?
1. My impression from the preface to The Plato Cult is that Stove does not really pretend to prove Popper wrong, but rather to show that he, as a philosopher, can use logical tools to challenge Popper’s ideas, just as Popper challenged verification. Stove seems to be hampered by his own uncivil writing style.
2. Stove challenges metaphysical assumptions going all the way back to Plato. He is challenging an entire lineage of western philosophy. He seems to dismiss an entire lineage of philosophy, based on historical starting point. He respects the philosophers as philosophers, but challenges some of their metaphysical foundations, as not “common sense” not probable, or not verifiable by outcomes.
Are 1. and 2. above correct? Are there any recent balanced and critical overviews Stove’s work, that you are aware of?
Suggestion: you could answer email and “thoughts” on your web page, on a separate “Feedback, Thoughts”” dropdown. Now you have that under “Texts in Philosophy”, “Philosophy of education”, and other headings, very hard to find. Maybe all “thoughts” under all headings could be searchable under a single dropdown. . That would make answers to your correspondence available to anyone, and avoid wasting time with individual correspondence. I searched for David Stove on home page, found nothing.
Best regards, and as always, thanks for what you do,
Dan
David Stove
https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/davidstove.html
I am so thankful for this offering of yours. I can only say that I believe you’ll be quite pleased what I’ll do with it. You shall have recompense in ways you may not yet imagine. Soon… very soon I’ll have it ready for you. Well done!
Here is a corrected link for Ayn Rand’s ‘The Objectivist Ethics’: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/the-objectivist-ethics/
Your summary is here: https://www.atlassociety.org/session/ayn-rand-the-objectivist-ethics which links to it correctly.
Thanks, Carey.
Dear Dr. Hicks,
Thank you so much for the excellent interviews you do in the podcast/videocast world. I am presently listening to the interview you did with the boys of Triggernometry on “The Truth about the Nazis…”. It’s fascinating and confirmed lots of thoughts I’d had over the years of reading about WW2 but had not known how to knit them together, i.e. I didn’t understand how they all fit together. What I especially enjoy and find so helpful in this talk and in others I’ve heard you do is the clear chronological lines you make between the philosophers who originated certain ideas and how those ideas then become manifest in the political philosophies of certain leaders and ultimately in their practical implementations as real world policies.
I’m a Spanish teacher at a large urban high school in New Mexico. For many years now the creep toward collectivist thought has been an undercurrent of the way teachers are trained here and how they teach. In the last two years we’ve reached critical mass. The ideological struggle between the collectivist value system and the value system of individual identity and accountability has now almost become publicly open. All it lacks is for someone to identify it openly and clearly in one of our faculty meetings or instructional council meetings. For various reasons I’m probably going to be that person. I think this previously covert and now overt attempt to ideologically take over the school needs to be called out in a public fashion. I see no reason why teachers should roll over and throw up their hands and just go along with the collectivist steamrolling. At the very least, a public discussion and debate about it needs to take place so that all teachers can make up their own minds. All our instructional council meetings are like struggle sessions where the collectivist side wears the non-collectivist side down with incessant stone walling and divergences into petty minutiae for the sake of “reaching consensus”—which never really happens. What does happen is that they get their way because they tire out their opponents and drag the meetings out for as long as they can.
This year three teachers on staff began a club for students called “The Proletariat Club”. It is an overt and very public effort to inculcate students into a collectivist worldview. I’m not positive but it may even be a Communist worldview. It is certainly Marxist; one of the teacher sponsors runs reading and study circles of the works of Karl Marx outside of school in his free time. By his own admission he is a dedicated Marxist, maybe even religiously so. It is not a stretch to conclude that he is probably doing something similar in the student club. Each day when the club is announced on the school wide announcements they lead off with a quote from some Marxist or Communist leader or intellectual. It sounds crazy to me to hear these cherry-picked quotes about the selfishness of capitalism and the promises of free stuff under collectivism. I worry for the students: they are young, inexperienced, and easily influenced. Every divisive tactic in the book is on display at my school: the encouragement to put rainbow signs on classrooms to identify them as “safe zones” for LGBTQ+ students; the teaching of the 1619 Project as the curriculum in the Social Studies Department; the policy of Restorative Justice (here that manifests as permissiveness); the push to obfuscate language regarding the legal status of “immigrant” students; the pressure to use preferred pronouns by everyone; a “dual language” program in Spanish/English that serves as a cover for ethnic balkanization along linguistic, cultural, and historic lines; and regular “professional development” in Critical Pedagogy and Social Emotional Learning. This is just a sampling of what goes on at the school where I teach.
Thank you for reading my long letter up to this point. I mentioned the above to give context to my question. Through listening to you and James Lindsay I think I understand what is happening at my school and I think I can identify the chronology of how we got to this point. However, I know that I need to read some of the original works by some of the collectivist thought leaders whose ideas are underpinning this ideological overthrow to really tackle this issue at our school meetings because I don’t just want to simply repeat what I’ve heard you and James say. I need to know the ideas for myself. I know from repeatedly listening to you and James Lindsay who the big names are: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Marcuse, Freire, Giroux, et.al. When I look at their oeuvre, I am overwhelmed. Where do I start? When I was a freshman in college in the 80’s I read The Critique of Pure Reason, but I didn’t understand it and remember nothing except the title. I’ve read The Communist Manifest twice over the years, but again I don’t remember much now. I’ve read excerpts of Nietzsche and read The Pedagogy of the Oppressed right before I started my first teaching job in Arizona in ’91. (I threw his ideas out the window during the middle of my first semester teaching on the US/Mexico border. They were unworkable.) I am embarrassed to say that my education has not been very good. Part of it is my fault, but part of it is that I attended school systems that weren’t sincerely dedicated to education. (I suspected this as a youth; now as an old person I’m sure of it.) Therefore, I need: 1) to read an overview of these philosophers and how their ideas lead into or are connected to one another; and 2) a basic and essential reading list of the above philosophers’ works that would give me the intellectual underpinnings I need to fight back. Can you help me with one and two above? What books/essays/articles would you recommend? I suspect that many of the listeners of James Lindsay are in the position I am. I think your suggestions would probably become very popular.
If you’ve read this far, thank you so much for your patience, your time, and your attention.
Best regards,
Yolanda T.
Thank you for this long and thoughtful note, Yolanda. Let me follow up with some recommendations soon.
Hi Dr. Hicks,
Do you have any reading recommendations on contemporary conceptualisations of human nature? Is it best to begin with Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, modern thinkers like Kahneman, Pinker and Dennett, or somewhere else?
Thank you!
I think start where you are most interested — biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, or wherever — and follow your nose. Read some reductionists, some dualists, and some emergentists to get a sense of the range.