Because the subject matter of the history of ideas is so immense it is hard to make significant progress quickly and it is easy to get discouraged. That’s why I suggest you start with the secondary literature rather than with the primary.
You don’t have to finish mastering everything mentioned here before you start your primary text readings, but starting with the secondary literature will, I think, help you more easily grasp the primary when you get to it. And it may give you that coveted sense that you’re making significant progress. When you “graduate” from the secondary literature below, I have only two (lage) primary literature suggestions for right now--see further below.
Suggested (Starter) Secondary Readings and Primary Readings For Your Library:
Palmer, Donald. Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter (Fourth Edition). New York, NY: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2006.
This is a very easy place to dip your foot into the water. For many it might be too easy and facile, but if you don’t have much background and want a place to jump into the pool, this may be the place. It can help you get some some sense of key thinkers and their key ideas, a knowledge of which can form prominent “hooks” on which you can hang the dates. ideas and people you will learn and thus make the difficulty of this project (because of its scope) easier to get your mind around.
Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy (in IX volumes). New York, NY: Doubleday, 1993.
A remarkable example of intellectual labor and erudition. It has been described as, “broad-minded and objective, comprehensive and scholarly, unified and well proportioned....We cannot recommend [it] too highly.”
This is not easy reading, but I would suggest first reading his very helpful summaries which are interspersed throughout the text. Doing it that way, before you get to Copleston’s details, can help you avoid getting lost in the details. This set of books and the one below are a major jump in sophistication and density from the first one I recommended above.
Jones, W.T. A History of Western Philosophy (2nd edition in V volumes). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1975
A very fine, but expensive set of reference books. Titles of his books are, “The Classical Mind”, “The Medieval Mind”, “Hobbes to Hume”, “Kant and the Nineteenth Century”, and “The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstien and Sartre.”
Suggested Primary Readings and For Your Library
Hutchins, Robert Maynard. (Editor in Chief) Great Books of the Western World60 Vols. Chicago, Ill: William Benton, Publisher, Encyclopedia Britinnica, Inc. (.).
The Harvard Classics 50 Vols. New York: New York, P.F. Collier & Son Corporation. (.).