The philosopher’s toolbox is an introductory work that surveys the field, and then a series of resources which help you read, analyze, write and criticize any argument that you encounter.

• The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant
  It’s not currently popular to like this book. Modern people like to re-write everything that came before, except in a modern image, so they will shy away from some things others have said. There’s no single category for these things, except that they tend to in some way violate our modern vision of ourselves. That leads to another reason people dislike this book: it shows how the ancients had a grasp every bit as competent, if not more competent, than what we moderns have. But as an introduction to philosophy, it’s excellent, because Durant grasps the handles used by each philosophers to address reality. Every philosopher has one basic technique to his outlook, and that then leads to a re-ordering of the hierarchy of events which compose reality, giving us a different view. Durant is on top of these differences but avoids the “laundry list” style that more modern books employ in order to be clever and non-confrontational.

• The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Robert Audi, editor
  One of the major challenges in taking up a new discipline is that it has a new vocabulary. Furthermore, that vocabulary is not as much explicit definitions as it is implications: what argument is being made, what other arguments connect to this one, what are the implications of the different options that modify this word, and finally, where does it fit in the diction of an elegant communication? It’s not a task you want to leave up to your run of the mill college bookshelf doofus dictionary; instead, since you have a good dictionary for everyday English, you need a supplementary dictionary for philosophical language. This book also doubles as a map through the different arguments and categories of belief systems which you will be analyzing. Master this, and every argument has a root form much like each word has a root word, and you can see how from a handful of ideas all of our modern ideas derive, and how they succumb to the same successes and failures as those original ideas. Through language, we see history and the structure of argument with this excellent book.

 

• Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, William R. Trumble, editor
  Want to speak English like a master? You’ll need to if you want to make arguments of the kind of precision that are used in philosophy — in contrast to what science students think, philosophy is actually the more precise genre when language is used (fewer numerical measurements in philosophy, but more assessments of multiple factors at once, something scientists are poor at). For precision use of language, you’ll need to know not just denotation (definition) but connotation, and factors of diction like what type of specialized vocabularies are compatible with each word. This book provides all that, and more, for the most common 35,000 or so words in English, albeit in a form shortened from the megalithic full O.E.D., which you could pretty much use as architecture.