My own personal introduction to philosophy came from Edwards and Pap's now rather dated 1965 textbook A Modern Introduction to Philosophy–my father did an introduction to philosophy course at university in the late 1960s, and that was the main textbook they used, and teenage me was rather excited to discover it on his bookshelf. I myself did 1st year philosophy at university in 2000, but only one unit (logic) actually had a textbook, the others I did (epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political philosophy) just used photocopied books of readings. I found a site with a whole set of free university-level philosophy textbooks – https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy – although I can't vouch for them since I haven't read any of them myself

Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them

The analytic/continental split happened around the 19th century. Both traditions read more or less the same thinkers in Western philosophy (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, the Enlightenment Rationalists, the Enlightenment Empiricists, the Enlightenment Idealists, Kant) up until then. Once you hit the 19th century, stick with the readings that deal with the problems set out by Frege, Russell, and Moore, who are trying to get as close to science and formalizing problems in a clear, mathematical way as possible. As a result, the philosophical agenda uses conceptual engineering as a general approach. Generally speaking, any topic that fits into a "Philosophy of X" (e.g. Philosophy of mind, language, ethics, action, etc) is part of the analytic tradition.

The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.

> "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?"

Feyerabend's "Against Method" comes to mind here. I haven't touched his work in a long time. It seems I've some reading to do.