Feynman Lectures for a newcomer I'm a senior philosophy/economics undergrad and I'm recently finding myself very interested in physics. For several reasons, I'm not able to take physics courses in college, but I wanted to introduce myself to the "corpus" of the undergrad physics. I'm willing to invest time and have taken several math courses (up to measure theory, though I missed Complex Analysis) so I don't think the math would be a problem, but... I literally don't know any physics (I mean, beyond the highschool curriculum, which is not saying much in my home country).
Can I use The Feynman Lectures for my purpose? Apparently, it's a very well structured corpus so it seems perfect, but I've heard it requieres to have some background in physics to really learn from it, and I really don't have any. Is that true? 
 A: Depending on your personality, I think you would be very well placed to read the Feynman lectures and they would be an excellent beginning. Beware, though, of seeking "Bibles"- seek a few references and read them all at a relaxed rate at the same time. Seek more specialized, but broad, references for the "pillar" subjects as well. Alonso and Finn, "Fundamental University Physics" (the multi volume edition, rather than the shortened, all-in-one tome called "Physics") may work for you as a backup. Measure theory is well beyond the mathematical sophistication you will need to understand Feynman's lectures. Feynman, notwithstanding his well kenned disdain for "Philozofers" and his infamous behest to "shut up and calculate[without understanding]", shows in his thinking and teaching style he is quite the philosopher himself: always on the lookout for meaning in this work. I find philosophy - particularly ontology and epistemology - fascinating and so I can tentatively recommend this book to someone like the impression I get of you from your short summary.
Complex analysis - if by that you mean the theory of holomorphic functions - is not needed to understand this work - Feynman makes one, cryptic reference to the Cauchy Riemann relationships in the whole work without naming them, asking the reader to ask the mathematicians for themselves so that the reader will have something interesting to do in maths course and lest mathematical teaching deprived of the CR relationships should become a "rather boring subject"!! I find mathematics highly interesting BTW! Pretty much all of the complex number theory you will need is covered by Feynman himself in the "Algebra" chapter of volume 1.
A: The Feynman lectures is an extremely poor choice for a newcomer to physics. You will just end up confused.
"University physics" by Zemansky and Sears (any edition will do, even the old ones you can pick up for a few dollars) is a really excellent introduction to physics. 
A newcomer to physics cannot possibly learn physics from the Feynman lectures on physics, the proposition is ridiculous. Most of the elementary explanations needed are completely missing from the book, there are no exercises except for some crappy typewriter-written things in a separate volume, and Feynman invariably takes an "alternative path" to doing things, somewhat like someone climbing up a mountain while walking on their hands.
Recommending the Feynman lectures as the main text to a complete newcomer to physics is myopic and absurd. I can open the Feynman lectures at random and find, on basically every page, a place where Feynman assumes some background knowledge or another.
