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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Question -- you say that you are a person who is able to learn in solitude. Would you have been able to pursue your dive into Philosophy without the environment that Brown offered you?

I ask this for a few reasons.

1) I have a fairly strong interest in the discipline, but have found rigorous self guided study to be a challenge, beyond cursory readings of the classics and a smattering of modern theorists like Singer.

2) I feel that a fortunate circumstance today that the fastest growing, lucrative profession is programming, which now has a wealth of online resources for new entrants to get started and become proficient. Many other technical disciplines require prohibitively expensive lab equipment to learn the craft. I wonder if philosophy is a discipline within the humanities that is more difficult to cultivate in a self-directed fashion than others.

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You certainly don't need expensive lab equipment to do philosophy. But a lot of philosophy is about interacting with others, about learning other people's ideas, considering them, coming up with your own reactions to those, and getting feedback as they consider your reactions. That kind of feedback loop is difficult if not impossible to do on a deep level without going to school for philosophy.

I'm sure there are people who have a very deep knowledge and understanding of philosophy despite being self taught, but I would be surprised if there were very many of them these days. It used to be a lot easier in the past, when there wasn't as much to learn. But even going back 2500 years to Plato's time, there was a great role for learning in the Academy, from which modern universities descend.

Of course, it doesn't take a university education to "do philosophy". You could certainly "philosophize" without any education (and a lot of people do, often not realizing that that's what they're doing). But I guess it all depends on what your goals are, and how deep you want to go.

I've personally found discussing what I'm learning with other students and with professors to be critical for my own education. I think philosophy is often as much of an oral tradition as it is a written one.

Finally, it requires an enormous amount of self-discipline to read and write as much as you would in getting a university education in philosophy, if you're going to try to teach yourself. A lot of people think they can just teach themselves, but later find to their regret that they can't without the structure provided by classes, schedules, graduation requirements, and teachers.

I'm not the guy you're asking, but I've spent some time 'in solitude' studying without an academic institution. I'd read philosophy books whenever I have down time. Consciously replacing entertainment with books works as well.

Philosophy to me is less about studying philosophy itself as a topic but encountering different people's various personal philosophies about things. Kierkegaard's "The Present Age" and Glenn Gould's perspective on anxiety helped me a lot.

I like Gould's music, but didn't know about his writing. Perhaps you could provide a pointer or two for an anxious fellow? :)

[0] "Anxiety gives way to pleasure and a passion for creative work for which the only condition is solitude."

[1] "I do feel quite convinced that one's creativity is enhanced primarily by the more-or-less single-minded pursuit and development of one's own resources without reference to the trends, tastes, fashions, etc. of the world outside."

[0] Glenn Gould - Selected Letters, page xx.

[1] Glenn Gould - Selected Letters, page xxii.

Who studies philosophy in school when graduates becomes a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher. Requirement of a diploma to philosophise contradicts philosophy itself. One can be a historian of philosophy and a philosopher at the same time, but the former does not require the latter and viceversa.

Philosophy is not a job, it's a personal trait, like honesty, faith, generosity, aggressiveness, asocialness, timidity, etc. If you want to enhance your philosopherness, then you think about things systematically, and learn as much as you can so that you have more raw material to use as proofs --pro and contro-- your ideas when you think. Reading others' philosophy is always useful as it expands your toolbox and knowledge.

Philosophy is love of wisdom. Just like love of your significant other is not a job, philosophy is not too. No-one gets to determine whether you're a lover of wisdom or not, just like no-one gets to determine whether or not you're a lover of your s/o.

So you don't need the school nor to quit your job to philosophise.

> Who studies philosophy in school when graduates becomes a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher.

No, when they graduate, they become a degree holder in philosophy. What they do afterwards determines if they become a historian of philosophy, a philosopher, or something else entirely (or some combination.)

> Requirement of a diploma to philosophise contradicts philosophy itself.

Perhaps (though I think its more accurate to say that it contradicts some particular philosophies), but pursuing a diploma to improve your ability to do something doesn't mean that there is a diploma requirement for that task.

I mean, "requiring a diploma to do science contradicts science itself" is at least as accurate, and probably more accurate, than the version with "philosophy" in place of "science", but few people would dispute that, in many fields of empirical science, the education which goes into a diploma, particularly at certain schools, is useful to one wishing to do science well.

Similarly, formal education in philosophy can be useful to those wishing to do philosophy well.

> Philosophy is not a job, it's a personal trait, like honesty, faith, generosity, aggressiveness, asocialness, timidity, etc

No, its not. "Philosophy" has at least two related senses, one of which is a thing one does (perhaps as a job, perhaps not), and the other of which is an a label for a class of belief systems, the holding of one of which is a personal trait, but philosophy itself is not a trait that you have more or less of like the ones you named, but instead something which you have one or another specific version of. (The first sense of "philosophy" discussed previously is approximately developing, refining, and critiquing instances of the second sense.)

> Philosophy is love of wisdom.

The English word "philosophy" derives from Greek for the love of wisdom, but that's not what it means. Etymology is distinct from definition.

>> Who studies philosophy in school when graduates becomes a historian of philosophy, not a philosopher.

> No, when they graduate, they become a degree holder in philosophy.

No, what they become is a historian of philosophy. Because what they learn is the eminent philosophers and schools from the past, and the philosophical methodology. This is like studying hittitology, they get to learn the hittite language, the hittitle literature, and they practice their writing on actual stone tablets, but at the end they become hittitologist, not hittites. What the education system in a given country considers a graduate from a philosophy course of a university is irrelevant, that's just a bureaucratic title.

>> Requirement of a diploma to philosophise contradicts philosophy itself.

> Similarly, formal education in philosophy can be useful to those wishing to do philosophy well.

My words agrees yours. I don't say a diploma is futile, just that it's not a requirement, and it cannot be one. Nor do I say that it's useless.

>> Philosophy is not a job, it's a personal trait [...]

> No, its not. "Philosophy" has at least two related senses, one of which is a thing one does (perhaps as a job, perhaps not), and the other of which is an a label for a class of belief systems, [...]

>> Philosophy is love of wisdom.

>The English word "philosophy" derives from Greek for the love of wisdom, but that's not what it means. Etymology is distinct from definition.

A personal trait is a group of things one does anyways. If one is timid, he does things that makes him timid. Philosophy is such, it includes thinking, doubting, searching, discussing and deciding.

You are mostly describing a western, originally-catholic, formal and academic sense of philosophy. I do not stay within that confining context, and think that the first and foremost task of a philosopher --and a task that continually shows up in whose life-- is to define what philosophy is, a task unachievable if one just opens some dictionary's P section and accepts whatever he finds there.

> No, what they become is a historian of philosophy.

No, they don't. If they go on to practice history of philosophy, sure, they become that, but many holders of philosophy degrees don't do that.

> Because what they learn is the eminent philosophers and schools from the past, and the philosophical methodology.

That's no more true than it is to say that what a person learns when taking a science degree is the eminent scientists of the past and their scientific results. Which is to say, that is a large and important part of what they learn, but hardly the whole thing, and there is utility in knowing what others have done in the space to doing new work in it. (Obviously, knowing the past of the field is also useful to people who wish to practice as a historian of the field, but its certainly not the only thing a degree is useful for. Holding a philosophy degree makes you neither a philosopher nor a historian of philosophy, both of those describe things you might do, with or without a degree, to which a degree might be useful.)

I've done both self study and school in that order. Exposure is the problem in self study. You need some way of giving yourself a balanced representation of ideas. You may do well to pick a syllabus from s strong Uni and follow it right through .

The other thing of course is someone to call bullshit on you... Phil is a great subject with which to convince yourself that you are a genius . Especially when the people you talk to about it (friends et al) are in awe of your expositions since it's hardly common parlance . Keeping the narcissist in check is difficult for some.

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