So You Want to Study Philosophy
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susanrigetti.com
There is great satisfaction in thinking through fundamental, important things deeply, and I promise you that studying philosophy will completely change your life.
Also this strikes me as uncritical:
The purpose of this guide is to provide a roadmap so that anyone who follows and completes it will walk away with the knowledge equivalent to an undergraduate degree in philosophy.
I'd like to hear an "experience report" from people who got an undergrad degree in philosophy more than 10 years ago. From what I can see the outcomes are very bimodal, not just in terms of future employment, but also as to whether they found it worthwhile, etc.
I guess what rubs me slightly the wrong way about this list is it seems focused on "who said what, and when" and not necessarily what's true.
Philosophy gave me tools to evaluate others' claims and taught me that communication is inherently difficult. And because of that, it's not enough to be right - it's important to be persuasive. But there's a tension there. Persuasion is very close to manipulation.
An unfortunate side-effect of philosophy is doubt. Lots of the beliefs that we hold without reflection are slippery, even incoherent. There's a riddle-like quality of attempting to define something like truth or identity and realizing that as one gets closer to that definition, the definition seems to slip away.
It's true that professional philosophers can deal with topics which inherently abstract and irrelevant to the everyday. The same is true with all specialists. Yet the skills that philosophers bring to bear are incredibly relevant to every social interaction. The philosopher's role is to evaluate others' arguments and posit one's own.
Lastly, one of the things that I enjoyed the most about philosophy is that touches many fields. While I would guess that the core of contemporary analysis are subjects such as Language, logic and cognition, it's surprising how many intellectual gaps there are in other parts of human thinking. Within those gaps, you'll find philosophers having a debate.
I agree with the doubt part but I do think that being able to suspend that is crucial to being happy.
But Plato doesn't lay out "the truth." He presents beautiful dialogues that allows the reader to consider, agree, disagree or digress. Try reading the Parmenides. Here, the impossibility of unity is presented alongside the impossibility of difference. It shows the limits of language and maybe thought— or read the symposium for radical ideas about the nature of love.
Or, hell, read Xenophon's Socratic dialogues. He was more radical than Plato, though they were both students of Socrates. Xenophon turned into a mercenary and defeated the king of Persia. Then wrote extremely practical dialogues about getting rich.
Philosophy isn't about truth. It's about the love of wisdom and, ultimately, wisdom is about living a better life. Philosophy includes material that cannot be expressed with words.
Finally, Pythagoras—who coined the word philosophy. He wrote nothing out of principle and yet his worldview is arguably the most transformatively modern. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Gallelio all credited Pythagoras for their findings. He seemed to believe that the world was made of math and that the natural harmonies of mathematics would manifest in the harmonies of the cosmos. This idea is still resonant in the sciences — like in the groundbreaking discovery of harmonic peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Pythagoreans conducted the first empirical test of a mathematical hypothesis (that bronze chimes in ratios of 1:2 and 2:3 would sound consonant).
When you read about groundbreaking wisdom that is over 2000 years old, it gives perspective on how we might build a society that similarly endures.
Take almost any book on the list of the OP, read it with a friend, and you will probably disagree completely on at least a couple of the points made, or how they should be interpreted.
This is a thoroughly modern perspective. Historically, Aristotle was considered "The Philosopher". Plato has staged a resurgence in the discourse (in fact I'm partial to Plato myself), but you're over-stating his historical impact. Which is sort of ironic, when you're discussing historical impact.
Further Marx predicted that the first nations to fall to communism would be the most capitalist ones, but in fact the opposite occurred and the least capitalist countries fell to communism, meanwhile the capitalist countries have not.
That's just one example there are plenty of other others that can be provided, from how is theory of dialectical materialism was wrong on all counts when it came to any scientific power, to history.
In fact the most impressive part of Marx is how truly wrong he managed to be without actually being original as the majority of his work is derivative from Hiegel.
I wish I could better understand dialectic materialism in order to critique it. I can't get around not having a noetic reality that serves like chaotic attractors to materials. Spheres and triangles are just more real than material manifestations. Penrose and Popper proposed similar tripartite realities of, roughly, the material, the conscious and the mathematical.
Quick thoughts:
1. I gave my siblings the advice after I was done to double major in something you love and something that will guarantee you employment. I graduated with not the most financially rewarding degrees, and while I ultimately taught myself programming and have made a pretty good career out of it, I wish I'd paired my humanities with compsci or business off the bat to make the whole job thing easier.
2. That said, I am very happy I studied those topics. They gave me a perspective that I don't think I would have gotten in a more nuts-and-bolts field. The name "humanities" is right on point: it's the study of what it means and what it's like to be a human being. And while I've been bitterly disappointed by the corruption of the field (which is the main reason I'm not a college professor now), I still think it's tremendously useful to have learned these things. David Foster Wallace's famous graduation speech has a line I particularly like, where he says something to the effect of "in the trenches of everyday life, it's little clichés that will kill you." All of this "obvious" wisdom that seems sort of hokey and unscientific often contains deep and terrible truths about life and what it means to be a person. And having a guidebook for that journey is a damned useful thing, and I feel bad for anyone who doesn't have one. This stuff won't solve all your problems, but it might help you with some of them. Chances are that of all the human beings who have ever lived, one of the great writers or thinkers or historical figures has dealt with something akin to what you will. We aren't all that different from one another. You can get some pretty good ideas out there for free. So I'm very grateful to have access to and a background in those things.
1. Education is a business now, and responds to business incentives.
2. The postgrad environment is a mess, in part because of #1, in part because of its own internal issues, and in part because of fundamental supply and demand.
3. The topics have all been deeply politicized.
> Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.
That being said, it certainly not an argument to start a philosophy degree.
Personally, I see philosophy a bit like sport. You don't need a sport degree to practice it, and you can do it at any level and get some satisfaction out of it.
Sure, I didn't get a job from a philosophy degree, but that's not really the point; it helped me better understand myself and the world around me, so that all my experiences have been richer.
That said, I'm similarly opposed to a 'who said what, and when' approach to philosophy; I don't care who said it, I care if it's an interesting or valuable idea.
I think the 'who said what' approach largely exists because when taught at the tertiary level, something is expected to be assessed, and it's kind of hard to objectively assess whether someone understands philosophy - far easier to test their recollection of who said what.
I think you can’t study Phil and not be significantly changed if you understand what you’re studying.
You study things like the Munchhausen trilemma, Bertrand’s watch, Grue, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, para-logics, Kantian epistemology, Quine and so on. I literally can’t think how you can understand these things and end up not a different person.
First, some of the scholars I met along the way were absolute saints, and spending time reading and writing with them made the whole journey worthwhile. They modelled patient, intense curiosity and scholarship, and they left an indelible impression on the students who learned from them.
For the most part, though, the field seems borderline intellectually bankrupt. The way modern academic philosophy functions is very odd. Researchers are stuck in tiny little pigeon-holes trying to churn out papers on the next fad in their discipline. There isn't a lot of critical reflection about whether topics are likely to be fruitful, or even what the goal of philosophical research is. The main "method" of analytic philosophy ("Conceptual Analysis") is at best a dull joke, at worst a weird mixture of hubris and narcissism... but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The "philosophy of x" disciplines have some gems but tend on the whole to depend upon a very cartoonish or superficial understanding of 'x', and tend to lag way behind the disciplines they should be leading. They almost never contribute back to x.
The field is at its best when it promotes deep reading, curiosity, patience, and intellectual humility. It does sometimes do this. Much of the time it promotes a mixture of artificial rigour, sophomoric egotism, and not a whole lot else.
Like anything else in life it is what you make of it. For myself, the relationship I built with philosophical literature continues to be rewarding (even in my day job as an engineer). The mistakes I made along the way were my own.
I think the best way to engage with philosophy in 2021 is to really give oneself time to read and go down a rabbit hole, and if one can, talk with people. I wouldn't read very much recent analytic philosophy, and would avoid the traditional "Epistemology/Metaphysics/Ethics/Logic/etc." structure like the plague.
Right, I'm just glad we don't have that in math, which is closely related. There are so much better ways of thinking about calculus than Newton's and Leibniz' works.
Sounds like philosophy to me. This trait is shared by scholastics and postmodernists alike.
I think the degree was great. It basically teaches you how to argue a point, makes you a better writer, and forces you to at least temporarily accept viewpoints that you disagree with if only to try to disprove them.
If you’re looking to philosophy to tell you what’s true, you’re going to be disappointed. The history of philosophy is a series of arguments. It is instructive to understand those arguments as the questions have been extensively explored, and you’ll almost certainly go further by reading arguments formulated over years rather than trying to think through the problem on your own. It’s sort of a shorthand in philosophy to simply refer to a set of arguments by the name of the person writing about them, which is why “who said what when” is important - more so than any other academic discipline, philosophy is a dialectic stretching back as far as the written word, and order is important to understanding. Nietzsche is a reaction to Kant and Hegel, and his arguments are far more coherent in that context.
The way you apply these lessons throughout your life is basically how you cope. For a long time I felt trapped in a life I didn’t want, and I found a lot of solace in existentialism as a way to accept the circumstances without accepting an outcome. Nothing in Sartre or Camus tells you this explicitly and I’m pretty sure their experiences were more about life in Nazi-occupied France than being a closeted trans person, but they provide a starting point and a framework for thinking about problems.
Similar to a lot of other commentators here I use it every day, and for everything.
An general apology of philosophy would be something like:
> Philosophy is the pursuit of the truth. That pursuit, and the development of mental tools and models to reach it, ends up spilling out into, and enriching, every other aspect of human thought and experience. Whether you end up questioning if there is any such truth (epistemology), attempting to determine a moral truth (ethics), or working out models of correct/truthful reasoning (logic), you end up building up a robust toolset and understanding of being human. Even the schools of thought that hold there isn’t an absolute truth have a little problem in that _that_ is a truth they are stating. The point being, if you are to be human, then you must act on things being more or less true (did that person do that thing? On a more fundamental level, does that chair exist? On an abstract level, does the money in your bank account exist?). If you accept that being able to evaluate the truth of things is fundamental to operating as a human, then philosophy is a necessary undertaking that everyone practices to some extent. It is, after all, just the love of wisdom.
A few specific examples of how it has been _useful_ to me and my career are:
1) Using my studies of logic to ground my understanding of programming languages - everything boils down to to binary, see “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic” or “The Laws of Thought”
2) Applying abstract mental models directly to code (see Plato’s theory of the forms and object oriented programming)
3) Understanding ethical issues with anything I do and being able to articulate them to others so that we can move forward on a decision not based on just everyone’s feelings.
4) Seeing things from the other side and arguing people to my own by showing them inconsistencies in their arguments - or by changing my own mind by discovering my own inconsistencies
And so on and so on.
As for the final complaint about who said what being an issue - naming is useful. It’s important to identify the source of an idea if you’re going to discuss it with others and share common frameworks (see my references to Plato and Boole above). Beyond that - I don’t know much, or care, about their personal lives.
* Note: idk about the whole student debt to study philosophy thing though. There are huge advantages to taking it while in university (discussion with peers, context from professors, immersion in thought), but I can’t recommend the experience of student debt for a degree with such a low signal (for employment) and such a low barrier to entry (I.e. you can do this outside of the university as well). Ultimately I did well, but only because the Seattle barista scene was too competitive and I had to find a fallback career.
I did get an undergrad Philosophy BA more than 10 years ago. Take my experiences with a grain of salt because I'm practically addicted to education in a way that probably goes strongly against the current in a place like this full of people who self-taught vocational skills (I did undergrad in Biology, Philosophy, and Applied Mathematics after originally starting in Studio Art but giving up, then did grad work in Public Policy, Finance, Computer Science, and Cybersecurity, so I am severely over-educated and love education). To be perfectly honest, I barely remember the "knowledge" of philosophy in terms of just memorizing the history of the western canon and who believed what.
To me, the actual value in studying philosophy formally came from the practice. Reading the entire multi-century history of lines of thought. Seeing all the different angles that different thinkers approached a question from. Seeing a dialog in terms of one thinker directly responding to the arguments of another, and then again in the other direction. Much of that can't always be found in books and is better found in papers because that is how philosophers are publicly debating each other. To really internalize this, you need to not only read, but also write. Making my own arguments and having them publicly critiqued was tremendously valuable, especially when these were purely formal "take one side and give the best you can" and not married to my personal beliefs and ideologies such that I could not take criticism. Learn to see the flaws and the holes in human thinking, including your own.
Studied right, philosophy can be incredibly humbling. It is quite different from studying the creation of software or physics where there have been so many wild successes and great leaps forward of human achievement. It is the exact opposite. You come to grips with what are very likely hard limits on human understanding. You see that the very best minds we have ever produced have been asking exactly the same questions for as long as we've had writing and we're no closer to having answers after at least 5000 years of this. A lot of people would see that and ask well, what's the point then? It's intellectual navel gazing that can never accomplish anything. But being intellectually humbled is itself an accomplishment. Learn to appreciate that the human mind is not almighty. On a similar note, study statistics, because done right, that will teach you much the same thing, how impressively we can estimate and come with good guesses, but hard limits on what we can ever really know.
That said, is it worth spending a whole lot of money on getting this education and getting a philosophy degree when you could get a degree that will lead to an actual job? For most people, probably not. I think it's a great second major, but it should only be your only major if you're absolutely certain you want to get a PhD and become an academic philosopher, but good luck since there are only maybe a few thousand people in the world able to do that.
There is some merit to this observation. Frederick Wilhelmsen[0] criticized Great Books for this reason, that not only was it selective and culturally restricted, but that it tends to degenerate into a he-said-she-said sort of relativism and leave it at that with no real finality to the whole thing. (Some will likely counter that philosophy isn't about the truth but considering "ideas", but that's nonsense. If we consider ideas, it is only because we are trying to determine if they're true and no other reason.)
Incidentally, it did not escape my notice that medieval philosophy appears nowhere on this list. This is preposterous. To venture from the ancients to the moderns while skipping over Scholasticism is lunacy. I don't necessarily blame the author. There may be a general ignorance and silence about the medieval period at may universities.
[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/09/great-books-e...
A more careful reading will show that Anthony Kenny's Medieval Philosophy appears in two different positions on the list, under Histories of Philosophy and under Electives. There's also another medieval text listed which I'm not familiar with that includes readings from the familiar trifecta of Aquinas, Augustine, and Scotus among others.
> If we consider ideas, it is only because we are trying to determine if they're true and no other reason.
I hope this is a definitional quibble (a poorly thought out one, I think) about what it means to be doing "philosophy" and not literally a statement of what you believe to be true. If we observe fallacious or false ideas popping up in literature or culture it's normal to do some work trying to understand the thinking that brings those about. That is work that has nothing to do with determining those ideas' truth or falsehood, which we've already decided upon.
In a way, the major accomplishment of today's philosophy curriculum is showing that it is not sufficient. I'm sort of okay with this :-)
Or an outright hostility toward Christian philosophy. St. Augustine[1] is conspicuously absent there as well and he’s certainly not medieval.
For starters, they all assume Jehovah exists, or seek to prove he exists. However, we have falsifications for most of the claims of Jehovah:
* Egyptology disproves the Exodus
* The Documentary Hypothesis disproves inspiration of the holy texts
* Quantum mechanics disproves omnipotence and omniscience
So the field of Christian philosophy is built upon sand which has already been washed away; the foundations already collapsed. How about the main philosophers?
* Aquinas just parroted Aristotle
* Augustine claimed that war can be justified and that souls exist
* Erasmus didn't really say anything of note
* Ockham gave us tools for breaking out of Christianity!
The main contribution of Christian philosophy to the rest of philosophy is the confirmation that Jehovah is an epistemic dead end.
That's quite generous of you. In the spirit of charity I'll reciprocate and then some. I'm going to give you the rest of your life to learn why love of God and love of wisdom are duals. Don't worry, given your obvious philosophical immaturity I don't expect you to figure it out anytime soon, but I honestly hope that you do in good time. A good place to start would be a deeper study of the three normative sciences: ethics, aesthetics, and logic. Respectively they can be thought of as the sciences of what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true. Pay particular attention to their necessary premises. As with all human understanding, they are subject to confusion, so be very sure to keep your thoughts both clear and distinct.
As for your particular examples, they are one and all either nonsense or irrelevant. One thing that Aristotle taught us is that there are persons who cannot be educated, only persuaded. Try not to be one of them.
You have your whole life to read, study and think about philosophy. It is easy, it is enjoyable, all the material is readily available.
I would almost view having a fresh recent philosophy degree as a huge negative in the 2020s. I would not hire someone with a recent philosophy degree almost point blank because IMO your decision making is highly suspect.
A formal education in philosophy at a good R1 school is not comparable to light reading by an amateur. The process of discussion, argumentation, and mentorship is not something you figure out yourself. Even an undergraduate degree is a huge step toward a philosophical education. I'm not sure it can be replicated in a vacuum. And it's certainly not easy (first time I've heard that).
OK do it. I don't want to pay for it though.
The core question of philosophy is: how to appreciate life? What is our responsibility? How should we act? These are vital questions. Everybody engages with them in some way. Everybody learns philosophy in some way, the vast majority of learnings have no explicit connection to any religion or philosophical writings. Real life teaches you philosophy.
This list, and the philosophy curriculum, has issues. For one, it's not the best way to learn critical thinking. It's better to learn math proofs. Truth tables, contra-positive, breaking things out into cases, induction. For two, western philosophy rarely provides actual answers. It asks more paralyzing questions than provides answers. Don't get me wrong, there are many beautiful things in many of the books - what I'm saying is that they don't equip you to recognize their value.. none of them give you the full picture. If you read these books, you will find that very few books will claim to present the full and complete truth. That's because they don't. They are incomplete.
I believe true philosophy is more psychological, pragmatic, and spiritual than most of the philosophy curriculum would teach you. What are thoughts? What is productive vs not productive uses of time? etc.
After I graduated with my minor in philosophy I read a book called Be Here Now. It discusses common aspects of many spiritual traditions. I also read some of the books in the bibliography of Be Here Now -- Tao Te Ching, some Hindu/yoga books, some Christian books. Today I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian. In Orthodoxy we understand Wisdom to be another way of talking about Christ. That's philosophy after all - philo sophia - love of wisdom. I can attest that the orthodox church has the fullness of truth and all the answers to any questions I have. It is the true philosophy.
Either you don't have many questions or you're content with answers that are sufficient rather than sufficient and necessary.
On the level of thinking and pure logic, nothing in orthodoxy is necessary. Part of the joy is learning to incorporate and trust other sources of information in addition to the empirical and logical. The two main ones being the conscience, and advice from a friend. Once you incorporate these other sources of information, it is terrifying how necessary some answers become.
The books I have studied in depth are:
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche
The Republic by Plato
A Critique of Pure Reason by Kant
The Phenomenology of the Spirit by Hegel
Life is so short, read nothing but the cornerstones (this may not be that) of western thought.
A great author for secondary texts is Stanley Rosen. He presents the material in a way that captures my imagination, and makes the philosophy understandable for a lay man.
I would also argue, that for most serious texts, if you arent reading them with a guide (in my case often multiple), then you are wasting your time.
This is my general criticism of philosophers [2] and the way they have constructed their discipline. In physics/biology/economics/etc a super smart person comes along and does some excellent work. Then later on, other smart people learn the stuff and build upon it, and rewrite it to make it better. Modern textbooks on General Relativity are an order of magnitude better than what Einstein wrote. Why has no one understood Nietzsche, and written a better and more understandable version of Nietzsche's work? And why is everyone not reading that?
[1] I have read some/part of the books you mention.
[2] As a physics phd, I have engaged in and enjoyed and found useful practical philosophy around issues of epistemology.
One possible answer to this question is the same as to the question: Why look at old paintings, read old novels and poetry, watch old plays, and study history? For me, it's partly because I am interested in what humans have created and thought in the past. It's partly because these works are often beautiful—an argument can be as beautiful as a work of art—and studying beautiful things is its own reward.
Whether they are true or not is another matter, but just as it's useful to read what other cultures in our own time think about a topic, it's useful to read about what people from other times thought. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
You can design a course of study that focuses purely on modern logic and epistemology etc if that's what you prefer. But philosophy is not a science (however much philosophers like to think it is) and its not maths. It is a branch of the humanities, and should be evaluated in similar terms to literary studies or history, not biology or physics.
In science (aka, natural philosophy) the goal is about finding answers. Perhaps in philosophy it is thought more important to ask questions, and the questions asked in "old primary texts" are still relevant today, and may be the exact same ones asked 2500 years ago.
What is [tT]ruth? What is beauty? Does God exist? What is the point of life? What is happiness? What does it mean to be a 'good' person? When it is okay, if ever, to lie?
Given your logic, which seems to be that we should only move forward, what's the point of studying history? Why bother reading Herodotus's The Histories when there are contemporary analysis? Tom Holland, who released a new translation, discusses some reasons:
So, there you have it, a (extremely reductive with huge gaps) history from early 1600s to the present, of philosophers building on each other's work into an intellectual framework you probably hold. There are of course many other branches; I just followed one, briefly, to the present to a tip that is probably pretty close to the thinking that informs your coursework.
Philosophy as a discipline makes more sense if you consider it as a form of literature. And it isn't true that "in no other field" beginners read primary texts -- literature scholars absolutely do this.
I'm a philosophy enthusiast, but I've never really understood the claim that philosophers seek to understand what's true. Mathematicians do that, and some types of analytic philosophers focus on that, but at least from my perspective philosophy is more about idiosyncratic excursions into interesting questions and ideas, the same way that fiction is about idisyncratic excursions into interesting plots.
IMHO no one rewrites Nietzsche because what would be the point? His headline ideas can be summarized in a rather short document, just like the plot of a novel can be summarized in a couple paragraphs, but it's the voyage that's the meaty, fun part, just like literature.
I think there are a few reasons:
1) I can't explain why, but, unlike physics or math, distillations and commentaries often miss key points and insights, and not uncommonly badly misrepresent works. Reading one then the other makes this clear. It's also the case that the canonical works are often (not always!) well-written, so difficult to improve on—possibly this is a side-effect of how philosophy works, as a field.
2) (I think this one's very important) Historical works of philosophy (which, see above, also have a tendency to be quite good for what they are) are, in themselves, a bit like exercises in math. Skipping wrestling with (at least a good number of) them is like trying to learn multivariate calculus without having yet put pencil to paper and worked through any exercises, for any kind of math, your entire life. In math, you have to do the work, to learn the material. Critically reading touchstone works in philosophy is philosophy's equivalent of doing the exercises, to a substantial degree.
3) The way philosophy has developed is kinda like rap: a lot of it won't make any damn sense—or, worse, will seem like it does, but actually you're getting entirely the wrong idea—unless you're familiar with the work of the person this track's responding to, and then that one is also part of a larger conversation, et c. Maybe that's a bad way for it to have developed, but that's what we've got.
1. I think you misunderstand me. I am not interested in distillations and commentaries. I am interested in building upon the works of past philosophers, improving their weak arguments, supplying better arguments that they missed out on, finding better examples than what they used, and finally going past what the said, and saying even more. The replacement of Nietzsche's books should be books that say somewhat similar things, but which are better arguments than Nietzsche. This must be possible for any intellectual discipline, because any such discipline by definition must create transferable knowledge and skills. And if you are not, the problem cannot be with the character of your intellectual discipline, but with the social structure and practices of your discipline.
2. To follow upon point 1, and to answer your points 2, take the example of GR again. What Einstein wrote is simpler and probably easier to understand than good modern graduate textbooks on the subject - the latter have far more sophisticated arguments, and they go explore the area far more than Einstein ever did. Because of course, physicists and mathematicians kept building and improving.
Similarly, what I expect is that philosophers should constantly be making better and more sophisticated arguments, that require more and more skill and acumen to understand. But a beginner starts with very carefully constructed arguments that easy to understand, yet astounding, and as her skills increases, she is given more and more difficult arguments to grapple with. this is how things happen in other intellectual disciplines by design. But not in philosophy, and I truly don't understand why.
The "replacement" for Nietzsche's books, if that's a goal, must also address WHY Neitzsche's arguments are weak or insufficient. It must also address, to a degree, structuralism/post-structuralism, postmodernism, etc. This is not a process wherein Nietzsche (or Heidegger, or Hegel, or whomever). Questions of "how ought one live?" are not narrowly focused. Simply because you did not study philosophy and seemingly disregard the idea that different people may adhere to different ethical systems (as one part of philosophy) does not invalidate the discipline. There is no universal, provable "right" answer to "what is ethical?" Certainly there is overlap between virtue ethics and utilitarianism and intuitionism for how one might behave, but the reasoning behind them all differs.
Humans are not omniscient. Philosophers are not omniscient. It's disingenuous to talk about general relativity as an example, and much more cogent to talk about theoretical physics (to which I can't speak with any authority except as a lay reader who's aware of multiple theoretical frameworks which cannot be simultaneously true). Sure, you can have "more sophisticated arguments (mathematics)", but the answers to some of these questions may never be known. In philosophy, we will NEVER know the answers to questions about the human condition, the nature of knowledge, etc. Just because it's not mathematics which are "transferable" and can build on top of each other does mean that the knowledge is not transferable or that the arguments do not get more sophisticated.
Exactly what you're describing DOES happen in philosophy, and has always happened.
Take an idea like Newton's Law of Gravity, and let's separate the words that Newton wrote, and the content of the ideas behind those words. Many people, over decades, have considered how to best to present and teach the content of the idea in the best way possible. The same happens with Einstein's General Relativity.
Current practicing astrophysicists, even those whose career is making measurements of General Relativity, have very likely never read neither the original words of Einstein nor Newton's words on Gravitation. This is not a scandal because the physicist's attitude is: who cares about the words used in the original description, when what matters is the content of the idea?
Further, if smart and pedagogically minded people can work and re-work the actual content into a much more understandable distillation of the actual idea, why not use that? Everyone still realizes that it's Newton's idea.
Contrast this with a philosopher working on some modern topic that built on some ideas of Nietzsche -- saying they have never read the original words would be seen as an admission of professional neglect. But even a 1st year undergraduate, what's taken as an important thing is to read the actual words of Nietzsche (perhaps in translation) and not someone's presentation of the ideas in their best possible form.
So, let's circle back to the original distinction: the idea and the words originally used to express that idea. In physics, you attempt go to the best exposition of the idea (which is rarely the original words). In philosophy, there is a primacy given to the words themselves that is bizarre from the physicist's perspective.
Finally to address what you wrote here:
> The "replacement" for Nietzsche's books, if that's a goal, must also address WHY Neitzsche's arguments are weak or insufficient.
This isn't what is being asked for. Easier perhaps to shift into the physics example.
When learning of Newtonian Gravity you learn about the concept in the best form possible (again, not the original words used by Newton but a modern presentation of the content of the idea). That's the equivalent of what's being asked for w/ Nietzsche.
You may later learn how Newton's ideas are incorrect just as you may later learn ways in which Nietzsche's arguments could be improved, but that's for later.
The missing idea in philosophy is having the best presentation of the content of the idea.
Long answer: First, although there has been progress in philosophy, it is much slower than in the natural sciences and harder to discern. Second, unlike any other discipline, philosophy has no agreed upon methodology and no agreed upon subject matter.
A consequence of both of these properties of philosophy is that older works can stay relevant and transformations and interpretations of them are often contested. It is very common for secondary literature to re-interpret heavily and in ways that might not capture the original author's intentions. Since work in philosophy is primarily working with texts, this explains the heavy focus on primary literature.
Since there is plenty of progress in philosophy, however, just reading the primary sources mentioned above would not get you anywhere. As a rule of thumb, the older a book or article, the more you'll have to take into account their reception. Otherwise you won't philosophize at a contemporary level and won't be able to publish about the work. For instance, writing anything insightful about Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason or Plato's Politeia will require specialization and taking into account many previous interpretations.
Some people would dismiss philosophy entirely because it has no common subject matter and widely accepted methodology, except for having relatively high standards for working with texts that are similar to those of historians and fairly high standards for laying out arguments. That's fair enough, but kind of short-sighted. Philosophy has had a tremendous influence on the sciences and still occasionally has.
Basically, philosophy is all about reading texts and unfortunately this often gets in the way of actually "philosophizing." I've met many philosophers who got lost in texts and never returned - they end up doing history of philosophy.
My best advise to anyone interested in philosophy is to approach it the way I was taught in Tübingen 30 years ago. Approach original texts seriously and in-depth, but carefully choose those texts and only read what interests you. There is no need to read the Critique of the Pure Reason if you're interested in contemporary analytic "accuracy first" epistemology, for example.
I'd like to recommend Bryan W Van Norden's book "Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto" for those willing to concede that maybe life is not short enough to ignore everything but Western thought.
https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Back-Philosophy-Multicultural-...
edit: my original comment was asking "Why only western thought?" I removed it as it wasn't substantial enough.
Hell, even most philosophers outside of Western countries doesn't really seem to look at non-Western philosophy that seriously. (Maybe it's because it's a Western thing to be a philsopher as a profession?) Chinese philosophers like Yuk Hui might be currently trying the synthesis of Western and Eastern thought, but it still seems like a long way to go (plus my objections on Confucianism).
1. The division of philosophy and religion into separate camps is a modern thing. It doesn’t hold up very well to scrutiny, either; much of what we consider “Western secular” values and ideas are really just modifications and reinterpretations of old Christian and Greco-Roman ideas. I recommend the book A Secular Age by Charles Taylor if you are interested in how this process has gone (and continues to go.)
2. There are extensive and thorough philosophical traditions in the Islamic world, Russian world, Indian world, and East Asia (especially China and Japan.) I really wouldn’t brush all of these away so quickly.
3. You might find the Kyoto School interesting and a good entry point. They attempted to synthesize much of Eastern and Western thought.
Tom Holland goes over this in his recent book Dominion as well:
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/21/dominion-makin...
* https://historyforatheists.com/2020/01/tom-holland-dominion/
See also from a sociological perspective as well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
A couple of suggestions: Angus Graham's translation of Zhuangzhi, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters and other Writings from the Book of Chuang-tzu and A Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu edited by Harold Roth.
Graham actually made me appreciate analytic philosophy.
I start by reading wide surveys and overviews and then dig deep (both original works and commentary) into areas and writers the resonate with me personally.
Some of my deeper dives have included Camus, Epictetus & Seneca, Popper and Spinoza.
It's a pretty eclectic mix, and few would consider these foundational authors, but their works have had a great deal of influence on me personally.
On my list are also the great epics, the Illiad and Odyssey
The cornerstone of Western thought would be more Aristotle, especially given the influence he had on Christian/Catholic thought via the Scholastics (Aquinas).
Western values are Christian values (Catholic and later Protestant):
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/21/dominion-makin...
* https://historyforatheists.com/2020/01/tom-holland-dominion/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
I don't suppose anyone have any recommendations from Africa or the Polynesian people?
And Bryan van Norden, a professor of Chinese and comparative philosophy, made a reading list for non-western philosophy: http://www.bryanvannorden.com/suggestions-for-further-readin...
For some reason German philosophy has always caught my thought process. It started with Nietzsche, and then went outward from there.
What do they think when they take the epistemology course next?
Is there somewhere you can suggest that I can read more about this notion?
3. Philosophical Significance https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-theory/
I suspect a lot of the formal work on ontology involves CT.
* Size issues. All the problems in set theory are back with a vengeance. Exploring size issues makes it clear that Russell's Paradox is not a fluke.
* Topoi. A topos is a generalization of the past few millennia of maths, and their existence shows that maths is a multiverse rather than a single collection of rules. Some topoi witness refutations of LEM, making them valuable counterexamples.
* Yoneda's lemma. The core of pragmatic philosophy is that objects are not separable from their effects in the world. Yoneda's result takes that to its logical conclusion: An object is equivalent to all of its effects under transformation.
* Equivalence of categories. Rel is equivalent to its dual (Rel is daggered) and so is Hilb; the category Set* of sets with an extra point is equivalent to the category Pfn of sets and partial functions. These show us that parts of maths are self-symmetric beyond group theory.
In addition, why shouldn't adjunctions be covered at some point? Adjunctions can't be studied without category theory (look up "Galois connections" for a history) and they're hard to avoid once we're talking about enough categories of note. I bet that the adjointness of syntax and semantics is very relevant to philosophy of language.
It would be more appropriate for graduate phil courses to consider the ideas you highlighted.
Look at ethics for an example. Mathematics is the venue for arguing against utilitarianism. Putting those together with category theory, we get a mathematical explanation for why pragmatic ethics is preferable to utilitarian ethics.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCTMeyjMKRkoS699U0OJ3...
And he wrote a textbook on CT with Naman Gupta:
https://www.amazon.com/Categories-Toposes-Visualized-Richard...
FWIW, for philosophy of mathematics, I'd recommend reading "Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. The recommendation of The Frege Reader is actually good, but I'd recommend watching some lectures or something as well, otherwise it'll be a difficult read.
In physics, you learn formulas, and those can/do build on top of each other (as well as mathematical axioms/shortcuts). Reading Aristotle isn't any different in that sense. You aren't reading Aristotle for The Physics. You're reading it for ethical theory (and virtue ethics in theory), the underpinnings of philosphy of science, and Aristotelian/term logic (so you can understand the arguments of later authors prior to propositional logic).
In order to understand philosophical thought and argument, it's necessary to have this knowledge, and it's no different than me saying "in the process of studying physics, you have to study geometry" (as a prerequisite to later mathematics). This isn't any different, and putting the study of philosophy in some sort of "philosophy is slow" or "can only be understood in the historical and/or cultural context" box denigrates the entire discipline from a position of ignorance.
On one hand, you will find many people who frequent HN like Stoicism, a philosophy that is over 2000 years old and yet still applicable in many senses. (I personally prefer Epicureanism and Zhuangzi, but that's me.)
On the other, I think it would be difficult to understand Kant without being familiar with Hume.
Philosophy is not like physics or mathematics. (Some modern analytic philosophers would disagree. They're wrong. They're also not as smart as they think they are. (C'mon, fight me! Anytime, anyplace! I've always got my Junior Philosopher's Secret Decoder Ring and Brass Knuckles with me.)) To expect it to act like physics or mathematics is a mistake. Do you expect progress from a conversation with friends?
Apart from very good coverage of the usual suspects, here you have much, much more Africana and Islamic philosophy (for example) than the average Western academic philosopher has been exposed to.
Seneca’s letters are intended for a public audience; Aurelius’s meditations are the self-reflective journal writings of a stoic (and emperor).
Additionally Epictetus has the enchiridion that is the closest thing to a textbook on Stoicism we have
— Philosophy Major
Personally I enjoy philosophy but in a much less indepth sense.
I have no doubt that after reading all of these books I would become a most unbearable expert on philosophy that considered themselves the smartest person in the room.
I’m personally doing something totally differently from this - trying to read recent texts on philosophy (mostly continental) and backtracking my way through the older ones. I don’t know if that’ll work (given the small amount of free time and mental energy left to devoting on it), but it still seems much more engaging than the usual standard philosophy curriculum.
If we're talking about page impressions, then it seems less than certain that every one of them corresponds to a unique person who has followed the described advice exactly.
Would recommend Epictetus after a reader got through Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, especially if that reader was intrigued by their ideas. It's a surprisingly easy read for a classical text, and a lot of the humor and sarcasm still hits after 1900 years.
Reading the history and categories is like reading vocabulary books, it won't help you speak unless you learn the grammar first. (grammar => argument)
All of the sciences began in philosophy. When the great big questions that invoke a great deal of discussion over meaning subside, that science has gone on to supersede its parent: This happened with physics in the 17th century, biology, and psychology. If you want to ask great big questions of a discipline that are often frowned upon within that discipline, philosophy is a place to engage in this type of discourse.
Further, the lines of _what a discipline is_ are typically drawn in philosophy, not within the discipline itself. This is a frequent discourse in the philosophy of science. As, the question of, "what is science" doesn't seem well suited to be answered by any science in particular.
Analytic philosophy is contrasted with continental philosophy (as in, the European continent), which tends to be more interested in politics, society, the individual, and other less technical topics. An old joke goes like this:
"The analytic philosopher will accuse the continental of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the analytic of being insufficiently."
Since this is HN, you might be interested in language, logic, and similar topics. If this is the case, you will likely enjoy analytic philosophy, especially Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Popper.
However, if you are coming at philosophy cold, I really don't recommend the academic analytic path. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds and decide that all this stuff is just too obscure and abstruse to be useful.
If that's the case, I suggest a very brief reading list to shake up your default preconceptions of how the world works. The goal here is to make you question your basic assumptions, which is when philosophy is at its best.
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Classic Stoic works. Very accessible entry points to classical philosophy and Stoicism.
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. If you read this and understand it, your entire conception of ethics, values, and how we use labels like "good" or "evil" will be shaken up.
- Republic by Plato. If you live in a Western country, you probably think that democracy is the highest and best form of government. Plato thinks otherwise and it's worth understanding why.
- A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. This is a fairly recent book but it serves as an excellent introduction to East Asian and Japanese thought via art and aesthetics.
- I Ching. The Chinese classic is super easy to read and is diametrically opposite to the static, eternal universal Platonic model much of Western thought it built upon.
- You should also probably read something from India, the Islamic world, and Russia, but I wanted to keep my list fairly short. Some recommendations here are The Bhagavad Gita, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and anything by Dostoyevsky.
For reference: I have a bachelor's in philosophy from a program in the US which is almost exclusively analytic in nature.
"What’s wrong with contemporary philosophy?"
[1] http://www.edarcipelago.com/freebooks/CioranHeightsofDespair...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-101-Socrates-Metaphysics-E...
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listin...
do you think they don't read adorno in beijing university? they do. if the chinese started off the great Deng reform era based upon the marxist doctrine of historical materialism, maybe it's worthwhile to go learn historical materialism! the Bourbaki conversed extensively with the French post-structuralists and various other weirdoes including Dieudonne, Levi-Strauss, Piaget and Lacan: if you understand more of post-structuralism, maybe you'll understand why the hell they are / were that way!
they sure didn't have the early-Wittgensteinian idea of philosophy as fundamentally therapy underneath. they lived by philosophy, and slaughtered millions for it, but this is still worth study, if not very useful as life-enrichment.
Super esoteric— But so good.
While I enjoy a close read as the next guy, I really have difficulties not to get sarcastic.
That said: philosophy was cool when public intellectuals had some importance. But that's a thing of the past. Philosophy is done. It still can be a nice hobby but you should look for ways to find people you can discuss things with. This becomes even better if you disagree.
Everybody has a philosophy they live by in the ethical, social, scientific (epistemological) etc spheres. If you haven't studied philosophy, it's very possible that there are other ideas that could better inform your thoughts and decisions, or your current ideas might be inconsistent.
I'm far from well read in philosophy myself, but I've already learned a lot from what I have read and look forward to learning more in future.