/philosophy/ - Philosophy

Can you link the starter kit bruv?

>>4035

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8_RRaZW5X3xwztjZ4p0XeRplqebYwpmuNNpaN_TkgM/edit

>>4043

This is what i asked over at lit

I defiantly at least want to be able to understand Kant. I tried reading Pure Reason and it was a bit much for me, but apparently he's super important to understand German Idealism and later existentialists like Nietzsche

Because from there i'd like to learn more about about economics, political philosophy, sociology and the left/right split. I've already Hobbes and Locke but I feel like I need a better foundation.

Do I have to go ALL the way back to the Greeks or can I just read some Plato, Aristotle and philosophy history books?

Not that I don't find these unenjoyable, i'll probably finish off some of the recommendations of the OP :)

it just takes a long time for the sake of may mays

>>4051

> should I really start with the Greeks? Is it just a meme or will it ultimately serve some sort of purpose? Can I skip to the enlightenment?

>I defiantly at least want to be able to understand Kant

nearly all enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophy is incredibly dense and difficult, even for academics. telling someone to read the critique of pure reason is the /philosophy/ equivalent of telling someone to install gentoo. so you can go ahead and be rid of the idea that the next dialogue about Alcibiades' boypussy will magically unlock the secrets of Kant. the best advice i can give you is to take notes while reading any of them.

here is the best way i can explain it; most cars are generally the same under the hood, but its a helluva a lot easier to break-down and build-up a car from 60 years ago by merit of having fewer parts, and the parts that are simpler than current designs. thus, you can get a general understanding of automobiles faster, and possibly better if your not aiming for something specific,by working on an old car and moving your way up.

getting back to the OP, you dont need to read the fiction. Republic, nichomechian ethics, Eudemian ethics, and Aristotle's politics should suffice at the minimum.

>philosophy history books?

whatever you do,stay away from Bertrand russel's history of philosophy. i personally recommend Daniel N robinsons great ideas of philosophy, even though its a lecture series and not a book. Its expensive, but worth it imo. dont buy it at full price either, they put every video on their site on sale for like 70% off at some point throughout the year.

>>4055

Thanks! That is really helpful advice. I'll dig around in the Greeks for a bit more just for fun and a bit more of an introduction then i'll consider moving on.

>>4058

stirner won't be too useful if I don't understand what he is responding to

>>4051

Kant varies on his difficulty. His conceptual schemes are not too difficult to get around though, which are a part of his epistemology.

Political philosophy is also good. Start with the state of nature. Political obligation and consent and then disobedience and dissent. Those are the basics.

I have never read philosophy history books, so I cannot recommend anything to you. Perhaps buy some college text books on introductions to philosophy?

On the memes I think this is just therapy for people who have studied this shit academically and need to get over the ptsd.

>>4055

>nearly all enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophy is incredibly dense and difficult

not all are difficult

the only ones ive ever struggled with post enlightenment are kant and nietzsche, most others are fairly easy if you put some thought into it

even kant's deontological ethics are easy, and he is not a philosopher i read lightly

>>4062

>not all are difficult

hos epi tol polu, anon. also i have a hard time believing you understood hegel all that easily.

>>4064

Hegel is not that hard if you just read him and get rid of all the bullshit you've been told about his system and method.

If you can do that you will actually have a far easier time of finding secondary literature that you can be sure isn't bullshit. This is assuming you actually read Hegel directly and do the work of thinking through his texts yourself and asking questions you have about the text as you understand it.

>>4068

I do plan on reading Hegel. What should I know before hand? All the different types of idealism is a little confusing.

>>4069

Nothing. The less you know the better. You have to read Hegel without assumptions to get the real methodology he uses, which is all his philosophy ultimately is.

>>4064

Hence "not all are difficult", rather than "all are easy"

>>4069

Easiest idealism is probably Berkeley. His is also the weakest.

>>4076

I had thought the same until literally two weeks ago when in a lecture Berkeley came up and the lecturer said almost no one reads Berkeley despite Berkeley being an even bigger philosophical threat than Hume in his day and afterward according to his own peers right before Kant. Berkeley wasn't a simplistic idiot, he's like Descartes and Hume in that the strongest points of his philosophy, if taken seriously, are pretty terrifying on an intellectual level. Berkeley's theory of the subject was a concept of a completely passive subject, something that not even the moderns who were skeptics like Hume were willing to swallow.

>>4071

SO go STRAIGHT for him? That seems like a little much when most Continentals can barely wrap their head around him.

>>4081

Yes, go straight at it. Skip the Preface. Read the first two or three chapters, do your best to follow and formulate the argument he's making for yourself. The questions you will come to are ones that if you google, assuming you use the right phrasing, will get you secondary literature.

I read the Phenom and decided to just try to forget everything i had ever heard about Hegel, in the first few chapters the feeling I got was a very heavy epistemological project about epistemology itself. I decided to look that up, and found Westphal's work on Hegel's meta-epistemology. Just read on and you find a lot of interesting things, which since you've fucking read the book, will actually be intelligible to you.

Or you can just read it with standard commentaries if you're not into that kind of level of self-sufficiency from the get go.

Hegel is a philosopher you either have a passion for because you see a glimpse of something deep in there, or you just don't find him interesting enough.

>>4085

So where should I start?

>>4088

strangely enough, after a bit of plato and "problems of philosophy", i started in with phenomenology of spirit...

i wouldnt recommend that method.

philosophy of history is a much nicer way to go.

that said, ive found textbooks to be the best way of getting my bearings. more specifically, ive found logic and philosophy of mind the most helpful in that respect.

read some plato, read some descartes, read some hume, then you can just follow the road signs for physicalism or idealism or whatever stupid thing and see where you end up.

if you need it more specific than that:

plato (until youre tired of him)

metaphysics

meditations on first..

enquiry concerning human understanding

prolegamena (sp?) to any future metaphysics & critique of pure reason

cartesian meditations

history of the concept of time

^along with a smattering of overviews, essays, excerpts and the like mainly to do with philosophy of mind, this is the primary text track ive been on

also, i recommend reading some philosophical fiction or technical literature alongside for the sake of variety (not getting burnt out)

>>4091

You don't just read Hegel just because. That's stupid and guaranteed to get you nothing and nowhere. You read Hegel because you glipmsed something he offers and you want it very badly, and you're not gonna give up until you know what it is for yourself.

You need passionate interest to slog through it, an interest that is willing to do the work to get it. That includes retroactively reading the philosophies Hegel responds to, looking into the historical epoch, etc.

To read Hegel is to read his time and its history and do nnect it to ours. Hegel isn't a thinker that everyone can understand or care about, he only appeals to certain kinds of intuitions and backgrounds.You must have a certain kind of experience, both practically and intellectually, and a driving desire to know the absolute, whatever it may be.

>>4093

>you dont just read hegel just because

what

>the philosophies Hegel responds to

this is why i think developing a small background in rationalism and empiricism is a decent method of approach.

once that is acquired, hell still be difficult to parse...

>certain kinds of intuitions

true enough.

what ive read of him completely meshes with my intuitions...

its just the combination of highly abstract and strangely pedagogical writing, un-moored from its time and language that really makes me believe that a lot can be lost reading it without a bit of context and just a feel for abstract philosophical writing in general. for the sake of addressing one of those issues (abstraction), i found intro to philosophy of history to be a good first point of contact with his thinking.

>>4034

You could stay with Plato and Aristotle alone, indefinitely, -- and it would be fine. After that I'd just swim right into German Idealism -- and also never leave, which would be fine.