Preparing a course of self-study in Philosophy.

December 14, 2006 12:01 PM

I'm preparing a course of self-study in Philosophy. I need text-suggestions and ESPECIALLY secondary source suggestions.

Yo! AskMeFi!,

I got my undergrad degree in English and Philosophy. I loved the Philosophy end, although the order in which I took my classes resulted in a lot of things going over my head at the time. As heading to Grad. School for Philosophy would likely put me in the same position I'm in now (Terrible job!), I'm looking to prep a course of self-study in philosophy on my own. I have at least a moderate familiarity with the big names: Kant, Hegel,Nietzsche, Berkley, Hume,Kierkegaard, Adorno on and on.

What I'm looking to do is to revisit those names, pick up some new ones and really get down and dirty with the subject. I realize "self-study" in Philosophy is not the greatest idea in the world, but I don't have a lot of options for various reasons.

To that end, MeFi, I need suggestions on what primary texts I should turn to as well as- and this is the important part, especially in lieu of an instructor and a class room- secondary sources, online resources, communities and forums for this kind of thing.

Thanks!

posted by GilloD to education (28 comments total)

I think MIT's Opencourseware would be a really good start. You can see the syllabi and assignments for pretty much every class they give there.

However, their course offerings in the philosophy department seem a bit skimpy/more focused on linguistics. But it definitely looks like something to check out.
posted by jourman2 at 12:19 PM on December 14, 2006 [1 favorite]

I cannot recommend "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder. Even though you're already familiar with philosophy and so the intro-to-philosophy aspect might not be as helpful, I find that the summaries of countless philosophers that Gaarder offers are still just about the best and most concise review material around if you need a quick brush-up on topics that you kinda-sorta already knew. That, and it's just a fun read.
posted by Rallon at 12:28 PM on December 14, 2006

And when I say "Cannot recommend" I mean "cannot recommend ENOUGH." Sigh.
posted by Rallon at 12:30 PM on December 14, 2006

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is essential, and shouldn't be too difficult for you, give your undergrad degree. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has fewer entries, but it's generally easier to read.

In terms of the big names, I'd say you should start with Greek philosophy and skip all the way to Descartes.
posted by smorange at 12:37 PM on December 14, 2006

As a great secondary source I would recommend Hegel scholar Jere Surber's book "Culture and Critique." It says "cultural studies" on the cover but it's ostensibly about philosophy and theory schools-of-thought since 1850 or so up to the present.
posted by mattbucher at 12:39 PM on December 14, 2006

Greetings from another former English and philosophy major!

At my grad program we had a saying, "The road to the General Exams is paved with Coppleston." The Generals were our comprehensive exams, and showed a wide knowledge of the history of philosophy. Copleston wrote a 9 volume history of philosophy that is an excellent secondary source for someone looking to build a good knowledge of the history of philosophy. Of course, it doesn't hit the latest and greatest interpretations and it's not accurate in every single place (the secondary sources he cites are very out of date). But bang-for-your-buck, it's hard to think you could do better.

For more existentialist stuff, William Barrett's Irrational Man is a nice overview.

Also, and I can't recommend this enough, for Kant, Descartes, and Hume, Georges Dicker has written three amazing tours through their arguments. Kant and Hume can be hard to systematize by reading just their work, but Dicker really draws out the arguments in an amazingly clear way. Buy those three books and you'll be much farther along than with many other treatments.

Finally, while doing the history is important in a study of philosophy, you may want to also consider a problem-based approach. So another way to study philosophy aside from studying the major historical philosophers is to study certain problems, such as the mind-body problem or the problem of political authority and figure out not just what famous historical figures have said about them, but also what contemporary argument testing shows. For this kind of study, I recommend Westview's Dimensions of Philosophy series. Shelly Kagan's book on Normative Ethics in this series is particularly good as an introduction to high-fallutin' ethical theory (of which I am a big fan).

Go through those and you'll be a force to be reckoned with.
posted by ontic at 1:08 PM on December 14, 2006 [1 favorite]

ontic's advice is good re: problems approaches, which are much more popular now (that's how I've done my degree). If you want to go for a more historical route, start with the following. For Greece, read Plato and Aristotle. You can buy Plato's Complete Works, edited by John Cooper, for a reference. For better individual translations, seek out Allan Bloom, Seth Benardete, Thomas West (editor), Eva Brann. The most useful dialogues are, IMO, Crito, Apology, Euthyphro, Phaedo, Meno, Symposium, Republic. For Aristotle, buy the Modern Library Basic Works. It's cheap for what it is. Read Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Physics, Politics.. For Descrates, you can get the multi-volume Cottingham editions, which are the standards (and they're complete), but they're also expensive. Or you can get anything with the Discourse, Meditations, and the Principles.

If you want to read less of these writers, but still get the gist, start with, in order of importance, Republic, Meno, Apology, Euthyphro, Crito. Read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It helps to read Aristotle's Metaphysics, too. You can read Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm if you want something for in between, but I think they're all a bit silly, frankly. Make sure to read Descartes' Meditations, though. From there, read Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and either the Treatise or the Enquiry. You can read Locke as well, but I find him difficult to get through (because it's boring). That should be a good start, I would think, and it would get you ready for Kant.

If you go for a more problems-oriented route, the texts will change, depending on which problems interest you; most likely, you'll only read excerpts of the above. In ethics, for example, the most important historical works are Aristotle's Ethics, Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and J.S. Mill's Utilitarianism (and On Liberty). John Rawls' Theory of Justice is the most important modern book, but reading the original is a fool's errand (it's too long). A compilation of Rawls excerpts and post-Rawls stuff is best. There are quite a lot of these.

Realistically, I think the best thing to do is to head to your local university or college, and ask the professors for syllabi for classes you would take, if you were in a position to do so. Or search online for the same. Use the suggestions in this thread for secondary sources.
posted by smorange at 1:46 PM on December 14, 2006 [2 favorites]

Smorange, you like Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes but think Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm are silly? Sure, whatever.

GilloD, Augustine, Aquinas and Anselm are three of the most important philosophers bridging the ancients and the moderns. In fact, it's pretty hard to figure what the hell Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Leibniz, etc. are arguing against if you've never read Aquinas or some other Scholastic philosopher.

For secondary sources, I've found the Cambridge series of books on philosophers to be rather good. (The link goes to a British list for convenience, you can find any of them through Amazon.) Each book collects essays about the philosopher's various arguments and positions. For example the Descartes book, would have essays on his views about knowledge, substance and the mind-body problem.
posted by oddman at 2:10 PM on December 14, 2006

I have an undergrad in Phil too, though I didn't take it very seriously as it was a minor that developed into a 2nd major at the end, when it turned out I had to stay on a year to finish my undergrad research in my original major. So, I've always approached it more as I would anything else I was amateurishly interested in than as a potential career path and such.

My undergrad department consisted mostly of classicists, so I got a very strong grounding in the Greeks. Everything else was hit-and-miss... quite a bit a of Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Locke, and Kant, then a lot of Mill, the Pragmatists, the Existentialists, and Foucault. Everything else was pretty spotty. Never even touched Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, anything Postmodern besides Foucault, or anything much non-Western, and I also have a huge gap when it comes to Medieval/Scholasticism, though from what little I've read, I don't think I care.

Post-college, to fill in those gaps, I read Sophie's World, Durant's "The Story of Philosophy" and Russell's history. They did a decent job at that, as far as it goes. They really lack for anything postwar, and it's kind of hard for me to tell in general what's worth reading out of that whole mess, so if anyone has any good secondary source suggestions there, I'm all ears.

I tried to read some of the things those two histories pointed me to that I hadn't read, but I've gotten sort of stuck. In general, I've had a really hard time disciplining myself to closely read and reason in the absence of the motivator of papers to write, or a discussion to participate in. In fact, those very processes tended to be when I did most of my more rigourous teasing-apart of what was going on in a given work. When I read, I basically got only the jist, and that has continued to be the case outside of academia. Not sure if this will be a problem for you, but it's something to keep in mind in going out on your own. If you have access to any sort of discussion groups in your area, that could help, or maybe just writing about what you're reading, either online or for yourself would help to inform the process.
posted by jdunn_entropy at 2:18 PM on December 14, 2006

oddman, yes, I think that the hyper-rationalism of that period is a bit anachronistic and silly now. Plato and Aristotle didn't get everything (anything?) right, but I think they're better reads for contemporary readers, and I think they're more relevant to the work going on now. It's probably a good idea to read some of the Scholastic philosophers, but not entire works, IMO. Also, I don't think you must read them to get something out of Descartes, though I acknowledge that it helps a lot. YMMV.
posted by smorange at 2:56 PM on December 14, 2006

With regard to moral theory, I like Alasdair MacIntyre's books on the history of philosophy -- A Short History of Ethics (or is it A Brief History of Ethics?) was outstanding, and you also can't go wrong with Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. His books have the virtue of not being mere summaries, but actually having philosophical content.

Charles Larmore's books (can't recall the names at the moment) are outstanding, also.
posted by jayder at 3:33 PM on December 14, 2006

As somebody who went back to do Grad School to study Philosophy, I want to caution, as strongly as I can: stay away from secondary sources.

I know that this seems kind of scary. As students today, we're taught to lean on our professors as windows into the world of those we're reading. But secondary sources are bad because they lead us to believe that we're getting a whole picture of one book from another.

Seriously, all authors you mention have been well-translated. Just read them. If you're looking to go beyond what you learned from your teachers, which was just an introduction anyway, then you'll really just want to read the originals well. It's not easy, but it's all there is.

And that's all you'd really do in grad school, anyway. Graduate school is generally about moving away from relying on guideposts and toward having a feel for the subject yourself. Do it. Move in your area of interest-- pick up the one of those that you listed that interests you most right now, and then investigate their influences and the people that influenced them. You'll learn more about philosophy from that than from anything else.
posted by koeselitz at 4:23 PM on December 14, 2006 [1 favorite]

Russell's History of Western Philosophy is without peer (except for Lord Russell himself, of course); it is the only history of philosophy I know of written by a person who is himself a substantial part of that history, and, as it figured prominently in Russell getting his Nobel for literature, may even be said to be the only history of philosophy ever to win a Nobel Prize.

It's absolutely never ponderous, and is usually very lively-- as well as breezy and irreverent, in fact. No one has wielded great learning as lightly and effortlessly as Russell has, in my opinion.

I read it as a teenager, and then again in my twenties, and quite a lot of it has stayed with me, unlike Copelston (S. J. by the way, if that makes any difference to you) whose first two volumes I slogged through at ten times the effort, but without having a single particle of that dreadfully thick prose sticking in my mind at the present time.

I don't think Russell's History is very well regarded by contemporary academic teachers of philosophy, and the Wikipedia article I've linked to above is mainly critical, but it remains indispensable, for all that.
posted by jamjam at 5:12 PM on December 14, 2006

I'd like to echo smorange and koeselitz here. Secondary sources are mostly only interesting to professionals; we like to read them for a quick review or quibble. Now, some secondary sources have become primary sources in their own right: Deleuze on Spinoza, for instance, or Macintyre on the history of virtue ethics. But if you're not going to graduate school, nothing is better than reading Plato and Aristotle to preserve the practice of thinking and reading philosophy. If you are going to graduate school, but are not yet sure what areas you'd be specializing in, a broad knowledge of those two will at least serve some use once you've decided on epistemology or political philosophy, since they're read universally. Unlike Adorno, for instance, who is not quite so canonical.

oddman: I like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Descartes but think Aquinas, and Anselm are silly. How's that?
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:13 PM on December 14, 2006

Russell and Durant are fun reads. Not considered as serious authoritative scholarship, no, but as a lively quick tour, they're great. Be aware of the biases of each writer which color their accounts of the thinkers they describe, and of which thinkers they include.

Probably I would recommend doing as other suggest above. Read primary sources, google to find course syllabi with secondary readings if you want those, and find someone (or a group) to talk about this stuff with!

One survey I have found useful when working through some thinkers on my own is A Short History of Modern Philosophy by Roger Scruton. He's not always totally trustworthy, but in this book he gives a very nice, concise capsule version of each of the major modern philosophers (Descartes - Kant). Very useful as a reference, and to remind you of what the general picture is of, for example, Locke's views when you're reading some specific bit of Locke. He doesn't fool around, so it might be somewhat hard reading for someone who hadn't studied philosophy at all, but for you it might be just at the right level.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:03 PM on December 14, 2006

Among contemporary philosophers, I always find Thomas Nagel's essays (collected in several books) offer accessible introductory treatments of a bunch of different interesting topics. (If you're looking to get started on some problem.)
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:07 PM on December 14, 2006

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with the primary source advocates. I think you can get a pretty good education from secondary sources. There's just so much context the historical writers were writing in, and reading them without this context in mind can lead to a very diminished understanding. (I'm not talking about cultural contexts here, but they types of problems they were trying to address.)

You might think that you're doing yourself no favors by not getting it "from the horse's mouth", but without correcting your interpretation with good secondary literature you can get a strained view of the horse. Every once in a while there's a new interpretation that needs intense devotion to the original texts (Hume's transition from skeptic to natural psychologist), but it's more likely you'll get more out of what the best scholars of the day take to be the accurate interpretation.
posted by ontic at 10:18 PM on December 14, 2006

As a English/Philosophy major, you might find some of Stanley Cavell's work interesting.

Ontic: I think we disagree only in our interpretation of what GilloD is looking for, not in what would constitute a well-grounded view of the authors involved. However, I'm curious: do you think it better, as an advanced student or young scholar researching a new field, to -start- with the secondary texts before approaching the primaries, or to take a quick pass through the key primary texts then proceed to delve into secondary literature? (Sorry for the derail, but I find this question endlessly fascinating.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:09 PM on December 14, 2006

I get the feeling AMF is probably hostile towards 20th-century French/German crit/lit-theory philosophers (leaning towards British analytical philosophers like Russell), but you mentioned Adorno and you are a lit/philosophy major, so here's my list:

--Heidegger - Being and Time
--Benjamin - Arcades Project, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
--Lacan - "The Mirror Stage"
--Levinas - Totality and Infinity
--Barthes - S/Z, On Racine
--Althusser - Reading Capital
--Baudrillard - The Mirror of Production, Simulations
--Deleuze - Anti-Oedipus, Difference and Repitition, What is Philosophy?
--Foucault - Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Society Must Be Defended "What Is An Author?", "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"
--Derrida - Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Specters of Marx
--Agamben - Homo Sacer, State of Exception
--Nancy - The Experience of Freedom

A little (or a lot) of Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Spinoza (and to a lesser extent Hegel and Husserl) might be needed as background. But these guys (and my list is mostly guys, sorry; I don't know enough about the women [or for that matter nonwhite] crit philosophers to make a decent list--names to look up: Fanon, Said, Mbembe, Kristeva, Spivak, Butler) are serious philosophers and should be treated as such; intelligent people can and often will disagree with some or all of their bodies of work (myself included) but only idiots dismiss them entirely.
posted by maxreax at 11:56 PM on December 14, 2006

As for secondary lit--I recommend The Contiuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory plus those "Beginners Guide to..." books.

And even if you hate hate hate these dudes, still do yourself a favor and read some Spinoza and Heidegger, who are more orthodox but still mind-blowing.
posted by maxreax at 11:58 PM on December 14, 2006

OH and don't neglect non-Europeans because they don't get a lot of love--Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës) are major-level geniuses without whom we Europeans would never have read Aristotle. At least as important as Aquinas.
posted by maxreax at 12:05 AM on December 15, 2006

Seconding maxreax's list.

But also, make sure you get a solid grounding in the Presocratics. The Parmenides/Heraclitus dichotomy is fundamental to the history of all Western philosophy. I suggest Kirk, Raven, and Schofield,The Presocratic Philosophers, as well as Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic (he went sorta nuts later and became a guru, but this first book is excellent). Also, possibly, Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

Some of these guys were also profoundly original in a way that hasn't really been approached since. See, for example, Anaximander, who thought that our existence was a crime against the "unbounded" substrate of reality and that the passing away of everything is a way of exculpating this crime.
posted by nasreddin at 10:38 AM on December 15, 2006 [1 favorite]

anotherpanacea: Actually, I find this question extremely interesting too. My temptation is to say yes (on a "physicists don't read Newton" kind of reason), but I feel like I haven't listened enough to the other side yet to make up my mind. In fact, I was going to post an AskMe about it, and I think I will after my week of waiting is up.
posted by ontic at 11:21 AM on December 15, 2006

ontic: "There's just so much context the historical writers were writing in, and reading them without this context in mind can lead to a very diminished understanding."

That's very true. However, philosophy is an interesting field, in that the secondary sources are almost invariably not about 'the historical circumstances' but about 'what the books mean.' You can get Hume's historical circumstance from a biography of Hume, and from history books about the time; but most of the secondary sources out there about Hume deal with what his books say and that you can invariably get better from the horse's mouth. Furthermore, most philosophers, especially nowadays, don't really know much about history, or even the history of the writers they're interested in; so one would be better off doing that research outside of the field.

This thread has enough evidence of that. A whole slew of people from the current generation, who couldn't be bothered to actually try to understand what was going on in about 500 years' worth of philosophy, have just dismissed it, because that dismissiveness is the current trend. Bucking the trend is the goal; avoiding 'secondary sources,' which usually have the effect of encouraging us to think in superficial ways, is the method.
posted by koeselitz at 12:11 PM on December 15, 2006

Umm... do physicists read Newton at all?

As far as I'm concerned, nothing beats a primary text with good annotations and a well-researched introduction by the translator. The Carnes Lord translation of Aristotle's Politics, for instance, or the Pangle translation of Plato's Laws. Afterwards, I might go and look at Seth Benardete's book. Then, somewhere down the line, after a rigorous course of study of primary texts with good backing by the major scholars, I might turn to something like Wolin's Politics and Vision for a broader view. I have colleagues who start with Wolin and Foucault and Heidegger and Derrida... but I think they're shortchanging their students.
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:15 PM on December 15, 2006

Yeah nasreddin is right; you might want to forego Nietzsche and Derrida altogether and just read Heraclitus, because it's all there.

Also--I hope no one takes my list as a standalone recommendation. Obviously writers like Derrida and Foucault and Heidegger are responding very specifically to philosophical questions and challenges that have been debated for centuries, and a grounding in Plato/Plotinus/St. Augustine/Descartes (who are the "enemies" of a lot of the crit-theory d00dz) is as necessary as a grounding in their "allies" (Spinoza, Nietzsche, &c.)
posted by maxreax at 1:15 PM on December 15, 2006

Furthermore, most philosophers, especially nowadays, don't really know much about history, or even the history of the writers they're interested in; so one would be better off doing that research outside of the field.

This can't be denied, but the secondary sources we're talking about here are secondary sources about the history of philosophy, written by people who have devoted their lives to explicating what the historical philosophers said and thought. If any in the field are on the front lines against the ahistorical approach, it's them. I've met Hume scholars who probably know more about Hume and maneuvering inside the Humean system than Hume himself knew.

...Bucking the trend is the goal; avoiding 'secondary sources,' which usually have the effect of encouraging us to think in superficial ways, is the method.

I disagree here too. I think that extensive secondary literature about historical philosophers and their works is all about going beyond superficial readings, and I think someone who reads with attention to the secondary literature has a much less superficial understanding than someone who just picks up Kant or Hume and thinks deeply about it.
posted by ontic at 2:51 PM on December 15, 2006

If you want to read Deleuze and Guattari, then Brian Massumi's "Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari" is a great companion. Massumi is also their translator.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:36 PM on December 15, 2006