How do I teach myself philosophy?

January 22, 2005 9:16 AM

How do I teach myself philosophy? [more inside]

Besides reading Sophie's World a few years ago, I have no prior background in the subject. What books should I read in order give myself a good grounding so I can branch out into more specialized topics? I'm mostly interested in the Western side of things, but a good primer on the Eastern tradition would be most welcome too.

posted by sid to Religion & Philosophy (27 answers total)

I'm sure that I will make any serious students of philosophy cringe with this, but I've found several of the "For Beginners" series a good first exposure to some of the big thinkers. I'm never going to read Fear and Trembling, but it is interesting to know some of the highlights of Kierkegaard's work.
posted by scarabic at 9:28 AM on January 22, 2005

Plain and simple. A truly wonderful resource. Not a shill... it's worth checking out.
posted by ac at 9:43 AM on January 22, 2005

I've been meaning to read Martin Cohen's 101 Philosophy Problems [Amazon] for a while. This is more of a "What is philosophy?" rather than "a What did famous philosophers say/think?" book.
posted by carter at 9:44 AM on January 22, 2005

Wikipedia has a great series of articles on the history of western philosophy.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:48 AM on January 22, 2005

Answer one of my professor's gave me back in college: Well... you go up a mountain, live there for awhile, and then come back down to find the locals think you're fucked-up.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:07 AM on January 22, 2005

I've heard good things about Making Names by Andrew Malcolm. Purportedly a good examination of the current state of philosophy. Has anyone read it?
posted by Gyan at 10:10 AM on January 22, 2005

Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can serve as a nice introduction to western philosophy, as well as outlining the basic dualist/monist (mind/body, romantic/classic, etc etc) conflict that so much of philosophy is, at its heart, concerned with. In many ways, ZAMM performs the same job as Sophie's World; it uses a narrative device to deliver a lecture about the history of philosophy. I've read both, and the difference, imo, is that ZAMM doesn't talk down to the reader in the same way SW does. As an amateur with next to no formal education in philosophy, I feel I definitely took away a hell of a lot more from Pirsig than Gaarder.

While there's something to be said for reading primary texts, and only primary texts, philosophy's a pretty wide world. It can be useful to start off with a survey of what's available, and to understand how ideas evolved over time. History of philosophy books, like Pirsig's or Gaarder's or Durant's, are helpful to see things like how Plato affected Christianity, or the relationship between Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution. Once you have that groundwork, you'll be better equipped to decide on a particular branch of philosophy, or a specific school of thought.
posted by jbrjake at 10:13 AM on January 22, 2005

Read the primary texts. Philosophers are backbiting and catty, so a lot of times if you read an "explanation" of a primary text by someone other than the author, you're reading something that is less than fair, and the author of the secondary source will never tell you that, in fact, he's got a competing theory or book out there, or the head of his department does, et cetera. This is true for many things in academia, but philosophy, in my modest experience, has it among the worst.

Read the primary texts. "Introductions" to philosophy present you with the Gee Whiz, What if We're In The Matrix aspects of philosophy, without all of the reasoning that goes behind them. If you just get the interesting parts and a little background on them, you aren't really seeing the argument that lead up to it, and you are more likely to a) dismiss it as bunk when maybe it isn't, or b) draw non sequitor conclusions from it and have it be a waste of your time.

Plus, one of the most useful benefits of an education in philosophy is the rigorous analytical side of it. Following an argument through the twisted syntax of an English Translation of a half-mad German from two hundred years ago is like aerobics for the forebrain. A Philosophy For Dummies is designed to spare you precisely that arduous task, while maintaining only the Gee Whiz, What If We're In The Matrix stuff--which is great in the same way that candy is great.

The other great part about reading primary texts is that most of them are in the public domain, and available for free on the internet. You can find which ones to read by going to the Philosophy department website of some university and looking at the reading list or syllabus for their Philosphy 100 class. For instance here, or here
posted by Hildago at 11:00 AM on January 22, 2005

I second those who suggest primary texts. I would suggest reading Plato until you can't take him anymore. His ideas may be outdated, but lay out the foundations of western philosophy. Also, if you can, read Aristotle, for the same reason. Many early modern philosophers respond to the early greeks and frame their discussions around them. Once you've learned your way around the greeks, other roads will become self-apparent.

"Philosophy is a disease best cured with philosophy."
posted by elwoodwiles at 12:57 PM on January 22, 2005

What Hidalgo said. No substitute to the real thing, really.

When I wrote philosophy papers myself, in order to make them appear rigorous and critical I was typically less than fair to the author's true position and would focus simply on the logically weak sections of their argument. I found this was the typical method of philosophical analysis (and it got me good grades), but you would do yourself much better to read the source texts for yourself and draw your own conclusions if you are truly interested in the ideas.
posted by rooftop secrets at 12:57 PM on January 22, 2005

Several people have argued that those who write about the primary texts have axes to grind and, consequently, don't do said texts justice. Prisig (author of the aforementioned Zen and the Art) is obviously one such writer. In his defense, I have to say that he makes a remarkable effort to reveal and discuss his own biases. Indeed, in a lot of ways, the book is, first and foremost, about Pirsig's axe.

I have to say that because it was so personal, I felt like the book made a lot of ideas (Plato, Kant, etc.) seem both intelligible and relevant. So, Sid, to answer your question... If you're like me, you may need a writer with an axe to grind to take you on a tour of this particular land. Or you may find that you prefer the more objective approach. It's your call, but I'm guessing that if one method doesn't work, the other will.
posted by Clay201 at 1:17 PM on January 22, 2005

Start with epistemology. Until you know how you're determining truth, everything else in philosophy will be bewildering.

Also, rather than just reading "philosophy", consider why you're interested in philosophy. Is there a particular question you want to answer (i.e., what is truth, does God exist, how should I live, etc). Then consider structuring your study around that goal.
posted by gd779 at 1:27 PM on January 22, 2005

Read metafilter.
posted by googly at 2:15 PM on January 22, 2005

It really depends on what type of philosophy you want to study. Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, etc. all have different traditions and demand different methods of study. If you liked Sophie's Choice, you're probably interested in epistemology (which the book focused on, IIRC). You should also know that contemporary philosophy tends to be characterized by two different traditions: analytic and continental.

Most people here have said you should just jump into primary texts. Don't do this. If you're just starting out, picking out some famous work at random and digging in will just be bewildering. Most works are rooted in a vocabulary and tradition you'll find arcane, and are usually directed against positions held by their contemporaries which you won't know anything about. God help you if you try teaching yourself The Critique of Pure Reason without any prior background. It's possible that you'll enjoy getting in over your head, but it's much more likely that you'll just become exasperated that you don't know what's going on. I think it's better when starting out to try to read works that give you an overview of the field, the various positions that are held, and the arguments that people have given for those positions. It's probably true that most Intro to Philosophy texts are bunk (I don't really recommend those For Beginners books either; they tend to be short on argumentation), but there are good ones out there - a good idea is to find those written by real, published philosophers.

I recommend you pick up Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. It's a good intro to many problems in contemporary epistemology, and although some of the positions he holds have become a little antiquated, it's very good philosophy. Many intro to philosophy or beginner-level philosophy courses use this as a primary text. Michael Loux's Introduction to Metaphysics is a great metaphysics primer. (This is also an interesting article on the subject). Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening is a very readable philosophy of science text. Daniel Dennett's Kinds of Minds is good for philosophy of mind. Simon Blackburn has some introductory material on ethics that is acceptable.

Of course, all these authors are trying to push their own agendas as they tell their stories; keep that in mind.
posted by painquale at 5:56 PM on January 22, 2005

I mean Sophie's World, not Sophie's Choice (the William Styron novel). Oops.
posted by painquale at 5:58 PM on January 22, 2005

It's old (as in 70+ years), so it doesn't have modern philosophers, but for an absolute beginners book about the big names in Western philosophy that gives a great a great overview of their thoughts while placing them in historical context (and all the while written in very approachable language), you should check out The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant.
posted by thewittyname at 6:25 PM on January 22, 2005

I second painquale's notion of figuring out what kind of philosophy you're interested in. A great way of doing this is to sample the "Very Short Introduction" series from Oxford that has been recommended here before.

I also agree that jumping into the primary texts unprepared is not so great of an idea. Without some kind of idea of why the great philosophers are writing their treatises, you may greatly enjoy reading philosophy, but you probably won't learn it. (That is, you won't be able to have good, productive conversations with other people who know or are learning philosophy.) Except for Hume, I really can't think of a historical philosopher who does a very good job of telling you why he or she is writing what he or she is writing.

So ask yourself whether you are interested in the history of philosophical ideas (what have people thought about whether we have free will, and why?) or philosophical problems (given a certain notion of free will, do we have it or not?) This will help you decide what kind of philosophy you're interested in (the history of philosophy and continental philosophy in the first case, and analytic philosophy (broadly construed) in the second case). If you don't believe that the notion of a philosophical problem considered ahistorically makes any sense, then you're probably interested in the history of ideas.

If you really liked Sophie's World, you could do a lot worse than Will Durant's Story of Philosophy [on preview, several people beat me to it]. As for a more in-depth study, I'm going to be a troglodyte and suggest Frederick Copleston's history of philosophy series. It's not glamorous or always easy to read, but it's what seminarians and philosophy majors cut their teeth on for many, many years and I think it's the best introduction you could have. Read Copleston's books until you see a reference to ideas you want to read more about and then read them in the original philosopher's hand. In my department, we have a saying that "The road past the generals [comprehensive exams] is paved with Copleston." If you can understand and remember half of what Copleston says about the greats, you'll have taught yourself more philosophy than 99% of the people who have read philosophy.

For the record, I do not think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a good way to teach yourself philosophy, but it might be a nice suggestion for how to live.
posted by ontic at 6:53 PM on January 22, 2005

My college had a Moral Reasoning requirement, and I enjoyed and recommend the following from its reading list:

Machiavelli's The Prince (pragmatics)
Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (epistemology)
Locke's Second Treatise on Government (social philosophy)
Rawls' A Theory of Justice (justice)

I recommend reading Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (ethics) at some point, too, but there are parts of it that are rough going; the lens of 3000 years introduces distortion and confusion.

The Kant changed my life. I went on to read the Metaphysics of Morals and the three Critiques. It is slow going - I spent several hours per page on parts of the Grounding - but it is rewarding.
posted by ikkyu2 at 6:59 PM on January 22, 2005

I highly recommend Alain de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy and Status Anxiety for starters. If you don't like to read, both were made into TV series by Channel 4 in the UK, and are available on DVD.

I find it really difficult to sit down with, say, a pile of Plato or a stack of Socrates and just read. de Botton starts with discussions of issues that are relevant to pretty much everybody (lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure), then compares and contrasts the views of great thinkers, padding it all out with a helpful historical context. If you find the views of a particular philosopher intriguing, you can go find out more about them and what they thought.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 7:59 PM on January 22, 2005

I majored in Philosophy in college, and it's striking how little I know

I minored. I don't think it matters a rat's ass what you know, to be honest. I regard my studies in philosophy as helpful in training me how to think. What others actually thought? Well, that's secondary, I reckon.

Which makes me semi-informed and opinionated! Hooray!

To the original poster : find smart people to talk and argue about this stuff with, ones who have at least some grounding in the subject. That's worth 1000 'primary texts' from dead old men any day.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:13 PM on January 22, 2005

I don't think that anyone has mentioned Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy". It is well written and clear and it doesn't have any pictures or cartoons. It starts with the pre-socratics and ends with Russell's contemporaries Whitehead and Frege. It has the advantage of being written by one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century.

Besides that, as elwoodmiles said, read Plato. I cannot stress that enough. Anyone who says that Plato is boring or difficult to read has obviously either not read Plato or has no interest in philosophy. Such people should be given the torture of 100 cuts, not for their dishonesty, but because they haven't read Plato. Start with the Apology. You should be able to find a Penguin edition of it at any used bookstore for three or four dollars under the title "The Last Days of Socrates," which also includes the Euthyphro, the Phaedo and the Crito. Then read the Symposium. You can easily read all of those on a Saturday. You should also read the Republic, but it is a good deal longer. If you get the Penguins or Oxford World's Classics they will have decent introductions that will explain the problems at stake as well as enlighten you on general historical and philosophical issues. All of the issues which we now call 'philosophy' begin with Plato, and if you start with his stuff, which is all fucking awesome.

Thanks to the Perseus Project you can start immediately:
Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo

They also have the rest of Plato and most of Aristotle at their Greek and Roman Materials Page.
posted by mokujin at 10:27 PM on January 22, 2005

And when you're tired of slogging through all of the above recommendations, remember these two maxims:

"It is always easy to tell whether people are doing good philosophy: they are if they are laughing."

-- Charles Daniels, Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria

"To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher."

-- Pascal, Pensees B 4/K 513
posted by gd779 at 10:36 PM on January 22, 2005

I find it really difficult to sit down with, say, a pile of Plato or a stack of Socrates

or? same thing, right? (socrates is a (presumably real-life) character in Plato's work, not a writer)

Russell's history is easy reading and gives you a nice background, though I think it's tremendously unfair to aristotle. But I'd go for the original texts, myself. As Whitehead said, western phil is "footnotes to Plato", so that's where to begin. And I disagree that the primary texts are too advanced to jump into. Even Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is not actually all that technical - it is very dense and difficult and may include some vocabulary you're not familiar with, but you don't need a background in X to be able to understand it. In general the only thing you need to 'get' philosophy is time to bother with it.

Really it is very important what questions or interests are drawing you to the field, though. There are so many authors that can be grouped under the term 'philosophy' that it almost becomes a meaningless subject heading.

The thinkers who often provoke the most literary excitement include plato, hume, emerson, nietzsche, & sartre, I'd say. Oh, augustine's confessions, also (though they're much more religious), and william james. The most foundational /schematic philosophers are probably Aristotle and Kant, and not surprisingly, a lot of non-philosophers find them the most boring. But there are so many other directions to explore as well... descartes, spinoza, heidegger, blah blah blah

basically, go to a bookstore and look around until you find some stuff you want to read. then read it.
posted by mdn at 11:16 PM on January 22, 2005

This thread is full of a bunch of recommendations that out-and-out contradict one another. Maybe the best thing to do, sid, is to describe why you're interested in philosophy and what you hope to get out of it.

(Just in case you don't: my hunch is that if you enjoyed Sophie's World and want to continue reading that kind of philosophy, you'd be best off picking up an overview of the field or a subfield rather than diving into a primary text.)
posted by painquale at 12:41 AM on January 23, 2005

I was a university lecturer in philosophy some years ago, and I strongly advocate reading primary texts. My purpose in studying (and the purpose I tried to instill through teaching) philosophy was at least as much about developing certain habits of mind or modes of questioning as it was about learning a set of views or propositions held by different thinkers, and these habits and modes are best learned through encounters with the primary texts. (If your purpose is, instead, to get a historical overview, then I can enthusiastically endorse the Bertrand Russell and F.C. Copleston recommendations made earlier in the thread.)

I haven't been in a classroom for almost 10 years now, but the texts that taught habits of mind which I still rely on today are the early Plato (Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Meno), Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Books I, III, VI, and X if you're in a hurry), Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica (small doses are best here, but his practice of trying to set out a decent case for the opposing view before making his own argument is definitely worth a look), Descartes' Meditations, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and Wittgenstein's Culture and Value (which is not a philosophy text per se, but an interesting record of a someone looking at a range of phenomena with a philosopher's eye). Enjoy them. . . .
posted by muhonnin at 3:06 AM on January 23, 2005

Response by poster: Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. I'm deeply gratified that so many of you chose to share your expertise.

I suppose that in my none-too-clear thoughts I was expecting reccomendations for books that provided a general survey of the field, so that I could pick up the main ideas and read the primary texts of areas that interested me.

But I'm glad I did not include that information in my orginial post, as the diversity of opinion expressed here is very valuable. I can see that there are many ways of reading philosophy as there are sub-fields in it.

I'd say that the sub-fields that would probably interest and fascinate me the most would be those looking on the nature of existence and matter, and those that explain the functioning of the human mind. That is, those that explore the nature of the interface between the human mind and external reality. I'm not sure if these problems feature prominently in any particular sub-field. I have a sneaking suspicion that they feature prominenty in many, if not all, sub-fields, and that I have to narrow my area of interest somewhat!
posted by sid at 7:42 AM on January 23, 2005

nature of existence and matter,

Aristotle's physics & metaphysics, and Kant's 1st critique are probably the most important metaphysical texts. Spinoza's ethics can be read as a kind of interpretation of aristotle; Hume & Descartes punch at the difficult bits but don't really answer problems, Heidegger gets fascinated, wittgenstein gets frustrated, sartre accepts what seems to be...

that explain the functioning of the human mind

modern pop-neuro is wonderful stuff for exploring this - Sacks, d'amasio, Ledoux, etc. A lot of modern analytic philosophers (like dan dennett) spend time in this territory too.

The best thing about reading is that the more you read, the more you realize you need to get ahold of. Personally, I really like aristotle's Metaphyics - it's kind of a mess in certain ways, but it has a lot of insight, & it's definitely a determined attempt to get some understanding of these questions, so I'd suggest checking that out and sort of going on from there. The Hippocrates Apostle or Joe Sachs translations are both pretty good (Sachs quite non-traditional).
posted by mdn at 9:33 AM on January 23, 2005