Hello /lit/I want to get into philosophy. I was recommended this:Start with Plato’s Republic, then Descartes’ Meditations on first philosophy, then read Bertrand Russel’s history of western philosophy (apparently it is biased, but the point is to be able to disagree with Russel later on), and then if I’m interested in the Greeks, Reginald E Allen’s Greek Philosophy Thales to Aristotle. Is that all worth reading?
>>24892499Naw.Seriously, check the short podcasts here for what YOU want to pursue.https://historyofphilosophy.net
>>24892499>skipping the scholastics You're doing yourself a disservice
reading philosophy that has no relevance to the time youre living in is just reading history.
>>24892518Well I’m not skipping them, I’ll try to get to everything I can. This is just an intro
>>24892499Plato and Descartes are really good starting picks. They write in a clear and engaging way, and help you get familiar with a lot of important philosophical ideas without drowning in jargon. Bertrand Russel is just not worth it i think, although he had a big impact in how history of philosophy is usually thought/simplified to students. Russel gets so many philosophers wrong in such comically wrongheaded and ungenerous ways that reading it is just is not useful if its the first time you hear about most of the philosophers he mentions.Perhaps a rather specific recommendation but if youre interested in a really good overview of (modern) moral philosophy i have found Rawl's Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy an incredibly impressive analysis/introduction to the moral thought of Leibniz/Hume/Kant/Hegel, albeit with a very specific interpretative lens.
>>24892499I would start more simply, maybe with the Stanley Rosen edited "The Philosopher's Handbook," which is an anthology of excerpts (each of about several pages' length), arranged by topic, covering ancient and modern philosophers. A smorgasbord of excerpts by the philosophers themselves may be a better use of your time at the start rather than devoting yourself to texts that you may quickly find you don't care for. In general, I would skip histories, even good ones like Copleston's, since the necessity of summarizing means you're in the dark on how the philosophers reached any of their positions, or, worse, really hoping the historian isn't biased or didn't fuck up in their own reading of pretty difficult material.
>>24892499Early modern philosophy like Descartes is a good starting point because it sets up the discussion for what a lot of thinkers are going to talk about, even to this very day. Ancient guys like Plato had an unimaginably huge impact, but they are harder to approach without direction from a university, lest you get miserably bad readings. For Plato, the republic is actually in 10 parts (books), and the early sections were written at different times to the latter parts. I think it's better to start with the doing the story of the trial of socrates. It follows the events of a cool narrative structure and shows the birth of philosophy as an activity through the contrast with greek ideas at the time: euthyphro -> apology -> crito -> phaedo. These are short works, and much shorter than the republic in total. I believe there's even a text that unifies them in print.The russell text isn't a great help. The worst way to be wrong in philosophy is to just be completely off the mark conceptually in a misleading way. Texts like Russell's ferment deep conceptual misunderstandings that can throw you off track for a long time. Doing philosophy is a slow and accurate process, like mathematics. Avoid wikipedia and the IEP for the same reasonUse the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy as your primary secondary source whenever you want to look something up. >>24892511>https://historyofphilosophy.netbuy an ad nigger.
Do not read the retarded nigger Plato. Start with CD Broad, Wilfrid Sellars, and JL Austin.
>>24892499start with homer
>>24892832if you need university guidance to read plato and get anything out of it you should honestly just stop reading philosophy and stop bothering to put on the pretension you just aren't cut out for it.
You need to read primary sources, not compendia and summaries. Philosophy isn’t about the results or the gist it’s spending time thinking along with a genius and the professors who write these books are generally not geniuses. I’m not saying never read them but you shouldn’t rely on them or doubt your ability to read independently. For premodern philosophy you need Aristotle, for modern philosophy you need Hegel. Plato to Descartes is a retarded trajectory. Online, most people are pseuds, they’ll say Aristotle and Hegel are boring, autistic, etc, but they are wrong and they are absolutely indispensable. A good plan would be to read Plato and Aristotle alongside each other for at least a year or two. Philosophy is a science, you have to put in real work and study it. It’s not like reading literature. If you study for an hour or two a day for years you’ll get somewhere and if you don’t you won’t. You have to read these books over and over again to really understand them. Al-Farabi is said to have read each of Aristotle’s works hundreds of times, for example. Philosophical reading/thinking is so opposed to our general culture and reading habits that I doubt you will succeed but I hope you prove me wrong. Anyone who doesn’t tell you to read Aristotle is a pseud, it’s that simple.
>>24892499>I want to get into philosophyWhy do you want to get into philosophy?What are the question you want answered and truths you are seeking.The books that you listed may seem very boring to someone just starting out.
>>24892499Start with geometry. Theon of Smyrna. Then begin with Plato.
>>24892886Not just Plato but the greeks in general. The greek ways of life, as well as the difficult y of reading a 2000 year old text in translation is a recipe for awful readings, which are already innumerable. One could definitely get *something* out of it, just that it would be insanely retarded and wrong - esp if starting there
>>24892912>over 2500 years of philosophy>myriads of schools and sub-schools of thought>people still arguing about what's true or bullshit>"no, you have to read only two">"you have to read the guy who's wrong about the solar system and the guy who took hermeticism to seriously">"philosophy is really just reading what some other guy wrote, not thinking for yourself, dumbass">"no, you're not supposed to watch drama or read homer or dissect and watch animals or run a school, like aristotle did, you're just supposed to read aristotle">"no, you're not supposed to read everything you can about everything and travel europe to see museums and operas and write newpaper articles about local politics, like hegel did, you're just supposed to read hegel">"the only way to do philosophy is by reading two authors like theyre gods"go play in traffic fag
>>24893040dude you are retarded im sorry you won't get it no matter how much you are taught, not everyone is cut out for philosophy that's fine.
>>24892499>read Bertrand Russel’s history of western philosophythat is 3000 pages of pure bilge. read the condensed frederick copleston instead
>>24892832>buy an adIt's a quick overview. Why waste time in such a huge time wasting field? Buy a Snickers. faggot.
>>24892499>Start with Plato's republicNO!start with the Socratic dialogues, yes, but NOT the republic. The apology, the meno, or the euthyphro would all be a fine start.
>>24892526You don't understand Plato if you think it has no current relavence.
>>24892499whoever recommended that is a bad friend and is playing tricks on you
>Start with the greeksDon't foget to read Euclid or at least what several philosophers have thought about Euclid. His Elements are the second most read book in western history after The Bible.
>>24892499why not start with the presocratics? their not a big time sink to read or nothin
>>24893216"Don't read the most important philosopher, who dominated western thought for hundreds of years. He's boring, do all this other shit instead and then you can be a pseud just like me!"I also never said you should only read two philosophers, I said you need to read these two. This is true. Any philosophy professor worth his salt would say you need to read Aristotle and, if you get into modern continental phil, Hegel. If you skip Aristotle you have no frame of reference and will not be able to understand anyone writing after him. And I never said this is the only thing you should do in your life. You're a pseud, exposed in your pseudness by my brilliant and helpful post, and now you're lashing out like the retarded animal you are. The reason online philosophical discussion is so shit is that most of these hobbyists don't read Aristotle or Hegel. Simple as.
>>24894966Legit for presocratics, just read the Aurea vidya translation of Parmenides and then watch this short film of the key Heraclitus fragments and you’ll have a grasp on presocratic monist philosophy.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nhLxgLBji48&pp=ygUQSGVyYWNsaXQgbG9ic2N1cg%3D%3DThe first section of “On Nature of Man” is cool primary resource on criticism of Ionian school also btw. It is available in GER Lloyds translation of Hippocrates for penguin classics
>>24895001kek you're a pseud making philosophy into whose line is it anyway "the subject where everything's made up and the results don't matter"keep seething that people read other philisophers than the only two you read
>>24892499>Is that all worth reading?Depends, for what end?What you described is an ultra-speedrun of Western Philosophy from its "glory days" to its current, abysmal state. If you want to just check what's out there in general, it would probably be more beneficial to get an introduction or a couple. Then I'd recommend that you indulge in the particular topic you find interesting. It's like listening to one track per genre vs coming to a well throught-out concert. In the former case you will be able to say you learned more, but the latter contains actual understanding. And the learning curve for most topics is incredibly interesting, since most topics (from universals to free will) have actually gone through so much development that the discussions of today barely relate to the original questions.
I started with Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy first and then read things I found interesting. Durant's book will ground you w.r.t Western Philosophy. I think from this book I went to Plato's Dialogues and the Republic -> skipped Medieval Phil (sorry Catholicsisters) -> Decartes -> some Kant -> some Schopenhauer -> Heidegger -> a bachelor's degree focused on 20th and 21st century analytic philosophy
>>24892499First watch youtube videos JUST to get introduced to the main problems and philosophers, don't become a diehard advocate of certain school of thought in your first approach. After that, you can read Russell's history of philosophy (I only read the first volume about classic philosophy, which I think it's less controversial) and Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, perhaps peek a philosophical dictionary to get familiar with concepts (I'd like to recommend one but I'm ESL).Then you can read Plato; almost everything by him is worthwhile and enjoyable but if you want to go faster, the most important dialogues in my opinion are: Eutiphro, Gorgias, Meno, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, Parmenides (hardest one by far, additional commentary is needed), Theaetetus and Sophist. The reading at this point, when you are actually tackling classics, has to be complemented with some writing. Take notes, organise ideas, come up with your own refutations or arguments, you decide how thorough those notes will be, but you have to write something. You can also complement the reading with secondary sources or commentaries, especially those which provide ordered lists of the interpretations for each dialogue that important philosophers have made. Some people might say "but this way you are not being an independent thinker, you are going to be brainwashed by academia", and to that I respond that as a starting point you have to humble and check from time to time that your interpretations are not diverting too much from the historical interpretations. I'd like to recommend books or video series in English with these characteristics, but again, I'm ESL, perhaps the Copleston manual, idk. After you are done with Plato, you'll probably already have a strong foundation to decide what to read next, but Aristotle is obviously unskippable. Aristotle is very hard if you read him seriously and not in an arrogant way like "heh, I'm reading this outfashioned retard just to be able to get to Hegel and the homoerotic frenchcucks". Getting in depth into Aristotle is not for everyone, so I can tolerate that someone reads some of his works here and there at the same time they read something else, but if you do get in depth and write your interpretations, I'd say that you'll already be a philosopher. Maybe a bad philosopher with a lot to improve, a lot to read, but a philosopher at the end of the day. Not understanding scholasticism and Aristotle is modern day route to become a member of the mediocre philosophers stockpile.
>>24892499I bet that you ain't reading allat
