Any advice for independent philosophy study?

[Joel McCracken]

I've never really studied philosophy seriously, but recently I've been
thinking more about it and want to work studying more philosophy into
my time.

I wonder if the group has any general advice on independent study of
philosophy? I'm thinking the kinds of things to watch out for that
someone who was studying might not have a problem with.

[Hugo Estrada]

Hi, Joel,

Start with the early dialogues of Plato. They are essentially plays, and they are fun to read. The early ones, which are believed to be closer to Socrates' ideas introduce many of the basic tools of philosophy. The best dialogues are the ones where Socrates and his opponent are both confused. Reaching this point of confusion where you face your ignorance is the most positive take on the Socratic method.

For a survey on the topic of philosophy, go to the library and get a comic book history of philosophy to quickly get an idea of the landscape, and then get a "for dummies" and quickly page through  to get a slighter better notion of what each philosopher is about. After that focus on the topic that interests you the most. And I truly mean it: just dive into whatever you find attractive. 

Finally, if you could get someone to discuss these issues with, that that would be pretty nice. On this, independent study gives you an advantage. Unfortunately when studying in universities your grade depends on agreeing with your professor. So unlike school, you can actually engage in real philosophy.

Hugo

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[Dave Sims]

All really good advice. I eventually got into reading source texts almost exclusively, but when I was starting out, I found a few of the shiny-page textbooks actually pretty helpful in getting a high-level overview, in particular, The Great Conversation.

My personal philosophical commitments may be showing here, but I just want to really emphasize what Hugo suggested about starting with early stuff. It's too easy to read recent philosophical discussions (and by "recent" I mean, basically the last 300 years) and lose essential perspective on core questions that have driven western philosophy from the beginning.

With that said, I wish someone had emphasized the presocratics to me when I was just getting started. Specifically, the tension between Heraclitus and Parmenides, but really an overview of all the presocratic philosophers makes understanding Plato, Aristotle, and everything that came after so much easier. It's essential context, and was a huge "ah-ha" moment when that was backfilled for me with later readings. The good news there is there's not much of it -- just fragments and some commentary. Deep readings aren't really necessary, just broad strokes will do, because for most of them the complexity and subtlety of the giants like Plato and Aristotle just aren't there. But once you get a basic handle on the core questions that weren't presented in that era, pretty much the rest of western thought makes so much more sense in terms of those questions: change and permanence, unity and diversity, what is the ultimate nature of reality?

Dave

[Dave Sims]

s/weren't/were/

[Steve Klabnik]

I had some guidance from a professor, but basically, started with
this: https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/4017292

[Mike English]

One way I've enjoyed surveying the classics has been the History of Philosophy podcast by Prof. Peter Adamson. His motto for the podcast is "without any gaps" and after 136 episodes he is still leading up to Avicenna (c. 980 - 1037). The format is a mix of lecture-like monologues (complete with witty puns) and interviews of experts on particular topics as they arise. Episodes are a brisk 20 minutes or so in length. I really appreciate the chronological format because it makes the development of ideas much easier to understand. If you have any interest in the History of Western Philosophy, it's worth a listen.

You can find it here:

http://www.historyofphilosophy.net/

-Mike English

—
Sent from Mailbox for iPhone

[Simon St.Laurent]

I have a simple piece of advice:

Don't seek answers.  In fact, be suspicious of anything you find that seems like an answer.

It's not that there aren't answers.  There may well be.  It's more that if you find something that seems like an answer early on, it will change the way you read and explore from there on out.  It's especially important when you don't have professors or a syllabus to make you read stuff you'd otherwise avoid.

Stick to looking for good questions for a while, and even there, be cautious.  Eventually you'll know when to discard this advice.

Thanks,
Simon

[Hugo Estrada]

Hi, Simon,

Yes, this is very good advice.  Let me extend it: don't read introductory essay. Just dive right into the books. The essays are a specific reading of philosophers. Read them until you have read them yourself and you made up your mind.

[Joel McCracken]

Thanks for all the advice! It all makes sense.

I've read (some) Plato and Aristotle, and it seems like they are a
good place to start to really dig deep. I am enamored with ancient
Greek civilization, so that only makes it easier (or, really, the
entire extended Mediterranean world -- it was a really interesting
time). I probably would have skipped over those earlier philosophers,
so its nice notice.

I've been partial to Russell; has anyone read "The History of Western
Philosophy"? Would it compare to "The Great Conversation"? I imagine
that Russell doesn't include much post-modern thought.

Thanks for the reading list Steve +1. As I tend to lean toward the
analytic side, I think that list is really valuable.

Podcasts are also a really interesting source of learning. I think
they are a good source of "supplementary" discussion to get you more
familiar with a topic. I am already enjoying the "History of
Philosophy" podcast. I think it'll fit my workflow as a good overview
of the entire field.

Also, interesting advice to avoid answers. I think it makes sense
though. Without an understanding of the broader issues involved in
philosophy, it seems like it could be easy to get "stuck" on a certain
concept.

I'll go over this again in more depth, but thanks guys. I appreciate the advice.

[Dave Sims]

Russell is important to read, but keep in mind that you're reading a specific important philosopher with an agenda, not an objective history. Russell's take on philosophy is highly particular to Russell. He's not a historian of ideas so much as a man who wanted to save the world with Reason and Math, and he had a very specific take on philosophy that colors his account. When reading Russell, you're reading Russell.

For a high-level objective view, I much prefer TGC. But that's not to say you shouldn't read Russell.

[Steve Klabnik]

+1 on the comment about Russell. His Nietzsche is particularly bad,
but you have to remember he was writing at a time period where N's
sister was using his work to justify fascism, soooooooooo

[Dave Sims]

Yeah, heh, that's a great point. Russell is a fascinating figure, both for his highly charged and emotional move into philosophy out of math, and the kind of philosophy he was doing that was so informed by his time. But, imo, he was not a great philosopher, and at times egregiously bad with basic concepts. He was no doubt one of the great mathematicians of the century, but not a great philosopher. In The Problems of Philosophy, his fundamental misunderstanding of essences and ignorance of Greek metaphysics was kind of shocking to me.

That said, his footprint, like Descartes, is vast and far bigger than the quality of his actual technical philosophy, and it's important to read and understand his place in the century, particularly the Principia, its effect on positivism, and how that set the stage for Popper.

[Joel McCracken]

Peter Aronoff (@telemachus) added his own reading list via twitter:

https://gist.github.com/telemachus/b4bbebae4f4493550919
https://twitter.com/telemachus/status/357160172830982144

[Mike English]

Here's another good reading list. 

This one from Peter Aronoff (@telemachus) who has a strong background in ancient philosophy and actually teaches classics when not hacking on code:

https://gist.github.com/telemachus/b4bbebae4f4493550919

-Mike

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[Dave Sims]

Great list, was not familiar with Stroud, but it looks great, and, well, right up my alley. At the risk of being glib, I found the top amazon review particularly helpful:

Most scholarly philsophy of the twentieth century has as yet failed to emerge from what Richard Rorty has termed the "linguistic turn." That is, by the early 1900's professional philosophers were driven out of the more investigative fictions through a few hundred years of forced exile qua scientific optimism and instead began to concentrate on the ability of the agent to actually say anything meaningful, a problem that many early modern philosophers, as evidenced by their lengthy treatises, did not appreciate. Stroud's work is a return to that older idea that philosophy should be less investigative and more speculative. 'The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism' seeks to reaqaint contemporary thinkers to an idea they had largely abandoned as meaningless or else secondary to the linguistic nature of experience. Stroud argues that, far from such belittling views, scepticism is alive and well. Indeed, the book could have been retitled 'The Damnable Persistance of Philsophical Scepticism' as Stroud shows how historical and now famous efforts to refute it, from Kant and Hume to Moore and Quine, have failed.He is not hopeless, however. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that Stroud is searching for a reply. "Even if the thesis means nothing, or not what it seems to mean, can the study of scepticism about the world around us nevertheless reveal something deep and important about human knowledge or human nature or the urge to understand them philosophically? I am pretty sure that the answer is 'Yes', but I do not get as far as I would like towards showing why that is so. Nor do I ever manage to state precisely what the lesson or moral of a study of philsophical scepticism might be" (Stroud, pg.ix). In that sense, the book reaffirms the faith that what philosophy is good at is not investigation, which in the intervening decades since Descartes we have delegated the exclusive realm of science, for good or ill, but instead of speculation. One has a hard time with the former if the latter remains unclear. The author says, "I mean that the study of the very nature of a philosophical problem can be an illuminating activity quite independently of whether it ever leads to a better answer"

[Simon St.Laurent]

On Tuesday, July 16, 2013 12:51:34 PM UTC-4, Dave Sims quoted:

 Indeed, the book could have been retitled 'The Damnable Persistance of Philsophical Scepticism' as Stroud shows how historical and now famous efforts to refute it, from Kant and Hume to Moore and Quine, have failed.He is not hopeless, however. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that Stroud is searching for a reply. "Even if the thesis means nothing, or not what it seems to mean, can the study of scepticism about the world around us nevertheless reveal something deep and important about human knowledge or human nature or the urge to understand them philosophically?

This reminds me of the other approach I sometimes recommend to people convinced that their philosophy is right: revisit Descartes' original problem of knowledge and see if you can climb out of that hole without his resort to a benevolent God.

I don't believe anyone, even the immortal Kant, has actually succeeded at that.  (Of course I'd say that - I'm an epistemological nihilist and a theist, though it took me decades to arrive there.)

The efforts have certainly struck interesting sparks, though!

Thanks,
Simon

[Greg Borenstein]

Great thread, guys!

Here's a totally different angle on this. As someone with academic training in art history, one of the first branches of Philosophy I encountered in depth was Aesthetics. Aesthetics hasn't come up yet on this list, but it's one of the branches of Philosophy of most immediate and practical use to makers of software. How often do technical arguments degenerate into "just a matter of taste" or other aesthetic judgements? How do you make something great if you can't define what "great" is?

Awhile back, Alex Payne (who I think is on this list -- hi, Alex!), in a post calling for more reasoned technical discussion brought up the fact that this needn't be the end of discussion. That "the humanities have provided us tools for reasoning about that which hard science may not be able to measure".

In response, I put together a little post with an Aesthetics reading list for programmers that might be an interesting starting point:

http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2009/04/05/an_aesthetics_reading_list_for/

Would be curious to hear suggestions in this area from others as well.

-- Greg

[Steve Klabnik]

I was just speaking with someone last night about how we (she and I)
have basically entirely ignored Aesthetics. Seems great!

[Luca Vallino]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AL95TcwXQc

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/podcasts/aesthetics_and_the_philosophy_of_art

These are a good enough starting point, i think?

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 8:53 AM, Steve Klabnik <st...@steveklabnik.com> wrote:

I was just speaking with someone last night about how we (she and I)
have basically entirely ignored Aesthetics. Seems great!

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Luca Vallino

[Sam Serpoosh]

 

I just started reading/learning about philosophy and I've always found it fascinating and super interesting!

There' s a book called: "The Philosophy Book" which talks about the very basics of philosophy and why it matters 

and what is it all about! And also starts from Thales of Miletus and so on talk about the main way of thinking and reasoning 

of each philosopher and how one got affected by another etc. it seems like a very interesting read!

Hope you'll like it,

Best Regards,

[Luca Vallino]

I strongly dislike "The Philosophy Book" because of its simplistic form that causes constant inaccuracy. I have not fondled its pages in a while, but i seem to remember it accuses Hume of dogmatic insistence on the fact that humans are machines of nature and this is so patently untrue that even the back of a milk carton could explain him better. Don't touch this book with a ten foot pole!

To Mr. Serpoosh: you are on dangerous ground. There is no "easy way in" to philosophy. If you really  really need an introduction, try "Sophie's World", by Jostein Gaarder, or else pick up the Discourses somewhere and begin there. 

Hopefully,

LV

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[Simon St.Laurent]

On Tuesday, July 16, 2013 4:55:01 PM UTC-4, Greg Borenstein wrote:

In response, I put together a little post with an Aesthetics reading list for programmers that might be an interesting starting point:

http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2009/04/05/an_aesthetics_reading_list_for/

Would be curious to hear suggestions in this area from others as well.

Great list, especially Baudelaire.  Did you really have to remind me of Clement Greenberg?  Well, okay, I get why.

I'd suggest adding Christopher Alexander.  He's known (sort of, often wrongly) by programmers for A Pattern Language, but The Nature of Order definitely fits this list, as might The Timeless Way of Building.  He has an address to the IEEE that probably fits this list:

http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm  (maybe I shared that before?)

Another good option would be John Ruskin - both his explicitly aesthetic work and his more economic and moral work are deeply grounded in aesthetics.  William Morris would also be a good idea, again for his work on aesthetic creation and for things like the interplay of aesthetics and social structure in News From Nowhere.

The three of them together have pretty well convinced me that there is more to aesthetics than "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  Took some doing.

Thanks,
Simon

[Chris Morris]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Simon St.Laurent <simo...@gmail.com> wrote:

He has an address to the IEEE that probably fits this list:

http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm 

"In our own time, the production of environment has gone out of the hands of people who use the environment." ... reminds me of spreadsheets. :)

--
Chris

http://livingsocial.com | http://clabs.org

[Richard Massey]

I think reading up on critical thinking is very important. Being able to recognise why an argument an author is putting forward is either valid or invalid is particularly valuable.

There are many tools in the critical thinker's arsenal, not least of which is an understanding of necessary/sufficient conditions. For me, it is invaluable to be able recognise whether or not an author has explicated what the world would need to be like in order for a given claim to be "true" -- whatever that means!

Also, I think the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy is a very useful tool. It comes in handy when something you are reading mentions some specific topic, or term, or controversy (behaviourism, say) and you want to read up on the matter from a philosophical perspective without having to chase down references from whatever you happen to be reading.

[Dave Sims]

I think one big mental shift necessary for thinking “philosophically” is dispensing with some of the analogies we might have as technicians/coders/professionals. Learning to think critically at a deep level requires rational discipline but also intuitive and poetic habits. I’m betraying some of my fundamental biases here against pure rationalism/reductionism, but I feel pretty strongly that philosophical thinking is as much like a muscle you train, or an instrument you learn to play, as it is gathering information and applying new “rules”. 

It’s a skill, a ‘habitus’, acquired by reading great philosophy and internalizing not only facts and principles, but conforming your mental intuitions and resetting/expanding the expectations you have for what philosophical insight really gives you. Philosophy just “feels different” than other mental disciplines. One reason I favor Husserl’s influence over the last century (as fragmented as it is), is that he was able to recover some of this for the modern imagination in his notion of phenomenological “reduction” or bracketing: it’s very much a mental exercise that takes practice before you become comfortable with it. 

So, as much as it’s extremely important to internalize principles like the rules of logic, necessary/sufficient, and other basic categories, it’s also important to just read great philosophy: The Republic, Nichomachean Ethics, The Gay Science, Discourse on Method. Those works cannot be distilled. The poetic, historical and autobiographical aspects of those works are inextricable from the ideas that they contain, and help transform the way we experience the world and reason about it.

-- 
Dave Sims

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