Ask HN: Learning about philosophy
Are there any books that are considered a must for someone new to the field of philosophy?
I understand it is a vague question but it is a topic I have recently become interested in because of digging deeper into mental models. Mental models address a lot of 'practical' situations but I am realizing that they fall short when it comes to bigger questions of life.
What path did you follow to develop a personal philosophy?
292 comments
[ 8.9 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadI would also recommend The Structure of Science Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn), very important book to understand how science works, what are its limitations, how should we treat scientific facts. It also show very nature of learning about world (it's not lineary incremental like most people think). It also emphasize that there is always quite a lot of dogma in science (you need some assumptions that can't be really proved right, only wrong if you dwell on it and eventually fail). If you are interested in modern science belief system and what are stuff it can't explain (according to Kuhn, any science paradigm has smaller or bigger blind spot), it's quite well explained in The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.
If you are interested in nature of non-linearity of learning, what were steps in forming human's worldview, I think Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West make a good point. I can't say for sure, because I have only started (it's very long, 1500 pages), but I definitely like the guy. :)
He is a modern philosopher with really valuable insights about how to navigate the world given all of our biases and inability to accept the role of uncertainty in just about everything we do.
https://plato.stanford.edu/
It was written by a teacher and geared at young adults. So its not a rigorous introduction. But its a short read and by the end you'll have enough leads to follow.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie%27s_World
I'm sure people out there criticize it as not rigorous or full of inaccuracies, but I've found it an easy read that gives a good overview into the works of western philosophy.
https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World-Sophie-Book-1/dp/031070...
I'm sure it's charming, but not what I was after. You want the one by Jostein Gaarder.
* Descartes' Meditations
* Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding
* Hobbes Leviathan
* Kant Critique of Pure Reason
* Kant Prolegomena
* Kuhn Structure of Scientific Revolution
* Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit
* Foucault Discipline & Punish
* Sellars Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mind
* Sellars The Scientific Image of Man
* Quine Word & Object
* Davidson On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme
* Nagel What is it like to be a bat?
* Searle Minds, Brains, and Programs
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [0] has a ton of great summary articles and bibliographies that could definitely keep you busy for a few decades or so. I've never been tremendously into ancient or non-western philosophy, which is a deficiency I aim to correct one day, but there are a ton of great essays there as well.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/
Kant may also be a stretch for someone whose new - even the "idiots guide" versions of his works that he wrote because his other works were criticized in his own time for being hard to read
The rest listed here are good - but IMHO you should always start with plato/socrates. I'd throw in Timaeus and the sophist and maybe even parts of republic (at least the chapter involving allegory of cave and allegory of divided line) to this list
Similar with Kant. Bang your head against the categorical imperative at least. It’s a concept to be familiar with. I agree that a deep read of Kant is too far down the rabbit hole to start with.
Why no Greeks? Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics at least!
I would add Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” as a short and readable intro to existentialism, followed by kierkegaard’s Being and Nothingness and Nietzche…maybe The Gay Science? (I am biased towards existentialism)
EDIT
I’m sure to get carried away, but some utilitarians would be good. Bertrand Russell is quite readable. His essays on Happiness are quick and impactful. John Stuart Mill, too, is a marvel of rationality (and progressivism (not on everything)) and sometimes prophetic. There’s value, I think, especially for those in tech to see the limits of rationality.
Spicy hot take, I think Ayn Rand is great for this. She takes hyper rational philosophy as far as it can go. It ends up being absurd precisely because it is so divorced from the irrational sides of humans. She’s fascinating, in my opinion. Understanding why she’s both revered in some parts of society and a bit of a meme in “serious” philosophy is a valuable exercise.
(To this day, I feel like maybe one might…not imagine Sisyphus to be happy? But Camus getting there is valuable. And maybe he’s right!)
Source if you don't believe me (see conclusion and checkout a full copy for further context): https://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/Sartre-Search.pdf
Here's another source in html: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/crit...
These are are probably the most significant works of Continental philosophy, and should definitely take precedence of Foucault, who's really the only representative of Continental philosophy (with the exception of maybe Hegel) on your list.
It should also be made clear that plato.standford.edu is a highly biased site that mostly depicts philosophy from an Analytic perspective, where Continental thought is barely represented (or misrepresented).
NOTE: As I tried to make clear in a later post in this thread, I'm not recommending Heidegger or Nietzsche for a beginner. I just think their works belong on the list of the person I replied to more than do a lot of the other people he lists (many of whom, by the way, also aren't good for beginners to start with).
As far as Nietzsche goes - by his own words (he is very clear about this in one of his books - I think it was ecco homo) - you're supposed to have read ALL of the works of Kant and then Schopenhauer before you can even understand Nietzsche. Not that many people agree with him about that, but it did color my perception of him (and the study of the two that he asks the readers to look into does a massive amount to explain why Nietzsche sounds like such an edgelord)...
They're not going to understand Hegel either, and probably not Kant, or a bunch of other philosophers on that list.
But Heidegger and Nietzsche were undeniably hugely influential on philosophy, so they belong on that list as much or more than many of the other people listed, who were of minor significance, at best.
Ecce Homo was written shortly before Nietzsche went insane, with chapter titles like "Why I am So Wise", "Why I am So Clever", and "Why I Write Such Excellent Books". I wouldn't take what he wrote there at face value.. and much of what he writes in other places should be taken with a grain of salt also, as he often wrote with tongue firmly in cheek, and it's often difficult to nail down exactly what Nietzsche thought or intended.
This is one of the reasons he's been so influential on modern Continental philosophy, some of which took on wholeheartedly his spirit of play and irony, which most of philosophy before Nietzsche was missing.
That's not to say that Nietzsche can't be serious.. much of his work is serious, but it's written in an aphoristic rather than a systematic way, which makes understanding what he's saying a lot more difficult than, say, many Analytic thinkers, who prize being clear and straightforward.
So, yeah, Nietzsche's not great for beginners either, and he's famous for being misinterpreted anyway, even by professional philosophers. But he's still highly significant, and for my money far more profound than all the Analytics put together.
And sticking with western philosophy, if you are suggesting Hegel and Nietzsche. I would also bring you into the (late) twentieth century with Deleuze & Guattari. But I also wouldn't recommend them to a beginner.
I also think as a start, knowing these figures, perhaps even tasting their work, lets you read around them. You see the way their ideas spread out into the world. I sometimes think there are more different takes on Nietzsche's work than ideas in them!
You can also read back and trace a line of thought through various philosophers from say, Deleuze back through Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Liebniz, all the way back to the Stoics. To understand Dennett, you need see the impact Descartes has on modern thought, and you can trace that kind of thinking back through to the Socratics. You start to see that these philosophical threads actually shape people's entire view of the world around them, and in some way the world itself.
Hegel, however, was clearly influential, so he shouldn't be left out of a list of influential philosophers. I'm just personally not a fan of his at all, and were it not for his significance I would skip him.
https://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achi...
His Practical Ethics [0] and other books are excellent.
Primarily, I think it's important to very seriously think about our moral obligations to others, especially in today's interconnected world (where we not only can, but inevitably do affect others whether we like it or not).
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/0521...
Note that philosophy requires a significant amount of thought on your own part. There are parts of these three (and many others that follow) that are absurd. See Aristotle on many scientific matters. They lived in a society with slaves, so you’ll find some hierarchical views of humans that we now reject.
What’s most important from there is what you care about.
Is it epistemology — the study of knowledge? Or ethics — what is right, wrong, just? Is it political philosophy, be it democracy or monarchy or anarchy? Are you curious about power? Want to explore consciousness, what it is to be a “self” and the repercussions of those answers? Maybe linguistics, how we communicate, use language, and the strengths/weaknesses of it.
There is philosophy of sport, of war, of aesthetics; on gender and race; on the meaning (or not!) of things; on life and death and god(s) and spirituality; on machines, computers, and artificial intelligence.
I believe that the Greeks are important because they are so foundational to what comes after. Everything, the saying goes, is a footnote to them.
But after that, follow your questions. You can spend a hell of a lot of time reading things you don’t deeply care about. It will be a slog and without an external forcing function, you’ll probably lose interest and give up. For me that is philosophy of language, specifically a fair bit of what I consider to be nonsense in the past sixty years.
A good way to find who to read is to first know what people call it (e.g. epistemology) and then either find college courses or online lists. Go back to the early work and work your way through the Core. From there you’ll know enough of what the questions are that you can branch out.
* A very detailed and useful resource for a lot of topics is also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2].
* You can also try the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series [3]. These cover a broad range of topics, not just philosophy; plus, you can approach each topic separately, without having to go through things that might not interest you.
Of course, these recommendations completely ignore non-western philosophical traditions. Hindu and Buddhist traditions might also be interesting to explore.
Personally I have approached philosophy strictly as an autodidact, hence quite haphazardly. After having explored a bunch of topics I however find most use and interest in those more modern and analytical parts of philosophy that touch on science, mathematics, cognitive science, logic.
Political and moral philosophy are also quite important because they allow you to get a grasp of the intellectual framework modern institutions are built on. A lot of the things that we take for granted (e.g. representative democracy, the ubiquity of nation-states, the central role of economic institutions in society) are actually not at all dictated by nature, but more by cultural norms and various philosophical ideas and systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosoph...
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/
[3] https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/v/very-short-...
Opinionated is one way of describing it. Myopic, ill-informed, and narrow-minded on subjects that Russell wasn't an expert on is another way to put it.
As someone who used to be a huge fan of Russell when I was young, I'd say a beginner would do themselves a huge disservice by letting their views of philosophy be colored by Russell's bias and mischaracterization of philosophers he doesn't appreciate or understand.
With this in mind, it's probably good to treat anything you read as something that has to be filtered through your own mind; always questioned and re-questioned, compared with the original sources and with competing interpretations and views.
At the end of the day we have to make our own mind, nothing should be taken as holy writ. This is the case for people with some philosophical experience, as well as for beginners.
Learning philosophy or philosophy history is one thing (I'd guess it is more about discussing texts with others than acquiring encyclopedic "knowledge").
To develop your own "philosophy", you need to get rid of other philosophies. Then maybe you will become another philosopher or not. Check my answer on how to think for yourself for the details.
Survey the landscape first - get a hand-wavey high level understanding on the two primary schools today: analytic vs continental philosophy. Then study each one’s history and origins.
Read this book (also available as YouTube videos I think): https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Book-Ideas-Simply-Explaine...
This will give you high level introduction of the landscape across the various epochs, the big ideas and their main purveyors.
At the end of that you should have a good idea which philosopher/era/ideas interest you most. Only then consider diving deeper.
Specifically because you speak of mental models and “developing a personal philosophy” (and because you are on this website I am making some assumptions about your background ans familiarity with computer science/information theory) I also recommend Luciano Floridi. The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design
https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Information-Theory-Philosophy-C...
These things will shape your worldview. Reading books is just a small piece in this puzzle, and I'd definitely skip books written by professional philosophers.
Books aren't nearly as good because you won't get to discuss the ideas with other students who are also learning the subject, which is half the fun and half the point of philosophy. You'll also miss out on the insights and explanations of the professor, which will be very valuable, if the professor is any good.
As for books, the Socratic dialogues are probably the best place to start, since the ideas pretty easy to grasp compared to later philosophy, they're written in an engaging way, and give you plenty of food for thought. Also, much of later Western philosophy is a reaction to, comment on, or has been influenced by Socrates and Plato. You'll be much more "in the loop" after getting some familiarity with ancient Greek philosophy than if you just dived straight in to later work.
Something else you'll want to be aware of is that in contemporary philosophy there are two major approaches: Analytic and Continental. Adherents of these approaches generally despise one another, denigrate, or ignore one another's work, though at least more recently the Analytics have been starting to read, re--envision, and appropriate Continental thinkers.
The Analytic approach dominates philosophy in the English-speaking world (and is coming to dominate the rest too), and when you take philosophy courses that's the view you'll most likely be exposed to, and it's Analytic philosophers you're most likely to be recommended when you ask about philosophy, especially on sites like HN, which are more likely to be peopled by fans of logic, rigor, and science, which Analytics themselves are huge fans of.
But your exposure to philosophy would be incomplete and probably really biased if you were mostly exposed to Analytic thought or viewed philosophy primarily through an Analytic lens.
This conversation between Siddhartha and the Buddha is always relevant. Siddhartha must leave because Buddha himself did not achieve enlightenment by reading and studying the Buddha’s teaching. He found his own path there.
I think about this a lot when, say, a Paul Graham essay makes the rounds. There’s a sense that “to become like X, I must read them and do what it says so I might become them.” But of course they didn’t become who they read, were not The Next Steve Jobs. They were the first of themselves.
As a fan of both analytic and continental philosophy, I can also confirm that professionally trained analytic philosophers tend to be biased and limited in their arguments. But aren't we all.
I agree: it's essential to expose yourself to broader works of philosophy. I would extend this beyond Europe to Asian works of philosophy, and aboriginal and indigenous stories across the world. Outside the Eurocentric philosophy bubble, it can be harder to disentangle philosophy from religion, culture, and myth, but that's part of the fun.
How idiotic would it be if there was a book called "A Perfectly Complete and Eternally Correct Encyclopedia of Philosophy", and we all read it and called ourselves 'philosophers'.
maggie thatcher didn't say "all problems come from outside europe". she said "in my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland europe and all the solutions have come from the english-speaking nations of the world"
i think you're a bit mistaken about the nature of the analytic-continental divide
Also, wow that's an ignorant quote. Let me rephrase it: "We have no internal problems. All of our external problems during a 60 year period have come from our neighboring countries, and all the solutions are the ones we and our allies came up with." Genius. (sorry for the snark). Is your argument that the analytic-continental divide is just Thatcherite Anglocentrism? Because I really don't think it is.
That's my whole disagreement. The analytic-continental divide is a split within the western world. But you present it as if the non-eurocentric world is more conducive to the continental tradition, when even the concept of eurocentrism not only comes from europe, but it comes from the continental tradition through hegel's philosophy of history and his predecessors.
Ah okay, I see the confusion: I mean "western philosophy".
Here is one very specific recommendation for a place to start: Richard Rorty, and in particular, his book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature."
I've suffered through the tension between the Continental and Anglican worlds, and I think that Rorty is extremely valuable as a bridge between the two, and potentially an entry point to the one you're not familiar with (or both if you're familiar with neither).
Given the original question (about "mental models"), the Philosophy of the Mind is one of the more universal topics, that tends to be less controversial across the different schools of Philosophy. That Rorty book is a decent entry point to it, which will lead to things like...
A debate between Rorty and John Searle about consciousness (Searle is a mind-is-not-the-brain person):
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/425883
Correspondence between Searle and Dan Dennet about the mind (Dennet is a brain-is-a-computer person):
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c...
OP wants to "develop a personal philosophy." So they will want to learn the state of the art of philosophy. Starting with Plato to learn philosophy is like starting with Archimedes to learn physics. They would be much better off getting a lay of the land from a modern writer. In fact, just as you don't read original research papers to learn physics, I wouldn't recommend OP even read the primary works of any influential philosophers until they've gotten an overview of philosophical thought writ large, a general outline of the specific philosopher's thinking and how it changed over time, and how the philosopher's thinking influenced others. Wikipedia would be a great place to start.
There is simply too much philosophy for any lay person to read thoughtfully in their spare time. And philosophy isn't like math or science, where a small kernel of knowledge and consensus among scholars slowly grew over time. It's more like sculptors shaping clay into pots. Subsequent sculptors may immitate past artists in certain ways, and certain long term trends may emerge, but there is a distinct lack of consensus on almost everything in philosophy.
In my opinion, the reason for this is that philosophy as a means of understanding ourselves and our world beyond what science can tell us is essentially futile. In Plato's time, there was no delineation between science, philosophy and mathematics. The word "philosophy" meant "love of wisdom" in Greek. A philosopher was just someone who wanted to discover knowledge of any kind. Over time, philosophers systematized certain areas of knowledge, giving us math, logic, and science. The areas of knowledge that we were able to systematize are no longer considered to be philosophy. Philosophy today, almost by definition, is the study of problems that have resisted all attempts at systematic understanding for two thousand years. It has no wisdom for us. If you want wisdom, look to math and science.
What do math and science study? What is the proper subject of chemistry or physics? That question such questions are not something math or science can answer.
When you've got some knowledge (say from science), what do you do with it? That question, again, is not something science can answer.
Which course of action is right or wrong? Again, science can not do otherwise than to be silent here.
Mathematics is widely considered to be the foundation of and one of the most useful tools that science has, yet it itself is based largely (if not completely) on logic. Logic is part of philosophy. The foundation of mathematics (as distinct from logic) is also a branch of philosophy.
If you look at the deepest, most critical questions that science tries to answer, at the core of them is often a philosophical question that at least up to now has been intractable to scientific study. I'm talking about things such as the nature of consciousness or the mind, deep questions in physics also blend almost seamlessly in to philosophy -- things such as the nature of time and causality.
Now, it may be the case that at some point in the future science will have some convincing answers and explanations to these questions, but the belief that it will is a form of faith in science that is often termed scientism -- something which is distinct from science itself, and is not subject to scientific inquiry.
Also, when you say that "If you want wisdom, look to math and science", do you know what you mean by the word "wisdom"? Are math and science sources of wisdom or merely of knowledge, and what's the difference? All philosophical questions.
How about whether science helps us to get closer to truth? And what is truth anyway? Again, all philosophical questions which science can not answer.
I would argue that the most important questions for most people are not scientific or mathematical questions, but philosophical ones -- such as:
- "what should I do with my life?"
- "what is the purpose of my life or of the world?"
- "should I help someone in need or help myself?"
- "what subject (including mathematical or scientific subject) should I study or work on?"
- "who should live or die, be punished or rewarded?"
- "how should we structure our society?"
- "how should we as a society or as individuals spend our money?"
Science can offer no tools to help us answer any of these most pressing and practical of questions. At best it can give us some indication of what has happened or would happen if we chose a certain course of action, but is silent on what we actually should do or what the purpose or meaning of anything is.
Even the question of how science itself should be conducted is not open to scientific inquiry.
Usually people answer these questions for themselves in some ad-hoc way, usually without recognizing that they are philosophical questions, and usually unconsciously adopting some many-hundred-year-old philosophical position which has be passed down to them through the culture around them by osmosis. If they studied, read and thought about these questions, they might actually make more informed decisions.
GP is fundamentally right that those questions have proven intractable to philosophy. Philosophy is a standing list of all the theses put forward as solutions to those questions. But even people who are fully engaged with, have a stake in and spend their whole lives wrestling with such questions can come to diametrically or orthogonally opposed answers.
Shrug?
Philosophy offers lots of frameworks, tools, prior art, etc. to tackle such questions with. But it can offer you no sure answers and no means of mediating between potential answers.
Science, while it has huge blindspots and terminal unanswered questions, can goddamn perform in the areas that are well-trodden.
There are plenty of philosophers (and non-philosophers) who've thought they did in fact answer such questions, so they would not agree with you that these questions have been intractable.
What philosophy lacks is the broad consensus that science has, there's also arguably no way to "objectively" tell who is right in philosophy, as what that even means or what standards we use is itself open to debate.
"it can offer you no sure answers and no means of mediating between potential answers"
If you agree with someone about the ground rules and assumptions, then you can judge and by some such standards there have been "objectively" provable answers and "progress".
But is philosophy's function to find answers?
Many would say that it's actually more about helping you to find questions.
I've heard that in science finding the right questions is often the harder and more important thing than finding the answers, which are often a pretty straightforward process after you know the questions to ask.
If philosophy can help to ask the right questions, then it can be useful even if it doesn't help you find answers that will convince everyone no matter what assumptions they have or are willing to grant.
People involved in the sciences (and believers in scientific ideals) often pride themselves as being open to questioning everything, and greatly value such openness.
First, this itself is a philosophical position, so if such a position is useful to science then philosophy is useful to science.
Second, while such openness is often claimed as an ideal, in practice it's common for people involved in the sciences (and their fans) not to be so open after all. Philosophical training can help them to be more questioning and see their own assumptions where they might be blind to them otherwise. So this too makes philosophy useful to science (or at least the ideals of science that so many aspire to).
Next, philosophy, like math, is useful for training the mind. You can become a more rigorous thinker by studying philosophy -- this I believe is one reason that people with a philosophy degree are the ones most commonly admitted to law school.
Philosophy could also expand your mind or your horizons, and let you see things from another perspective that you otherwise might have been blind to. That's been one of its most valuable uses for me.
You're moving the goal posts. Why did you just say that philosophy can help us address a long list of questions if you're willing to concede that maybe philosophy isn't for answering questions at all.
OP wants answers. They want to develop a personal philosophy. They are not looking to "expand their horizons" or "question everything."
> there's also arguably no way to "objectively" tell who is right in philosophy, as what that even means or what standards we use is itself open to debate.
Then it's not going to be very useful to OP, is it? It's like using a random number generator to predict the Powerball. "One of these numbers will win. Can't say which, though."
Because I was answering people who insisted that philosophy was has to be useful. I'm not moving the goal posts so much as questioning their assumption that philosophy must have a use to be of value.
"OP wants answers"
But this sub-thread is not about the OP's wants. It's a reply to people challenging the value of philosophy.
"Then it's not going to be very useful to OP, is it?"
Again, you're assuming that philosophy has to be useful to be of value. And, again, it can be, for the reasons I stated before, but it can still be valuable even if it isn't.
> - "what should I do with my life?"
> - "what is the purpose of my life or of the world?"
> - "should I help someone in need or help myself?"
> - "what subject (including mathematical or scientific subject) should I study or work on?"
> - "who should live or die, be punished or rewarded?"
> - "how should we structure our society?"
> - "how should we as a society or as individuals spend our money?"
And yet philosophy offers no practical help to the student seeking answers to these questions today. Sure, a philosopher will happily produce a mountain of pages addressing any one of these questions, but you will be no wiser for having read them.
You might not be any wiser after having read them, but that doesn't mean no one is.
> "what should I do with my life?"
Try to improve body and spirit. Shape and obey the rules of he society you live in, be thankful and respectful of the liberties society has produced. Obey the laws of the city above everything else. Live by them, die by them.
> "what is the purpose of my life or of the world?"
The meaning of life is to reach happiness. To do, one most attain knowledge. Knowledge is virtue.
> - "should I help someone in need or help myself?"
You should help someone in need of help, because this way you help your spirit and the society (in Socrates parlance, you help the "city/neighbourhood/etc".) Acting in a selfish way will hurt your soul.
> - "what subject (including mathematical or scientific subject) should I study or work on?"
You should study them all, do your best to gain knowledge because knowledge is virtue. Know thyself, realise you know nothing.
> - "how should we structure our society?"
See Plato's "Republic", it's pretty detailed. Of course is utopian yet many ideas could be adopted easily.
> - "how should we as a society or as individuals spend our money?"
Wisely :-)
I could make another such list for Aristotle, Spinoza or Nietzsche and they'll most likely collide. So my take is that what you're looking for is a "rulebook" to tell you that Nietzsche (or Gorgias in Plato's dialogues) is right and Socrates is wrong.
If that's what you're looking then you're out of luck, not only in philosophy which is the highest form of education IMO but in science too, as science is equally ambiguous. There's literally NOTHING out there that can definitely prove that 2+2=4.
IMO philosophy guides someone from the land of certainty to the land of uncertainty where he can make his own choices and decide what kind of person one wants/needs to be.
While we are shaped by our culture to a long extend, philosophy can help us choose the answers to these questions. Then we are able to accept the good and the bad part of our choices and live a life without remorse, second thoughts and regrets.
I'd suggest the opposite, do start from the Socratic dialogues if you are really interested in philosophy.
On the other hand, if you want to be a tech guy with the common tech preconceptions about philosophy, feel free to skip Plato and his ilk.
And to answer my immediate parent, first, there's no "state of the art" in philosophy. Same way there's no "state of the art" in actual art (ancient art can be as good or better as modern art, and Bach e.g. can be as good or better than a modern composer, and in any case as relevant and enjoyable).
The concept of "state of the art" exists for engineering not art (and is within an engineering/tech context where the term first appeared in the 19th century, not in an art or philosophical context).
While technology can be accumulated, philosophy is a discourse and exchange of ideas. And, like in art, the formulation matters, and more often than not the best formulation is the original (because its closer to their source, the thinker who came up with those ideas). Plus, the main questions haven't changed the last 5000 years, to make answers outdated. Smartphones or cars change messaging methods and habbits, not philosophy.
>In my opinion, the reason for this is that philosophy as a means of understanding ourselves and our world beyond what science can tell us is essentially futile.
Restricting ourselves and our understanding to "what science can tell us" is absolutely futile, like trapped in a tautology (science is a closed system explaining what is, not what should be, as by itself it has no value, morals, aesthetics, and so on. You can be a scientist and a Nazi - and many were, without anything being problematic in that scientifically as long as you perform your experiments with the scientific method. The only objections to that would be moral and thus, the realm of philosophy).
Science is a tool, we don't ask tools for their opinions or for our goals or for what to do with them. We use them to make things or to examine things, no to think about what we want to make, or to think about what is best to make. That's for philosophy.
I also personally don't like Plato (he always creates these absolute strawmen as opponents), but that's more personal. I agree though that it's valuable to read at least some of it and to see whether it speaks to you or whether you find the method of inquiry interesting.
So, it's ultimately a question of why do you even want to study philosophy in first place. I suspect that for most usual purposes, Plato is perfectly okay.
Same way people that studied science X (including linguistics and CS), but are philosophically naive, can have a coarsed-grained view of very nuanced situations, and adhere to naive assumptions...
As an American philosopher noted, "An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing".
This is true for a scientist with expertise in whatever X.
Philosophy and epistemology (along with history and art) are ways to not be a simpleton with a narrow field of view who can't put together two coherent sentences outside their field (and doesn't even understand the second and third order implications of what he studies, its possible societal impact, its relevance and so on), but to get a wider picture.
Whch is not the same as "impressing others", except in the sense that intelligence and education do impress others sometimes...
You don't read Plato for empirical science though (or Aristotle for that matter). You read him for the philosophical ideas.
Whether language is X or Y for example is still debated, and while a modern linguist might know X research results or new theories, Plato still sets off many questions that are still dividing sides and are under debate. E.g. from a Stanford website breakdown:
"The positions of Hermogenes and Cratylus have come to be known to modern scholarship as ‘conventionalism’ and ‘naturalism’ respectively. An extreme linguistic conventionalist like Hermogenes holds that nothing but local or national convention determines which words are used to designate which objects. The same names could have been attached to quite different objects, and the same objects given quite different names, so long as the users of the language were party to the convention. Cratylus, as an extreme linguistic naturalist, holds that names cannot be arbitrarily chosen in the way that conventionalism describes or advocates, because names belong naturally to their specific objects. If you try to speak of something with any name other than its natural name, you are simply failing to refer to it at all. For example, he has told Hermogenes to the latter’s intense annoyance, Hermogenes is not actually his name".
Generally, I don't think that philosophical ideas exist in a vacuum, they are informed by the real world and by science (hence why e.g. quantum mechanics plays such an important role). Plato bases his ideas off of specific premises (that's the whole point of the socratic dialogues), but I find the premises often very flawed. For example, how does Platonism and the idea that there is "an ideal horse" make sense in the context of evolution? It doesn't, IMHO, and cognitive science seems to give much better answers to such question as how we can recognise the concept of "horse".
And yet philosophy is utterly incapable of telling us what to make or do. People often come to philosophy with the hope that studying philosophy will help them live a better life or help them make sense of life. The truth is, it won't. They can devote their life to studying philosophy and they won't squeeze a single drop of utility from that parched rock.
Take a look at the enormous popularity of Stoicism on HN. I think quite a few people here would disagree with you about philosophy being "utterly incapable of telling us what to make or do".
You are a person who desperately needs philosophy, yet you seen incapable of understanding why you would need it. Science seems to have ruined you.
This is a very interesting thought. Is this something you came up with, or are you quoting any specific philosopher? I’d love to read more about this topic.
Scientistm being to science what nationalism is to patriotism.
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/science-versus-scie...
This canard has been raised several times in this thread. Yes, who will teach the physicists how to think? Who will teach the engineers how to put two and two together?
> Apparently you expect everything to be 1+1=2, which really is kind of sad.
If by this you mean I reject irrational thought, then yes, guilty as charged. This has nothing to do with my views on philosophy, though. Philosophy is a type of rational inquiry.
> Science seems to have ruined you.
Or perhaps math has ruined me, expecting everything to be 1+1=2? But isn't math an extension of logic, and logic a part of philosophy? Maybe philosophy has ruined me.
You're moving the goal posts.
First you said:
"philosophy is utterly incapable of telling us what to make or do"
I gave you an example how philosophy is in fact capable of doing that, and it does so for many people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike).
Instead of granting the point, you move the goal posts.
Suddenly, philosophy being capable of telling us what to make or do is no longer good enough for you. Now you want answers to satisfy "most philosophers".
"You can ask a dozen physicists and they will all give you the same answer. Philosophy only tells you how to live if you ask exactly one philosopher. Ask a second, and you will be no better off than when you started."
Philosophy is not physics. There is no consensus on many of the problems that concern it.
Philosophy, by the way, is far from the only academic discipline that lacks such a consensus.
Harry Truman said "If you laid every economist in the country end to end, they would all point in different directions."
There are also many disagreements on fundamental issues in psychology, and probably many if not most other "soft sciences".
But philosophy is not a science, so why are you holding it up to scientific standards?
Art and music aren't sciences either, but most people recognize they have tremendous value anyway.
By the way, I've noticed that you're laser-focused on this consensus issue, while completely being unable to acknowledge that philosophy has value apart from the issue of whether it gives you answers that everyone can agree on.
How about philosophy's value in training the mind?
Please answer if you find that valuable.
How about philosophy's value in letting people question their own assumptions?
Do you find that valuable?
Or philosophy's value in letting you see things from a different perspective?
Can you specifically address these points instead of endlessly returning to the one point of philosophy not having answers that everyone can agree on?
I will make this one concession on reflection. It may help immunize one from simplistic explanations and just-so stories. It will not give one truth, but perhaps it will reveal the lie. The study of philosophy is a great way, for example, to disabuse someone of religious faith.
Actually it is perfectly capable.
In fact, nothing has been made or done without a philosophy guiding it.
It's just that for most people this is usually a self-made, uninformed, ad-hoc (and usually bad and unfit for the purpose) philosophy, or some low-tier second hand pop philosophy.
If you mean "philosophy can't tell what X exactly everybody should make or do" that's true. But that's also true for science and everything else. We are individuals, in different situations, different problems, and different goals.
Philosophy teaches us how to think about our problems, goals, etc, and how to put them in perspective, value them, examine them, etc.
It doesn't hand them out to us. Philosophy is not an oracle telling you what to do and absolving you from thinking (and that's true whether some philosophers treated theirs as such or not).
In its totality, philosophy is the exact opposite, a set of prior observations, discussions, hypotheses, thinking tools and approaches, to make you think better and to give you the benefit of the insight of others.
You get that insight on technical matters from science.
You get that insight on meta-matters (thinking about thinking, morals, etc) from philosophy.
This is sometimes true, but I think it depends on who you're reading. The skill of philosophizing, and of carrying on a discourse with other philosophers, is very different from the skill of bringing a novice up to speed. Not everyone who's great at one is great at the other. There's also value in what the grandparent post mentioned about establishing historical and biographical context before jumping into primary sources. It helps you understand what you're reading and what the community thinks is important about it.
That said, I definitely agree that primary sources are valuable to read, and to appreciate as works of art in their own right. Yes Wikipedia can give you the big ideas, but it's just not the same. But hitting Wikipedia first can give you context to get more out of the primary.
> The concept of "state of the art" exists for engineering not art
I don't understand this. Yes philosophy is not a linear progression of ideas, but the iterative process of people building on one another's ideas is definitely present, as it is in music or mathematics or poetry. Philosophy responds to current events, to art, to science, and to itself.
To put it another way, it's totally valid to ask "what was up with philosophy in X decade". You can look at the ideas that were floating around, how they interacted with each other, how they built on the past and led to future ideas. As I see it, that's the "state of the art". It's more a question of "what were top minds in the field working on", or maybe "what ideas were most influential", than anything else, but that's true if you ask that question of technology too.
> Smartphones or cars change messaging methods and habbits, not philosophy.
Philosophy (or philosophers) respond to what's around them. The conversation around whether the brain is a computer, for example, is very different today (and probably more interesting to most people) than it would have been 200 years ago.
Have a look at Adam Neely on Youtube.
I think it's unfortunate that so much of the pedagogy is focused on following the history. Of course it's useful for people that plan on continuing with it, but it's a terrible introduction.
On philosophy a good one used in many universities is "The Great Conversation" by Normam Melchert.
Bonus tip: try to find it used online. It will be a lot cheaper.
I knew a little already, so I started with topics in metaphysics/epistomology, made up my mind about them, and moved more into meta-ethics/ethics and more "practical" philosophies. Reason being, if you have a strong stance on something like free will, a lot of your ethics can be derived from there.
If you ever want to talk about it, feel free to shoot me an email evankozliner@gmail.com
I've also got a blog and substack where I write sometimes. You need to write about this stuff to really absorb it imo.
https://thinkoutloudnews.substack.com/ https://medium.com/@evankozliner
I would stay away from analytic philosophy, if you are not an US based academic.
Philosophy is a cosmos, the same way that science is: you study particular fields within it based on what you want to get out of them.
The "questions of life" fall into several categories (not exhaustive): biological, phenomenological/experiential, emotional, moral, existential, absurd. Do any of those interest you?
Edit: I also want to say that I strongly encourage people interested in reading and learning philosophy to do it in a class or group setting, at least initially. It's good to be an independent reader and interpreter, but most philosophy makes heavy use of terms of art that can be profoundly misleading or easy to misinterpret on one's own, particularly when getting started.
My bachelor's is in philosophy and I second this.
Read the original sources, ideally in a group setting, since discourse is key to philosophy.
Start with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, work your way up through the ages. But read through the original sources.
Also don't be afraid to try a different translation if you're struggling, as sometimes the translation can make it break understanding and enjoyment.
This may also help determine what area you might want to dig into. Ethics? Politics? Mind/how we think? Logic? Existence? Perception?
First, as a general heuristic, if there's some topic (in philosophy or otherwise) you want to learn, find syllabuses of courses in that subject at good universities and figure out what books they use.
If you do this for philosophy courses, you will find either anthologies of (contemporary) articles, or modern textbooks like Jaegwon Kim's Philosophy of Mind. At a high level, these more or less follow the same format (after perhaps some historical prologue). A reasonable view is presented, then in the next chapter (or essay) an important objection is discussed. This goes on for a while until you understand the strengths and weaknesses of various positions. At the end, you may favor one or another, but rarely is there is a clear winner.
Note that philosophy is distinct from the history of philosophy. If you care about what is true, and not the historical development of ideas, there's not much point in reading things written before, say, 1900, or even 1950. So no Hume or Hegel or whatever. In general these texts are poorly written and unclear compared to modern ones. And of course, they can't treat the developments that have taken place in the intervening years. Consider an analogy: you would not read Newton's original manuscripts to learn calculus.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good reference work, but it presents mainly literature overviews, not pedagogical essays. Again, you wouldn't read an encyclopedia to learn math; it is similarly unwise here.
You write about developing models that address "the bigger questions of life," and "a personal philosophy." This is not something that contemporary academic philosophy talks much about, at least in the broad sense. But, in this direction, you might enjoy "Six Myths About the Good Life: Thinking About What Has Value" by Joel Kupperman. There's a good review of the book here: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/six-myths-about-the-good-life-think....
This type of view is extremely common amongst students of analytic philosophy. The "problem" approach to philosophy.
IMO Reading Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, etc. and other thinkers deemed outdated and unworthy is absolutely a good use of time for anyone interested in Philosophy. This post is actually the first time I've ever heard anybody suggest not reading Hume.
The biggest value I got out of being a philosophy major was building reading concentration skills - being able to read dense passages takes a lot of commitment and practice, and that can build thinking skills. The internet teaches us to skim and do fast/shallow reading, which doesn't lead to deep thinking. Reading older philosophy is a great way of building those deep reading skills, even if the actual content of those texts is not applicable to modern life.
To the OP, if you see this, I would suggest looking into Experimental Philosophy. It's a branch of philosophy that focuses on using neuroscience to understand how we think about the world. Books like Thinking Fast and Slow may be much more interesting to you.
To clarify, I don't think reading the original texts is a bad use of time if you're already in deep, just that it's not good for a first introduction (for the reasons I mentioned). Plato was simply confused about a ton of things and makes egregious errors while reasoning through ideas. We don't read him because he was right, we read him for other reasons.
For a more detailed treatment of this issue, see this blog post: http://fakenous.net/?p=1168.
I do think there is some pedagogical value in reading some canonical works of modern philosophy, just for context about what Frege and later analytical philosophers are reacting to. I wouldn't completely write off Kant and Hume, for instance. Hegel, yes, but that doesn't mean it's completely not worth reading.
What is truth?
I go with Nietzsche and think that philosophers seeking the absolute truth are actually influenced by Christianity.
Second, what does Christianity have to do with anything? Was Aristotle influenced by Christianity?
> Second, what does Christianity have to do with anything?
The way Kant tries to base his theories on axioms is similar to what some theologians did.
[0]https://www.philosophizethis.org/
[1] - https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/
Once you’ve finished Plato, you can move onto Aristotle, particularly his Ethics.
As for “how to deal with bad things,” the Stoics are very popular now. Also check out the Epicureans. I think you should balance out these views with alternate approaches, maybe from Laozi.
After that, you may be interested in the rationalist-empiricist debate. (I’m skipping over a lot of medieval work that laid the foundations for this.) Descartes and Hume are the most readable of each group, respectively, in my experience.
If you are interested, you can move onto questions of “the meaning of life” or however you want to phrase it. A lot of this work rests on the very difficult works of Hegel and Kant, which would take a ton of time and effort to read and are probably not worth it for a non-academic. Kierkegaard is wonderful but also difficult to read. Fortunately at this stage, there are novelists who have read this stuff and put it into novels. Dostoyevsky and Camus provide a good synthesis of existential thought, coming to very different conclusions.
Everything I’ve mentioned in this comment can be read in a year or less, assuming you read at least the major one or two works from each author I’ve mentioned. At that point you won’t have an academic understanding of the field, but you’ll have a solid practical philosophical foundation for your daily life.