Hi, I'm Professor Ellie Anderson. And I'm here to share with you some tips
for reading philosophy, otherwise known as advice for reading texts that seem
very boring at first, but are actually amazing and very much worth your time. If you spent any time trying to read
philosophy, you may have found that much of it is very, very hard, like
way harder than most things you've ever read in your entire life. How could you possibly
comprehend what's going on? Here's one of just many possible
examples, opening to a random page of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Sensuous singularity, therefore,
does indeed vanish in the dialectical movement of immediate certainty
and becomes universality, but it becomes only sensuous universality. Or let's open to a random
page of A Thousand Plateaus. Since every articulation is double,
there is not an articulation of content and an articulation of an expression. The articulation of content is double
in its own right and constitutes a relative expression within content. The articulation of expression
is also double and constitutes a relative content within expression. How do we make sense of these? Now the best way to do this is to
learn from other people, right? Learn from somebody who
has expertise in this area. Um, my YouTube lectures are all well
and good, as are those of many others, but it's sometimes hard to separate
what's legit from what's not legit. There's a lot of not
legit stuff out there. So if you can enroll in some
sort of course taught by somebody with expertise in this area, I
would highly recommend doing so. You could also develop at least
some sort of reading group, perhaps, with other people online. I also recommend working with
online resources that are vetted by the profession. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy are the two primary open access encyclopedias a philosophy
that are available online. Please use them rather than
Wikipedia, although there's also a lot of good stuff on Wikipedia, too. It's just not peer reviewed. And peer review is important. Now, let's get to some specific tips for
what to do once you open the book and are trying to figure out how to understand it. Now, one of the tips that I suggest to my
students is what I call the skim and slog. The skim and slog involves first
skimming a portion of a text. Maybe it's a paragraph. Maybe it's a couple of pages. Maybe it's even an entire chapter. And then going back and
really closely reading it. I sometimes find that this can be more
helpful than just slogging through the texts from the beginning, trying
to understand every single sentence, taking forever to do so, because it
will help give you a little bit of the shape of where the argument is going. Even if you don't understand the argument
itself, uh, while you're reading it. This is especially helpful with
philosophical texts that are in the continental tradition, where there's
not often a clear definition of a term that's given from the outset. You gather the definition of
the term over time through the authors repeated use of it. You get a sense of the shape of what the
author is meaning by a particular term. So sometimes you can just kind
of skim it at first and then go back through it in greater detail. Most philosophical writings
are not exactly page turners. So don't worry about the skim and slog
giving you spoilers for what's to come. Right? Nobody ever gave a spoiler alert
for the Critique of Pure Reason. Instead, it can be helpful to know
where an author is going and then backtrack and work your way through. Don't be worried also if you don't,
even after slogging through it, that second step, understand the whole text. That's fine. I've read Hegel's phenomenology of
spirit more than once and I still don't understand everything in it. I also highly recommend annotating,
philosophical texts as you're reading them through highlighting
and writing marginal notes. Or underlining if you
prefer that to highlighting. Both of those, equally valid. Okay. So when you are doing that,
I actually recommend waiting until the end of a paragraph. Sometimes even the end of a page or
section, uh, if you're anything like me, you might, as you're reading
philosophical texts, be tempted to underline, highlight, and, or write
marginal notes on just about everything. And that's not always the best
way to do it because then you just have a sea of color on your page. And it's really hard to tell what
actually were the most important points versus the less important points. In Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and
Nothingness, for instance, some of the first times that he introduces a
word are actually the least helpful and he'll offer the definition later. So I'll wait to, till that
definition comes more clearly later and then make an annotation. That way, as I flip through my book, I
have less to focus on in my annotations. This also gives you a chance to take
stock at the end of a given paragraph page or section and look back and see
what you think was the most important point or the most important points. In addition to that, I know this
takes a while, but I usually recommend after a reading session. To take a few notes, uh, in a notebook
or in an app about what you read. And that can also really help give you
a sense of the shape of the argument. In addition to being helpful
for knowing where the author is talking about certain things. So if you see a keyword appear early on. And you have a note on that in your
app, then you can go back and text search it later when you get to a
different section that uses that. And you're like, where was that again? How is it defined? You can even juxtapose the different
places that, that keyword comes up and see how it's being used
and defined in different ways. But complementary, hopefully, if
the author's being consistent, ways throughout the text. Another recommendation for reading
philosophy is to watch out for the logical moves that are being made. One of philosophy's greatest assets is its
emphasis on the coherence of arguments. Arguments should be coherent. They should be valid and
they should be sound. As you're reading, take note
of how the author builds on one point and then moves to another. And you also might want to make
a visual map of the list of premises that are being used. So the author says one thing, then
builds on it with a second premise, or makes a second premise that's related,
but not even necessarily building on it, and then moves to a conclusion. Really making notes of those,
I think can be helpful. And also look out for potential
errors or logical fallacies, which you can find lists of online. Philosophers are not perfect. We definitely make mistakes. And if you do find an error,
reflect on how much or how little of the argument this bears on. Does this error that you've found in
the argument actually undermine the author's whole claim in a given section
or a given text, or is it somewhat minor, undermining a certain point,
but not really becoming an issue for other aspects of the argument? This really aids critical thinking and
forces you to find the parts of the argument that are doing the heavy lifting. All right. Let's think about attention. It's very common when people are
reading philosophy, even seasoned readers of philosophy to have the
urge periodically to stop reading. Maybe you want to check your phone. Maybe you actually hear a ding on your
phone or you want to get up and do something else and then come back to it. You're just kind of bored or impatient. That's okay. That urge is okay. I encourage you to resist the urge. Resist it the first time. Resist it the second time. Maybe resist it the third time,
but I'll leave that to you. Definitely resist it the first two times. Notice it, and have a mindful moment
of saying, Hey, I'm experiencing some resistance to this text right now. I feel like I'm not really getting it. Um, or I'm bored or I'm impatient. Just make a mental note
of that and then continue. Resisting this urge builds up
your stamina and allows you to get more deeply into the text. There've been studies of marathon runners
that show that the body sends signals to the brain saying "I'm done" well before
the body has actually run out of energy. So we have kind of a hair
trigger for challenging times. Especially in this day and age when
our attention is often so frenetically oriented in different directions. Marathon runners learn to ignore this
inner voice of I'm done before the body is actually done and to develop a different
sort of intuition when their body is actually running out of energy, when it
would be dangerous to continue running. I think you can do the same
with philosophical reading. You can develop stamina, you can learn
to ignore that inner voice of "I'm done." And then that will enable a different
kind of intuition to kick in, which is intuition of "no, no, no. I'm actually done now. I'm not going to get anywhere. I'm not in the right head
space to understand this piece of material at the moment." So try powering through the first
and second urges to stop reading and then see where that gets you. Okay. Um, also don't check your phone. Seriously. Don't check your phone. This is hard for a lot of us, but
we tend to think that a quick break to just respond to a text or check
Google for something, um, won't have any effect on our concentration,
but studies show that they have way bigger differences than we realize. Even very short breaks, greatly
diminish our concentration. I'd suggest .Leaving your phone
potentially an audible level or putting it on, do not disturb, uh, but
keeping it out of reach or putting it on silent and stowing it altogether
for a period of at least 25 minutes. I think 25 minutes is a good goal to set
when you're first starting out reading philosophy and this kind of rewiring
is not fun at first, but it's crucial. The next thing I'm going to suggest might
initially seem at odds with what I've just been saying, but I don't think is at all. And this is to read the text
in more than one sitting. Like I said, I think a period of
25 minutes can be a good general rule for people who are first
starting to read philosophy. And then maybe you can build up
to a couple of hours over time. But I think that, you know, it can be
good to do even, uh, even an essay in multiple reading sessions, depending on
the length and the level of difficulty. I sometimes find it helpful to have a
short first session where I skim the text and then read the first few pages, then I take a break and then I can
come back to it later to read more thoroughly and take notes on it. And again, this depends a lot
on the length of the text. Right. What I just said might
apply more to an essay. And if you're reading one of
these two texts or something like it, it might take you. And that's fine. Uh, another note is learn to swim. I remember when I was first reading Kant
and finding it impossible to understand, that somebody suggested to me that
once you actually figure out the basic rhythms of Kant's movements in the
arguments, He's really easy to read. He's actually kind of repetitive
and he's pretty consistent. Uh, nah, pretty consistent? He's unusually consistent! Maybe not entirely consistent all the
time, but he's a very consistent thinker. And that really catalyzed my sense
of confidence in reading Kant. What I found was that I was learning
to swim in the waters of Kant's prose, and different thinkers
have different waters, right? Some might be a really hardcore waves
off the coast of Portugal that you need to learn to stay afloat in. Others might be more of
a peaceful, lazy river. That would be perhaps Heraclitus. Not a lazy river, but at least --not
peaceful either actually, but a river. Heraclitus is a river,
a rushing rushing river. Uh, maybe Rousseau's
a peaceful lazy river. In any case, what I've often found is that
approaching a text this way means that some of the texts that appear hardest to
read at first end of actually being among the easiest over time, because they have
a consistent pattern, a consistent flow. What's necessary is the patience to
learn, to swim, to figure out the flow of a given philosopher's approach. Once you get used to it, you'll be
swimming with the current so easily that you'll practically be floating. I want to end just by urging
you to read philosophy! Because as wonderful as it is to
have YouTube lectures, to have podcasts, I co-host overthink
podcast, which is meant to be accessible for nonspecialists, to have different online written resources
that help you make sense of philosophy, reading is really important. If you're trying to understand the
kind of thinkers that I do lectures about-- people like Nietzsche and
Hegel and Beauvoir and Arendt, the TL:DR version of their philosophy is
never going to be the whole story. And so I hope that you can see the
online lectures and other resources as an aid in your reading, perhaps
as inspiration to read the thinkers and then start the skim and slog,
start swimming in the waters yourself.
