Why Read Philosophy? Where to Start? Where to Go?

hey everybody thank you for watching leaf by leaf today I want to talk a little bit about reading philosophy I'm entitle in this video why read philosophy where to start and where to go so the target audience is of course those of you who are thinking about reading philosophy or you've started into it and found it extremely tedious and perhaps unnecessary and so you've abandoned it my own story is that I of course started out reading fiction all of my life growing up and not really you know didn't really have a taste for nonfiction and then eventually about a decade ago as I was finishing grad school and you know having to read a lot more excerpt from philosophy but more literary criticism I started to get you know really interested and then I read Infinite Jest in January of 2011 and then I was I was piqued to the point where I had to start on my journey so as I normally do I like to start a chronicle chronological order and read my way through in 2011 I did this in fact I recently recovered one of my notebooks and you can see that my then one-year-old daughter scribbled and in fact adorned a lot of the pages with her artwork which is totally fine with me here you can see I guess she didn't really like puss calls palms say very much but anyway it's it's a real treat to go back and see what you know some myself eight nine years younger thought about a lot of this and so recently I decided to pick up the Republic this as I'll talk about in a moment I believe is the best beginning place for Western philosophy and I got myself a brand new Luke term 1917 journal to go with it and so I can take fresh philosophy notes and then two days after I decided to go back through all of the great works of Western philosophy I went up and checked the mailbox and what was there but none other than the latest edition of philosophy now which is ancient Greek wisdom today and that's really a look at that cover art I love that that's amazing only the cat is paying attention so this was sort of a you know cosmic confirmation that I was doing the right thing and then I got to thinking about it and I started some of my friends I started talking about what I was doing and they said you know I've been thinking about reading philosophy for a long time but you just don't have tolerance for it I don't know where to start I've tried it whatever so I decided to make this video let's make it clear if it isn't so far by now that I am in no way a philosopher I am NOT a student formerly speaking I'm not a student a philosopher I've never taken a single philosophy class in school and well I did take an ethics course so that is one of the branches of philosophy and you know it includes morality and so on but I'm in no way qualified for this and so for the most part I have to consult a lot of secondary resources great Gregory B Sadler here on on YouTube is a phenomenal resource he has been making videos for a long time in fact when I took on comps and Hagel in 2012 I used a lot of his videos to understand what in the world was going on but I hope that this what I'm communicating here is that I'm not qualified really to to grasp everything but I have an interest in a passion and Timothy Keller in his commentary on the book of Proverbs he says wisdom is not only for deep thinkers it's how you get through daily life and I love that the more that I think about read about philosophy and so on the more I realize how true that is contrary to the cliche that is imprinted on the collective consciousness it really isn't just for people who want to be extremely pious and so on but it really is for everybody and my reading experience nearly a decade ago was very fruitful because I realized that the reading of philosophy greatly enriches all other reading it truly is like like the great conversation from the the whole great books series it really is a conversation that's been going on for over 2,000 years by some of the greatest thinkers and I'll say that what it is is it's the best of recorded thought because of course they're they're certainly certainly have been great thinkers that unfortunately we never got to get to hear from because their thoughts didn't get recorded but if you think about it we now in 2020 we have access to read over 2,000 years of the best of recorded thought and so if we take the time to read and absorb these with what we're doing is we're laying a very strong foundation within our own minds for considering what is right and what isn't and then continuing the discussion if we don't take the time to read these then what we're going to end up doing is wasting a lot of years thinking on our own and coming to conclusions that have probably already been met you know a millennia millennia ago or a millennium ago and so you know it's like the the equip of standing on the shoulders of giants but we don't want to remain drawers of course the other thing to think about in terms of why read philosophy is because it is a conversation you will begin to see connections and this is why I argue for reading them in chronological order at least to begin with because each philosopher is building upon a previous one if you just jump straight into comp and and his metaphysics is great critique of pure reason and you don't read Hume and Locke first there's you're going to miss a lot of what's going on but then even beyond the philosophy books as in their primary sources you know if you're reading The Unbearable Lightness of being but you haven't read Nietzsche and you know and and you read say Robert musel's the man without qualities but you haven't really taken the time to read Vidkun Steen you know you're not gonna get as much of course you can consult references during the reading but the more you lay that foundation the more you're going to start making connections and it's making those connections and then pulling them all together that really starts to take you from knowledge to wisdom you're also another reason to read philosophy is because you will be expanding and building upon what American philosopher Richard Rorty calls our final vocabulary and to quote him all human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions their beliefs and their lives lives these are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies our long-term projects our deepest self doubts and highest hopes I shall call these words of persons final vocabulary those words are as far as he can go with language beyond them is only helpless passivity or a resort to force now that's interesting one connection that pops up immediately when he says those words are as far as he can go with language I immediately think of it concealed in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus one of his propositions I think five dot or six dot something I've talked about it elsewhere one of his propositions is that the limits of our language of the limits of our world so you see that these build off of each other and in fact now that I'm reading the Republic and I'm seeing how Plato or Socrates or sucker Plato's Socrates is showing how an oligarchy can devolve into a democracy and then because of too much freedom a democracy can devolve into a tyranny then in Pascal and his Paul say we see that he harps on the fact that too much freedom is deadly it can lead to tyranny well of course he's picking up from Plato and in fact a lot of people pick up from Plato so let's go ahead and talk about where to start if you want to get more of a survey instead of taking each work individually and working through it but you want to start with kind of a wide swathe of the landscape of Western literature I highly recommend will directs the story of philosophy this is actually where I started back in 2011 when I decided to read through through the Western the works of Western philosophy I started with the the history of philosophy this is a great account the Durant's they actually have a huge series of Western civilization but this is just a single volume and it's only about roughly 400 pages and covers from Plato to the American philosophers John Dewey and so on but it is very engaging and it gives you a lot of the the historical context that you'll really that really makes everything pop the other one I would recommend it's a bit longer and a lot a lot more engaging I argue but the history of Western philosophy by Bertrand Russell and I've featured this in another video probably I think it's in my 10 non-fiction recommendations but this one this this is the greatest resource for as far as a single boy of Western philosophy if you're struggling with whether it's philosophies even valid anymore maybe you've you've really taken to heart Steven Hawkings quit that you know philosophy is dead it's been replaced you know by science and so on well that is pretty to a degree obviously if we're going to try to examine and think through some biological process we're not going to use the dialectic method any more to you know in the in the realm of ontological studies and or metaphysics and so on we're going to get into the laboratory but there's always gonna floss afee is at the core of everything there's a philosophy of science and philosophy of mind a philosophy of politics and philosophy of education it really is that core because philosophy teaches you the best way to think about something it's much more than just being being smart or looking smart that would be what Socrates de cries as sophistry most notably in in for Simic as' in the Republic but no a true philosopher to someone who you want to think and formulate things the right way and I would say that if if that's your view that you know philosophy is is nonsense and so on try Rebeca Goldstein's Plato at the Googleplex why philosophy will never die or won't go away this is great this is this is as you can tell from the title this is a fun book it in one volume you you get a little acquainted with Plato which again for me that for for most this just traditionally the beginnings of Western philosophy there are the pre-socratics Democritus and so on but Plato is really the beginning and and in fact Alfred North Whitehead in his book process in reality he says that the safest general character is a of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato so you may have heard that before that all of Western philosophy is but footnotes to Plato you get deep looks into Plato and then you get this this fun little situation where Plato is placed into the work environment of Google and then a good strong case for why philosophy is not dead and in fact won't go away as far as primary texts again the Republic the kallipolis is the best starting place it's really the beginning it covers everything which is great in this in this one dialog it's really it is a dialogue you get epistemology the study of knowledge how we can have it what it is through the education of the philosopher Kings you get ontology which is the study of being or metaphysics in his conception of forms you get ethics you get aesthetics where he talks about the prescribed art and music even though there's a there's a big dimension of censorship going on here and I think it's it's books 3 and 10 I think it's three can't quite remember that first one but then it's picked up again in the final volume but there's a lot to be said as far as art literature and so on right here the beginning logic you get you get the beginnings of formal logic in here although it's nothing like the analytical philosophy of Bertrand Russell and Bergson and others political philosophy you know the the main question of the text is what is just and what is unjust what what is justice versus injustice and is a just person truly happier than an unjust person because they're they are showing that unjust people go and satisfy their desires you know they're very selfish very hedonistic and they do appear to be at least worldly wise happier and so Socrates decides that the best way to approach this problem is not by looking at an individual but by looking at something on a much larger scale which would be a policy or a city and of course a policy at this time is not you know a city as we think about today with a bunch of buildings and so on but it's this group of lots of people in one area and so if they build up what they call a kallipolis which is from just two greek words that mean beautiful and city said the beautiful city the Utopia the Republic of Plato if they build this up from from scratch then they'll get to examine and and observe the inception of justice and that will allow them to be able to to better examine it as transposed to the individual so it's really brilliant and engaging dialogue to watch how Socrates and his interlocutors build up the city just using their thoughts and words we get these great and famous analogies the Sun analogy of the line analogy and of course the cave analogy which you've probably heard of and then by the end of it in this one roughly 300 pages of dialogue we you will have a philosophical foundation upon which to build and go further and and again the majority of all subsequent philosophers novelists painters really do engage with Plato in one way or another so let's talk about where to go from the Republic I have a list of 26 books that I've put together by you know basically curating other people's lists and weighing them and examining them and so on I won't go oh into what I've done because it's not that interesting you know it's pretty much just an excel sheet with columns that represent different lists of the greatest works of Western philosophy looking at where there's overlap through the lists and then trimming out some of the outliers to try and get it you know down to to just the highlights as my as possible though as with any list we're being exclusive and we're leaving out a lot but again this is just prescribed for you know people are saying where do I go from here how do I hit the whole you know main swathe of Western philosophy well as I said start with Plato's Republic I would move to the Nicomachean ethics from Aristotle the prince from Machiavelli and then Francis Bacon's essays Descartes the meditations in the discourse on method Hobbes the Leviathan Spinoza his ethics and I would also argue for his theological political treatise although the ethics are the main thing and then past all the pulse say my books are falling everywhere Locke the Second Treatise of government and then of course this we start getting into some big boy well the Leviathan is pretty large but the essay on human understanding this is part of the British empiricism and it also goes in tandem with Barclays the treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge this is going to look at the old riddle of a tree falls in the woods can we really say that it fell like that book that just fell I wasn't watching it but it fell I heard it well okay we're getting into sense perception and so on and I won't spoiler alert and I won't blow Barclay how he deals with it but David Hume an inquiry concerning human understanding this is very very critical and then jean-jacques Rousseau and this is this is of course his basic political writings but what you're really wanting is on the social contract critique of Pure Reason this is a big boy once you start getting into the German idealism you will want to consult secondary resources and in fact look at this that I printed out back in 2012 this is sort of a mind map of what's going on in the critique and I actually did use this to try and follow along this was this was the hardest thing I had ever read up to that point but luckily about a year after he published it I think even philosophers with whom he was trying to engage we're so confused he gave us this short little treatise called a prolegomena to any future metaphysics and this in a very thin volume breaks down his main points in the critique of Pure Reason it cannot be missed once you make it through that you may want to take a break before moving on to Hegel the phenomenology of spirit this is even Gregory B Sadler will tell you that he's not sure Hegel understood understood everything that Hegel was saying nonetheless it is it is one of the touchstones of Western philosophy then for some more German idealism the world is will and presentation in two volumes Schopenhauer Schopenhauer is very important especially in terms of German music with vogner was Schopenhauer Ian Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer Ian and then Karl Marx Karl Marx rather the Communist Manifesto and also Das Kapital mainly volume one like Voltaire and Candide I cannot find that anywhere I've lost both of them somehow so I guess after a 4-hour new ones Kierkegaard fear and trembling this is the as Harold Bloom says Kierkegaard is the greatest melancholy Dane next to Hamlet which I love that Nietzsche once you get to Nietzsche this is when you start realizing that philosophy can be extremely fun to read Nietzsche there's a lot to be said and I'm gonna save I'm gonna reserve that for my bookshelf tour once I get to my philosophy shelf but what you're gonna really want to focus on with Nietzsche if you're very literary and artistic minded you'll probably want to read the birth of tragedy but for the purposes of this video I'm prescribing on the genealogy of morals and Beyond Good and Evil Martin Heidegger being and time and then finally Vidkun Steen the Tractatus logico-philosophicus and the philosophical investigations you're going to want to do both of those and in here they have the blue what's called the blue book and the brown book together with the Tractatus and another one so so I definitely recommend those so that's it that's much but that's my spiel on why you should read philosophy why you don't need to be a philosopher or have training and formal philosophical thinking to enjoy it the the the biggest argument I can give again just to close this video out is that the more you read throughout the works of philosophy the more you are going to lay that foundation that you will see is critical to unlocking more and more of everything else you read the other biggest argument I can say is that for anyone who loves language and it's sensitive to language and what it can do just as Socrates was in the Republic he talks about how if you don't take the time to talk out and write out exactly what you mean when you say something such as the try partition of the soul into the Opena t'v part and the rational part and the spirited part then when you say soul you don't really know exactly what you're talking about and the people with whom you're conversing don't really know what you're talking about and so it forces you to learn language and to utilize language an exhaust language take it to the absolute edges of what it can do because you're using it to explicate things that are greater than us and so it's very very different than a picture or a video or music you're taking this very very malleable thing called language and you're using it you're learning to use it like a sculptor to be very very precise and you'll find that the more you make yourself sensitive to that from watching others do it the more you will begin to do it yourself and this makes you more articulate and more of a critical thinker

Channel: Leaf by Leaf

Views: 53,765

Rating: 4.9797091 out of 5

Keywords: leaf by leaf, book, books, read, reads, reading, booktube, literature, lit, literary, review, reviews, literary criticism, criticism, lit crit, philosophy, list, lists, Republic, Plato, Aristotle, The Prince, Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Leviathan, Hobbes, Spinoza, Pensées, Pascal, Ethics, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Candide, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard, Marx, Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Being and Time, Heidegger, Wittgenstein

Id: GlXi2nuu2KM

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Weliveanddietogether]

I thought he was going to talk about the philosophy of reading