Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

The author of Existential Comics offers some advice:

https://existentialcomics.com/blog/1/How_to_study_philosophy...

I like courses or philosophical works, which focus on a common themes, common threads. That allows one to see more connections across different thinkers.

One instance of this is John Vervaeke's Awaking from the meaning crisis (which isn't only philosophy, but also cognitive science).

Other courses like that are those from John Searle (philosophy of language, philosophy of mind).

Hubert Dreyfus has a course on existentialism in literature and film.

Thinking of it, there is also a channel called Like Stories Of Old. The maker publishes video-essays, which are often philosophical in tone and reference existential thinkers like Kierkegaard.

My own journey into philosophy started with Wittgenstein (apart from an introduction in Greek Philosophy in high school).

Actually, I found watching The Good Place to be really enjoyable in part because of how well it acted as an introduction to philosophy and ethics.

There's some great scenes explicitly addressing concepts like utilitarianism and it's ups and downs, moral desserts, classic examples like the Trolley Problem, and relativism that, at least for me, made those concepts much more accessible when I was doing more reading later on because I already had some sort of concrete idea of how those concepts addressed certain (fantastical) situations.

It's also just a wonderful show, and I think it's worth recommending on its own merits, but there's definitely some actual value there as an accessible intro to several different aspects of philosophy.

Just my 2c below.

I went down a similar path over the last few years. Here is what didn't work well for me:

- Reading books on the history of philosophy summarizing a wide range of ideas from famous philosophers. Examples would be Bertrand Russell's and Anthony Kenny's books. The problem I found is that there's just too much stuff in there that is not of interest to me personally.

- Reading books by author. For example, just reading through Plato's dialogues never worked for me, again because the topics are vast and varied, and many are not of interest to me personally.

What worked for me are diving into specific topics that interested me deeply. In my case: political philosophy, the question of the existence of "God", and topics pertaining to morality and ethics. (There also happens to be a nice overlap across these topics making it easier for me.)

Starting out is the hardest part. I find that the first books you pick seem to set the stage for one's worldview to a large extent. That's just a correlation from personal experience, not necessarily causation. My basic approach to not blindsiding myself to specific views has been to work my way up through history to understand how the ideas and arguments pertaining to a topic evolved over time. I found that during this phase I have to actively suppress my natural impulse to immediately criticize arguments I come across; I rather assume that I missed something. The next phase for me is to actually dig deeper into some of those criticisms that came up, and see if they hold up.

Next, pick your translations very carefully. Research the best translations for each book before purchasing. /r/askphilosophy and /r/philosophy are great resources for this and the deep-dive phase of your research.

A final piece of advice: read slowly. Comprehension is king when it comes to philosophy. I was reading, re-reading, and parsing through 2-3 pages per hour when I started out. This is mostly because many terms that you wouldn't think are technical turn out to be (for example, Aristotle's use of the term "motion" refers to something much more expansive than what we think of motion as today). However, on the bright side, that speed tends to go up (slightly) over time as you become familiar with the area.

So to summarize: my recommendation to you for developing a personal philosophy is to ask questions first, and then seek out answers that you judge on their merit, regardless of who wrote them.

TLDR: Ask questions first, read widely second, and think for yourself.

For Hegel I’d just say read a short modern secondary source that summarizes the main ideas and traces their influence on subsequent thinkers. Honestly the main point of knowing about Hegel anyway is because he deeply influenced Marx, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and many other philosophers that you might actually want to read and apply to your life and worldview. Peter Singer’s Hegel: A Very Short Introduction is short, clear, and has all the information you’d need (https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer...).

The podcast The History of Philosophy without any gaps is a great way to get into it. I found the philosophy of the pre-socratics all the way through to the scholastics was easy to understand and grasp as a lay person. After that, the language gets a bit dense. However, I was still able to understand it.

https://historyofphilosophy.net