Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

I agree with you, because it would be too time consuming to read all original sources. To get the context (how ideas evolved over time) you need to learn a bit about the history of philosophy.

On the other hand reading original sources gives you more than a summary. The way of thinking leading to the idea or the way the idea is presented is often more interesting than the idea itself.

Take Platon for example. The way he teaches his ideas in dialogue form is very pedagogical. It is even used in psychology [0].

An other example is Freud. He uses a very genius style of logical reasoning. Reading a summary of his ideas doesn't help you because you'll probably not understand it (and think it's nonsense) and sometimes he is just wrong (e.g. homosexuality is mental illness).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning#Psycholog...

At some point you should get to the original sources if you want to be an academic, yes.

But the reality is that 99% of the original source material is not relevant, will not be particularly rewarding, and may require a grad-level background to even understand many of the sentences. You want to read Hobbes Leviathan? Guess what, the only parts that matter today are a handful of pages. Same with Kant's Groundwork, Aristotle's Politics, etc.

The famous philosophers are (mostly) famous for their essential ideas, not the full lengths of their books.

For example: the majority of Hobbes' Leviathan is coming up with an entire theory of natural law, dealing with religion, etc. But none of that stuff was particularly noteworthy. The part that's relevant today was his original thoughts on the social contract, which is a very short part.

It's far more important to read textbooks, surveys, etc. to understand the ideas and be able to put each philosopher in context of who they were responding to and who responded to them.

Then if you're an academic or going to write a paper or something, sure go to the actual sources.

I say this having read tons of Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Kant, Locke, Rawls, etc. I've needed to for my work, but I would never recommend reading them to someone just casually interested in philosophy. That's like telling someone who wants to learn how to program that they should be reading the C compiler source code.

This sounds like good advice in theory, but if someone isn't even at the stage of knowing what they want to read, I don't think picking a significant book at face value is going to work out well. In fact, I bet it would probably end with a large majority of people reading the first 10 pages of Plato/Socrates/etc., getting confused by the utter lack of context, and giving up. That's what I did the first couple times I "tried to get into philosophy." It took me getting to undergrad philosophy classes to really "get it."

At the very least, if you're going to go for primary sources, find a guide or lecture to lead you through it. Of course primary sources are important to read in philosophy, but in my personal opinion, I would recommend going for an introductory text first and picking primary sources to read from there.

The problem I found in reading, or general media consumption is, you'll very likely to directly take everything the authoritative figures say, without resolving internally, if you don't have strong personal philosophy yet. I hate to talk with people who quote Hegel or Kant all the time, using them as natural laws. Even I agree with some of it and respect them a lot, I don't think in essence they're more valuable than any random homeless people say. There are people who read a ton but have the poorest mind. The same goes to artists, there're a ton of artists who read a lot, watched a lot and listened to a lot but still make absolute crap.

I think getting into the field of philosophy is very different from developing a personal philosophy. The "field" sounds to me like you'll be talking to other people who study philosophy, and you're expected to read certain materials to stay literal. But to develop your own personal philosophy there's no requirements about what you need to read. I consider myself to have strong personal philosophy, where I have a general rule / ideal mindset that explains everything (ideal meaning I might not act to what I believe in), and my philosophies are the direct reason that I'm always very happy in life (which is my primary goal). I rarely talk to other people about these, so I consider myself not in the field of philosophy.

So no, I don't think there's a general clear path to develop a personal philosophy. What is personal philosophy? It's your own personal way of living. I would say it's a lot luck, either you found it or not. It's possible to read something, or watched something that coincidentally matched very well with your underlying personal philosophy that you haven't discovered yourself yet, and discovered a bit after experiencing those, so my only advise would be stay honest with yourself, keep reading / watching / listening to whatevery you're most interested in. Personally I think the film First Love: The Litter on the Breeze (1998), 20th Century Nostalgia (1997) and The Troubleshooters (1988) helped me discover my personal philosophy, but that's highly personal, just written here for reference (also recommend to everyone because they're good).

It's an unpopular opinion depending on what you're recommending.

Telling someone "read the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle" will lead someone to just pick up any copy of the Nicomachean Ethics. There are a lot of translations of the Nicomachean Ethics and they are not all equal. They range from very good translations, to idiosyncratic readings of the text, to flat out bad translations.

Beyond poor translations, the ancients that you've recommended are good to start with and the recommendation to read the primary sources of them is just fine. Those texts are easy to digest without having a formal background in philosophy.

But for other philosophers (e.g. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel), telling someone to just "pick up one of their primary texts" is a disaster. It will either (a.) be complete gibberish to the reader without any context and they may just give up, or worse, (b.) they think they'll understand something without the proper context and spew nonsense in regards to that philosopher (this is why there are so many bad readings of Nietzsche).

So depending on what you're recommending, primary sources can be good, but in my experience, primary sources aren't good most of the time. Moreover, if someone is interested in a specific field like the OP is, then having a good secondary source can be extremely helpful to give someone an overview and proper understanding of the topic.