Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

Can highly recommend the podcast Philosophize this!

I don't think that there's a universal truth about what you should be making or doing. It's up to each person to decide that for themselves. Philosophy exposes you to different ideas and ways of thinking, showing that there isn't a single correct answer to the questions people have in life. What you make of that is up to the person on the receiving end of those ideas.

I majored in philosophy and I think one of the biggest missteps in how I approached my degree was what I thought I would get out of learning philosophy.

I thought I'd learn about "truth" from my degree, and I was initially very disgruntled when learning about very incomplete philosophies. I learned eventually that the goal of a philosophy degree was not to find "truth", but to learn about the myriad arguments and models people had for "truth", and how to critique and understand truth.

If you're on your journey to developing your personal philosophy, then a basic understanding of philosophy will help you escape pitfalls and traps a lot of annoying armchair philosophizers fall into. A lot of people read a single philosopher and think they understand everything.

What is your goal for developing your personal philosophy? It might be faster and more meaningful for most people to start with theology/spirituality, books on justice (Rawls, Nozick, feminist literature), or carefully selected business books than to start from the basics because that road is long and full of fallacies.

I think it's very important that for every philosophy you learn about, learn the critiques of those arguments. You kan't learn about all the great critiques of Kant from reading Kant. This is where professors and peers are really useful with discussions to tease out nuances of particular arguments and models.

My personal favorite philosopher is Iris Marion Young. I think her work on intersecting democracy and feminism is wonderful.

An important note is that reading is entirely auxiliary to philosophy. The important thing is to think, and to interact with others who are thinking, either orally or in writing. I'd even go so far as to say you could be a philosopher in the fullest sense without ever reading a page of philisophy, although you'd need to know some smart philosophers to get away with that, and you'd be unnecessarily holding yourself back anyway.

The purpose of reading in philisophy is to become aware of interesting problems, challenging arguments, to notice and comprehend tools of thought, and to avoid spending your time developing your thoughts in a direction someone has already travelled. You can get all of this by talking to smart people, it's just that reading is much more efficient.

But what you can't get away with is just reading, or even just reading and writing. You need others to read what you write, and have them respond to you. Or engage with them back-and-forth orally (although writing really helps to organize your thoughts).

If you want to study philisophy, then, you'll need to find a way to interact with others who have studied philosophy, and the best place for that is a university, where you could ask to audit a class, or to join in a discussion hosted by a philosophy club.

If that's not an option, there are internet communities where people discuss philosophy, just be aware that these communities usually form around groups of people who share some philosophical view, and can be insular echo chambers, and they may not be interested in discussing any old philosophical topic. Academic philosophy is filled with bad ideas and counterproductive norms of discourse, and can guide you in completely the wrong direction, but they're still the best environment in which to learn to think.

As a philosophy graduate I would say that learning philosophy solely from books would be a very ambitious / dangerous attempt. The philosophical books can be very persuasive for the beginner in the field, leading to many misconceptions. I would recommend to take part in some (university/on-line) courses, but not in one, but at least two from different teachers.

As for the books, Plato (Socrates dialogues) is must have to understand the field. Also it's fun to read, so it's great to begin with :) The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle is another beginner friendly book which lays field for others to follow; it's much more practical/friendly than the Metaphysics, which should be approached only with an assistance of a good teacher (unless you're a genius like Avicenna or Thomas Aquineas).