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Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

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Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#101
Take any suggestions with a grain of salt. Philosophy as a discipline has terrible quality control, and there is a great deal of status worship and outright charlatanry.

Often the big interesting questions are unanswerable, so the field is split between those who pretend to give answers (sometimes via bait-and-switch tactics, whereby a trivial or only tangentially relevant question is swapped in for the interesting one; sometimes via obscure, grandiose, ultimately hollow nonsense), those who fiddle around the edges making 'progress' that can never resolve anything important, and those who give boring history lessons about the failures of the past.

On the other hand, philosophy can provide you with a toolset for dissolving confusion, crystallising concepts, and minimising self-deception. In its more poetic forms it can be inspiring and emotionally resonant, if you are that way inclined. Follow your nose, delve deeply into the areas that interest you, and make sure it's an active process: always be thinking, rather than hoping to passively receive knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#102
A few years ago I was on a tram reading one of these alphabet books on philosophy, made especially for the students like myself who didn't pay attention in class and needed to learn the main concepts and authors quickly before the test. A homeless person sat in front of me, and seeing me reading that book, suggested me a book by a French philosopher named Émile Bréhier [1]. The book in question was Histoire de la Philosophie, translated in English, and covers all the way from the Pre-Socratics to the modern philosophy at the time of the author (circa 1930 IIRC).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Br%C3%A9hier

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#103

I was a philosophy major at a good (but not top) department. You are getting a lot of advice from autodidacts here that is well-intentioned but, in my view, unproductive. First, as a general heuristic, if there's some topic (in philosophy or otherwise) you want to learn, find syllabuses of courses in that subject at good universities and figure out what books they use. If you do this for philosophy courses, you will…

> If you care about what is true,

What is truth?

I go with Nietzsche and think that philosophers seeking the absolute truth are actually influenced by Christianity.

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#104

Philosophy is a huge field, and you first need to figure out what part of philosophy you're interested in. Moral and political philosophy is one area of philosophy -- Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, etc. That's more practical, and associated with probably the majority of the "names" you've heard of. But then there's philosophy around deeper things like how we know things, what knowledge is, debates over free will, etc.…

Wikipedia great for some subjects, but is simply awful for philosophy. I'd stay far, far away from it.

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#105

Take any suggestions with a grain of salt. Philosophy as a discipline has terrible quality control, and there is a great deal of status worship and outright charlatanry. Often the big interesting questions are unanswerable, so the field is split between those who pretend to give answers (sometimes via bait-and-switch tactics, whereby a trivial or only tangentially relevant question is swapped in for the interesting o…

Can you list some of the people you consider charlatans?

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#106
Context for my comment: I am not an academic, my focus here is to share books that helped form my personal philosophy.

I am certainly not an expert on philosophy, but I found Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" (especially with the post-script added in 1984) and Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" to be instrumental to becoming the person I am.

I also gained a lot from Plato’s republic (particularly book 7[0][1] - i.e.: the allegory of the cave - and book 8/onward[2][3] - a discussion of government that feels like it could be had today) and Huxley’s "Brave New World"[4] (if you're okay with spoilers and just want a quick glimpse at a good part of the book, I highly recommend reading chapter 16[5] -- it has some great dialog!).

The way thinkers of the past could frame problems of their day in terms that still apply today has been eye-opening to me. It makes today's problems feel less insurmountable. They are instead challenges we as a collective humanity will overcome and (as Frankl would say) give us an opportunity to transform suffering into human achievement[6].

PS: The myth of Sisyphus really wasn't one of my favorites until I got to the middle (the passage on "living without appeal"), it's a slow build that's worth it in my opinion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)#Book_VII

[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#link2...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)#Book_VIII

[3]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#link2...

[4]: https://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html

[5]: https://www.huxley.net/bnw/sixteen.html

[6]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6807951-i-speak-of-a-tragic...

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#107

Philosophy is a huge field, and you first need to figure out what part of philosophy you're interested in. Moral and political philosophy is one area of philosophy -- Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, etc. That's more practical, and associated with probably the majority of the "names" you've heard of. But then there's philosophy around deeper things like how we know things, what knowledge is, debates over free will, etc.…

Wikipedia great for some subjects, but is simply awful for philosophy. I'd stay far, far away from it.

Is Wikipedia great for learning philosophy? Of course not, no better than it would be for learning math or physics.

But it's unsurpassed for learning what all the kinds of philosophy are, for getting a sense of all the stuff that's out there.

Simply because any "philosophy" intro text you buy, no matter how broad, will ignore huge swathes of it. Wikipedia really is the best place to get an initial "lay of the land" I'd say.

From there you can move onto survey texts in a particular subfield you've identified, then drill even deeper into Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles, and then make your way to primary texts.

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#108

Philosophy is a huge field, and you first need to figure out what part of philosophy you're interested in. Moral and political philosophy is one area of philosophy -- Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, etc. That's more practical, and associated with probably the majority of the "names" you've heard of. But then there's philosophy around deeper things like how we know things, what knowledge is, debates over free will, etc.…

Wikipedia great for some subjects, but is simply awful for philosophy. I'd stay far, far away from it.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is pretty fantastic. They have a lot of articles summarizing debates as well, which I find very useful. Example: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#109
Start from the beginning: learn everything you can about Pythagoras--he coined the term philosophy.

I learned recently that hr credited a woman for his philosophical doctrines, the Pythia of the oracle of Delphi. Nice.

The Pythagoreans conducted the first hypothesis driven scientific experiment: casting bronze chimes in numeric proportions (1:2, 2:3, etc), to test the pythagorean theory of harmony in the cosmos.

Re: Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

#110
Read as much as you can on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [0] and Wikipedia. Switch over to real books once you’ve got some clarity on what you’re most interested in. Read books on the history of philosophy as well.

Don’t worry about “mental models” and “personal philosophy.”

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/

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