Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

I decided to get it with a remaining Audible credit I had, and found it to be informative and easy to understand for someone without any previous experience in philosophy. It also comes with a 200-page PDF guidebook that includes the bulk of the content and follows along with the lectures. I think it's easier to digest then just reading through a traditional book as well.

With this in mind, it's probably good to treat anything you read as something that has to be filtered through your own mind; always questioned and re-questioned, compared with the original sources and with competing interpretations and views.

At the end of the day we have to make our own mind, nothing should be taken as holy writ. This is the case for people with some philosophical experience, as well as for beginners.

The advice to take an intro course is solid. Open culture has a few linked courses that look good (it’s all about the quality of the lecturer). Also a compendium book is a good place to start.

Because primary sources are highly valued in philosophy, and unlike math or science, those sources never become obsolete.

Also, contemporary philosophers trying to restate the ancients often distort the originals, or do so in an inferior way.

Philosophy is not a mathematical or experimental result you could just summarize or restate in an equivalent way without distorting the meaning.

That's not to say that summaries or restatements don't have their place in philosophy too, but to really get what these philosophers were saying there is no substitute for reading the originals.

One other thing I want to add is that, unlike most other academic fields, philosophy is very much a conversation where the participants of today are still in dialogue with people who wrote hundreds and thousands of years ago.

If you were to limit yourself to just what your contemporaries said and wrote, then even if these contemporaries were honestly doing their best to summarize and restate what came before them (instead of distorting them and putting words in their mouth, which philosophers have a bad habit of doing) then you wouldn't be a fully informed participant in the conversation.

It's also a bit like a court of law, where you don't want to admit hearsay evidence, but want to hear directly from the people who were there.

"There is a strange idea that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about ‘isms’ and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire." -C.S. Lewis

I attend the best "Great Books" program in the country, the Torrey Honors College. Here are the strictly philosophy texts they had us start off with the first semester: Plato's Meno, Symposium, and Republic, and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. You can find the full reading list here: https://www.biola.edu/torrey/academics/reading-list

If you want to dig in more, I would encourage you to look into the "Great Books of the Western World" set compiled by Mortimer Adler. There is an accompanying curriculum that walks you through reading them without a teacher or classroom [https://www.thegreatideas.org/tgi-program.html]. You can typically find them on eBay for relatively cheap.