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/lit/ - Literature


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11365172 No.11365172 [Reply] [Original]

There is nothing wrong with reading the Wikipedia article or secondary sources on a philosopher if you weren't going to critically read and analyze the works themselves in the first place.

>> No.11365186

>>11365172
There is nothing wrong with eating a big fat turd.

>> No.11365191

Nice opinion dude, well thought out! You've earned my hard-won esteem, and I pray other anons lift you as high in their eyes as I do today.

>> No.11365194

>>11365172
This is true. However, if you do this, you should be prepared and accepting of the fact that someone with more rigorous knowledge of that philosopher will come along and BTFO you.

>> No.11365204

>>11365172
alri WN

>> No.11365517

>>11365172

No there is nothing wrong with that, anon. Only, don't get tempted to use that superficial, half-baked knowledge to actually support or refute the aforementioned philosopher's ideas.

>> No.11365522

>>11365194
That's fine, I have more important things to do than read philosophy, like making lots of money and laughing at you poorfags.

>> No.11365643

>>11365522
damn

>> No.11365791

>>11365172
Small Brain: reading the original works, plus the introduction and translators preface because you got a good edition and not a cheap public domain reprint

Medium brain: Reading large introductory volume which gives you a synoptic interpretation of the thinkers whole body of work, and then guide a couple guide books to their essential works

Large brain: Reading the SEP and OEP articles, and watch a couple university lectures on YouTube

Galactic Brain: reading the Wikipedia article, listening to the PEL episode in the background while watching a fifa match.

>> No.11365887

>>11365791
But in all honesty if your goal is to work though the history of philosophy in order to get up to somebody you want to actually understand you are gonna be fine relying pretty heavily on secondary lit. The reality is that a lot of the work of many philosopher is badly written, scattered across a huge number of pieces, or involve so many contemporary details that it requires annotation to be parsable anyways.

Unless you are a student and have hundreds of hours to dedicate to studying philosophy you are going to learn far more reading the secondary sources. Spending the time to read the 600 pages of Christopher Shield’s Aristotle will give you a vastly greater knowledge of artistotles thought than spending the same amount of time reading the first hand text.


Often the really important philosophical content is buried in all sorts of extra nonsense that is totally irrelevant today and uninteresting to read.


However I’d say that when it comes to Wikipedia, with few exceptions it’s useless for philosophy. Use SEP or OEP for getting a quick article length run down, and actual books as secondary sources.

If you google either Cambridge or Blackwell companion and PDF you can find a load of really helpful books.

Also the Routledge Philosophers series is really good, I’ve read a couple of books from that series and they have been consistently good. The ones on Freud and Aristotle especially.

>> No.11366228
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11366228

>>11365887
I appreciate your insight and suggestions, anon. I've saved your comment.

I've long fantasized about "reading the canon" but regrettably it's just not realistic for me. I just don't read fast enough, and I have broad interests outside the canon that I also want to explore before I'm old. Really what I'm interested in is a worldwide history of ideas encompassing art, science, and belief. But I've long struggled to form a "plan of study" of satisfying breadth and depth. In most of my attempts I've tended too much towards depth at the expense of breadth, and sputtered out.

One possible solution is to study this "history of ideas" in rounds, ie read one or two world history survey texts, then read a series of surveys on specific periods (prehistory/antiquity/middle ages/modernity), and then start reading primary and secondary source material on specific periods in greater depth.

Anyway, the online encyclopedias and companion books you mention might be very useful to me, so thanks again. Also, just a side question, but is there anywhere I can find more texts like the Shield's Aristotle? That's just the kind of scholarly, authoritative survey work I'm always looking for for different topics, but struggle to find amid all the pop stuff.

>> No.11366240

>>11366228
i always suspect these stupid effort posting type threads are one dude samefagging himself with what he thinks is a brilliant dialogue but everyone else just scrolls past as quickly as possibly

>> No.11366263

>>11365791
BASED AND REPDILLED NIGGA: diving into the original text, spending a few hours trying to understand it, and shitpost for several days on /his/ and /lit/ to see if anybody understood it better than you, calling bullshit out on those who interpreted it differently from how you understood it.

>> No.11366408

>>11365172
How to find good secondary texts as autodidact?

>> No.11366447
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11366447

>>11366263
>tfw this is all you do
I never claimed not to be a pseud, but I never actually realized it either

>> No.11366757

>>11366228
I think people put way to much emphasis here on reading order, or doing everything from the beginning of time to present but I don’t think this needs to be as rigorously observed as others.

Learning the history of ideas in any real practice is far more like the printing of an image, where the same paper is passed over again and again, each time filling in finer lines and more connections.

Part of building any sort of plan as you’ve described inherently requires coming to some understanding of who the important thinkers are and where in history they stand to each other.


As for where I find these sorts of books, having access to a university library makes all the difference. Sometimes you can find books which contain annotated bibliographies on a philosophers secondary literature. On any of the companion books looking up other works by any or the contributors typically yields something useful.

>> No.11367568

>>11366240
>>11366228
>>11365887
samefag

>> No.11367571

>>11365791
Multiverse Brain: Reading 20-word summaries of philosophies on 4chan and masturbating to hentai shortly thereafter

>> No.11369014

>>11367568
Calling all actual exchanges ‘samefags’ is why this board is nothing but memes, CoC, and Peterson posting.

>> No.11369675

>>11367571
Trans-reality brain: Reading philosophy and simultaneously masturbating to h-manga

>> No.11369689

True, but the issue is attempting to talk about it as if you know more than someone who has read it. There is no issue in not knowing something or knowing very little of something, the issue is in how people perceive the knowledge they have.

>> No.11371521

>>11369675
Alpha-Omega: Masturbating to philosophy h-manga

>> No.11371522

>>11365172
Only stick to primary sources. Disregard critique unless it is so profound it is a source of it`s own which is extremely rarely the case.
But when reading don`t read book by book. Follow cross references, flows and processes.

Thanks to computers and the internet it is possible to, instead of reading, cross reference subjects, notions, concepts etc.
It is also better since
a) no one before could do it so quickly and with so wide a choice of sources
b) given the multitude of sources we have and the access to them, books beget a very different standing, they no longer need to be read, as they used to be in the past, as standalone bricks, instead you can distill a hitherto non-existing author`s whole system by cross-referencing several books by an author and especially books by different authors from different fields. Thus you can give births to literary gods never before seen. You can understand the author(or literary entity) that wrote behind multitudes of other authors.

>> No.11371526

>>11365172
Hume was gay and no one talks about it

>> No.11371628

>>11365172

This.

Also read Copleston. Best man on the history of philosophy.

>> No.11371630

>>11365172
yes there is? wtf

>> No.11371638

>>11371526

He was?
Proof.