/lit/ - Literature

Why do you want to read philosophy? What is philosophy?

>>11306649
Philosophy is a spook

>>11306649
I want to increase my knowledge

>>11306677
Knowledge is a spook

>>11306640
Nietzsche is a good start, he referred often to other authors and it's """easy""" to read

>>11306649
wacky subject that will give me /lit/ cred

Read the original texts by the Pre-Socratics themselves. Interpretations of them made by people like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger barely resemble the thoughts that were originally expressed by them. This happens to be the case with many other philosophers who interpret others.

Don’t start with that. But an intro book if you like, but begin with the presocratic philosophers. They aren’t hard to understand and there’s lots of work on their significance. Move from their to Plato, and read his works with the help of some online sources, and then move on to Aristotle and do the same. You can read Epicurus and some stoics and hedonists too, but the importance of those works is exaggerated. Move on to summaries Averroes, Maimonides, and Avicenna, then watch some lectures on Aquinas and read some of his work if you’re dedicated. Maybe look into the scholastics in general.

Then Montagne, Leibniz, Berkeley, Descartes, Pascal, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Carlyle, Kierkegaard, Peirce, Bergson. I list them without directions because you’ll need to be able to progress on your own at this point.

There are other great thinkers (Montesquieu, Jefferson, Bacon) but they’re not necessary to a general understanding and can be read later.

Other posters will recommend more, but again this pretty much follows the main line of western thought from its origins to its most recent real contributors.

>>11306799
I wouldn't say people like Montaigne or Carlyle were really philosophers. They wrote down their opinions, but they didn't use logic to arrive upon their conclusions.
Descartes and Hume are closer to what I would think of as philosophers.

I just signed up for pic related at Coursera. It's free, it's five weeks. I hope I get the basics.

>>11306814
Philosophy is not a series of syllogisms

>>11306640
Study it at a top one uni

>>11306640
>tfw started with aristotle metaphysics
am i doomed /lit/? i have a some what stable background but this is the first book on philosophy i ordered

>>11306640
>How do I start with philosophy?
If you feel the need to ask, you're already failing.

"Autodidactism" is a myth. There is no such thing as education without a teacher. The question is who you want your teacher to be. That's for you to decide. You want to start reading philosophy? First, you have to know yourself a little, and what your goals are. Who are you as a person, what do you know, and what do you NOT know? What do you want to learn? Start reading snippets of philosophers' work to see if any of their ideas resonate with you. Once you come across a writer that does, become relentless. Read everything and I mean EVERYTHING that you can from and about that person until you feel as if you aren't learning anything anymore. You have to own your actions, that way you'll stay focused and not lumber around like an oblivious tool.

>>11307035
do you belive in horoscopes by chance?

>>11306640
Literally start with argument forms and move onto symbolic logic. THEN you can get into that faggy continental crap.

>>11306714
>Easy
>We moderns have an advantage over the Greeks in two ideas, which are given as it were as a compensation to a world behaving thoroughly slavishly and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the word "slave": we talk of the "dignity of man" and of the "dignity of labour." Everybody worries in order miserably to perpetuate a miserable existence; this awful need compels him to consuming labour; man (or, more exactly, the human intellect) seduced by the "Will" now occasionally marvels at labour as something dignified. However in order that labour might have a claim on titles of honour, it would be necessary above all, that Existence itself, to which labour after all is only a painful means, should have more dignity and value than it appears to have had, up to the present, to serious philosophies and religions. What else may we find in the labour-need of all the millions but the impulse to exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse by which stunted plants stretch their roots through earthless rocks!

>Out of this awful struggle for existence only individuals can emerge, and they are at once occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic culture, lest they should arrive at practical pessimism, which Nature abhors as her exact opposite. In the modern world, which, compared with the Greek, usually produces only abnormalities and centaurs, in which the individual, like that fabulous creature in the beginning of the Horatian Art of Poetry, is jumbled together out of pieces, here in the modern world in one and the same man the greed of the struggle for existence and the need for art show themselves at the same time: out of this unnatural amalgamation has originated the dilemma
What does this even mean?

>>11306640
I'd recommend starting at our end of things with Quine and working back to another empiricist like Aristotle. You'll see how philosophy was constantly co-opted and derailed into competing with science instead of being appropriately subordinate to it.

Many 'philosophers' perpetuate confusion and vaguely defined terms... Some are cynical propagandists, some are crypto-brainlets, some were just working with far less knowledge than is available now. Then there are academics, many of which want to imagine that they are something other than glorified history teachers. Be aware.

If you're really interested in the concepts and not just seeking 'cred', go on a wikipedia odyssey and attempt to understand the distilled products. Actual philosophy is about manipulation of logic (like math), not history.

>>11307035
>If you feel the need to ask, you're already failing.
I wish everyone who said this would spontaneously drop dead. Such fucking retards.

>>11307612
You need to know you aren't all that you can be before you can improve yourself.

>>11307491

He's saying that although we have potentially good ideals like the the dignity of man (even common man) and his work, we don't live up to such sentiments. Instead, we hypocritcally justify much slavish work and attitudes which serve no higher ideals/dignity (we're hamsters on a wheel trying to pretend we're something more special). This is sad because we are actually capable of a more dignified and rareified existence.

Then he points out that this state of affairs tends to atomize and degrade us, and that we seek solace by indulging in art (in other words, we're seeking cheap dopamine hits to cope with the fallout of our failure of ideals). Goes on to note the odd juxtaposition of the need for art in people who are still mired in mere existence struggle, the noble vs. the base (although if he saw the state of our artistic culture, I doubt he'd note much contrast).

Yes, the language is somewhat too poetic to be clear. I think philosophers should clearly define their terms and stick to logical arrangements... But it is impressive how much he packs into those sentences.

>>11306744
no N understood heraclitus and you must study the occult
to fathom the pre-socratics to begin with

>>11307878
>occult
This is the worst advice I've ever seen. Reading Heraclitus requires nothing more than a wish to understand what is and what becomes. Maybe it might've seemt "obscure" to people living in antiquity, but it's pretty easy to understand if you've actually tried tackling Hindu/Buddhist philosophy, or Joyce.

>>11306677
If you want philosophy for knowledge, then you should probably look into works of philosophy discussing the character and possibilities of knowledge. The ancient stances can be roughly but relatively completely taken up by reading Plato's Theaetetus, which is explicitly about knowledge, and perhaps Rival Lovers, a very short dialogue about philosophy, and Euthydemus, about the character of philosophic seeming sophistry. Further, you'd probably want to look at Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul, which all deal with "science" (in Greek, 'episteme'), and what it must be like, what kinds of questions it can answer, and how we can come to it, if we can come to it at all. Add to that Aristotle's Organon (six related treatises dealing with arguments and how they might work), and you'll have a pretty complete view of the basics of the ancient position. Maybe look at Sextus Empiricus if you'd like to see ancient skepticism.

For the modern, you might want to look into Descartes's Discourse on Method and Meditations, and Francis Bacon's New Organon (among other writings), since they offer something like the foundations which the modern mathematical physics that makes up modern science is grounded upon. Add the writings of Locke and Hume on human understanding, and you'll have a very good position for thinking about empiricism and mathematics.

To see some of how that's played out, you'd have to read some dense stuff, like Kant's critiques, Hegel's Phenomenology, and the logical writings of figures like Frege and Husserl to see where modern positions both take off from and react or respond to.

Nietzsche can fit into this, but he makes very good sense as a reaction to the problems Kant raises, with his response being an attempt to retrieve something of the ancient understanding of the world.

>>11306799
>not making neoplatonism required reading.
>not even mentioning Plotinus

>>11308982
Only worth getting into if you're into mystic shit

Similar question: How do I know I like reading philosophy and not just the idea of reading philosophy?

>>11309176
By reading. In part that may be more or less negotiable depending on the style of the author, but if you're reading some work and your response is total boredom, not even puzzlement or confusion or curiosity or shock or anything, but just boredom, then you probably don't like reading philosophy.

>>11308993
How does one get into mystic shit?
Essential authors, works?

Wow this thread is fucking mess.

Plato was a cum gobbler.

>>11306640
Anyone who tells you to start with anyone but Plato is full of shit