/lit/ - Literature

>>15560967

You can do Descartes cold anon. That's kind of the point with him, and it's also why he's universally assigned freshman reading.

>>15560967
If you're reading that little it's not worth trying Aristotle Metaphysics. I wouldn't even bother with Descartes he's boring dull faggot in Meditations at least

Read something cool like On the Heavens or Physics

>>15560993
>>15561002
My ultimate goal is German Idealism

>>15560967
>I need to read bare minimum
Are you actually interested in philosophy or looking for that participation trophy?

>>15560967
You have to read all of the major presocratics and about them as well. Just buy the complete Presocratic works along with the complete works of Plato and Aristotle.

And yes, you have to read everything by Plato and Aristotle also. But perhaps more importantly, you have to read the Greek poets Homer(not a single great English translation but the best is Lattimore), Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar and Sappho. Aristophanes is funny too; nobody told me that the Greeks were actually funny. Epicurus is also necessary because for example, how something like his materialism relates to Descartes mind-body dualism. You should also be familiar with every major Greek Stoic and every major work of Greek Stoicism.

The Romans are a different subject, but you can read much less of them for the time being. Great stuff to read for enjoyment though. However you really must read much of and about medieval philosophy/theology/poetry/art because of how it relates to the renaissance and its mistakes made and further to the enlightenment. It'd be a great idea to read de Montaigne and de Maistre before Descartes as well however.


It doesn't take that long apart from Homer, Plato and Aristotle; so just get used to and enjoy it.

>>15560967
>>15561076
Oh and I almost forgot, read about the exact effect Socrates actually had on philosophy and from this the multiple and schools and pupils which were created as a result of him. Antisthenes is an important example.

You should also read some Greek oratory, most peoples favourite is Demosthenes.

>>15561022

Greeks, Rationalists, Empiricists, Kant. Supplemental related reading as you see fit.

>>15561039
I'm interested in philosophy that's more...relevant. Reading Plato is just annoying, socrates is an asshole and from what I've read so far he has nothing good to say when he's actually confronted with someone who disagrees with him and goes on wild unfounded tangents when someone is licking his ass. Plato spends and entire book claiming he's only talking about the ideal city as a metaphor for the soul which would be fine if it wasn't completely obvious that it's much more than a metaphor and he clearly has political ambitions. And then the nigger actually went later in life and tried to mold a city into his Kallipolis. Maybe I'd get more out of this later in life but right now it's just a slog and not really what I'm interested in, but I'd like to know enough to actually understand the context of later stuff.

>>15561076
>>15561085

This one is having a giggle OP, you do not have to do all of that prior to Descartes.

>>15561095

See, this is good. You're indicating that you've read a bit, have engaged with the content/ideas, and are forming your own opinion of same. You have something that you dislike, that you reject, and you can articulate why. That's a great step in reading philosophy. So what do you value? What would you hold to be "relevant"?

>>15561095
relevant in what way?
What are you 'interested in'?
What do you expect to actually get out of philosophy?
>Maybe I'd get more out of this later in life but right now it's just a slog and not really what I'm interested in
It's meant to be a slog. It's philosophy. You're meant to work at it. Digest it. It's not about simply running your eyes across the page. You have to consider it.

>>15561104
>This one is having a giggle OP,

>>15561095
One thing I found helpful with Plato was realising that he was more self aware than one at first thinks. This is more secretively obvious in his later works, but it can still be found in things like the Phaedo, Republic or Symposium.

Really Plato is one of the most necessary people to read when starting philosophy, even from a technical level, but more importantly from a philosophical one.

>>15560993
this

>>15561095
I want to be ripped, but I also to sit on the couch!

>>15561121

>dude our senses deceive us therefor ta-da rational argument for self also god too
>dude scientific method is cool also Harvey was right-on in his description of the heart's movement amirite
>dude plane geometry

As a modern no, you do not have to read twenty volumes of Diels/Kranz, Oxford Aristotle, and commentaries on the clepsydra and the fifty different cosmogenic views of the presocratics to read Descartes' little texts and get something out of them. Of course it's helpful, but you don't have to, and that's what the OP asked about. That's why modern philosophy is credited to have begun with Descartes: the ideas are intelligible to moderns.

>>15561114
>>15561112
I mean ideally I'd like to be able to read the Critical Theory guys, considering they're meme'd about so much by both sides but nobody ever really seems to agree on what it actually is. My point, I guess, is that I'd like a decent foundation without spending the next half decade of my life reading nothing but Ancient Greeks. I'm sure anything I skip I'll go back to eventually but at a certain point there's definitely a chronological requirement. I've read later people like Nietzsche and Baudrillard in college and they were more interesting to me because they seemed to tackle problems that are more specific to the state of living in the 21st century.

>>15561130
I mean I figured Plato is very important considering everyone goes back to him, but he has many dialogues and even more students and offshoots and it just seems this can't all possibly have to be relevant for 19th and 20th century writers

>>15560967
Read Plato's Apology of Socrates, then read Plato's Phaedo. A lot of the background Plato uses for proofs for the existence of the soul are later used by Descartes in his Meditations,

>>15561146
>>dude our senses deceive us therefor ta-da rational argument for self also god too
>>dude scientific method is cool also Harvey was right-on in his description of the heart's movement amirite
>>dude plane geometry
What a crude limitation of meaning, not to mention on a technical level what they even meant.

You, sir, are a pseud!

>>15561175
>I mean I figured Plato is very important considering everyone goes back to him, but he has many dialogues and even more students and offshoots and it just seems this can't all possibly have to be relevant for 19th and 20th century writers
Trust me, he does. For the most important thinker of the 20th century and still yet Heidegger, you have to have read Plato as well as Aristotle. To properly understand one of the most important thinkers of the 19th century, Carlyle, you have to have read Plato. I don't mean to say pretentious or "blah blah blah you have to waste your time on loook how complex i a blh blah blah" useless things like that, but that he is spiritually necessary. Both in the literal sense of what he himself Plato believed, as well as dissecting it and seeing its apparent value in other things. To have a grasp on any political philosophy to have to have read Plato's Republic.

You aren't meant to enjoy it like fiction, but it is ultimately enjoyable in the sense of what you get from it in part and in whole.

>>15561076
is sappho real, or just a homosexual psyop?

>>15561076
>fell for Greeks meme
>no herodotus or Thucydides

Imagine not reading Greek history

>>15561095
The republic is insanely good. You have to pay close attention and read it multiple times, especially books 7 and 8. It's not just central to the western philosophical tradition, but if you look at philosophy worldwide the way he connects his ideas on the soul, the ontology and ethics through the idea of the good are central problems in virtually all philosophical traditions, and the republic is one of the few nearly systematic texts that tackles them together, the first in the western canon that does so. You find the concepts and their connections reappear in Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, when they are all at their most profound. Even if you have problems with the republic if you don't see it's depth and don't even find it interesting you definitely have not read it patiently or enough. I didn't love it on my first reading but it's incredibly layered.

>>15561175
>a decent foundation
For what?
What is it about Critical Theory that interests you, just because it's meme'd?
>they seemed to tackle problems that are more specific to the state of living in the 21st century.
What does that mean?
>and it just seems this can't all possibly have to be relevant for 19th and 20th century writers
Baudelaire's definition of 'modernity' aside, that's precisely why you should read the Greeks and everything in between. So you can point to truly unique 21st century phenomena and say clearly and confidently: "this is unprecedented."

>>15560993
>tfw did Descartes cold

Feels good to be Cartesian by birth.

>>15561224
>>15561341
Maybe I will give some of his other dialogues a chance

>>15561022
Hegel Kant and Schelling for the divine triangle of German Idealism's God