/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.9882331]

>trying to read philosophy
>no fucking idea what he meant by a while argument
>read a summary online and finally understand it
>repeat
have any ex-brainlets ascended here? can you give me tips?

[Anonymous No.9882338]

>>9882331
You seem to be doing it right. You can understand what the philosopher is saying but not necessarily how they argue for it

[Anonymous No.9882341]

>>9882331
So, I am a well read guy. But philosophy is wasted on me except maybe descartes most basic logical presumptions about destroying your preconceptions. Instead, I find easy life guide philosophy, like epicureanism, stoicism, Spinoza's thoughts on pan-deism and the words of the synoptic jesus much more palatable. Existential logic gets me nowhere, and Kant is totally unreadable for me.

So yeah, find your niche if you are a true brainlet (I have never scored above a 105 on an IQ test)

[Anonymous No.9882348]

There is not one correct interpretation.

[Anonymous No.9882363]

Philosophy demands engagement with the text. Discussion and reflection is very useful to get a better understanding. Reading summaries online can help in taking in the large ideas. If you're lost at a first reading, you can read a second time after the summary.

[Anonymous No.9882387]

>>9882363
>>9882348
I just feel like I'm cheating. I don't always agree completely with the summaries but I guess they'd probably refute my problems since I'm some brainlet reading philosophy for leisure and they're old academics with decades of experience.

[Anonymous No.9882519]

>>9882331
This isn't a fix all and it depends what philosophers you're reading (some don't work this way at all), but maybe try a more Analytic approach if you want to grasp arguments. I'm assuming you don't know this stuff already so sorry if you do and I come across as patronizing.

So basically you need to work out what conclusion a writer is trying to push towards in a passage, which will generally be explicitly stated either at the start or the end of the argument.

Try and work out if its inductive or deductive argument. You work this out by figuring out what premises the writer is using to support their conclusion and the way those premises relate to that conclusion.

If an argument is deductive, it’s argued using premises which the writer claims logically lead to the conclusion. So, an example from Descartes' Meditation:
>Nevertheless I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as I am. But how do I know that He has not brought it to pass that there is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place, and that nevertheless [I possess the perceptions of all these things and that] they seem to me to exist just exactly as I now see them? And, besides, as I sometimes imagine that others deceive themselves in the things which they think they know best, how do I know that I am not deceived every time that I add two and three, or count the sides of a square, or judge of things yet simpler, if anything simpler can be imagined? But possibly God has not desired that I should be thus deceived, for He is said to be supremely good. If, however, it is contrary to His goodness to have made me such that I constantly deceive myself, it would also appear to be contrary to His goodness to permit me to be sometimes deceived, and nevertheless I cannot doubt that He does permit this."
So, if you look at this passage and strip away any extraneous stuff, you get the Deceiving God Argument:
Premise 1) If there is an all-powerful God, he is able to deceive us into believing that we clearly perceive some essential laws about reality (e.g. mathematical laws, spatial laws etc.)
Premise 2)If it's possible we can be deceived about these essential laws, then our knowledge of the world is uncertain.
Premise 3) There is (or it's at least possible that there is) such an all-powerful God
Conclusion 1: It's possible we are being deceived about these essential laws
Conclusion 2 (which follows from Conclusion 1): Knowledge of the world is uncertain (Radical Scepticism)

(1/2)

[Anonymous No.9882527]

>>9882519
This section of the meditations is cool because Descartes also deals with a possible objection to his argument (which is an objection to one of his premises, because if an argument is logically sound, then the premises follow on from the conclusion and thus to dispute the conclusion you have to argue against the premises.)

So someone could object that God is by his nature benevolent, and so Descartes introduces the idea of the Deceiving Demon, who is also all-powerful but is not benevolent. So if it’s possible to imagine a Demon who is this powerful and also willing to deceive us, then we have reason to doubt this. You can update this argument if you want, to suppose that maybe it’s possible we are being systematically deceived by some kind of malevolent Artificial Intelligence, who has created the universe as we know it as a simulation.

So that would be a deductive argument. Inductive arguments are more common in the way you reach conclusions in everyday life, but less common in philosophy. Simply put everyone believes the sun will rise tomorrow, and they believe this broadly because it rose yesterday and the day before and the day before etc. So:
P1) The sun rose yesterday and today
P2)The sun rose the day before yesterday
P3) The sun rose the day before that
…
P100) The sun rose the day before that
…
C: It is very very very likely that the sun will rise tomorrow
Now notice that the conclusion doesn’t say that the sun WILL rise tomorrow, just that, because of the number of examples we have of it rising before, it is almost certain to rise again tomorrow. Obviously the more examples you have in your premises, the more certain your conclusion will be.

So 99% of philosophy can be broken down in exactly this way to make it more manageable. Most passages will be a little more complicated than the examples I gave but if you learn the principles of how this works, there aren’t many arguments in philosophy you won’t be able to understand and assess.

(2/2)

>Inb4 aspergers train set philosophy
Ree im neurotypical analytic philosophy is real philosophy shut up contifags

[Anonymous No.9882538]

>>9882519
>>9882527
Thanks, this is useful. I'm going to give it a more thorough read this evening.

[Anonymous No.9882541]

>>9882348
There is no 1 correct interpretation, however reading interpretations give you a better understanding of how to interpret texts yourself.
>>9882341
You are not cheating, anon. You are learning.