Where to start when beginning to study philosophy?

[dje101]

Hello,

A couple of people in their responses mentioned that it’d be wise to start with the earlier philosopher, like Aristotle.

Would this book be a good place to start?

 

[polytropos]

Guys wouldn’t it be okay to concurrently read the really old stuff from Western philosophy like Plato and something more “cutting edge” and recent (turn of the last century) stuff like Ferdinand de Saussure or Ludwig Wittgenstein,letting yourslef cross-analyze stuff as you go into less dated stuff?.

I would second some of what other people have said (The Republic is worth reading, and Feser’s Aquinas is the best introduction in my view). But I would also say that reading some Wittgenstein would not be a bad idea. You can get his collected works for about $10 on Amazon (though unfortunately they will not contain Philosophical Investigations). Perhaps getting Philosophical Investigations would be better, as the Tractatus is probably not worth reading if you are a newcomer to philosophy.

 

[sidetrack]

I doubt there is anything more cutting edge than Plato who uses Socrates to teach us how to think.

Sorry for getting back late-ish .-_- No offense but I’m that there are various ppl who are more “cutting-edge” then Plato and Socrates in the ~2300 years after both of them lived.=

 

[polytropos]

No offense but I’m that there are various ppl who are more “cutting-edge” then Plato and Socrates in the ~2300 years after both of them lived.=

Well, I don’t know about “cutting edge,” but it has been said (by Alfred North Whitehead) that the entire western philosophical tradition is made up of “footnotes to Plato.”

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Sorry for getting back late-ish .-_- No offense but I’m that there are various ppl who are more “cutting-edge” then Plato and Socrates in the ~2300 years after both of them lived.=

Not sure what your definition is of “cutting edge.” Perhaps a professional philosopher would think of modern philosophers as more “cutting edge” because they deal with issues in philosophy that are novel today compared to the issues dealt with by Plato and Aristotle. The role of semantics or language in our thought processes, for example, might be something you would be more likely to find in more modern philosophers, some of whom think that language is really the problem that underlies the failure to adequately address many of the traditional philosophical questions.

But anyone first entering the philosophical arena for the first time should put that sort of thing on the back burner, I think. Maturing first in studying the traditional issues of philosophy, and especially how to ask questions and how to go about answering them, was a specialty of Plato and Aristotle. All of the Platonic dialogues teach us how that process should be carried on through the give-and-take of dialogue. Aristotle adds another layer of complexity in his book Prior Analytics, which is the study of formal logic (the syllogism).

Augustine was very much influenced by the Platonists who were carrying on Plato’s ideas.

Aquinas was somewhat more influenced by the newly rediscovered writings of Aristotle.

Aquinas often enough found Plato useful to cite, but seems to have sided more often with Aristotle when Aristotle disagreed with Plato, especially on the subject of the Forms or Ideas.

As polytropos points out, Feser’s *Thomas Aquinas *is one of the best introductions to Aquinas. Josef Pieper’s Guide to Thomas Aquinas is another good source.

G.K. Chesterton’s *The Dumb Ox *cleverly weaves together the strands of Thomas’ life and thought, and is a delightful read compared to some of the “heavier” biographies.

 

[jimmy]

I would start with Plato and Aristotle. Once you have a grasp of their philosophy, you can study Aquinas and some of the modern philosophers.

 

[PseuTonym]

I would like to start studying philosophy, but I don’t quite know where to begin.

I know there are plenty of philosophy books out there that would probably be a huge waste of time.

I can recommend topics. You will not necessarily read more than a small fraction of any one book, because you will read in those books only what is on the recommended topics. Of course, you’re free to read as much as you like of a book, but don’t blame me if you then waste time!

The first topic is logic, but because logic is a tool or methodology for getting at the truth, you need to start with some topic where the truth is very clear.

So I recommend that you begin with the Peano postulates, propositional logic, and what is called predicate logic or first-order logic or the logic of not only variables and connectives, but also quantifiers

I recommend that you avoid reading anything about geometry until much later. The Peano postulates deal with the properties of the non-negative whole numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, etc.

After that, I recommend that you study Aristotle’s treatment of fallacies, and ignore his treatment of deductive logic. However, you should consider his fallacies as strategies that other people might use deliberately, but that you aren’t to use deliberately. You aren’t to accuse anybody of using any of the fallacies. They simply are patterns that you may suspect describe a strategy that somebody might be using. They cannot be used to confirm that an allegedly invalid argument is irreparably invalid. It’s possible that a fairly small change to an invalid argument will repair the defect.

If you feel ready for geometry, and actually have an appetite for it, then I recommend that you begin with Pasch’s postulate, a postulate that is required to reach Euclid’s conclusions, but that was never formulated by Euclid.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

After that, I recommend that you study Aristotle’s treatment of fallacies, and ignore his treatment of deductive logic. However, you should consider his fallacies as strategies that other people might use deliberately, but that you aren’t to use deliberately. You aren’t to accuse anybody of using any of the fallacies. They simply are patterns that you may suspect describe a strategy that somebody might be using. They cannot be used to confirm that an allegedly invalid argument is irreparably invalid. It’s possible that a fairly small change to an invalid argument will repair the defect.

I don’t agree that you should ignore Aristotle’s treatment of deductive logic. For those who agree that mathematics is not a necessary tool for developing sound principles of reasoning, I think Aristotle’s *Prior Analytics *is a fine substitute. Not that Aristotle is the last word in logic … but young student philosophers with a logical mind will find him scintillating.

Bertrand Russell was one of the great mathematicians of the modern age, so you could never say he was not a logician (everything mathematical requires a logical mind), but he was a sloppy philosopher. Anyone well versed in Aristotle’s treatment of deductive logic could make mincemeat of Russell’s infamously ridiculous essay “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

We should be well versed in those ancients who were logical, as opposed to those moderns who are not so logical as they think they are.

 

[dje101]

Please forgive my COMPLETE ignorance of philosophy. Some have mentioned Socrates and Plato. I can’t find anything by Socrates, but have read that the only way we know Socrates is through the writings of Plato. Is that correct?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Please forgive my COMPLETE ignorance of philosophy. Some have mentioned Socrates and Plato. I can’t find anything by Socrates, but have read that the only way we know Socrates is through the writings of Plato. Is that correct?

Yes. But even then we do not for the most part know how much of Socrates we know.

Plato was inventive with Socrates. No doubt he was inspired by his master, but also no doubt he went far beyond his master, who then became a mere mouthpiece for Plato’s own original thoughts. We will never know exactly where Socrates ends and Plato begins.

Xenophon, another contemporary of Socrates, wrote a biography of Socrates which may well give us additional material that Plato does not relate; but Xenophon was certainly not the philosopher Plato was, and so the philosophical approach he gives to Socrates, though it may in some respects be more accurate or more literal, is less interesting.

Both Zenophon and Plato depict Socrates as a harsh critic of the democratic thrust in Athenian politics, so we can be pretty sure that this fact alone could account for why the jury was biased enough against Socrates to find him guilty of the crimes he was charged with and sentence him to death.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

If you are looking for an easy introduction to the history of ancient philosophy, you can hardly do better than F.M. Cornford’s Before and After Socrates.

amazon.com/Before-after-Socrates-F-Cornford/dp/0521091136/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1401216857&sr=8-2&keywords=cornford

 

[sidetrack]

If it’s not too late, you might be interested to know that you are highly advised to not get busy reading modern philosophers at all, in the beginning.

Here I talk about why I’m bothered by why we can’t seem to

Awww but it tastes so much more fresh .

:I Really though,it’s pretty darn tempting not too. As much as I know the ancient Greek stuff is important to Western thought,I feel impulsed to feel that part of the reason why/how we got into the philosophical “muddle-clouds” we got ourselves into now is b/c so much of the ancient Greek stuff gradually got rusted.

I mean how else am I gonna wrestle with Roland Barthes,if i’m gonna have to start from square one with ancient Greek stuff,when in philosophy you can probably spend a lifetime wandering around solely one era?.

I kinda feel it can be sorta found to be analogous with how we can’t do debates about the latest science developments with say Michio Kaku on gravity b/c learning to come to a competently intuitive grip of Newtonian mechanics is a tremendously effort-full undertaking that could take up a significant chunk of our time/life-span and still mean we can “get our butts kicked” and made to look like clueless old fuddy-duddy’s when talking about gravity with someone who’s more on the “cutting-edge” of things.I.e. a particle physicist or a post-modernist.

And we are not even talking about the impact ppl knowing applied philosophy (like in law or politics) can dish out .

I mean I understand how we appreciate the ancient Greek stuff to help us understand our own religion far better but come on :shrughilosophy certainly isn’t out of neccesity always spiritual which makes consistent suggestion to start with Plato smells to me of leaning on historicism,instead of say “the father of modern Western philosophy” Descartes.

_ Sure his personal spirituality doesn’t jive well with Catholicism ( I find “congito ergo sum” and related things to been somewhat invalidated by neurosci) but it’s a historical person closer to our current mileau and makes me think how odd how on this site so often ppl keep on referring to the ancient Greek stuff and not much else outside of spiritual philosophy,ethics and (to some extent) metaphysics.

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
A question about Socrates portrayal though:I’ve heard that Plato is basically acting a lot like a “yes man” agreeing/conceding to the premises Socrates gives with a few words of affirmation which is like the only thing otherwise preventing what Socrates is saying to be monologues instead of dialogue. Is this true and what do you guys say to that?.

 

[sidetrack]

You should be approaching the Queen of the Sciences with a supple mind, ready to receive an appreciation for the LOVE OF WISDOM (that’s what philo-sophia means). And that cannot be procured by vending machine consumerism.

Your referring to theology aren’t you :ehh: and not math?. Is it the same Queen if “her highness” is actually Gödel’s ontological proof ?.Cuz I **wanna **meet that Queen (leading me to my love of math and how I wish I were better at it)…

Going about it the wrong way can risk losing your enthusiasm, and so, rather than risk giving up, begin with the basics and work your way up.

I hear ya,even with the first reply I wrote but after your down with the basics are you allowed to jump around in big (chronological) leaps through the centuries?.

The most important place to focus at first is in Logic. It is a bit tedious and you might wonder what it’s all for, but the purpose is to verify that your thinking processes are in order – which is most useful these days, when liberalism has introduced so much bad thinking into our everyday lives. So here too, DO NOT presume that a college textbook from 1958 on “Logic” is going to work for you, because even early 20th century books were starting to substitute mathematical formulas and symbols for logical operations, and all that is JUNK.

Are you saying that b/c you don’t see “pure” axiomatic math as so neccesary (is it b/c the whole Anglospheric Analytic school got fixated on it after Bertrand Russell?),if your trying to be philosopher or a mathematician?.What about a logician?.* Maybe with a theistic Jew like Saul Kripke as an inspiration *

Cuz I sorta wish i were one b/c of the awesome skill at both philosophy and math,I wish I had.

Also , again what if the Queen is Gödel’s ontological proof all dressed up .

Don’t waste your time trying to turn Logic into symbolic calculus.

I have a discrete math txtbk with the last chapter on logic. I’ll concede to what you say here as I’m assuming a scant handful are actually competent enough mathematicians to be able abstract some introspective take-away.God knows I’d LOVE to be able to that though _ .

Learn instead, how to identify and work with syllogisms. Learn to distinguish effect from cause and cause from effect. Learn about “If A then B; If B then C; therefore, if A then C.” The mathematical discipline that most closely resembles logic is Geometry. But geometry is not Logic.

You can know a whole lot about geometry and still be entirely lost in the more challenging Logical exercises. …work your way gradually from Logic (often times in two courses) to psychology (not modern psych but classical – much different!), ethics, and epistemology.

~ Why not the logic dense modern cognitive psych maybe minus the mentions of bio/neuro- stuff?. -~- Don’t tell me you have to start with Freud…

epistemology has become a most valuable study and much new work has been done in the past 100 years, but please beware to avoid this until you have done the groundwork in the previous 6 courses listed above.

_ Just imagining the gap of time it takes to get to the field about “the limits of knowledge” is an apparently info- based world…

A year or even two is not unreasonable, but if you press on it hard and pay attention perhaps 5 or 6 months is possible, but you’re likely to not enjoy it as much, going that fast. .

; D Thank you for the encouragement.

 

[DanAl]

Greetings to you all!

I would like to start studying philosophy, but I don’t quite know where to begin.

I know there are plenty of philosophy books out there that would probably be a huge waste of time.

So, I would like to ask the members of CAF where it would be best to start?

Thank you for your (name removed by moderator)ut!

God Bless!!!

Jesuit Frederick Copplestone wrote a series on philosophy that is the best I know in the english language. Copplestone is known also for debating Bertrand Russell and Ayer over the existence of God.