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Philosophical journeys
A loyal MR reader (and yes they are all loyal, are they not?) asks:
I always enjoy your posts on philosophy, but sometimes I feel like I’m a bit out of my league. For example, after skimming through Parfit’s new book manuscript you linked last week, I don’t feel like I have the philosophical background to understand all of the issues he raises. I have always had an interest in philosophy (took a couple undergrad intro courses), but I never had the time to fully pursue my interest.
Now that I do have time, I’m at a loss of where to start my philosophical journey. Should I start by pursuing only the questions and fields that interest me? Or should I be more broad? Should I start with the “heavy” stuff (large tomes like Reason and Persons)? Or should I start off some place else?
To answer these questions, I was wondering if you could describe where your philosophical journey began. What books most interested and influenced you at the outset? Did you focus on particular philosophers or questions?
I am not a professional philosopher, but here goes...
As a young teen I wanted to start with all of Plato's Dialogues (yes including Parmenides, which I loved, but I didn't finish The Laws) plus the major works of modern philosophy. I used the old John Hospers text to identify Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. I read some Aristotle too, although he bored me. Then I read lots of Karl Popper and Brand Blanshard, the old-fashioned defender of rationalism and critic of positivism. I gobbled up George Smith and Antony Flew on atheism. I was influenced by Ayn Rand's moral defense of capitalism, though I was never impressed by her as a philosopher.
Much later I read Nozick, Rawls, and Parfit. Parfit made by far the biggest impression on me. The other two, however smart, seemed predictable.
In graduate school I read Quine avidly. George Romanos's book on Quine I found more useful than any single Quine work, although Word and Object and the essay on "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" are the places to start. Quine remains a major influence, including on how I think about blog posts. Which thicket of assumptions might lead one to a possible conclusion? I took a class on philosophy of language with Hilary Putnam and developed interests in Kripke and others, but they never displaced Quine in my affections. I developed a fondness for William James. From Rorty I saw more value in the Continentals, although I prefer to misread them. I flirted with the early German romantics and their rejection of philosophy, at times mediated through J.S. Mill.
Later experience with Liberty Fund interested me in "deep" readings of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Maimonides, and some of the other "Straussian" texts. I've never been a Straussian, though. I've made attempts to understand Heidegger but without any success.
Right now the philosophy journals I read are Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs. When it comes to metaphysics, mind-body problems, and the like, I prefer books, usually of a semi-popular nature. The academic debates on these topics are too rarified to interest me very much.
That is my path, in a nutshell. I don't pretend it is an optimal sequence for others.
The bottom line: I have learned to focus on the philosophy which clicked with me at the time. The rest was just so much blah blah blah. Philosophy books are more like self-help tomes, or fun record albums, than they let on.
Any suggestions for how our reader should choose a path?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 17, 2006 at 07:19 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
Blah blah blah is definitely the way to go, :-).
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Aug 17, 2006 8:11:37 AM
Start with the Pre-Socratics, as they will give you a good foundation in terms of philosophy of science, then go on with selected dialogues from Plato. You have no business not having read "The Republic". I personally greatly enjoyed Aristotle's "Politics" as well as is "Nichomachean Ethics", but I was primarily interested in political philosophy as a background for my training in economics. Some of the medieval philosophers might be interesting, but they are largely a religious restatement of Aristotle (e.g., Thomas Aquinas). Rousseau (his "Discourse on Inequality" is much more interesting than his "Social Contract", in my opinion) and Hobbes ("Leviathan") are must-reads, but I never cared for the too-religious Spinoza.
Frederick Copleston has a really good series of nine volumes on the history of philosophy, which should give you a good bird's eye view of the discipline starting from the Pre-Socratics and going up to the Existentialists. I personally advise spending less time on metaphysics and ontology, and more time on ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, and analytical philosophy.
Posted by: Arsene at Aug 17, 2006 8:26:54 AM
Tyler,
Obviously you put Descartes before de horse.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Aug 17, 2006 8:35:43 AM
Wittgenstein for fun and profit!
Not only do you get 2 distinct solutions to all philosophical problems (Wittgenstein I vs. Wittgenstein II) but you also understand why philosophy itself is useless and a pseudo-problem.
For Shiva's sake! There's been more progress in theoretical macroeconomics over the last 25 years than in philosophy over the last 2500 years. There's something very rotten in Denmark and Wittgenstein II has the scoop.
I suggest starting with On Certainty and then The Philosophical Investigations. I'm unsure if the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is best read before or after Wittgenstein II.
Alternatively, Nietzsche and Freud are always good suggestions, but they're less philosophical than one might think.
Posted by: Gabriel Mihalache at Aug 17, 2006 8:39:56 AM
I was also going to recommend the Coppleston books, which are long and difficult for a beginner, but are also very erudite and comprehensive. I believe they were written for Catholic seminary students, but he makes a good effort to render most philosophical traditions understandable.
The other work I recommend is Bertrand Russel's "History of Western Philosophy." This book is shorter and less comprehensive, and you get Bertrand Russel's unique view of things, but it does hit the high points and I found it to be witty, well-written, and fun to read.
Those two works gave me a good overview of the historical context of important philosophers, their basic ideas, and the web of influence by which they affected one another's work. That was enough to satisfy my curiosity and allow me to pretend to be an educated person, which was all I really wanted out of a book on philosophy. Good Luck.
Posted by: Will at Aug 17, 2006 9:15:13 AM
Ethics is a mug's game, so just go ahead and jump in at the deep end of analytic philosophy. Read Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" and work back from there.
Posted by: Urstoff at Aug 17, 2006 9:16:17 AM
Hi -
As a former ABD philosophy grad student who saw the light and became an economist, I think I might have an insight or two.
Your list is a good one, but with one major omission: the German phenomenologists. Now, I'm not exactly impartial (my half-finished thesis was on the differences and similarities of the phenomenological reduction in Husserl and Heidegger, especially in reference to the late Husserl and the early Heidegger), but if you haven't read the Crisis of European Sciences by Husserl and Being And Time by Heidegger, you've missed acquiring some of the best analytical tools available: phenomenological hermeneutics.
Of couse, you might just be happy with Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an alternative. The Phenomenology of Perception is a fundamental book for the analysis of perception and the lived-world of Husserl and Heidegger. Sense and Nonsense is also good, as is his seminal work Humanism and Terror.
And no Kant? How can that be???
And no Hegel?
Ok, ok, I admit to a bias here because I spent 4 years reading them...
And any econmist should certainly have read Fichte's "Der geschlossene Handelsstaat" (1800) to understand where one of the philosophical bases for Marx came from. (Geschlossenen Handelstaat = closed trading state, i.e. a utopia where the state decided what was good for the people).
John
Posted by: John F. Opie at Aug 17, 2006 9:24:35 AM
If you want to be freed from the brute utilitarianism that characterizes economics, read Kant. :-)
(And if you want to understand Kant, read Christine Korsgaard's books.)
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Aug 17, 2006 9:46:18 AM
Ooh, ooh, ooh. Also, everyone should read at least some Habermas (I personally like Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, which throws together his best defenses of discourse ethics), and at least a little existentialism (Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity is underappreciated in my humble non-philosopher opinion).
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Aug 17, 2006 9:50:19 AM
Read Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth.
There is a lot of typical, politically correct green thinking and bad economics. Go ahead and skim / skip those sections.
On the other hand, Tolle's section on the delusional, mentally-made sense of self is probably the clearest outline on how we deceive ourselves through complete identification with thought-based models of reality. This will give vast insight into how your own mind works, as well as understanding others. Without this insight into the nature of the self, philosophy has no foundation.
Here is an excerpt.
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Aug 17, 2006 10:41:33 AM
Wittgenstein and Nietzsche takes you a long way. You get a good taste of analytic philosophy with early Wittgenstein, and late Wittgenstein tells why you don't need to bother that much (to be fair, "Tractatus" actually ends on that note). You can cheat by reading Monk's biography "Duty of genius" which covers Wittgenstein's philosophy fairly reasonably. Nietzsche is a good read, and much more philosophical than you might think. "The gay science" is a good starting point. Sample:
"In science convictions have no rights of citizenship, as one says with good reason: only when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, they may be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge—though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust.— But does this not mean, if you consider it more precisely, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would it not be the first step in the discipline of the scientific spirit that one would not permit oneself any more convictions? ... Probably this is so: only we still have to ask, to make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior conviction, even one that is so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself? We see that science also rests on a faith, there simply is no science "without presuppositions." "
If you only want to read one book, read Rorty's "Philosophy and the mirror of nature".
Posted by: Dan K at Aug 17, 2006 11:02:25 AM
From Rorty I saw more value in the Continentals, although I prefer to misread them.
As does Rorty.
And I would warn anyone against relying on Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Read it with pleasure, but don't take seriously anything after the Kant chapter, except for the last chapter on his own philosophy.
The best advice I've ever seen for how to read philosophy is from Nietzsche, which I paraphrase thus: when wondering how or why a philosopher came up with some particularly abstruse metaphysical assertion or theory, ask yourself, "at what morality does this aim?"
Posted by: Anderson at Aug 17, 2006 11:16:20 AM
OK, time to commit sacrilege. There's a lot of philosophy out there, and the most important part is knowing what isn't worth reading, so with that in mind...
Skip the Greeks completely, with the possible exception of Aristotle's Poetics. Ignore all continentals except Kant, and yes that includes Wittgenstein. Of the empiricists, read only Hume: he is a delight, and had pretty much the right idea about most things. Read Karl Popper, then if you feel so inclined go back and read Kant -- he'll make much more sense that way. Russell is overrated as a philosopher but still a pleasure to read on nearly everything. Quine is excellent and goes very well with Popper (strange that they hardly ever interacted), and Tyler is right about the best places to start. Daniel Dennett is the go-to guy on philosophy of mind and free will. Tyler is also right about Rawls, Nozick and Parfit. Give Rand a miss -- she is impressive as a rhetorician but subtly wrong about 75% of the time. Read Hayek. Lots of Hayek. He is a bland writer but you will never look at the world in quite the same way again.
Posted by: Matt McIntosh at Aug 17, 2006 11:23:38 AM
Daniel Dennett is the go-to guy on philosophy of mind and free will.
Ah, yes, Dennett, the one who says subjective experience is not a problem because, after all, we cannot objectively measure it, therefore it doesn't really exist. . .
I like Chalmer's explanation for Dennett's stance: Maybe Dennett really is a zombie. . .
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Aug 17, 2006 11:44:38 AM
Someone help me - I've read too much Foucault...
Where do postmoderns fit?
Posted by: anne at Aug 17, 2006 12:02:51 PM
I'm an amateur reader of philosophy too. I think the best approach is to let yourself be suckered a little bit, just so you can get impassioned on some of the topics.
The first serious thinker I read was Hayek on Liberty. I got all charged up on liberty, and that led me down all sorts of paths like Oakeshott. Just following Hayek's footnotes led me to Popper on science. There's an interesting topic too.
I never took the time to go back and read the greek stuff. Not sure if I should. What's the payoff?
Science and religion were central for me. What a struggle! Get stirred up with some Dawkins (biology), and when your head cools read some Hume. Hume isn't hard to read, but it's still a good idea to get one of those Routledge guides to read along with. Atheism is the first reward most people get from philosophy.
By far the writer I've enjoyed most, who just happens to be a philosopher, is Nietzsche. He was nothing but a strange man before I sat down with Leiter's Routledge Guide and worked through some of his stuff. Just inspiring. I love reading secondary lit. on Nietzsche now.
Parfit is sort of the opposite of Nietzsche in style, but he takes him as an inspritation. One pleasure with Parfit is seeing him turn self-interest theory on itself, watching it eat its own tail. If Ayn Rand wasn't dead to me before, she is now.
If you want to know why all this dry moral philsophizing might be useless, then read Posner's "Problematics..." --- He's another Nietzschean, and a wonderful writer.
Tyler mentions that Rorty gave a reason to read Continental. I just recently read some Rorty, and I think he has a beautiful view of Nietzsche's project and he even made it sound like Freud did something useful. But I am more enchanted by Rorty than convinced.
But that's just my personal journey, by no means should you follow it.
Posted by: Lee Beck at Aug 17, 2006 12:31:54 PM
Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy is a great one-volume guide to what everyone believed.
I think I'd read Plato to start with (he's much, much more readable than most commentaries on him, though I tend to think that Protagoras got somewhat the better of Socrates in that debate). Then I'd go on to Whitehead's Adventure of Ideas.
Posted by: Tony Zbaraschuk at Aug 17, 2006 12:43:13 PM
"I am not a professional philosopher" -- And neither anyone else!
Posted by: Kent Guida at Aug 17, 2006 1:07:19 PM
I agree with Alfred North Whitehead's statement that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
So start with Plato.
Posted by: cllam at Aug 17, 2006 1:13:56 PM
OK, I have been a naughty boy and will play seriously.
If Dennett is the go-to guy now, which I have some
doubts regarding, then indeed the fundamental problem
in philosophy is the deepest one that split the major
Greeks, Plato and his student Aristotle, about whom
we probably know much because of the military-political
successes of Aristotle's most important pupil, Alexander,
which got their writings spread far and wide. Heidegger
and some others praise the pre-Socratics, but they are
more for fun and games.
In the more recent period, the Platonic impulse remains
strongest as one goes from philosophy into mathematical
logic, which one is treading on with Quine and Kripke.
Going further will lead to Goedel and a lot of other stuff
that may not be viewed as philosophy, but certainly has
some links to economics through computability theory.
Among the figures who straddle this divide historically are
both Kant and Hume, who allow both the Continental and
Anglo-American traditions to straddle the divide in their
respectively own curious ways. Wittgenstein goes on several
sides in the movement between his periods.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Aug 17, 2006 2:50:51 PM
For ethics, if you have no prior background, read Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" and Thomas Nagel's "The Possibility of Altruism." Then, once they have made it clear that ethical philosophy isn't just about justifying your own impulses, backfill with "Gorgias," "The Republic," and "Nichomachean Ethics." Zip forward to get the latest work on ethical philosophy from Parfit, Scanlon, or Habermas. You are now set to try political philosophy: start with Aristotle's "Politics", then skip to "Leviathan," "On the Social Contract," and finally get the modern philosophical consensus from "Theory of Justice."
Posted by: anonymous at Aug 17, 2006 3:15:28 PM
Hmmmm..... Okay, I have only just got back to re-reading my old philosophy collection (thanks Matt!) but like Matt I say Hayek, Popper, Quine and Hume. I would add Plato and Aristotle's Ethics. John is right, Merleau Ponty is enough to get what you need of the phenomenologists, skip Russell except for fun, maybe some Kant. Wittgenstein if you have time.
Posted by: Lance at Aug 17, 2006 3:29:59 PM
I recommend starting with David Stove. See my Skepticism of Philosophical Thought for a review of his "The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies". I guarantee laughter, if not an indrawn breath at his takedown of the 'great thinkers'.
Posted by: Mike Huben at Aug 17, 2006 5:36:21 PM
When you give economists the chance to talk about philosophy, most of them (not you, Tyler) will say how useless and worthless it is. When you give philosophers the chance to talk about economics, most of them (not me, though) will say how useless and worthless it is.
These people are wrong.
It's actually a pretty good test of an economist or a philosopher. Ask a political philosopher what he thinks of economics. If he says, "Not much", or starts spouting old-school Keynesianism as if we haven't learned anything since the 1930s, the philosopher is probably an ideologue and can be ignored. Ask an economist what he thinks of philosophy. If he says, "Not much" or starts attacking it by producing caricatures of the great thinkers (as some of the above posters have, or as Posner likes to do, for that matter ), caricatures that would get him a C or less if used in a undergraduate philosophy class, then he's probably an ideologue and can be ignored.
Though I'm a philosopher, I do think that most academic philosophy is pretty much worthless, but I also think that for all X, most academic X is pretty much worthless. So what. Probably about 3% of the product of the average academic discipline has any long-term worth. This 3% justifies the other 97% percent, because we aren't good at sorting the good from the worthless except in hindsight. (Plus, what we justifably place in the 3% changes over time.)
Posted by: J. at Aug 17, 2006 11:39:46 PM
Semi-empirical claim which I can probaby not justify but believe anyways: Intellectually interesting people who make genuine contributions to their fields hold genuine respect for most other fields.
Posted by: J. at Aug 17, 2006 11:45:54 PM
