Tips for reading philosophy
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- Опубликовано: 11 июн 2024
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Professor Ellie Anderson, co-host of Overthink philosophy podcast, offers tips about how to read philosophy! If you've been puzzling over Hegel, Sartre, or other challenging philosophy texts, this video is for you.
This video was created just for our RUclips subscribers (thank you for your support!) based on Professor Anderson's courses at Pomona College.
For more from Dr. Anderson, check out Overthink podcast! Available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen (including previous episodes here on RUclips!)
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Another method I've discovered is float and focus. That is, on your first reading, expect that you'll understand nothing. If it feels too difficult, float through it. When you come to something that feels comprehensible and lucid, slow down to focus on it. Then float some more. You'll find as you go along that the more comprehensible parts reinforce what you've picked up subconsciously from the more knotty and difficult parts. The further you go, as Professor Anderson indicates, the more comfortable you'll become with the concepts and at a certain point you may be surprised to discover you're absorbed in the argument--it's come alive. At the end of each chapter, paraphrase to yourself the gist of what the author is saying or what you think she's saying, then write it down.
Philosophy is the only academic field in which writers intentionally make their work obtuse. It is exactly the opposite of good thinking and writing.
@@scambammer6102 It is a feature to find new or forgotten meanings in words you first tought they are trivial or in old or fresh words. Not a bug. Also often times the lexicon of a language doesn't allow the philosopher to express himself/herself in the way he/she intends because it is too poor. Basically can't do his/her job so it's going to make use of weird techniques like using a trivial word in a new sense (like "field" in physics for example).
@@adriancioroianu1704 I am not talking about semantics. It is the GOAL of philosophy to spin impenetrable mazes of bullshit to confound readers so that the "philosopher" looks smart. It's a con game, very similar to religion.
@@scambammer6102 I don't share your opinion. To make a poor analogy (probably) it's like when you listen to non-vocal music and suddenly you "see" or feel something that your never "saw" or felt before and imagine describing that in words. Well, good luck with that. Of course you are going to use metaphors and words in weird and unfamiliar ways, sometimes even inventing new ones to express yourself because everything is novel, sometimes even the whole framework. Religion is similar in this regard but less rational in the way we understand today rationality. Anyway i find your take too harsh and even shallow.
@@adriancioroianu1704 I assume that most people visiting this channel do not agree with me.
I don't think there has been anything original in philosophy since that moron Plato and his vastly superior student Aristotle.
My copy of Ethics of Ambiguity has notes from a previous owner, and you can tell they hated the book because their notes are really passive aggressive and they descend into chaos and madness towards the end of the book. It’s nice having a friend to suffer along with when you’re struggling lol (I am enjoying it more than them, though)
lmao, please put one of their notes here. I'd love to see what the wrote . >_
Lmao
as long as they don't use a black marker to hide the curse words...
It would be great to own such a book!
That's actually hilarious and I totally feel their pain
Ibn Sina, the great physician, claimed that he read Aristotle's Metaphysics more than 40 times trying to understand it, so much so that he memorised the lines and those lines started appearing in his dreams.
That’s absolute crazy dedication
1) Skim first (paragraph/page/chapter), then go through in detail
2) Wait until finishing paragraph/page section until highlighting/annotating
3) Watch out for how arguments are built and premises introduced, check for fallacies (reflect!)
4) Resisit the first and second urge to stop reading
5) Read text in several sittings
6) Learn to swim (get used to flow of writing/approach)
7) chuck in garbage
Ty fren
@@scambammer6102 very mature
@@vishnu2407 pull my finger
7) Avoid postmodern thoroughly refuted and non-sensical theories.
I read Kierkegaard in my first philosophy class in undergrad (200 level). Reading passages like "the self is the self reflecting on its own self.." without any background was 🤪
I think the backgroud and intellectual lineage is imporntant and not mentioned in this otherwise useful discussion. For instance, reading Deluze and not appreciating the traidition of metaphysics and Deluze's reponse to Heidegger's argument regarding metaphoysics.
Ellie Anderson, a new star in the sky of philosophical thinking.
As a philosophy major, I can attest to all of these. I wish I had this video when I first started my degree. I’m currently a senior for clarity.
You would have been much better off changing your major before you started a useless degree. Enjoy working the grill after graduation.
Seniors for Clarity - great name for a band of retired philosophers.
@@dogchaser520 I would join :D
and are you still sane ? im currently studying sociology btw
I am the first president of the local “Seniors for Clarity” chapter.
I enjoy the process of working through a text, without any preconceptions based on the academic or traditional views on it, and then comparing after. Even though you will not be benefitting from centuries of really smart analysis, and end up misinterpreting or getting stuck on many things, the process of working through it raw is just so valuable. When you do dig into what other people say, you will have many epiphanies that have more potency because you did the work and have the foundation. Not to mention insulating yourself from conclusions being pushed as fact by various agendas.
This is one of the few videos on youtube that actually has helpful tips on reading not only philosophy but theory books in general. Most of the stuff you find here have millions of views but it's bs after bs. Thanks
I was born BC (before computers) and lived in a rural suburb in the US. A traveling salesman convinced my mom to buy an encyclopedia set and some "classics." We didn't have any other books, so at about 10, I just started reading Plato's Republic, partly because it was mentioned at school along with the ideas of democracy and republican forms of government. There were some things I liked and some I didn't, so I decided to create my own "ideal nation." Thus, one way to approach a philosophy text is to argue with it and pinpoint what you don't like. Another way is to extrapolate from it and say "what if."
Second suggestion: Read Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World. Yes, it's for teens, but I recently re-read it and had a great time.
Third, re notes: Try Cornell Notes and variations on it. That makes reading far more interactive than highlighting and/or underlining. I wish someone had told me about this when I was starting out in college or even earlier. I teach this technique to all of my students.
Fourth, beware of translations. When we were studying literary theory in grad school, we got bogged down reading Derrida. I went online and read him in French and found out the ugly secret: He's telling puns or making witty remarks or going off on delightful tangents--none of which the translator included. In short, sometimes we have to try these works in the original to really get what the author is trying to convey. However, while Kant in German is indeed systematic, ah, Hegel, oh, my gosh, no wonder Mark Twain dissed the German language!
Love the comment on no spoiler alerts ever being given for the Critique of Pure Reason! One of my favorite observations about philosophy texts now. I am reading the French Existentialists (Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus) after reading a lot of Russian classic literature last year, (Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov) and I love seeing the parallels between such different cultural philosophies. I just discovered your channel with this video and thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope you have continued to make such content and still enjoy it. Thank you for your work on the video!
Thanks for this!! A personal tip that’s worked for me-if you can find any RUclips lectures by the author, or by a contemporary expert on them, just gobble those up. Get your algorithm full of lectures. There are some real gems on this site. Make playlists, write down time stamps, take screenshots and make albums in your phone. Even if you don’t get stuff, you’ll pick up on things just through exposure and immersion.
As a philosophy person preparing for a PhD program and marathon runner, I completely agree with your tips! I will say, in terms of marathon running though, it's important to listen to your body because not doing so may lead to injury. Absolutely build up the physical and mental endurance, but don't get hurt (whether physically or intellectually lol). Love your channel and podcast!
Agreed - she has misunderstood the science of fatigue and marathon running. Sensations associated with fatigue are not "stop signals" as she claims; people can literally run themselves to death if they choose to do so. Newer research on the role of peripheral afferents in causing central fatigue has now disproven the theories of Noakes et al. that her comments are most likely based on.
@@snowleopard9749 Very interesting. What about the notion of the "second wind", which a lot of us can relate to, even in daily life? I get the sense that the body does adjust and regenerate somehow, pump different hormones, perhaps. Fatigue can also come from tension. Not disagreeingin fact, quite interested and will look up those peripheral afferents.
@@robertalenrichter A key paper is "Fatigue-related group III/IV muscle afferent feedback facilitates intracortical inhibition during locomotor exercise" (2018) which among other studies with similar results shows the coupling between peripheral sensation and central fatigue, which in turn is critical for appropriate regulation of ventilation with respect to sustained fatiguing activity as an individual exceeds the gas exchange threshold and 'anerobic threshold'. This also helps explain the increased perception of effort which is based on the strength of signals upstream of the motor cortex and is a critical part of the proprioceptive system (muscle function is predicted as real time feedback is too slow), the delayed proprioceptive feedback is then compared and if performance is lower than expected, this is perceived as fatigue (but not to be confused with the physical sensations associated with fatigue that are also facilitated by the aforementioned group III/IV afferents).
@@snowleopard9749 You'll grant that it's a bit difficult for me to grasp all of these temporal interactions, even with repeated, reflective reading. I would need a diagram. But some of the terms are fascinating -- "peripheral sensation and central fatigue", "predicted muscle function", "delayed proprioceptive feedback". The first two would actually look good in a literary text...
I loved the last point. It reminded me of this quote by Deleuze where he talks about Kant (but it can be applied to any philosophy):
"It´s an excessive atmopshere, but if one holds up, and the important thing is above all not to understand, the important thing is to take on the rythm of a given philosopher, if one holds up, all this northern fog which lands on top of us starts to dissipate, and underneath there is an amazing architecture."
There is so much good advice in here not only just for reading philosophy but almost any other academic texts
I just realised by the end of the video that I had to watch it again because all the time I was just listening to your voice. It's so nice😍
I learned (and use) "Multiple draft reading" : 1st draft : skim/scan for big picture, identifying areas that seem really important .... 2nd draft: a little closer read of the parts that seem really important, 3rd draft: slow down and work on passages (by re-reading them, often), and then 4th draft... : re-read.... all the while making notes >.... and if you do this well, it actually SAVES you time and is way more engaging!!! (and can be fun to identify WTF is going on :) thanks for this channel and pod!
The color palette of this video is one of the most mesmerizing I have ever seen.
Thanks! The bit about building stamina to resist temptation of giving up and keep going is true for so many other facets of life too.
I'm a brazillian and noticing throughout the video a "Clarice Lispector Complete Stories" on your shelf made me really happy. She is a wonderful writer and really deserves to be read on another langagues besides portuguese as well!
I’m going back to school after 10yrs and I’m really glad I stumbled on this video. I’m going to use these trips to help me study.
Several good tips. I would add the Feynman method on top of all that. When you get to a point where you no longer understand ... go back to the beginning and start again.
As a scientist who listens to philosophy videos on RUclips, I would suggest listening to Shelly Kagan's Philosophy 176 course at Yale about death. Shelly goes really slow and explains everything in detail because it is an introduction course. It also makes it easier when the philosopher is talking about a specific subject that people can relate too. Philosophy has its own specific definitions, and generally philosophers can/will complicate a donut, so it does take a long time to figure out what they're talking about.
A _donut_ ...? Surely you mean a post-risen saccharide torus-as-such. In a manner of speaking.
@@dogchaser520 Spoken like a true philosopher/
Sometimes, philosophers are not talking about anything, only unnecessary obscurantism and complexity. Fortunately, contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett are very clear. Assumably, due to the influence of science, which tries to be as clear as possible and actually say things.
@@bastiaanvanbeek You had me at Dennett. A thinker for the ages!
Be well.
I like to read a philosopher with the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy open right next to it and jump back and forth. This allows me to get a different perspective on a difficult word, phrase, or idea and reread it again for understanding.
A delight to hear someone encourage these tips, thanks. I have no formal training in philosophy, and when I picked up Kant's Critique of Pure Reason I was completely lost and gave up after the second chapter. Years later I read through it with a group led by a trained philosopher, and, like you said, by the end it was pretty easy to understand. Then we went to Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, and I was lost again, but now halfway through it I am familiar with Hegel's vocabulary and I get the gist pretty well on the first reading of a passage, with exceptions, of course. Thank you for the encouragement to keep reading hard stuff. Subscribed
this video totally changed how i approached reading things in general. going over it quickly first orients you to certain terms and primes you to see certain things. then the second, deeper reading, allows you to fully engage or interact mentally with the text. i know for certain something i do in general is get "stuck" or have thought loops on certain sentences, this process of reading helps deal with that. ❤️ to overthink
Thank you so much for this. You deserve more subscribers.
One thing I do that helps is I read the source, then I immediately pick up another book that's all about exploring the source. For example, I read Marcus Auraleus - Meditations cover to cover and immediately followed with Pierre Hadot's - The Inner Citadel. That way I can develop my own ideas and first impressions, and then in some sense "check" against what the literary community believes. It also leads to a lot of "aha" moments that I find oddly satisfying as things you didn't initially understand are explained or when you encounter interpretations of a text that are totally contrary to your own.
Amazing video and really insightful, I hope your channel really kicks off because it deserves more attention and attraction from the people
Excellent video! Nice tone and useful tips, especially just embracing the joy of the struggle of turning pages in a book
Thank you for this wonderful video! Just when I needed advice on reading, I discovered your channel. Love your content.
Thank you so much for these tips, Ellie. I spent 7 years at university studying for various degrees in physics - most of the time wishing I'd opted for my first passion, philosophy. Now, having retired, I decided to take up that undiminished desire and see if I could learn about the thing that really interests me - ideas. The problems I've encountered do centre around trying to read texts - I am far more used to solving equations. Each time I try to read I encounter the same issue of, 'Am I too old for this?'.
With the tips you've given, I'll have a more concerted effort and see what happens. Thanks again.
I would like to recommend 2 things: a dictionary or googling things, and most importantly, approach the book with humility. No snobbery is needed, nothing is easier or harder than making a living and being alive. Don't underestimate yourself. Remember, humility before any reading, 50 shades of Gray or Plato, it doesn't matter (really) what you read, it doesn't make you better or worse, it just makes you, any book that makes you feel joy is a good book.
What do you mean by humility before reading?
@@beenstressin9984 Simply not judging a book by its cover, as we may have prejudice even before reading the first page of a book. We may think the writers aren't good enough .
“50 Shades of Gray or Plato”. Two works of debatable value.
I don’t see “humility”, just an open mind.
It does matter.
Thank you Ellie for a very useful vlog - I totally agree with your advice. One has to allow time and commitment to allow these various paradigms to melt into our mind.
This is great! I'm a Pomona alum (class of 2003) and it's awesome to see your content!!
Thank you this is very helpful! One of my Dreams and purpose of life is be able to undestand books like Critique of Puré reason and phenomelogy of the spirit! greetings from Nezahualcoyotl City in México.
Critique of Puré sounds like a fire recipe book
Puré is smashed potatoes in French lol
no one understands phenomelogy of the spirit, lol.
That's a very noble goal, I wish you all the best for attaining it!
Best to read a synopsis of these work first before considering if it is worth your time. I liked Bertrand Russell's survey of these two works.
I'm always excited to find people discussing these issues. It's something I'm passionate about and have been exploring on my channel as well.
Thanks , for a good overview of reading philosophy. I am a retired teacher and artist who still at 68 read a hour ( re reads and rereads of the classics ) or more a night .
From a artist perspective when starting a artwork it is much like your skim and slug rather than getting to the details .
I find during my journey especially as a teacher that one must honestly understand and present the work from the inside circle of the author rather than projecting your ideas of it .
A find the best professors are one who after teaching the works of many philosophers you don’t know in fact what philosophy he or she endorses because they are teaching honestly to the meaning of the author .
Of interest , about twenty years ago l was in a regular restaurant stop of mine . After eating l had a coffee and read Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra . About forty minutes later the waitress came up to me and asked if l was all right “ because the table of people over there thought you were dead !
I smiled saying oh sorry !, I was reading Nietzsche, so l guess l was a paradigm of his aphorism “ God is dead “
Thanks for bringing me back to life !
Just found your YT through Twitter. This was really helpful, as I've been diving into different philosophical texts and always get stuck. Thanks for the content and the hard work! Subscribing :)
This. Has been the most helpful advice for maintaining focus and tackling challenging tasks that I've ever received.
So grateful for you! So helpful.
Great tips.
I see them as similar to a classical approach: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
So first the ‘grammar’ read-through is to get a sense of the gist and shape, perhaps of the paragraph or the whole work. Then the logic read-through for the argument, definitions, etc. Then comes rhetoric: what do you think of it? Do you agree with it? Is it valid etc?
This 3-stage process is a useful one.
Trivium is fundamental
If Ellie was a professor in my college I'd never miss a single class !
Try to appreciate content over the way it is presented. I know that a good teacher is important. The way it is presented is important, but after all, many great thinkers are not the best presenters and teachers. And there are many (especially in media) who use good presenting to talk/sell bullshit. In general, the content itself is what matters or what 'should' matter. ;)
but i probably could not concentrate on anything she's saying...
@@SPACEDOUT19lol had a philosophy professor just like her in college except the guy version, he’s all the girls would ever talk about after class never the actual material 😂
This speaks to me truly. I was reading CJ Stevenson's essay on emotivism and I had that urge to stop reading like you just said, I took a breathe and drank a bit of water, then just pull through, I was so concentrated and it was so rewarding after doing all the highlighting and combining all the side notes into a final explanation of his theory.
Thank you so much for this video, reading philosophy can be so hard sometimes, it's nice to have a few tips to make it less frustrating! Thanks again :)
Thank you so much! Feeling alone in facing such problems feels terrible. You are great!
Thank you so much for sharing all these useful tips.
Great effort! Thanks for uploading
Thank you for the wonderful tips! They’re encouraging ! I also found reading philosophy early in the morning with a fresh mind helped a bunch
This was outstanding - thank you, Professor!
Many thanks for these suggestions.
Thank you, I really enjoyed your sense of humor. Much love from Mexico.
Thank you so much for this video! I just started learning my ethics and leadership class at university. It is really helpful. I am lost in reading philosophy and I will try your methods today.
I’m about to get my bachelors oh philosophy but these last few classes (metaphysics and modernity of critics) are pretty difficult reads for me but your videos have helped me. So thank you!
More of this content! Thank you for all the protips.
Thank you so much for this video, I study philosophy and we were never taught how to read properly, just how to write essays and such so I always felt a little blocked even tough I love this subject, these tips made me feel much more confident in reading !!
Another important issue is generally the hermeneutics. Most issues arise because (we students) have absolutely no clue about the context the text was written, why it was written, who is addressed in the text, does it continue a previous discussion, is the translation bad or wrong, etc. I had this experience just hardcore in a seminar about Duns Scotus, where everything cryptic came together. We had no clue what we were reading and the million discussion it connected to at the time of its writing. Also the translation was often wrong. Without the professor we'd have no chance understanding anything 🥴
Love that there is a Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector on the shelf behind you! This channel is obviously awesome. :D
RUclips got it right this time with the algorithms and introduced me to your channel. Thank you for your work.❤
Listening to Alan Watts & sipping high voltage cocktails. That's the way I absorb grand ideas.
Thanks for the absolutely insightful video! As a mathematician i actually realise that the tips for reading philosophy in the video actually share quite many similarities with reading maths.
Thank you for the great video. Very informative and helpful!
Perfect advice for reading works of theology too! Thank you!
Nice Channel, i was searching for channels with good content to improve my english and i found the best one, i'm already a fan.
I love theses tips , thank you so much !!!
I've been meaning to read more philosophy but was often overwelmed .
very clear and concise. thank you!
Thank you for a very good video on how to read philosophy. Great work.
This was really helpful advice and most of the tips you said are things that i tend to unconciously do with other subjects i study and had never realised it. I will definitely try to make note of and maybe adapt some of the rest to all my areas of studying. Thank you very much. This is your first video i come across and im definitely a subscriber now
Great advice, thanks.
Mark here: Ive just been of the tradition that someone else reads and curates the work for me. Not rigorous, (it IS youtube). You tube is as close to 2 hour lecture in or around great American institutions as I might get. Just really glad these folks put all this great work on an accessible platform.
Thank you so much. It’s very helpful. You will always and forever have my support.(Thailand 🇹🇭)
Regards Sartre, it's helpful and enjoyable to read his novels before his philosophy.
I have read "Finnegans Wake", Beckett, and Pynchon...but I have stayed away from a lot of philosophical writing because of its density and thickness of textual argument (good phrase, right). Maybe I will finally finish certain pieces now...
My complete set of Nietzsche and collection of Hegel's thoughts await...
Very helpful. Thank you ❤️
This is excellently organized and presented. Thank you for this. Subscribed with notification bell. I look forward to your future explanations.
Will the channel be covering analytic philosophy more down-the-line? If not, that's fine. I mostly follow the analytic tradition, so I love finding videos on subjects I'm less inclined toward. It would be great for you to do a video on analytic philosophy in comparison to continental. Like, for instance, why do you not cover it? I think that could be a really interesting video for someone like me who leans away from continental philosophy generally. Just my two cents. Thank you for your videos! I'll be watching many more over the coming days.
Your speaking is very captivating. These are great tips as I always find myself distracted when things get difficult. I do find reading Neitzsche exciting. I will sub for your wit and enthusiasm.
Thank you this is very useful in life and action.
This is good advice for reading nonfiction books in general. Love it!
Watched this in Turin in 2022. Loved it. Am currently reading (slowly but rewardingly) the great Hegelian opus. And big gulps of Derrida. Danke.
Thanks, incredibly helpful
Thanks for shelving your books properly.
Some really good points on continental philosophy here, especially learning the "shape" of definitions and acquiring Sartre's in *B&N* later in the work. I found Kant in *Critique of Pure Reason* very systematic--his logic is easy to follow!
Really useful tips.Not only can be applied on reading philosophy But also everything on work or study.
Hey I just found your channel. I liked it! Thanks for the tips.
Don't know how this comes to my phone screen. I am so grateful to listen the advice that gives me confidence to read on :)
Thanks so much for this. After reading a handful of shorter philosophical texts ever the years, I decided to take on Heidegger's _Being and Time_. About a third of the way through the text now, I've understood maybe a third of what I've read so far. These tips are extremely helpful!
I appreciate this video, will watch it again.
great content. very helpful tips. thank you!
So glad I’ve found this vid! As someone who has ADHD and Dyslexia I find Philosophy quite hard to read at times even if I am interested in the content. I find after reading a whole page twice I realise that the idea being explained could’ve all been condensed into two sentences, but of course it mightn’t sound nearly as interesting that way.
I haven’t finished watching this vid before commenting but I’m sure I’ll find lots of tips!
Hello. I’m Brazilian and a big fan of Clarice Lispector, that said, I’m so glad to see that you read her book ❤️. Great tips. Thank you.
After an afternoon of self imposed slogging, I found your channel, and am eternally grateful.
Thank you ! great methods ❤
I am kind of a professional philosopher and I myself find this informative and useful -- not for teaching, for myself. Thank you for making these videos!
Thank you, these tips are really helpful
very well put together.
Thanks for this post, professor. I found that your strategies for reading philosophy also helped me enormously with navigating my way through experimental literature, particularly Joyce's Finnigan's Wake. ..... Also, to add a tip of my own, I find that wearing a pair of soft, foam earplugs while reading anything difficult helps with comprehension. Thanks, again.
Wow! Pretty high level... I thought the first tip would be read an introduction to philosophy like Stumpf's" Socrates to Sartre." Glad I found your channel :) I am looking forward to exploring the content. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on these difficult cocepts!
Great tips. One thing I'd add is to read annotated editions of texts, that way you have expert opinion ready at hand. It makes reading Philosophy a bit easier, but sometimes a bit harder, too, because commentators draw your attention to questions that you've never would've asked yourself. This is good, though, if your aim is to enrich your understanding of the text and the questions it poses. I wish everyone fruitful reading!
I really like Prof. Ellie Anderson's delivery. I rarely, if ever, hear a pause, and an "ah" before the thought resumes. Beside the delivery, the content is very deeply understood and conveyed. An example is Prof's explaining how, in much Continental philosophy, terms may not be overtly defined but become clear as the term is read and reread. She makes philosophy seem fun, interesting, and compelling because she, herself, obviously feels that it is. I have never had a philosophy prof. that taught how to experience reading philosophy and now to monitor yourself reading it. Her pedagogy may bring many new students to a field that is currently so neglected.
Thanks for the advice.