@Pfhorrest. So I take it, Mr. Pfhorrest, that if you were enthusiastic about the art of say, making moonshine whiskey, and wished to become a master distiller, that you would prefer to make day trips to the various moonshiners, learn what you can in a short time from each of them, compare their various techniques in your leisure and choose which ones you liked best, rather than apprentice with an acknowledged master and learn from him over several years?

No, but neither would I recommend what I did earlier to someone who specifically wants to be a Kant scholar.

If someone else wanted to figure out what is “the correct alcohol” (if there is such a thing), I would advise starting out with a survey of different kinds of alcohols and the differences between them, and what makes one better than another in a particular way or vice versa.

Of course there probably isn’t a universally correct alcohol, but philosophers do act in a way like they’re trying in different ways to come up with the correct solution to the same problem(s) and that others who do so differently are wrong for that. So if you’re not just trying to learn how to master the study of one philosopher specifically, but you’re trying to master philosophy generally...

@Pfhorrest. I think you misunderstand me. When I say one should dwell with a book/soul for a long while, I don’t mean that one should strive to thoroughly master some philosopher or work in an academic sense, as being able to answer any question about it or him for some university exam. I mean rather that, should a college examiner, or indeed anyone at all, ask you, “who have you read that truly influenced you, and why?”, you be able to say, for example, “Nietzsche, because he opened my eyes that were before blind, and caused me to see the world as it actually is, contrary to the preconceived notions of it that I had entertained since my youth; I, who assumed that science was the route to all knowledge and goodness; though now I see that the dark disparate cultures of peculiar peoples is what generates those things in the world...”

Now, you may disagree with me in this thumbnail analysis of Nietzsche, but I only use him as an example...

In my intellectual life I have encountered one or two or three, or maybe four or five, souls that captivated me in this way, and that is the key term, “captivated”. To become a true student of philosophy, you must be in a state of destitution from the start, like a freed slave, as though wandering and weary in a world where you only find barren soil for your subsistence, but always hoping for and seeking nourishment...

...and the nourishment is there!...as I have found out during a life brief and full of evil...

So, the true student of philosophy is a truly lamentable soul...but the only human being who has the motivation within him to correct his situation, and, at least so far today, also the means, if he look hard enough outside. For the material still exists and is accessible...though how long such an existence remain for a rare and endangered flower of civilization, I cannot tell.

I think that might be more true for an existential, therapeutic, Continental style of philosophy than it is the more aloof Analytic style. I was not going into philosophy in a state of destitution, but rather from the heights of my youthful naivete, seeking deep truths out of pure curiosity. Philosophy to me was a neat puzzle to be solved, indeed where all the neat-puzzles-to-be-solved converged, which is what lead me there.

Many years later when I did find myself in a state of destitution, that abstract philosophy helped me to find me way out of it; and also, it helped me to really ground all of that abstract philosophy better. But I never found just one master to guide me into the light. I had to make one from scratch for myself.

@Pfhorrest. Pure curiosity, the sort that “killed the cat” as the saying goes, I don’t believe, alone, can lead one to true philosophy. One must be discontented with his present world, have a hole in his soul that needs filling by what he knows not, before he have the motive that might lead him there. If this appears to be a Continental sentiment, well, the Continent was the birthplace of philosophy, and her source for many centuries, until only yesterday so to speak, and may yet have something to teach us, in particular about the dangers of abstraction:

“The university’s task is illustrated by two tendencies of the democratic mind to which Tocqueville points. One is abstractness. Because there is no tradition and men need guidance, general theories that are produced in a day and not properly grounded in experience, but seem to explain things and are useful crutches for finding one’s way in a complicated world, have currency. Marxism, Freudianism, economism, behavioralism, etc., are examples of this tendency...

“The very universality of democracy and the sameness of man proposed by it encourage this tendency and make the mind’s eye less sensitive to differences...Our temptation is to prefer the shiny new theory to the fully cognized experience...Producing theories is not theorizing, or a sign of the theoretical life. Concreteness, not abstractness, is the hallmark of philosophy. All interesting generalization must proceed from the richest awareness of what is to be explained, but the tendency to abstractness leads to simplifying the phenomena in order more easily to deal with them.”

It seems to me that, someone to whom philosophy appears to be the neatest puzzle to be solved, might indeed be prone to the error outlined above.

Btw, I hope the inclusion of quotation marks, though I do not betray the author, shields me from being exiled for plagiarism!

I'm very liberal here. I don't even think you need to read more than one philosopher to "do philosophy" well. I'd go so far as to argue that those who say you have to have read Plato or Descartes or whoever, are potentially putting people off. What matters are the topics and what you think about them. We already know what Plato, Descartes and Hume said about these things. If any philosopher helps you in your pursuit, then that's all you need.

Given the era we live in, you have so many ways to get philosophy, you can see lectures online, you can see documentaries, you can participate in forums like this one, you can read any part of any philosopher you like while ignoring the rest. In short, I think it's a big mistake to focus on what X philosopher said. It's only valuable so long as you get something out of it. If you don't get anything out of it, then it has no value.

I disagree from the point of view that original works give an audience to a passion that descriptions of the ideas never will.
The net result of some survey you might employ is not the challenge the authors required from the readers.

It depends on the person, the idea under discussion and how the author is received. It can and often does help to read the classics, but I don't think it's mandatory to need to read anybody specifically. But this depends on each person's goal. I think it's a mistake to insist that you need to read X's thoughts on the self to understand the topic. It can help, but it may not. Novels may do a better job, or talking to a group, etc. The idea is to keep the approach to the topic broad, but not so broad so as to include New Age stuff. It's a hard line to draw.

As for "the challenge the authors required from the reader", maybe? I don't think difficulty for the sake of difficulty is good. The topics themselves are already very hard, so making it more difficult doesn't necessarily help out much. If the topic under discussion or the way somebody writes causes you to think from a different perspective, then that's obviously good. I have in mind people like Wittgenstein or Nietzsche as people who fall under this category.

how can I absorb philosophy better? — deusidex

I sat down beside the woman I loved. It was late evening, the sun was hanging low on the horizon, and I was spellbound by the play of light across that face I'd fallen in love with.

I reached into the wikcer basket, and picked up an orange. As we talked, I peeled the rind off, deposited it on the side of the table and popped one slice of juicy orange into my mouth. It was delicious but I had to do some tongue gymnastics to avoid biting and swallowing the seeds which I spat out as far as I could - it flew in a parabolic curve and landed on a patch of ground close by.

That's what I remember of those precious moments a very long, long time ago as I catch sight of the now fully-grown orange tree that's sprouted from one of those seeds that my love of orange and loving earth's gravity had conspired to deposit on that small patch of fertile ground.

I ate that orange.

I had no idea that orange trees are so easy to grow

Well, both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein asked that their readers undertake some kind of labor to engage with them. I don't understand what either was trying to say. But the demand to produce something is clear to me.

Then that's a problem. How can we be more or less confident that we know what a famous philosopher is saying? Is the point to be able to reproduce, word for word, the main insight from a major work? I get it that many of these figures did ask people to engage with them on some level. Sure.

But to do philosophy you don't need to read Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Descartes. You could do it through Rorty alone, or from a combination of Searle and Chalmers, or mixture of everybody. I think the point is to be engaged with certain ideas, but I understand if you say that these ideas are best expressed by a certain person. Maybe, but it's not clear to me that anybody is essential.

Think about what you read after you read it.
Take notes.
Write papers.
Walk up and down and talk to yourself.
Rehearse the ideas, and they'll stick.

That is good challenge. As a question of what can be asked, can the ideas of every philosopher be explained in terms they did not use? Is there a universal language of what can be talked about that encompasses all of what has been expressed?
I am not so sure. I greatly appreciate the various encyclopedias that compare one body of thought to another. But the act of collection misses something. If one can say what everything means, why bother with trying to understand things for oneself?

It seems to me inevitable that we express ideas of philosophers in terms they did not use. Quite clearly with Plato and Aristotle, after all they didn't talk about "the hard problem", though they had much to say about the mind. With Leibniz, we wouldn't talk about monads, but we would speak of intrinsic properties of particles or fields.

Hume's theory of mind (and Locke's too) has been refuted by modern neuroscience, the brain/mind is simply not "white paper" or a theatre of ideas. With Kant, we no longer speak of "space" and "time" as separate things, but instead of spacetime.

It's likely that in the future, the terms we use will be outdated or simply won't capture the same phenomenon we are discussing, although there is overlap otherwise we couldn't talk at all.

What you say is true, if we read an encyclopedia or several, that explain certain ideas of people like Kant or Hegel or whoever, we miss out on reading them. On the other hand, what if when we read Kant or Hegel, despite trying as best we can, we simply don't get much out of it? I personally get quite a lot from Kant and Husserl scholarship, but much less so from Kant and Husserl themselves. Not so with Schopenhauer or Peirce.

There's always an "opportunity cost". We may take longer and read Kant entirely. We may understand it better than the scholarship we read. But if it takes us 3 months to read Kant vs. say, a week or two to read good or useful interpretations of him, we gain time to look at other things.

It's not an easy issue. But it seems to me that there are many ways to proceed, which is better than only one way.