How to Read Philosophy (for Beginners)

0:00 today we are going to talk about how to read works of philosophy or really how to read any sort of argumentative text so that's a text that wants to make a point that wants to convince you of something and not necessarily something like a work of fiction which is more about evoking emotions perhaps making a point but usually through theme or characterization or plot a lot of people want to read philosophy but they have a bit of a hard time getting started they don't really know the techniques that are needed because there really are techniques that are needed and so I wanted to make this video where I'm going to give you some tips on how you can start reading philosophy so the first tip for reading philosophy actually takes place before you start reading you see if you're just like reading a work of fiction you could just pick it up anywhere you can read it on the train you can read it in a coffee

0:45 shop you can read it right before bed and while you can strictly speaking read a work of philosophy in any of those context I have found that you will b a fit if you actually try and make time to read philosophy so you're going to want to find a diet place to read you're going to want to find a work surface where you can actually put the book down and maybe have a notepad or have a pen or something like this and you need to be in a fairly distraction free environment that way you can actually build your focus because philosophy is a kind of intensive reading and because it is a little more intensive it does require that you can sustain Focus to try to see an idea develop over a whole paragraph or whole pages or in multiple chapters the second tip is to prepare

1:31 yourself to read twice as I was talking to people who have read a lot of philosophy or have taught students of philosophy say in University settings they all agree reading more than once is essential and a common method has emerged and it's one that I've promoted before but it's not original to me lots of people have stumbled upon this it's the idea that you're going to want to read the first time very quickly so that you can understand the overall point and the structure of a book and then you're going to want to go back and do a second read where you try to dive into the details of the argument so when you're reading philosophy you have to understand that there are two essential types of reading one of them is reading to understand and the second kind is a reading to engage so when you're trying

2:17 to read to understand what you're trying to do is to learn say what n said about a topic so for that first kind of reading you'll read something like the birth of tragedy and you'll just be looking to be able to recite back what n said now this can be very useful because when you're researching a particular topic it can just be really good to know what a wide variety of thinkers have said or maybe you're just interested in n and you really like what n has said about one topic and you just want to know what he would also say about some second topic but the second kind of reading is more purely philosophical and that is reading to engage when you read in this second way you are not just trying to learn what someone else has said but you are learning to engage with their arguments ments to assess them for validity and soundness and also to

3:04 figure out what you yourself believe and part of the way you can figure out what you believe is by looking at what other people have argued for and then looking at their best arguments and seeing where the evidence and reasoning can take you it can be rather hard to do both of these kinds of reading in the same sort of session and that's why I recommend reading a work of philosophy Twice first I think that you should read a book very quickly and when you're reading it very quickly maybe you will lightly annotate what you think are important points you'll do a little bit of underlining something like that and that's going to let you say here's what n said about some topic here's what n said about morality but then when you go back and do your second read you now kind of have a rough idea of what n believes you

3:50 don't know all the details but you have an idea and now you can look and say how does n argue for this what examples does he use to illustrate his point are those arguments any good and when we say is the argument any good we're asking do the premises actually support the conclusion or are there overlooked cases or exceptions that n can't account for when you have moved on from just repeating back what other philosophers have said and instead can engage in their arguments and can really engage with them as fellow thinkers I would say that is when you have stopped being a reader of philosophy and you have become a philosopher so let's talk about notes for a second I have a whole video on note taking I kind of have a method that I like to use however I think that the exact method that you follow is not as important as just the act of taking

4:37 notes by taking notes you have kind of ensured that you have moved into that active form of reading rather than a passive form of reading and that's going to let you actually grapple with these text now be careful you can actually take too many notes and the problem with taking too many notes is that your notes sort of become too cluttered you're not able to sort through them very well and they're not doing what notes are supposed to help you do see notes are to help you distill and to synthesize ideas that you have gotten from a book maybe to make connections with other thinkers something like that if you take too many notes and say underline every sentence on a page you are not synthesizing you are not distilling you are not processing all you're doing at best is repeating back what that philosopher has said when you are taking notes I'm going to say that you should look for three

5:22 things first you should be looking for important points maybe a clear statement of a thesis or maybe a kind of pivotal argumentative move and you should Mark those I actually just use a check mark or a star sometimes the second is that you should look for points of confusion these should be Parts where either you know that you're not well equipped to understand the point yet or a point where you think the philosopher is just being unclear when I think there's an unclear part in a book I annotate it with a question mark I can then go back later and figure out is this because I was unclear or is it because the philosopher who was writing it was unclear and the third point is try to find points of connection as a new reader of philosophy what you should be doing is finding ways where different thinkers have overlapped and so just write those down just write sounds like Aristotle sounds like n sounds like

6:08 anome by starting to make those points of connection that will allow you to then go back to those other thinkers and see what they said and you can really engage in this process of reading and rereading and assessing and reassessing and just a quick note if you like what I'm doing here and if you find any of this helpful you can actually help me out by either subscribing or supporting me as a YouTu yoube member or a patron YouTube members and patrons all get behind the scene content they also get extra bonus videos and they get early access to all my videos if that sounds interesting to you maybe give it a shot you need to be able to answer a question about any book that you read which is what is this book about by answering that question you have determined the topic of the book now many books actually have multiple topics that's okay but you should be able to answer

6:54 the question what is this book about and you probably already have a sense of how to answer that question before you read it because that's what led you to the book in the first place that said sometimes you would answer that question differently after you've read a book so it's always interesting to go back and reflect once you've finished your first or your second read the second question you should be able to answer is what is the philosopher arguing for so philosophers don't just write books about a topic they typically have a thesis that they want you to believe now there's usually a very general thesis in a book and then there are smaller thesis that you would find say in a chapter or in a section or even sometimes in a paragraph so you need to be able to figure out what is the thesis of the book and what are the smaller thesis that you will encounter the third thing you should look for is how does

7:40 the philosopher situate themselves in history or within the literature some Modern texts will actually do a literature review they will actually go through a lot of the relevant scholarly literature and explain where they differ with these people but more classic texts don't do this necessarily but they will refer back to older works and it's interesting to see where does that philosopher emphasize their points of agreement or disagreement with those who have come before sometimes philosophers are not explicit about this they assume a large background knowledge so unfortunately you're not always going to be able to answer that question well for yourself but that's a skill that you will develop as you accumulate knowledge and you read more philosophy and then finally what you need to look for are actually arguments every philosophical

8:26 text that I know of contains arguments even those who don't don't write their arguments out in clear precise premise and conclusion form writing out arguments almost like a math proof is a very analytic kind of disposition though there have been other thinkers in history who have done so other people like to do arguments via kind of suggestion they like to intimate the conclusion and kind of lead you there but still you need to figure out what is the evidence that supports the conclusion or the thesis that the author wants you to believe figuring out if that is valid meaning it's a well structured argument and if it's sound meaning it's a well structured argument that has true premises that's a crucial part of critically engaging with these texts now I would say when you start looking at arguments don't just look for

9:13 ways to prove someone wrong to show how every argument is bad one you need to figure out if some of those arguments are actually essential to the point of the book and two you need to figure out how you can reconstruct or save those arguments a lot of good philosophy is not done through merely criticizing those who have come before but finding weaknesses and then synthesizing them and then turning them into strengths now that is an art more than it is a science it takes practice and it's something you would have to really work at to get good at so I can't teach you how to do that in a short video but just keep it in mind as you go and start reading philosophy philosophy is difficult to read it is not easy but it is also incredibly rewarding and if you can spend some time reading philosophy then I think you will find that actually you

9:59 become a better reader in other subjects and other domains so take some of these tips go find a good book and give it a shot