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Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. This is my

Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. This is my general criticism of philosophers [2] and the way they have constructed their discipline. In physics/biology/economics/etc a super smart person comes along and does some excellent work. Then later on, other smart people learn the stuff and build upon it, and rewrite it to make it better. Modern textbooks on General Relativity are an order of magnitude better than what Einstein wrote. Why has no one understood Nietzsche, and written a better and more understandable version of Nietzsche's work? And why is everyone not reading that? [1] I have read some/part of the books you mention. [2] As a physics phd, I have engaged in and enjoyed and found useful practical philosophy around issues of epistemology.

andi999 5y ago
Agree. It is even worse, here you have to learn Latin and old Greek so you can read the original texts. It is believed that the translations are not accurate (due to the problem that multiple words can be used and people shd know if exactly the same concept was meant or not). Somehow this seems to imply that these text are closer to poetry than ideas.
Veen 5y ago
> Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. One possible answer to this question is the same as to the question: Why look at old paintings, read old novels and poetry, watch old plays, and study history? For me, it's partly because I am interested in what humans have created and thought in the past. It's partly because these works are often beautiful—an argument can be as beautiful as a work of art—and studying beautiful things is its own reward. Whether they are true or not is another matter, but just as it's useful to read what other cultures in our own time think about a topic, it's useful to read about what people from other times thought. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." You can design a course of study that focuses purely on modern logic and epistemology etc if that's what you prefer. But philosophy is not a science (however much philosophers like to think it is) and its not maths. It is a branch of the humanities, and should be evaluated in similar terms to literary studies or history, not biology or physics.
FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
Philosophy is not like physics at all. How do you propose you write a ''better version'' of the questions Nietzsche (or any other philosopher) grappled with? How do you know you are getting any closer to any truth?
throw0101a 5y ago
> Why has no one understood Nietzsche, and written a better and more understandable version of Nietzsche's work? And why is everyone not reading that? In science (aka, natural philosophy) the goal is about finding answers. Perhaps in philosophy it is thought more important to ask questions, and the questions asked in "old primary texts" are still relevant today, and may be the exact same ones asked 2500 years ago. What is [tT]ruth? What is beauty? Does God exist? What is the point of life? What is happiness? What does it mean to be a 'good' person? When it is okay, if ever, to lie? Given your logic, which seems to be that we should only move forward, what's the point of studying history? Why bother reading Herodotus's The Histories when there are contemporary analysis? Tom Holland, who released a new translation, discusses some reasons: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHTokb35nGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHTokb35nGM
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
Don't you still start out in physics by learning Newtonian physics? I'm sure if you looked hard enough you'd find excellent coles-notes-esque summaries of Nietzsche's arguments, so you don't really need to read them at all. But that would be the difference between reading a summary of Newton's laws and the Principia itself.
jonathanstrange 5y ago
tl;dr I think your critique i justified. The lack of a common methodology, terminology, and subject matter prevents clearly discernible, continuous progress in philosophy. Long answer: First, although there has been progress in philosophy, it is much slower than in the natural sciences and harder to discern. Second, unlike any other discipline, philosophy has no agreed upon methodology and no agreed upon subject matter. A consequence of both of these properties of philosophy is that older works can stay relevant and transformations and interpretations of them are often contested. It is very common for secondary literature to re-interpret heavily and in ways that might not capture the original author's intentions. Since work in philosophy is primarily working with texts, this explains the heavy focus on primary literature. Since there is plenty of progress in philosophy, however, just reading the primary sources mentioned above would not get you anywhere. As a rule of thumb, the older a book or article, the more you'll have to take into account their reception. Otherwise you won't philosophize at a contemporary level and won't be able to publish about the work. For instance, writing anything insightful about Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason or Plato's Politeia will require specialization and taking into account many previous interpretations. Some people would dismiss philosophy entirely because it has no common subject matter and widely accepted methodology, except for having relatively high standards for working with texts that are similar to those of historians and fairly high standards for laying out arguments. That's fair enough, but kind of short-sighted. Philosophy has had a tremendous influence on the sciences and still occasionally has. Basically, philosophy is all about reading texts and unfortunately this often gets in the way of actually "philosophizing." I've met many philosophers who got lost in texts and never returned - they end up doing history of philosophy. My best advise to anyone interested in philosophy is to approach it the way I was taught in Tübingen 30 years ago. Approach original texts seriously and in-depth, but carefully choose those texts and only read what interests you. There is no need to read the Critique of the Pure Reason if you're interested in contemporary analytic "accuracy first" epistemology, for example.
unethical_ban 5y ago
I have not studied philosophy formally nor read any text in a while. My understanding is that the vocabulary of philosophy is built on the major works. It helps then to understand the fundamental ideas in order to build on them.
AlanYx 5y ago
>Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. Philosophy as a discipline makes more sense if you consider it as a form of literature. And it isn't true that "in no other field" beginners read primary texts -- literature scholars absolutely do this. I'm a philosophy enthusiast, but I've never really understood the claim that philosophers seek to understand what's true. Mathematicians do that, and some types of analytic philosophers focus on that, but at least from my perspective philosophy is more about idiosyncratic excursions into interesting questions and ideas, the same way that fiction is about idisyncratic excursions into interesting plots. IMHO no one rewrites Nietzsche because what would be the point? His headline ideas can be summarized in a rather short document, just like the plot of a novel can be summarized in a couple paragraphs, but it's the voyage that's the meaty, fun part, just like literature.
handrous 5y ago
> Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. I think there are a few reasons: 1) I can't explain why, but, unlike physics or math, distillations and commentaries often miss key points and insights, and not uncommonly badly misrepresent works. Reading one then the other makes this clear. It's also the case that the canonical works are often (not always!) well-written, so difficult to improve on—possibly this is a side-effect of how philosophy works, as a field. 2) (I think this one's very important) Historical works of philosophy (which, see above, also have a tendency to be quite good for what they are) are, in themselves, a bit like exercises in math. Skipping wrestling with (at least a good number of) them is like trying to learn multivariate calculus without having yet put pencil to paper and worked through any exercises, for any kind of math, your entire life. In math, you have to do the work, to learn the material. Critically reading touchstone works in philosophy is philosophy's equivalent of doing the exercises, to a substantial degree. 3) The way philosophy has developed is kinda like rap: a lot of it won't make any damn sense—or, worse, will seem like it does, but actually you're getting entirely the wrong idea—unless you're familiar with the work of the person this track's responding to, and then that one is also part of a larger conversation, et c. Maybe that's a bad way for it to have developed, but that's what we've got.
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  Your is the best answer up till now. So let me respond. 1. I think you misunderstand me. I am not interested in distillations and commentaries. I am interested in building upon the works of past philosophers, improving their weak arguments, supplying better arguments that they missed out on, finding better examples than what they used, and finally going past what the said, and saying even more. The replacement of Nietzsche's books should be books that say somewhat similar things, but which are better arguments than Nietzsche. This must be possible for any intellectual discipline, because any such discipline by definition must create transferable knowledge and skills. And if you are not, the problem cannot be with the character of your intellectual discipline, but with the social structure and practices of your discipline. 2. To follow upon point 1, and to answer your points 2, take the example of GR again. What Einstein wrote is simpler and probably easier to understand than good modern graduate textbooks on the subject - the latter have far more sophisticated arguments, and they go explore the area far more than Einstein ever did. Because of course, physicists and mathematicians kept building and improving. Similarly, what I expect is that philosophers should constantly be making better and more sophisticated arguments, that require more and more skill and acumen to understand. But a beginner starts with very carefully constructed arguments that easy to understand, yet astounding, and as her skills increases, she is given more and more difficult arguments to grapple with. this is how things happen in other intellectual disciplines by design. But not in philosophy, and I truly don't understand why.
RogerL 5y ago
I think in some areas, especially the one you are interested in, do progress. We have Descartes, a bunch of people responded to him, that got us to Hume, who has a fairly modern outlook a scientist will resonate with. People like Kant tried to respond, not so well in my opinion. Enter the 1800s, we learn that Euclid's axioms are just that, not provable, that resonates through (some) philosophy, until we get to the early 1900s when people like Russell and Whitehead get pretty far into defining the limits of knowledge via their formidable knowledge of mathematics. At this same time the logical positivists were doing there thing, trying to establish exactly what we can know from observation and pure logic. Move ahead into the 50s or so and you have Quine, Kuhn, and Popper re-examining their work and establishing new ways of thinking about the topic. These days you have philosophers like Dennett who engage scientists to ensure he is starting from the best available evidence, and then philosophizes about what might be true. This is, IMO, valuable in that how else do you figure out research directions? That's overstated, usually the next question to try to answer is apparent based on our current understanding and experimental apparatus, but at the least Dennett is very entertaining to read. In any case, you don't have to read Descartes et al to have a modern, scientific understanding of knowledge, but all of this built from that foundation. Knowing some of the flawed reasoning that occurred along the way is vital to not repeat those same mistakes, in my experience. So, there you have it, a (extremely reductive with huge gaps) history from early 1600s to the present, of philosophers building on each other's work into an intellectual framework you probably hold. There are of course many other branches; I just followed one, briefly, to the present to a tip that is probably pretty close to the thinking that informs your coursework.

andi999 5y ago

Agree. It is even worse, here you have to learn Latin and old Greek so you can read the original texts. It is believed that the translations are not accurate (due to the problem that multiple words can be used and people shd know if exactly the same concept was meant or not). Somehow this seems to imply that these text are closer to poetry than ideas.

Veen 5y ago

> Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. One possible answer to this question is the same as to the question: Why look at old paintings, read old novels and poetry, watch old plays, and study history? For me, it's partly because I am interested in what humans have created and thought in the past. It's partly because these works are often beautiful—an argument can be as beautiful as a work of art—and studying beautiful things is its own reward. Whether they are true or not is another matter, but just as it's useful to read what other cultures in our own time think about a topic, it's useful to read about what people from other times thought. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." You can design a course of study that focuses purely on modern logic and epistemology etc if that's what you prefer. But philosophy is not a science (however much philosophers like to think it is) and its not maths. It is a branch of the humanities, and should be evaluated in similar terms to literary studies or history, not biology or physics.

FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago

Philosophy is not like physics at all. How do you propose you write a ''better version'' of the questions Nietzsche (or any other philosopher) grappled with? How do you know you are getting any closer to any truth?

throw0101a 5y ago

> Why has no one understood Nietzsche, and written a better and more understandable version of Nietzsche's work? And why is everyone not reading that? In science (aka, natural philosophy) the goal is about finding answers. Perhaps in philosophy it is thought more important to ask questions, and the questions asked in "old primary texts" are still relevant today, and may be the exact same ones asked 2500 years ago. What is [tT]ruth? What is beauty? Does God exist? What is the point of life? What is happiness? What does it mean to be a 'good' person? When it is okay, if ever, to lie? Given your logic, which seems to be that we should only move forward, what's the point of studying history? Why bother reading Herodotus's The Histories when there are contemporary analysis? Tom Holland, who released a new translation, discusses some reasons: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHTokb35nGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHTokb35nGM

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

Don't you still start out in physics by learning Newtonian physics? I'm sure if you looked hard enough you'd find excellent coles-notes-esque summaries of Nietzsche's arguments, so you don't really need to read them at all. But that would be the difference between reading a summary of Newton's laws and the Principia itself.

jonathanstrange 5y ago

tl;dr I think your critique i justified. The lack of a common methodology, terminology, and subject matter prevents clearly discernible, continuous progress in philosophy. Long answer: First, although there has been progress in philosophy, it is much slower than in the natural sciences and harder to discern. Second, unlike any other discipline, philosophy has no agreed upon methodology and no agreed upon subject matter. A consequence of both of these properties of philosophy is that older works can stay relevant and transformations and interpretations of them are often contested. It is very common for secondary literature to re-interpret heavily and in ways that might not capture the original author's intentions. Since work in philosophy is primarily working with texts, this explains the heavy focus on primary literature. Since there is plenty of progress in philosophy, however, just reading the primary sources mentioned above would not get you anywhere. As a rule of thumb, the older a book or article, the more you'll have to take into account their reception. Otherwise you won't philosophize at a contemporary level and won't be able to publish about the work. For instance, writing anything insightful about Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason or Plato's Politeia will require specialization and taking into account many previous interpretations. Some people would dismiss philosophy entirely because it has no common subject matter and widely accepted methodology, except for having relatively high standards for working with texts that are similar to those of historians and fairly high standards for laying out arguments. That's fair enough, but kind of short-sighted. Philosophy has had a tremendous influence on the sciences and still occasionally has. Basically, philosophy is all about reading texts and unfortunately this often gets in the way of actually "philosophizing." I've met many philosophers who got lost in texts and never returned - they end up doing history of philosophy. My best advise to anyone interested in philosophy is to approach it the way I was taught in Tübingen 30 years ago. Approach original texts seriously and in-depth, but carefully choose those texts and only read what interests you. There is no need to read the Critique of the Pure Reason if you're interested in contemporary analytic "accuracy first" epistemology, for example.

unethical_ban 5y ago

I have not studied philosophy formally nor read any text in a while. My understanding is that the vocabulary of philosophy is built on the major works. It helps then to understand the fundamental ideas in order to build on them.

AlanYx 5y ago

>Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. Philosophy as a discipline makes more sense if you consider it as a form of literature. And it isn't true that "in no other field" beginners read primary texts -- literature scholars absolutely do this. I'm a philosophy enthusiast, but I've never really understood the claim that philosophers seek to understand what's true. Mathematicians do that, and some types of analytic philosophers focus on that, but at least from my perspective philosophy is more about idiosyncratic excursions into interesting questions and ideas, the same way that fiction is about idisyncratic excursions into interesting plots. IMHO no one rewrites Nietzsche because what would be the point? His headline ideas can be summarized in a rather short document, just like the plot of a novel can be summarized in a couple paragraphs, but it's the voyage that's the meaty, fun part, just like literature.

handrous 5y ago

> Why should I read these decades, centuries, millennia old books as a beginner [1]? In no other field are beginners asked to read old primary texts. I think there are a few reasons: 1) I can't explain why, but, unlike physics or math, distillations and commentaries often miss key points and insights, and not uncommonly badly misrepresent works. Reading one then the other makes this clear. It's also the case that the canonical works are often (not always!) well-written, so difficult to improve on—possibly this is a side-effect of how philosophy works, as a field. 2) (I think this one's very important) Historical works of philosophy (which, see above, also have a tendency to be quite good for what they are) are, in themselves, a bit like exercises in math. Skipping wrestling with (at least a good number of) them is like trying to learn multivariate calculus without having yet put pencil to paper and worked through any exercises, for any kind of math, your entire life. In math, you have to do the work, to learn the material. Critically reading touchstone works in philosophy is philosophy's equivalent of doing the exercises, to a substantial degree. 3) The way philosophy has developed is kinda like rap: a lot of it won't make any damn sense—or, worse, will seem like it does, but actually you're getting entirely the wrong idea—unless you're familiar with the work of the person this track's responding to, and then that one is also part of a larger conversation, et c. Maybe that's a bad way for it to have developed, but that's what we've got.

abdullahkhalids 5y ago
Your is the best answer up till now. So let me respond. 1. I think you misunderstand me. I am not interested in distillations and commentaries. I am interested in building upon the works of past philosophers, improving their weak arguments, supplying better arguments that they missed out on, finding better examples than what they used, and finally going past what the said, and saying even more. The replacement of Nietzsche's books should be books that say somewhat similar things, but which are better arguments than Nietzsche. This must be possible for any intellectual discipline, because any such discipline by definition must create transferable knowledge and skills. And if you are not, the problem cannot be with the character of your intellectual discipline, but with the social structure and practices of your discipline. 2. To follow upon point 1, and to answer your points 2, take the example of GR again. What Einstein wrote is simpler and probably easier to understand than good modern graduate textbooks on the subject - the latter have far more sophisticated arguments, and they go explore the area far more than Einstein ever did. Because of course, physicists and mathematicians kept building and improving. Similarly, what I expect is that philosophers should constantly be making better and more sophisticated arguments, that require more and more skill and acumen to understand. But a beginner starts with very carefully constructed arguments that easy to understand, yet astounding, and as her skills increases, she is given more and more difficult arguments to grapple with. this is how things happen in other intellectual disciplines by design. But not in philosophy, and I truly don't understand why.

RogerL 5y ago

I think in some areas, especially the one you are interested in, do progress. We have Descartes, a bunch of people responded to him, that got us to Hume, who has a fairly modern outlook a scientist will resonate with. People like Kant tried to respond, not so well in my opinion. Enter the 1800s, we learn that Euclid's axioms are just that, not provable, that resonates through (some) philosophy, until we get to the early 1900s when people like Russell and Whitehead get pretty far into defining the limits of knowledge via their formidable knowledge of mathematics. At this same time the logical positivists were doing there thing, trying to establish exactly what we can know from observation and pure logic. Move ahead into the 50s or so and you have Quine, Kuhn, and Popper re-examining their work and establishing new ways of thinking about the topic. These days you have philosophers like Dennett who engage scientists to ensure he is starting from the best available evidence, and then philosophizes about what might be true. This is, IMO, valuable in that how else do you figure out research directions? That's overstated, usually the next question to try to answer is apparent based on our current understanding and experimental apparatus, but at the least Dennett is very entertaining to read. In any case, you don't have to read Descartes et al to have a modern, scientific understanding of knowledge, but all of this built from that foundation. Knowing some of the flawed reasoning that occurred along the way is vital to not repeat those same mistakes, in my experience. So, there you have it, a (extremely reductive with huge gaps) history from early 1600s to the present, of philosophers building on each other's work into an intellectual framework you probably hold. There are of course many other branches; I just followed one, briefly, to the present to a tip that is probably pretty close to the thinking that informs your coursework.