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I generally don't like summaries, as you just get a contemporary interpretation of what the translator/academic thinks the philosopher was saying. Far better to
by keiferski 5y ago
I generally don't like summaries, as you just get a contemporary interpretation of what the translator/academic thinks the philosopher was saying. Far better to go straight to the source.
Eventually you'll need to read the original works, but I'd recommend starting with philosophical fiction. Crime and Punishment, The Plague, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, etc. Plato's dialogues are pretty readable, too, as is Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche.
- ithkuil 5y agoOriginal texts are important but you also need to have a very good understanding of the historical language and wider context in order to not fall in similar pitfalls yourself as the ones you wanted to avoid on the first place.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoA good translation will contain a lot of that information as in the notes. I like the Oxford World Classics series as the translations are very good and the notes are often fantastic, the Cambridge Companion-series also make a very solid complement.
- ithkuil 5y agoAh sorry I thought we were talking about untranslated original texts. Translations with a lot of notes are surely more faithful to the original than a random summary, but there is still plenty of room to interpretation.