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I don't really understand this. Its very common when starting a new topic to start from a secondary survey and then dive into primary sources - often recommende

I don't really understand this. Its very common when starting a new topic to start from a secondary survey and then dive into primary sources - often recommended by the secondary survey. You are also missing a distinction between doing philosophy (what the post is advocating) vs doing history of philosophy, which secondary literature has different roles: Doing philosophy: Platonism about mathematics has had proponents and developments since Plato, its quite likely that that secondary survey provides links to more recent primary sources than Plato himself, which you would otherwise be ignorant of. Doing history of Philosophy: Diving stright into ancient primary sources without some supporting secondary literature could leave you confused and without some kind of historical context.

Ligma123 4y ago
>its quite likely that that secondary survey provides links to more recent primary sources than Plato himself, which you would otherwise be ignorant of. That is the only advantage of secondary sources. Telling you that guy X and Y wrote about Z. But if you want to learn about Z, go read what those guys actually wrote. If you don't understand a particular concept, word, or whatever, then do a research in secondary material available. >literature could leave you confused and without some kind of historical context. Specially in recent (basically anything written in the last 50 years) secondary sources I heavily dispense with comments on "historical context" as they are full of bs, and are heavily politically biased, one way or another, not necessarily in fields like Mathematics, but in History or Philosophy, etc.