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I have a hard time engaging deeply with philosophy. I've tried to get a good overview, but whenever I read the real scholarly work I find an assumption I hate o
by jfengel 3y ago
I have a hard time engaging deeply with philosophy. I've tried to get a good overview, but whenever I read the real scholarly work I find an assumption I hate on page 3 and cannot bear to engage with that assumption for a thousand further pages of close reading.
I don't want to be the philosophical equivalent of those guys who pester physics professors with "I've unified gravity with quantum mechanics and I just need you to add the math". But I can't pick up Kant or Hegel or Sartre without screaming.
- riversflow 3y ago> I can’t pick up Kant or Hegele or Sartre Ah, there’s your problem, at least in my opinion/experience. You have to start at the beginning, read Plato’s Republic followed by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. When you read them don’t take them as fact but as a “living” historical foundation that will help you set the stage for reading increasingly more recent books.
- jfengel 3y agoThat's part of it. I feel like I can't even start without reproducing 2,000 years of back work. I know it's not the same as science, but if someone said "you can't do basic mechanics without reading Archimedes in the original Greek", I'd laugh at them.
- Vecr 3y agoWhat do you think about Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher? I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146, so it's not perfect, but I haven't found anything that is.