Is it silly not to start with the Greeks and read other philosophy? For example I’m reading Kierkegaard, Cioran and Nietzsche but wonder if this is a waste of time if I haven’t read the Greeks. The only thing holding me back is I feel I’ll burn out if I need to read hundreds of books from them that I’m not that interested in. Or should I just accept I need to read them to get a base level (and might be better then above philosophers) Also i only read Cioran because I like the emotion in his style not because I’m an egdgelord nihilist. Long post sorry- genuinely curious to the question in my post.
All of Western Culture is based on Greco-Roman culture. You need to at least read Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Tacitus, Livy, Suetonius, Virgil, Ovid. And that is really just scratching the surface. I didn't include any of the pre-Socratics or any Roman philosophers.
So can I just read one of them? Or 3 perhaps that cover the majority of their discoveries
At the very minimum read Plato, Aristotle, and Homer. Read all of Homer, just two books. Read the Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Metaphysics, and read basically all of Plato.
Thank you I will do.
You don’t need all of Plato. You don’t even need all of Plato’s 36 confirmed works. You can get the basic gist from the trial dialogues and Republic.
what if i use gpt to summarize the arguments? same shit tho right?
>And that is really just scratching the surface
This. You have to spend twenty years straight just reading Greeks before you read an excerpt of anything post-classical otherwise you'll be totally lost.
20 years? So many differing perspectives here. Any charts for beginners
He’s trolling. Would you spend 20 years on algebra before moving to calculus?
I know shit posting is a thing here but I could imagine that being something he believes in
> All of Western Culture is based on Greco-Roman culture
Completely false
This. Let’s not forget the contributions of the African-American people
OP, IF YOU ARE STILL HERE, you are being actively trolled by absolute fricking morons who promote the same IQfy meme that started like a decade ago and manifested itself as something to be taken serious. Unfortuntely, some Autists (in the real sense of the word) and NEETs who don't have a live and are mostly mentally ill, fell for it and now promote this moronation thinking it's important at all you start with the greeks.
This one for example is straight up a malicious troll. Do you really thing this fricktard did this himself? Of course not, but mentally ill outcasts like him are in every newbie thread telling people curious about philosophy that they have to spent 20 years reading and understanding the greek canon before reading philosphers like Heidegger who's works are settled in completely different areas of thinking, just so you never get into philosophy. Their 20 year extensive knowledge about shit nobody cares about today is the only reason they have to feel like they have an advantage against the "Normies" they so despise, so they gate keep other people from getting gud in philosophy, as to not lose the only advantage against normal people or society, or maybe it's just psychological defense to suppress the fact they wasted their life, I don't know and I don't really care. Never listen to people who give you advice like this on a condom testing forum filled with autistic individuals.
Now I will advice you how to really learn philosophy. You live in the year 2024 and not 1809. You have Wikipedia, Youtube, online encyclopedias and recently even AI at your finger tips.
You pick a wok that sounds interesting to you and dive straight in. As long as you have enjoyed a good education, you will understand many references rather modern philosophers make about ancient philosophy. And even if not, you search up what you don't get in Wikipedia, the harvard philophy encyclopedia or watch a lecture on youtube about the subject. Or you straight up ChatGPT that shit and ask it to explain the concept to you in autistic detail. That's it.
One of the youngest philosophy professors in the world is some German guy who thought he was an average idiot in high school until a friend gifted him a book by Kierkegaard, which he didn't understand at all in the beginning cause he was your average scater no-fricks giver D student, but something caught his interest and he worked through it. Look where's he's now. And he didn't start with the greeks. There is a very low amount of autstic works though that are very specific (and useless) like Deleuze's and Guatarri's work, where extensive knowledge about some philosophic topics is required, but this shit is aleady written for total autists or academics.
(Part 1)
There are still very valid reasons though to start with the greeks, but not the ones mentioned by trolls and basket cases here, for example:
- Starting with the greeks give you a good idea how western philosophy began developing and touches on basic as well as advanced philosophical topics and questions
- Greek works are unironically very interesting and it's astonishing to see what people two thousand years ago thought about the world
- The work were written by real, battle hardened man who strove to find out what is true and good in life
- Philosophies like Stoicism are quite simple but made to be applied in real life
- Greek thought schools your soul and helps develop it, trust me
- Greeks sunned their balls in the sun. They walk what they fricking talk.
- It's the antidote to nihilism
But in general, start where you want and use 2000 years of technological advances to understand philosophy AND have a life. As some Anon said to me: if you're really interested in philosophy, then take your time and enjoy, this is a long term project until the end of your life. Wise words Anon, wise words.
TL;DR: Pick a work and jump straight in. Avoid specific or unnecessary work only valid for philosophy doctorands and autists (especially Deleuze&Guatarri, Nick Land etc. You can always dip in there when you have reached a proficient level in philosophy or are just bored. Thre's nothing to gain there.
Don't read shit that doesn't interest you and if you're interested but it's hard, work through it, cause it's worth it. And don't forget to read literature, that's important and cool too.
Have fun Anon and enjoy brightening your mental horizon and developing your soul.
P.S.: Don't forget to check out Dr.Sugrues lectures on youtube, they're gold.
That's a good advice anon.
Thank you I take all on board the advice given. I was aware ‘start with the Greeks’ was a half ass shilled meme here. Anyhow I think I’ll read a few of the guys I mentioned and not spend years of my life trying to read everything the Greeks wrote.
You shouldn't read the Greeks because you see The Canon as like a fricking video game where you need to pass stage 1 to proceed to stage 2, read the Greeks because everything is downhill after them. Epics, lyric, drama, historiography, philosophy, they did it all first and not only the first, but the best. You're never going to read a better epic than the Iliad, you're never going to read a better playwright than Sophocles and Aeschylus, you're never going to read better lyric poetry than Pindar, you're never going to read better historiography than Thucydides, and so on.
I understand your point of seeing it like a video game I just didn’t want to be ignorant and that wasn’t my intention.
>You shouldn't read the Greeks because you see The Canon as like a fricking video game where you need to pass stage 1 to proceed to stage 2, read the Greeks because everything is downhill after them
I mostly agree with you, but I think Aquinas completed philosophy as the Greeks thought of it (modern philosophy is a different discipline with the same name). But then, you can't understand Aquinas without some knowledge of the Greeks.
>I think Aquinas completed philosophy as the Greeks thought of it
Wrong. That honor goes to Duns Scotus
>You shouldn't read the Greeks because you see The Canon as like a fricking video game where you need to pass stage 1 to proceed to stage 2
I think that a better analogy would be as like watching a TV series. You can start with the final season but you won't appreciate it, let alone understand anything because you skipped several seasons worth of narrative.
Are you the same guy who was defending Aeschylus a couple months ago? That post was pretty funny.
Understanding Kierkegaard requires Hegel and maybe Kant. Otherwise, I don’t know what you’re getting from him unless it’s his self-help books. Even fear and trembling requires Hegel if you want to understand everything.
Kierkegaard requires Plato, the influence is too ingrained in his work. He lays the groundwork for all his future writings in The Concept of Irony.
Nta, but what should I read before Aquinas
Don't start by reading texts directly at all. Start with a summary of the history of western philosophy, then read the texts themselves if they take your fancy. "Just read everyone bro" is a waste of time and half the philosophers in the canon aren't worth the paper they're written on.
You should also read into Indo-European comparative religion to understand the origins of philosophy and make sense of the pre-socratics.
When people read ancient texts they tend to overlay their modern sensibilities anyway. Because of that, you should sample around and see what's interesting to you, rather than thinking you'll get the correct useful baseline from something you don't even like.
Yes, you should read the Greeks. Like it or not basically everything in philosophy is a reaction to Plato and Aristotle. You could just read a textbook on Greek philosophy and get the same out of it if you’d read the original works because all you really need from it is a groundwork for the separate disciplines of philosophy, basic reasoning skills, and a basic understanding of what the first philosophers thought about it the world. Without an understanding of how the different levels of philosophy intermesh with each other then you’ll be left with nothing but cool quotes that you can’t link into any formal system. If the author of a work makes a metaphysical claim then you should already be looking ahead to how this effects the ontology, how it’s epistemologically verified, how it impacts the ethics, etc. Once you get the basic 4 down modern philosophy essentially consists of adding new layers or contorting their forms to produce interesting results. Hegel for instance introduces dialectics as a metaphysical construct which alters the traditional orientation by essentially scrapping the entirety of the ontological field. Freud introduces a new layer of psychology which could be argued as an extension of epistemology if it weren’t for the effects it has on metaphysics. Hume essentially scraps everything but the epistemology. Nietzsche scraps everything but the ontology. These are simplifications and none of my examples are 100% true but that’s where the fun of philosophy lies: in investigating nuance. All of which would be impossible for you without a basic understanding of the cypher to the esoteric machinery of philosophy: Greek autism.
The way we approach texts today, no
You should read the Greeks because they're really good, as some others have said
If you want to "understand" authors, the method of stacking up previous philosophers is moronic since Kierkegaard is not influenced by your reading of Plato but by his reading of Plato, how would you know that reading
He was probably also influenced by the politics and culture of his time so better read them histories of Denmark but he was more directly influenced by other authors like Hegel so better try to understand Hegel first but how to understand Hegel if you don't already know the history of 19th century prussian politics and philosophy so better read those histories too
And so on and so forth
Instead, if you need to, read a general introduction and an intro to whatever philosopher you want to read
There are certain reasons why you should start with the Greeks, because most writers actually started with them. There is a book called The Western Canon by Harold Bloom himself. I might want to pick it up and get some recommendations there too. There is no reason why you should do it personally, so it's up to you, like I said before, but if you are doing it academically, then you definitely should.
I am not sure about Kierkegaard or Cioran, so if you are reading them now and everything is going well I would say keep going in all honesty. Nietzsche is an entirely different story, this is not to say you cannot just jump into Nietzsche because you certainly can and if you enjoy Nietzsche then certainly do so, that aside there is a veritable amount of Nietzsche that is responding to or critiquing or just praising various Greek thinkers and thought, he references Plato easily hundreds of times throughout his works, and that is just Plato. This also depends heavily on which Nietzsche works you are reading. You can read Nietzsche now if you want and see what you take away from it, but after reading the Greeks and reading Nietzsche again you will likely realize you only skimmed the surface of his thought.
Okay thank you guys good advice here. I’m going to start with Plato and Aristotle. Any recs for ‘general’ Greek philosophy books on them as well?
>Plato
You can just dive straight in to Plato, look for an anthology with the following dialogues:
>Euthyphro
>Apology
>Crito
>Phaedo
>Symposium
>Republic
Then you can branch out to some of the other generally accessible dialogues like
>Phaedrus
>Gorgias
>Protagoras
>Meno
>Philebus
>Statesman
>Sophist
The above dialogues should cover the essential ideas of Plato. If you really like Plato, then you can tackle the less digestible dialogues, but with the assistance of either a good edition with extensive notes and supplementary material, or secondary literature to guide your study:
>Parmenides
>Timaeus
>Theatetus
>Laws
>Aristotle
Aristotle is more "boring" than Plato, but the flip side is that he gives a more straightforward elaboration of his ideas. Aristotle has way more extant material than Plato, so I would pare down the "essential" Aristotle to:
>The Organon
>Nicomachean Ethics
>Metaphysics
>Politics
>Rhetoric
>Poetics
No need to splurge on the two-volume Complete Works set. I think Modern Library has an edition of the Basic Works of Aristotle that has all the above.
>You can just dive straight in to Plato, look for an anthology with the following dialogues:
You actually can't there's a dozen Pythagoreans you have to read before you even touch Plato.
You should NOT start with the greeks if you want to get into philosophy. Those who pretend as though a thorough understanding of the greeks is essential to understanding philosophy are woman-brained people who treat philosophy the same way they treat literature and history. You would learn more by reading David Hume than by reading all of Plato and Heracleitus.
The greek philosophers did not conceive of the study the same way we (and other post-1600 people) do. They had not yet appreciated the a priori and a posteriori distinction, and so they conducted their philosophy the same way they conducted their natural science. They looked at the world (both mental and physical) and imperfectly translated it into a net of abstraction on which to reason. They had not yet given serious attention to questions of epistemology and language. Much of their discussion ended up being composed of unclear, unnecessary, or vacuous ideas (take the "paradox" pointed out by Parmenides, the theory of forms, substance and accident, etc). What attention they gave to truly fundamental questions was extremely unsatisfactory, such as the other "paradox" of knowledge in Plato's Meno, or the puzzling over "non-being" in Sophist.
You should still read the greeks, but for historical, literary, and psychological purposes. Most of the people who shill for the greeks are christcucks, humanities people who think of philosophy as nothing but another form of literature, or people who just don't read much. Prime example is treating Homer as though he's relevant to any philosophy whatsoever.
You also don't need to read all of the people who "influenced" the philosophers you read, or who they were "responding to". Most philosophy treatises are relatively self-contained. There are a few obvious ones (don't read hegel before kant, don't read aquinas before aristotle, etc), but reading order is relatively unimportant. You would get everything you need in this respect by just reading Republic, Organon, and Metaphysics.
Opposing opinions here.. So I can read The republic(Plato) , organon (Aristotle) and Aristotle metaphysics which will suffice ?
Yeah. I would never recommend that a person NOT read a book, but the greeks are not absolutely necessary beyond that.
Okay thanks I probably will read them out of interest anyway
Ignore that dude.
Philosophy as the Greeks did is superior to modern philosophy.
Spend a month reading Greek Philosophy and you become a better, more virtuous person. Spend a month reading modern "philosophy" and you just spent a month in an useless activity.
You should read the Pre-Socratics too. See First Philosophers by Robin Waterfield
Start and end with the Greeks
Platos writings are so boring my friend killed himself