>start with the Greeks
Why can't I just read this instead and catch up to the middle of the 20th century in one fell swoop?
>start with the Greeks
>start with the Greeks
Why can't I just read this instead and catch up to the middle of the 20th century in one fell swoop?
You can.
because the aim is to seriously engage with voices from the past, not their modern summaries. might as well watch some youtube videos at that point. also starting with the greeks means homer, herodotus, thucydides, the playwrights and so on, it's not just philosophy. stop being a secondary source bugman and go actually read
That's like saying
>Why can't I just read this one 500pg book on the History of Soience instead of going through 40 thick-ass tomes on mathematics, physics, and chemistry?
I mean, you can, but it's not gonna give you the same depth of knowledge on theories and lines of reasoning that carefully studying lots of works on the subject over an extended number of years would. It's like wanting to be a chess grandmaster after just watching a few videos of famous games between high-ranking chess players.
There's nothing wrong with starting with this overview, so long as you use it as a jumping off point for more seriously engaging with the thinkers who resonate with you.
>You a pathetic person: start with the middle of the 20th century.
>he a less, pathetic person:start with the greeks, muh greeks.
>Me, an intelectual:Start with chauvet cave.
IQfy doesn't want you to know this but you can read all this shit in any order you like. You'll want to reread the later stuff eventually, after reading the earlier stuff, and this might strike some people as being inefficient. But guess what, if that later stuff is worth reading in the first place, it's worth rereading in any case, so you're not even losing time.
This. IQfy obsesses over the right way to start and never gets anywhere. The way actual experts, scholars, researchers, and the best philosophers actually do it is to prioritize the end goal. It matters less how you get there, more that you get there. You can start anywhere but you should cover ground eventually.
Because:
1. Russell did a bad job representing many of the thinkers in the book. It is often more polemic than anything.
2. Trusting anything an early analytic thinker has to say about the history of philosophy is a mistake in itself.
this isnt "a history of western philosophy" as much as it is "a history of the western aspects of what is important to early 20th century philosophy" and its great for that, but only kinda good for a history of western philosophy (note it explicitly ignores eastern philosophy). i own a copy and i 50/50 started with the Greeks.
To start with the Greeks or not to start with the Greeks is a classic problem in contemporary thought. It is well memed here and elsewhere, including in undergraduate university philosophy. and many who study classics say its the only way to go.
Pros of starting with the Greeks:
>anything that you read that engages with the greeks will make more sense
>less backtracking
>Greek and Roman culture are two of the biggest influences on modern day ethics and politics, and often defined what types of questions we investigated in the sciences, though its subtle
Cons:
>your reading list is infinite if you dont have a guide (heirophant)
>its fricking boring and often modern day thought considers it objectively wrong
>its usually about shit you dont care about
>it has no idea what we are capable of (WW2 and the Internet soon AI) (cannot stress this enough)
Pros of starting with the 20th century
>Less to read, seems more approachable
>engages directly with topics of the modern day
>can lead to incredibly subtle understandings of a culture you actually live in
>usually about what you care about
>shows the exact arguments used in modern day ethics and politics. (continental philosophy)
>shows the exact arguments used in modern day science and math (analytic philosophy)
>aware of the atomic bomb. (21st is also aware of the internet)
Cons:
>hard to tell what to read if you dont have a guide (hermit)
>fricking incomprehensible without background, youll end up reading the greeks against your will anyway
>endnotes and footnotes make it worse
>Impossible to tell what will be important in the future
>less ignorant of eastern philosophy (still ignorant tho)
>atheist (unironically.)
It actually doesnt matter what you choose, here's why:
https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/hermeneutics/#HermCirc
>only kinda good for a history of western philosophy (note it explicitly ignores eastern philosophy)
Hence the title.
do you know what explicit means? that wasn't a critique, just a note.
I still prefer to start with the greeks than moronicly starting on the middle of the 20th century or some moronic shit like that.
I actually don't care how long or how unrelatable it is,or how much books i have to read.
Because at the end of the day, im learning things chronologically and let me tell you, it's actually super satisfying to me, when you see the spread of ideas in a chronological way, and you notice andold idea, mentioned in some random philosopher in 50 books/mention before, it's like.
"ohh, this dud was inspired by that other dude from ionia", or something like that.
It's also really cool to see that, with modern philosophers for example, in fact it's like the afore feeling but even bigger.
For example, reading a 19 century philosopher mention the pre-socratics in a whole book about them, is super satisfying afer having gotten through everything else that mentioned them in sources from antiquity.
It's like a super interesting feeling to have, very satisfying feeling to recognize them.
So in my opinion if you don't mind to read like a million books, and you take your time, it's going to even more satisfying than moronicly starting with the 20th century and, being confused and probably dropping philosophy for such an easy mistake to make, a moronic mistake to make.
So start with the greeks, it's worth it, at least in my opinion, if it wasn't already obvious.
>or some moronic shit like that
hmm.
do you need Heraclitus and Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas and Descartes and Kant and Hegel to understand Derrida's Spectres of Marx? no, but it helps. however, if you haven't read the Communist Manifesto nor Hamlet, his discussion on hauntology won't make much sense. and that's the thing. with 20th and 21st century thinkers, it helps to know the influences, but you don't strictly need them, you just need the text they are referencing. this is particularly the case with stuff that would qualify as 'primary.' and for the secondary stuff, fortunately they have developed a tradition of citation.
I agree tho, it was satisfying to know what Jung meant by the Scylla and Charybdis of the path to individuation, and deepened my understanding of what he is talking about with the kinship urge (picrel, v interesting) and that satisfaction is built by succesfully anticipating who will be referenced.
But yet another question is whether or not philosophy is a chosen discipline or one topic of interest in the broader discipline of literature, or if even it is unrelated to the discipline altogether. (i think of mathematics, where most mathematicians know very little philosophy even though the modern rigor of mathematics is borne of the revelations of logic that lies in the history of philosophy, to use an example that engrossed the 20th century yet begins in the greeks. to mathematicians, Euclid is more important than Plato; and along with Descartes and Liebniz, he was a mathematician first, philosopher second.)
oh, citation for the pic:
Jung, Carl Gustav. 1983. The Psychology of the Transference. Pg 72 / ¶ 448
If you really pore over the texts, study reception, and secondary material... you'll be fine. But it's nice to have Socrates wean you into the door instead of having to do that. Keep in mind, any text you engage with will be written by someone who has an intimate relationship with the Greeks and you will miss nuance unless... you read the greeks.
Because that's one of the ways pseuds are created, and you don't want to be one of those.
He doesn't do a lot of shit justice and this book is known to be pretty noticeably biased towards Russell's own tastes.
Honestly just reading Wikipedia articles about thinkers you're interested in wouldn't be that much worse than reading Russell's history.
Having a timeline of notable people and getting a history overview to go along with the philosophy is nice.