balketh

Balketh

@balketh

Eggbug was here. Eggbug mattered.

Goblin Party @ My Brain 24/7 | A week shy of 33 before Cohost closed. Cis, ACAB forever, Trans Rights Are Human Rights forever.

RIP Cohost 2024. You were the best social media site to have ever been done. Long live eggbug. If you're seeing this in the future, on some archive, be kind to others. It's the only way things get better.

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balketh
@balketh

A Question For You Learn-ed Booky Types

Philosophy, and, in a similar vein, Political Theory. Both have the same problem in regards to self-education:

Where do you even start? There's obviously a directional flow, temporally, but where's the line? Should I be starting with dang papyrus tomes? Or are there, like, more well-known starting points?

Or do you just pick something that's interesting, jump in, and kinda choose a direction after that? 'Oh, I started with Foucault, but then I went Heidegger, Heigel, Kant', 'Huh! I went chronological, Kant to Foucault.'

Is there a philosophy speedrun flowchart? Or am I just asking the questions that are answered by a university degree in philosophy?

Basically, same questions for political theory.

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mojilove
@mojilove

(disclaimer: I'm not learned and I didn't do philosophy or political theory, but i did get a doctorate in another subject)

I'm assuming that you are doing this for your own pleasure rather than as a commitment, so I'd just suggest going with something that takes your fancy to start with, and then delving into the sources and influences that inform that particular work (and then looking at the sources and influences of those and so on), or alternatively going the opposite direction and reading works that are influenced by the book or individual you started with. don't be afraid to consult secondary works that help explain the ideas of a particular individual or book because they give a lot of helpful context. https://plato.stanford.edu/ is a nice site to check before you dive into a book for philosophy at least

another route (that you could either do first or in parallel with the above) would be to go through a college-level handbook on that subject to get an overview of the field, and then go dive into an area that interests you

good luck!

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balketh
@balketh

Ah, that's the right direction for me I think - a college-ish level overview through which I can gather a gist, and then decide where I'd like to devote my unfortunate attention span.

And yeah, no worries, it's absolutely just for me. I think I'm just getting to that age where I'm having Complex, Unstructured Thoughts About Life (CUTALs?), and every now and then I'll hear that thought, deeply and beautifully expressed in the most casual manner with a Name attached to it, and wonder what the hell I'm missing out on in Philosophy.

Wanting the same for Political theory is more a desire to put earnest understanding behind my long-festering disgust with the failures of Capitalism, but only having the cultural-osmosing of Other Ways.

Thank you!

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toad
@toad

this isn’t an endorsement for “the western canon” by any means, but pretty much everyone in the history of philosophy was responding to someone else’s ideas, even if they don’t mention them by name, so it’s definitely easier to go chronologically than the reverse. that said, your starting point and subsequent focuses really depend on what particular field of philosophy you want to study. you wouldn’t need to start with heraclitus to get a good picture of philosophy of language, but you might want to start with him if you’re interested in dialectics. philosophy as a whole i think is just as much about history - the context and procession - as it is about the ideas themselves. that said… with political theory you can skip everyone before marx lol

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balketh
@balketh

See, again, a thing I missed due to only scantly knowing what's involved! I correctly clocked that, of course, there's a chain of historical influence as the field of philosophy expanded and was subject to globalization as communications technology improved, but there are (obviously, in hindsight) whole fields within philosophy, and it's in no way obvious what those fields even are!

@mojilove recommended I consider a college-level handbook for an overview, and I can now add the concept of fields to my criteria - not just Names and The Thing They're Kinda Big For NGL, but also the spheres in which their works live and affect.

But also, shoutout to that last tip - that's also exactly the kind of mojo I'm after: clear, decisive cutoff point of relevance.

I presume it's because anything from before Marx just doesn't apply to the modern systems of governance and the state of the present world?

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toad
@toad

i say to start with marx because 1. he explicitly traces his own history and lays out his predecessors' ideas pretty well, 2. every subsequent political theorist worth reading is responding to marx, and 3. i think he's right about political economy in a way that other philosophers aren't about other fields such that you can kinda skip to the "correct answer"

(that being said, "read marx" is a terrible answer to "where should i start with political theory?" simply for the reason that there's just so much of it. to that end i'd 1000% recommend finding a reading guide for marx and marxists' work - i've gotten a lot of use out of Red Menace and Marx Madness

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balketh
@balketh

I was absolutely intending to track down some measure of guided address of the excessive body of work that must be approached to 'read Marx', but I'm also heavily grateful for your suggestion, as it may stand as a marker for others; thank you!

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chooseagoose
@chooseagoose

@mojilove gives reasonable advice, so here's some unreasonable advice :)

  • read prefaces last, or not at all
  • mark up your books - underline, write in the margins, go crazy
  • read the footnotes, or at least skim them
  • get comfortable with things not making sense - history aside, sometimes the form of an argument (with all the twists and turns) is more interesting that the content. sometimes its better to keep moving ahead to get a general sense rather than get stuck at every step.
  • read generously
  • start a journal/keep notes - write down those passages that hit differently, new words, things that don't sound right, connect what you're reading to your life
  • finally, read something else (at the same time or otherwise), do something else, and go outside. too much theory will rot your brain.

if any of this doesn't work for you, don't do it! 'how to read' is just as important as 'who/what to read'

gl hf

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balketh
@balketh

Someone's gotta give the unreasonable advice around here! :D

  • Interesting; is this to avoid bias the prefaces create over a work?
  • A loved copy of a studied tome is a beautiful thing.
  • Definitely, especially going in via guided/companion works.
  • I divvy it up; sometimes stopping to do a quick check of a concept or definition is also a good chance for a break. But pushing ahead is critical.
  • Not sure if this means in my assumptions, in perspectives, or what, but it's still good advice either way.
  • Tough to maintain with my wavelength of AADHD, wish to no end I could thought-to-text.
  • I can't do dual reading (wavelength, etc), but breaks are inevitable as focus can be the first to fault; more like I'm trying to accrue intentionally desired knowledge admist the mostly uncontrollable sea currents that are my foci de jour.

Thank you very much!

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chooseagoose
@chooseagoose
  • Interesting; is this to avoid bias the prefaces create over a work?

I guess I approach it as half a joke and half not. Some reasons are:

-- Some prefaces spend a lot of time explaining/interpreting what a text says. Reading the text itself can then turn into an exercise of matching the text to the preface, and not understanding what the text itself is saying (so yeah, avoiding bias could be a reason)

-- Some texts end up with multiple prefaces (translator's preface, original preface, preface to version X, etc). That's a lot of pages on top of whatever I'm already reading.

-- It is hard to write a 'good' preface.

When I do read a preface, I usually treat it as a re-cap or a way to see where my understanding might differ from another's.

  • Tough to maintain with my wavelength of AADHD, wish to no end I could thought-to-text.

This piece of advice is maybe one I wished I could follow better.

I have started and stopped many journals (in one form or another). Usually the text itself becomes my journal :)

happy reading

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