/edu/ - Education

>>26218
The best thing you can do if you want to be a self-taught philosophy student is follow your interests. I've tried the "start with the Greeks" meme and as a wagie I just don't have the time, energy, nor the smarts for it. President Sunday is good friends with the Youtube channel Quarantine Collective (a bit libby but he does great stuff) who has dozens of videos explaining Deleuze, not only that but has read through Anti-Oedipus chapter by chapter multiple times. Even with all the """prerequisite""" reading for AO you will still need to read it multiple times.

>>26218
Try not make your backlog to much, you could spend a lifetime following the thread back in time to the present. I suggest just going straight in to what you want to read and referring back to any references if needed for the sake of clarity, sometimes authors will try to write in a self contained manner that reduces the need to do so and sometimes they'll presume a level of background knowledge.

>>26218
Read all Plato's dialogues, especially the harder ones. Take your time, learn how to think. Don't buy the usual formulas, use the dialogues as conceptual workshops to make ideas clash with one another. Don't bother with the introductions unless they give some historical context and explains some of the complex terms, so you dont stumble into "false friends" (google it), such as ουσία and other such terms. Don't believe the usual interpretations, such as the supposed world of ideas vs world of the bodies and all that christian dualist crap, and also take the Phaedo with a grain of salt, don't go about reading the other dialogues basing your interpretation on the Phaedo, or on any other one for that matter. I say this because the usual crap that people say about Plato seems to take the Phaedo as the one and only dialogue he wrote. Dont try to fit everything in a single mega system that Plato supposedly had. Dont buy all the biographical crap, the introductions where they speak about Plato as if he was their neighbor, when we actually know almost nothing about his life. Dont bother with that, just use the dialogues to see how complex speculative concepts move, work each other out, transform into one another, destroy one another, etc.

This way, you will learn how to think, because Plato has put into the dialogues everything a philosopher needs. In the dialogues philosophy appears in its natural element, it's natural habitat if you will: two or more people talking about concepts, take advantage of that and treat them as if they were a friend you were reasoning with.

If I were you I would follow up with some Aristotle, some modern stuff (Descartes Spinoza Leibniz Hume etc) and then some Kant. Then, whatever you want, you are from that point onwards free. Take a word of advice from me: there will probably be a point you'll get into romanticism and/or existentialism and similar lines, be extremely wary of that because it's a phase not to get stuck on. Be wary of the philosophers that criticize Hegel saying he is an absolutist, that he rejects feeling, that he rejects this and that… Give good old Hegel the benefit of the doubt and approach him someday with an open mind, he is an endless source of complex concepts and manouvers no philosopher should abstain himself from. Marx himself said that Hegel "truly has the last say in philosophy". Also, Marx is the greatest, no doubt. That's all.

>>26223
Yes, Alfred Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle would be the most influential interpretation of Plato via scholasticism which is more or less a synthesis of the two and is still upheld in Abrahamic circles as a viable system into modern times. So one should definitely read those two authors.

Then as far as eastern philosophy, one should read the Upanishads and bhagavad Gita, Laozi, Zhuangzi and the I Ching, Visuddhimagga and Milinda Panha

>>26224
>Yes, Alfred Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle would be the most influential interpretation of Plato via scholasticism which is more or less a synthesis of the two and is still upheld in Abrahamic circles as a viable system into modern times. So one should definitely read those two authors.

First and foremost, Aristotelianism is but a small fraction of scholasticism. There are countless other schools and the Aristotelian one only got prominent in the end, and was never in a position of undisputed hegemony. Secondly, Aristotle in itself is very different from scholasticism, and Plato never ceased to be a direct influence in its own right, save for the long time in which most of his dialogues were lost in western Europe alongside most of the corpus aristotelicum. Even still, some dialogues always stayed in circulation, such as the Timaeus (for obvious reasons), and many of his ideas (or rather, ideas about his ideas), through Augustine, Boetius, Dionysus Aeropagite, and this general neoplatonic mileau of early christian thought. In the 1200s, the corpus aristotelicum was recovered, iirc, by translations from the arabic comissioned in Spain (translations themselves made from syriac, which themselves were made from greek), and Aristotle was back in the scene. All of Plato's dialogues were recovered afterwards, in the 1500s, after the fall of constantinople, when many greek scholars fled to Italy, along the original greek version of aristotle, again, iirc. Here Plato was truly recovered and had an immense influence in renaissance and early modern philosophy. If you read Descartes meditations after you read the Phaedo, you will understand, and this is just one connection.


Either way, I didn't recommend you Plato because he is an influential guy. I didn't even recommend it to you to get ahold of the philosophical canon and get your stuff together historically. In Plato's dialogue you will find a truly godlike philosopher showing how CONCEPTS work, what are their limits, what configurations can they work in, how do they clash, which ones are implied (often surreptitiously, unbeknownst to the user) by using and abusing other ones… By reading Plato you don't become a PLATONIST, you learn how to THINK, provided you approach the text without those plain formulas found in history of philosophy books. In other words: provided you read them forgetting everything you know about Plato. That's my advise, take it or leave it.

>Is it better to be patient or start with the harder texts and reread them?
It's not as if you have to waste your time with obscure works. You just need to read Plato and Aristotle as a preliminary to any further philosophy. It all begins with them. This is what Kant writes (1787):
<In relation to the origin of the pure cognitions of reason, we find one school maintaining that they are derived entirely from experience, and another that they have their origin in reason alone. Aristotle may be regarded as the bead of the empiricists, and Plato of the noologists. 
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/critique-of-pure-reason.htm
So Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is a commentary on these ideas.
Philosophy is also related to various Wisdom literature, such as Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" (300 BCE), so I would recommend this in tandem.

>>26223
Plato is extravagantly dialectical, by displaying the very process of thinking from an original premise itself, and to the same end, he is often open-ended in conclusion, such as the masterful deconstruction in Parmenides. Indeed, such as Socrates says to Phaedrus, he is a mid-wife of the mind. One of the earliest dialogues I read was Euthyphro, which completely changed my stance toward theological disputes, since it showed how the commands of God cannot be moral by themself, and so God is subordinate to a higher principle of virtue. This is tackled only in part by Aquinas later on regarding the Will of God - if God is always good, then can he be evil? Aquinas resolves it into the Aristotelian position of the potential to do evil without its actuality. Freedom of the Will is the capacity to act, distinguished from activity. It is a sound rebuttal, but it makes us ponder in the typical Epicurean way; "whence cometh evil?" I think the only real response is what Plato devises in Sophist, that matter (as becoming) is not a being, but is the negation of being, which is always good. So, evil does not exist; there are only failures of perfection. Kant adds to this in part by denying the validity of absolute evil, for if one acts toward his own (selfish) end, he still acts for the good of one. There is a small honour amongst thieves. This only makes sense by an Annihilationist eschatology also, since if Hell is separation from God, and God is absolute being, then the wicked soul must be destroyed, by itself. Thus, there can be no coercion in virtue or vice, but all is freely given.