How to Read Philosophy
Notes from How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren
- Philosophy is essentially asking questions
Steps to Read
- Ascertain what question the philosopher is asking and responding to
- may be explicit or implicit
- Determine authors controlling principles
- affect how he answers the questions
- may or not be stated
- discover the hidden and unstated assumptions
- Decide whether author adheres to the controlling principles throughout the work
- ensure his consistency
- do his conclusions stem from his propositions?
- ensure his consistency
Classifying Philosophy
2 Main Divisions of Philosophy:
- Theoretical philosophy
- questions about being and becoming
- have to do with what is or happens in the world
- Metaphysics
- questions about being or existence
- Philosophy of nature
- concerned with becoming—with the nature and kinds of changes, their conditions and causes
- Epistemology
- philosophy of knowledge
- questions about what is involved in our knowing anything
- with the causes, extent, and limits of human knowledge
- with its certainties and uncertainties
- Normative philosophy
- questions concerning good and evil, or right and wrong, have to do with what ought to be done or sought
- Ethics
- questions about the good life
- what is right or wrong in the conduct of the individual
- Political Philosophy
- questions about the good society
- conduct of the individual in relation to the community
Philosophical Styles
- 5 kinds of styles of philosophical exposition
- The Philosophical Dialogue
- 1st in chronology
- embodied by Plato in his Dialogues
- Plato raises most of the persistent philosophical problems
- Socrates asks in the course of the dialogues simple but profound questions
- conversational style
- style is heuristic—it allows the reader to discover things for himself
- employs drama and comedy, when good
- very difficult to do well, perhaps only ever by Plato
- The Philosophical Treatise or Essay
- embodied by Aristotle
- e.g., Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, Poetics, On The Soul
- recognizes the objections of other philosophers and replies to them
- Kant adopted this style too
- his are finished works of art, unlike Aristotles
- states the main problem, goes through the subject matter in a thorough way, then treats special problems along the way or at the end
- often more direct, clear, structured
- doesn’t employ drama
- most common
- embodied by Aristotle
- The Meeting of Objections
- developed in the Middle Ages
- perfected by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica
- combination of question-raising and objection-meeting
- divided into parts, treatises, questions, and articles
- form of all articles is the same
- question is posed
- the opposite (wrong) answer to it is given
- arguments in support of it are educed
- countered with an authoritative text
- gives his own answer or solution responding to each argument
- attempts to meet all possible objections to own answer
- imbued with the spirit of debate and discussion
- not common, but well suited
- The Systemization of Philosophy
- developed in 17th century by Descartes and Spinoza
- inspired by the success of mathematics in organizing man’s knowledge of nature
- Descartes tried to give certainty and structure to philosophy
- similar to how Euclid did to geometry
- Spinoza
- took it even further in his Ethics utilizing strict mathematical form
- using propositions, proofs, corollaries, lemmas, scholiums, and the like
- took it even further in his Ethics utilizing strict mathematical form
- not a suitable form for philosophy as it is for math
- developed in 17th century by Descartes and Spinoza
- The Aphoristic Style
- adopted by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra
- inspired by the use of this style from the East
- form of short, enigmatic statements
- advantage:
- is heuristic
- reader does most of the work of thinking
- disadvantage
- not expositional
- touches on subject, hints at a truth or insight, then moves on
- does not do well for debate and defense of ideas
- philosophically lacking