A Beginner’s Guide to Philosophy: From Logic to Epistemology to Metaphysics

These are, per­haps, not the very best times for human­i­ties majors. Sel­dom do we even hear the once-stan­dard defense that, by pur­su­ing a course of study in sub­jects of that kind, stu­dents “learn how to think.” Such a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion still points to real val­ue, at least in the most demand­ing set­tings. Take Har­vard’s course Human­i­ties 10, whose dig­i­tal device-free envi­ron­ment and syl­labus cov­er­ing every­thing from The Odyssey and Ulysses to Pla­to and James Bald­win — at a pace of one sub­stan­tial book per week — recent­ly drew the atten­tion of the Wall Street Jour­nal.

Yet it’s always been true that you don’t have to major in any­thing to learn how to think, or in any case, to make a start of doing so. Take the phi­los­o­phy-and-lit­er­a­ture YouTu­ber Jared Hen­der­son, who in the video at the top of the post tells us how he began his self-direct­ed study in high school. That sequence reflects the rea­son­able assump­tion that, before we can eval­u­ate argu­ments about how soci­ety ought to be arranged, we must learn to eval­u­ate state­ments about how things are.

We must, in oth­er words, learn how to think — but also learn about the nature of real­i­ty itself, and how or whether we can know any­thing about it in the first place, ques­tions rel­e­vant to both meta­physics and epis­te­mol­o­gy. That may seem like a daunt­ing task, but Hen­der­son frames all its stages in rela­tion to one anoth­er, nam­ing some of the most famous philoso­phers who have writ­ten in the rel­e­vant fields along the way. No sin­gle read­ing could give you mas­tery of their work, or even a full under­stand­ing of it, how­ev­er clear the big­ger pic­ture might seem.

But the attempt teach­es the true first les­son of phi­los­o­phy: in one area of knowl­edge or anoth­er, you’ll always be a begin­ner. Sev­en Phi­los­o­phy Books for Begin­ners: Where to Start The Rad­i­cal Ideas of Plato’s Repub­lic: An In-Depth Intro­duc­tion A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro.

Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (0) | We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to!

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