Hi, I'm Professor Ellie Anderson.
And I'm here to share with you some tips for reading philosophy, otherwise known
as advice for reading texts that seem very boring at first, but are actually
amazing and very much worth your time.
If you spent any time trying to read philosophy, you may have found that
much of it is very, very hard, like way harder than most things you've
ever read in your entire life.
How could you possibly comprehend what's going on?
Here's one of just many possible examples, opening to a random page
of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Sensuous singularity, therefore, does indeed vanish in the dialectical
movement of immediate certainty and becomes universality, but it
becomes only sensuous universality.
Or let's open to a random page of A Thousand Plateaus.
Since every articulation is double, there is not an articulation of content
and an articulation of an expression.
The articulation of content is double in its own right and constitutes a
relative expression within content.
The articulation of expression is also double and constitutes a
relative content within expression.
How do we make sense of these?
Now the best way to do this is to learn from other people, right?
Learn from somebody who has expertise in this area.
Um, my YouTube lectures are all well and good, as are those of many others,
but it's sometimes hard to separate what's legit from what's not legit.
There's a lot of not legit stuff out there.
So if you can enroll in some sort of course taught by somebody
with expertise in this area, I would highly recommend doing so.
You could also develop at least some sort of reading group,
perhaps, with other people online.
I also recommend working with online resources that are
vetted by the profession.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
are the two primary open access
encyclopedias a philosophy that are available online.
Please use them rather than Wikipedia, although there's also a
lot of good stuff on Wikipedia, too.
It's just not peer reviewed.
And peer review is important.
Now, let's get to some specific tips for what to do once you open the book and are
trying to figure out how to understand it.
Now, one of the tips that I suggest to my students is what I call the skim and slog.
The skim and slog involves first skimming a portion of a text.
Maybe it's a paragraph.
Maybe it's a couple of pages.
Maybe it's even an entire chapter.
And then going back and really closely reading it.
I sometimes find that this can be more helpful than just slogging through
the texts from the beginning, trying to understand every single sentence,
taking forever to do so, because it will help give you a little bit of the
shape of where the argument is going.
Even if you don't understand the argument itself, uh, while you're reading it.
This is especially helpful with philosophical texts that are in the
continental tradition, where there's not often a clear definition of a
term that's given from the outset.
You gather the definition of the term over time through the
authors repeated use of it.
You get a sense of the shape of what the author is meaning by a particular term.
So sometimes you can just kind of skim it at first and then go
back through it in greater detail.
Most philosophical writings are not exactly page turners.
So don't worry about the skim and slog giving you spoilers for what's to come.
Right?
Nobody ever gave a spoiler alert for the Critique of Pure Reason.
Instead, it can be helpful to know where an author is going and then
backtrack and work your way through.
Don't be worried also if you don't, even after slogging through it, that
second step, understand the whole text.
That's fine.
I've read Hegel's phenomenology of spirit more than once and I still
don't understand everything in it.
I also highly recommend annotating, philosophical texts as you're
reading them through highlighting and writing marginal notes.
Or underlining if you prefer that to highlighting.
Both of those, equally valid.
Okay.
So when you are doing that, I actually recommend waiting
until the end of a paragraph.
Sometimes even the end of a page or section, uh, if you're anything like
me, you might, as you're reading philosophical texts, be tempted to
underline, highlight, and, or write marginal notes on just about everything.
And that's not always the best way to do it because then you just
have a sea of color on your page.
And it's really hard to tell what actually were the most important points
versus the less important points.
In Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, for instance, some of
the first times that he introduces a word are actually the least helpful
and he'll offer the definition later.
So I'll wait to, till that definition comes more clearly
later and then make an annotation.
That way, as I flip through my book, I have less to focus on in my annotations.
This also gives you a chance to take stock at the end of a given paragraph
page or section and look back and see what you think was the most important
point or the most important points.
In addition to that, I know this takes a while, but I usually
recommend after a reading session.
To take a few notes, uh, in a notebook or in an app about what you read.
And that can also really help give you a sense of the shape of the argument.
In addition to being helpful for knowing where the author is
talking about certain things.
So if you see a keyword appear early on.
And you have a note on that in your app, then you can go back and text
search it later when you get to a different section that uses that.
And you're like, where was that again?
How is it defined?
You can even juxtapose the different places that, that keyword comes
up and see how it's being used and defined in different ways.
But complementary, hopefully, if the author's being consistent,
ways throughout the text.
Another recommendation for reading philosophy is to watch out for the
logical moves that are being made.
One of philosophy's greatest assets is its emphasis on the coherence of arguments.
Arguments should be coherent.
They should be valid and they should be sound.
As you're reading, take note of how the author builds on one
point and then moves to another.
And you also might want to make a visual map of the list of
premises that are being used.
So the author says one thing, then builds on it with a second premise, or
makes a second premise that's related, but not even necessarily building on
it, and then moves to a conclusion.
Really making notes of those, I think can be helpful.
And also look out for potential errors or logical fallacies, which
you can find lists of online.
Philosophers are not perfect.
We definitely make mistakes.
And if you do find an error, reflect on how much or how little
of the argument this bears on.
Does this error that you've found in the argument actually undermine the
author's whole claim in a given section or a given text, or is it somewhat
minor, undermining a certain point, but not really becoming an issue
for other aspects of the argument?
This really aids critical thinking and forces you to find the parts of the
argument that are doing the heavy lifting.
All right.
Let's think about attention.
It's very common when people are reading philosophy, even seasoned
readers of philosophy to have the urge periodically to stop reading.
Maybe you want to check your phone.
Maybe you actually hear a ding on your phone or you want to get up and do
something else and then come back to it.
You're just kind of bored or impatient.
That's okay.
That urge is okay.
I encourage you to resist the urge.
Resist it the first time.
Resist it the second time.
Maybe resist it the third time, but I'll leave that to you.
Definitely resist it the first two times.
Notice it, and have a mindful moment of saying, Hey, I'm experiencing some
resistance to this text right now.
I feel like I'm not really getting it.
Um, or I'm bored or I'm impatient.
Just make a mental note of that and then continue.
Resisting this urge builds up your stamina and allows you to
get more deeply into the text.
There've been studies of marathon runners that show that the body sends signals to
the brain saying "I'm done" well before the body has actually run out of energy.
So we have kind of a hair trigger for challenging times.
Especially in this day and age when our attention is often so frenetically
oriented in different directions.
Marathon runners learn to ignore this inner voice of I'm done before the body is
actually done and to develop a different sort of intuition when their body is
actually running out of energy, when it would be dangerous to continue running.
I think you can do the same with philosophical reading.
You can develop stamina, you can learn to ignore that inner voice of "I'm done."
And then that will enable a different kind of intuition to kick in,
which is intuition of "no, no, no.
I'm actually done now.
I'm not going to get anywhere.
I'm not in the right head space to understand this piece
of material at the moment."
So try powering through the first and second urges to stop reading
and then see where that gets you.
Okay.
Um, also don't check your phone.
Seriously.
Don't check your phone.
This is hard for a lot of us, but we tend to think that a quick break
to just respond to a text or check Google for something, um, won't have
any effect on our concentration, but studies show that they have way
bigger differences than we realize.
Even very short breaks, greatly diminish our concentration.
I'd suggest .Leaving your phone potentially an audible level or
putting it on, do not disturb, uh, but keeping it out of reach or putting it
on silent and stowing it altogether for a period of at least 25 minutes.
I think 25 minutes is a good goal to set when you're first starting out reading
philosophy and this kind of rewiring is not fun at first, but it's crucial.
The next thing I'm going to suggest might initially seem at odds with what I've just
been saying, but I don't think is at all.
And this is to read the text in more than one sitting.
Like I said, I think a period of 25 minutes can be a good general
rule for people who are first starting to read philosophy.
And then maybe you can build up to a couple of hours over time.
But I think that, you know, it can be good to do even, uh, even an essay in
multiple reading sessions, depending on the length and the level of difficulty.
I sometimes find it helpful to have a short first session where I skim the
text and then read the first few pages,
then I take a break and then I can come back to it later to read more
thoroughly and take notes on it.
And again, this depends a lot on the length of the text.
Right.
What I just said might apply more to an essay.
And if you're reading one of these two texts or something
like it, it might take you.
And that's fine.
Uh, another note is learn to swim.
I remember when I was first reading Kant and finding it impossible to understand,
that somebody suggested to me that once you actually figure out the basic
rhythms of Kant's movements in the arguments, He's really easy to read.
He's actually kind of repetitive and he's pretty consistent.
Uh, nah, pretty consistent?
He's unusually consistent!
Maybe not entirely consistent all the time, but he's a very consistent thinker.
And that really catalyzed my sense of confidence in reading Kant.
What I found was that I was learning to swim in the waters of Kant's
prose, and different thinkers have different waters, right?
Some might be a really hardcore waves off the coast of Portugal that you
need to learn to stay afloat in.
Others might be more of a peaceful, lazy river.
That would be perhaps Heraclitus.
Not a lazy river, but at least --not peaceful either actually, but a river.
Heraclitus is a river, a rushing rushing river.
Uh, maybe Rousseau's a peaceful lazy river.
In any case, what I've often found is that approaching a text this way means that
some of the texts that appear hardest to read at first end of actually being among
the easiest over time, because they have a consistent pattern, a consistent flow.
What's necessary is the patience to learn, to swim, to figure out the flow
of a given philosopher's approach.
Once you get used to it, you'll be swimming with the current so easily
that you'll practically be floating.
I want to end just by urging you to read philosophy!
Because as wonderful as it is to have YouTube lectures, to have
podcasts, I co-host overthink podcast, which is meant to be
accessible for nonspecialists, to have
different online written resources that help you make sense of philosophy,
reading is really important.
If you're trying to understand the kind of thinkers that I do lectures
about-- people like Nietzsche and Hegel and Beauvoir and Arendt, the
TL:DR version of their philosophy is never going to be the whole story.
And so I hope that you can see the online lectures and other resources
as an aid in your reading, perhaps as inspiration to read the thinkers
and then start the skim and slog, start swimming in the waters yourself.