On Reading Philosophy: How & Why?

I've got a question from the audience
it's questions come with my personal life I guess as well as my professional life scholarly life for education what have you many many times and it's a question I look at a little bit differently today because I bumped into an old friend at the airport flying back from France to China just a couple of days ago so Adrienne asks do you have any advice on how to start studying philosophy he says I always wanted to get into it but it's a very intimidating subject ok so I think the first fulfillment of a part of my reply has to be a question the format of the question it's about how to study philosophy but I need to know why you want to study philosophy on a case-by-case basis giving advice for this because the answer for different people is going to be very very different I bumped into an old friend someone I used to know very personally and you know very well but haven't seen in years at Bangkok Airport and he called out my name he called out eyes'll and he could pronounce my name correctly and normally when people call out my name correctly in public it's someone who knows me from YouTube because they've heard my name for now so I turned around thinking ok this is gonna be a vegan or some fad but no it was somebody who knew me from real life and he has nothing to do with veganism and nothing to do with you know my YouTube persona or what have you said oh wow so it was this old friend of mine who I knew well and you know we tried to get caught up talking for about half an hour there in the airport and one of the big changes in his life he explained to me is that fairly recently he had started reading philosophy by which he meant the big names in Western philosophy he had started reading Nietzsche and Heidegger I don't know names that carry some clout in terms of western academia but if you were to ask the question why why did he start reading philosophy his answer was as he told me proudly that he believed studying philosophy made his life better that it improved his own enjoyment of life now that's dubious that's dubious especially when you're talking about garbage like Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Heidegger in my biased opinion but we also if you care about philosophy it means you have strong opinions about which philosophers you think are good and what you think are bad or what you think are useful which are not useful which are worth reading which are not worth reading it's like any other genre of publications that way you're not going to have some kind of neutral attitude that somehow all books are worth reading just because they're categorized in the philosophy session that is ridiculous okay but it did seem to me peculiar that the two philosophers he said he was most interested in and he was most turned on by at least lately as he started this new phase of his life in his old age he's quite he's an older guy and he's not at a university program or anything he's just he has one friend with a PhD whose tutoring him to some extent as he's getting into reading pretty formal academic philosophy in his old age how differently how much differently might he perceive the situation if he wasn't reading philosophy for this supposed benefit of making his own life better but he was thinking about making our lives better if he was thinking about it in a social or political scale within a social political frame of reference Nietzsche and Heidegger have in common that they're fascists hiegel also I would quite willingly categorize as fascist Plato also I would categorize as fascist a great many of the presumed to be great philosophers were and are fascist it matters their politics matter and a large part of philosophy is ineluctably political so when we're looking at things in that perspective already then we see things very differently now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't Plato but it means that you should read Plato with an awareness of how very different his view of the world is from his contemporaries with in Athens Athenian Athenians who were Pro slave one to end slavery or who were pro-democracy were interested in the advantages and disadvantages of the constitution of Athens in contrast to the constitution of Sparta and other rival states in that part of the world of time or later in retrospect in contrast to the type of government they had in in Rome and what have you if we're starting on a politically savvy footing then the way we view these things is fundamentally very different why is Immanuel Kant shoved down the throats of so many young students who say their interests in philosophy this is Kant spelled ka NT right if you don't have a philosopher why is it that so many of these philosophers whether it's Hegel or can't they're basically meaningless if you're not either Christian or an X Christian struggling with some of the fundamental ideas within atheism what is the salience of Immanuel Kant's critique of Pure Reason to the lives of university students today other than the fact that they're forced to read it these are not easy questions to answer and in general when I talk to people who have been forced to read contour maybe we've been forced to reach short excerpt sermon there they're totally unaware of what really the thesis of that book was of why it was written of what the author's purpose was of them you know the significance of the scientific breakthroughs and the reinterpretation of the Bible from Isaac Newton Isaac Newton is really the context for Immanuel Kant he's a reaction against that so there are religious and political questions framing the significance of the books that are now on the Shelf called philosophy and their presence on that shelf is in many cases genuinely contestable why is this book in the philosophy department and not in the religion department why is in the philosophy department and not in the politics department and in some cases why is it not just in the personal autobiography department you know jean-jacques rousseau jean-jacques rousseau was a genuinely popular author in his own time and somehow he squeaks in to the philosophy shelf but he there's no need to regard him as philosophy I would say the same of Friedrich Nietzsche a lot of what Nietzsche writes sounds like a kind of of his era like a morning radio talk-show host or a newspaper columnist just trying to say the most outrageous things to get attention it doesn't stand up as as formal academic philosophy doesn't stand up as in the terms of meeting the definitions of problem solving in philosophy of what makes philosophy important as a genre unto itself that's separate from that's distinct from other kinds of literature other types of other types of writing on the types of publications so the question is how does this person get into philosophy how do they develop some confidence philosophy given what is intimidating about philosophy and I think the truth is this we're talking about Western philosophy precisely what's intimidating about it is that people do not want to let you ask those questions the professors do not want to allow students to ask why is this book required reading why is this book on this shelf instead of some other shelf why is this book taken seriously as philosophy as opposed to like in Immanuel Kant's case in many other cases as opposed to just being a series of excuses offered for the Christian faith apologetics within a Christian Studies course why why are we treating the texts in this way and in many cases why are we abstracting from the text a few special sentences and reinterpreting them and making them two kind of formulas and blowing them out of all proportion in terms of their importance and influence on on the rest of philosophy what have you I regard modern European philosophy as a as a tremendously weak traditional I'll tell you why well it's in a bit of a human context every new girlfriend I've had even the kind of short term girlfriends the girlfriends that didn't turn out to be long-term relationships pretty much every single girlfriend have had has asked me at some point about philosophy and normally it's been in the phone way normally new girlfriend's have asked me how do i define philosophy and then why did philosophy become an important part of my life why did I spend so much time reading philosophy and even now to give you another example earlier today I was saying to my current girlfriend that I actually want to make some time to read to read again and to read more of the philosophy of Seneca this is Seneca the younger from ancient Rome Seneca is a very philosophical author but again should he even be categorized as philosophy what about Thucydides ancient Greek author through Siddha tease Seneca you can include them in the category of philosophy or in both cases you could exclude them from philosophy so what you say the same even authors who happen to like this same critique in the same question sailing anyway with these various girlfriends would have you they've tended to raise this question one point or another and I say to them we'll look there are really two definitions of philosophy you need to know and one definition is down at the publishing house down at the publishing company that chooses to publish a book either they publish it in the category of philosophy or in the category of literature or cultural criticism or politics it's a 100 percent commercial decision made by the publishing industry for how to print and promote a book so any book that the publishing industry thinks will make more money in the category of philosophy is printed and promoted as philosophy and if they thought it would make more money there are other categories like cultural or it could be history or politics they will publish it under that category so there's one sense in which it is a purist of free market decisions and there is no more and no less to it than that and then there's another sense in which you know we have this idea coming out of Aristotle of metaphysics and the word metaphysics itself just has to do with the order of the books that ever sort of published it's an almost meaningless word metaphysics could have been called pro physics instead and we have works by Aristotle like posterior analytics and metaphysics and we have this sense definitely from Aristotle that when we talk about philosophy what we're talking about is fundamentally different from any other genre of literature any other category that the publishers handle because we are dealing with problem solving methods that ultimately this is what makes Aristotle's discussion in metaphysics or posterior analytics different from other categories and then at a certain point we have enough discussion of problem solving methods that we turn around and look back on them and we get into comparing and contrast to get into the comparative analysis of the problem-solving methods themselves so thus for example a philosophical approach to ethics is not merely interested in questions of right and wrong or questions of what to do you know what am I gonna do about this problem it's an ethical problem we can talk about that in a non philosophical way that simply comes to an answer here's what we got to do but when we talk about it philosophically in this sense then we're also genuinely interested in the problem-solving methods what methods did we use what series of steps what kind of reasoning to be used to arrive at that conclusion for example about ethics about good and evil so we're gonna do or not do something we're gonna do or refuse to do and maybe it's even worthwhile for us to answer the same question multiple times to come to the scene inclusion through different problem-solving methods and then to look back and compare those methods in this I fundamentally agree with the approach of Karl Popper and many people criticize what I say about Karl Popper but hey it's great anyone pays attention to what I say about Karl Popper he's not a particularly popular philosopher but I have a couple videos talking about philosophy of Kulpa so yeah there is this sense of taking methodology seriously and problem solving methods transforming how we think and I weighed gauges problems thus philosophy being different from any other category okay so let's come back to the question being asked here how to approach philosophy you've got to be honest about yourself but you've got to be honest with yourself about why you want to study philosophy is it just that this category is praised that it's regarded culturally as something lofty and fine that you aspire to be equal to you just want to feel good enough and smart enough to say that you've read Immanuel Kant and Hegel no matter how meaningless the philosophy of content Hegel may be your life is that what's going on I'm not saying it is the person answering I don't know the person asked this question is it just that you want a certain kind of social status that comes from being able to say that you have read Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides and Herodotus we can add some more names from ancient Greece and Rome if you like Seneca and all the rest is that is that what it's about is there a problem you're trying to solve do you have a political interest a social interest a personal interest and ethical interest when I first discovered Buddhist philosophy one of the things I said to a very skeptical colleague of mine was look you know in terms of philosophy discovering Buddhist philosophy is like suddenly opening up a kitchen drawer you'd forgotten about and finding this amazing jumble of forks and knives and screws and hammers all kinds of different tools this is kind of drawer of all these marvelous problem-solving tools that you forgot you had access to you know and I remember that further that was a striking and useful image Buddhism not as a single problem-solving method but as containing all these you know wonderful vital problem-solving methods and philosophy and if you've been working on just European philosophy then a lot of those tools you'd maybe forgotten about you hadn't seen him around in a long time or maybe you'd never you never seen it all so yeah I think that is enough of an answer here even though I'm maybe just giving you a warning you can do it there's nothing inherently intimidating about reading the ancient Greeks and once you've built up your confidence reading the ancient Greeks in English translation I think you know you should be willing to question for yourself why are these books in this section presumed to be important meaningful or presumed to be philosophy at all and you have to have the self-confidence to come to your own answers and then ultimately you have to have the self-confidence to both seek out new sources and to prune your own reading list where you decide after a certain point hey you know what it doesn't matter that Immanuel Kant is on the required reading list I'm not interested in these questions of Christian apologetics I'm not interested in a deeply Christian response to Sir Isaac Newton that's just not meaningful to my life or maybe I'm not interested in an author who's openly fascist making excuses for the government of Prussia and for why Prussian fascism was superior to British democracy it's a huge part of the philosophy of Hegel most people don't to be honest most people do not want to be honest with University students about that the political owned was these things be honest about why it is you're reading these books and when you decide not to read these books have the honesty and self-discipline you know to keep track of that to