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Book Club 9w
Does anyone have any tips for reading and learning well from philosophy books? I just started politics by Aristotle and wanna know any advice to retaining the info
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Anonymous 9w

Prob start by reading primers & watching lectures tbh. If you don't alr have a decent grasp of logic I'd def get a handle on that first. Then approach the text and play around with it in your notes, cross compare them to other ppl's commentaries (Reeve's translation has footnotes), figure out how you think abt it & why by tracking the actual arguments. Everyone is diff tho, so there’s trial & error in figuring out what works best specifically for you. Just some general advice

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Anonymous 9w

Lectures are good, honestly some works in the last few hundred years was what I started with and then did the Greeks, gave really good retrospective context, but I know that’s gonna trigger some people.😂

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Anonymous 9w

Tbh, I get not wanting to go through all the lectures and extraneous resources. When I want to learn/remember a book well, I just have a journal open when I’m reading (yes even if you annotate on the book) to write some key thoughts, topics, and points. Then after a long reading session I’ll go back and add to the pages and sometime even write a mini essay/journal about it.

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Anonymous 8w

Annotate like fucking crazy, when you are physically interacting with the text itself you retain information so much better. Underline, highlight, write questions etc… it helps so much. Also never skip an introduction, many times it will give the very baseline of what your need to know about the context of the author and his/her life.

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Anonymous replying to -> benjamin.rush 9w

Ive got a textbook on logic coming should I read that first?

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Anonymous replying to -> OP 9w

If you don’t alr have a grasp on it then yeah, which textbook?

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Anonymous replying to -> benjamin.rush 9w

I prefer buying used books so this is what I got off ebay

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Anonymous replying to -> OP 9w

Oh well this is a book for mathematical/symbolic logic, that’s great if you’re in math (I am) but it’s not going to help you much with Aristotelian frameworks. If you want something for that, Kreeft has a decent layman oriented intro with exercises for the reader that’s pretty approachable for ppl starting out

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Anonymous replying to -> OP 9w

Also you don’t have to read Nicomachean ethics first imo, but it does rly help frame a lot of arguments better since Aristotle is building off what he said for the individual first in it and expanding it to the community at large in politics

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Anonymous replying to -> benjamin.rush 9w

Oh ok thank u so much also didnt realize it was math I gotta do more research lol😭

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Anonymous replying to -> benjamin.rush 9w

Also do you have any starter book recs

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Anonymous replying to -> OP 9w

Hmm starter book recs for what?

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Anonymous replying to -> benjamin.rush 9w

The primers you talked about

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Anonymous replying to -> OP 9w

Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy is always a nice site to touch base with, there’s this series called a very short introduction to with a sort of bleed through color type of covers for various thinkers and there’s one on Aristotle, also a Cambridge companion is nice but I’d read that when engaging with the primary works as something to bounce ideas off of personally

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Anonymous replying to -> #4 8w

Also I’m not sure how much philosophy you read but watching intro to philosophy vids or reading intro to philosophy books will help to familiarize you with the basic foundational elements that much of philosophy is built upon, western philosophy that is (I admittedly haven’t read much eastern philosophy….)

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Anonymous replying to -> #2 8w

Starting with the Greeks is the only way to do it. Plato is my favorite recommendation to people just getting into philosophy

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Anonymous replying to -> #4 8w

Definitely not, the order of which might give good context, but to say one way is objectively better is unphilosophical.

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Anonymous replying to -> #2 8w

Every major framework is either building on or arguing against what the Greeks laid down. You can start wherever you want, but if you skip the origin point you’re reading footnotes to a conversation you never heard the start of.

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