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. “I did what a lot of peo­ple would think is nat­ur­al,” he says. “I went to a book­store, and then I just found some books that I want­ed to read.” The pieces of light read­ing he took home: Friedrich Niet­zsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger’s Intro­duc­tion to Meta­physics.

“If you know any­thing about phi­los­o­phy, I think you know that that was prob­a­bly not the ide­al way to start.” But all the years of learn­ing and teach­ing since have final­ly put him in a posi­tion of know­ing how to begin, and in the span of half an hour, he lays out an intel­lec­tu­al roadmap for any­one in the same posi­tion as his teenage self, with stops in log­ic, meta­physics, epis­te­mol­o­gy, ethics, and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy.

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Sev­en Phi­los­o­phy Books for Begin­ners: Where to Start

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

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.