Studying Philosophy

Philosophy is a cumulative field just like programming. If you're only involved with the most modern framework, there is a lot of magic happening underneath the surface. Most of the value to me seems to be in understanding an idea and then reading and understanding someone refute it later. That's basically my whole experience in reading philosophy "chronologically".

Go take an undergrad philosophy course

Always warms my heart to see philosophy on top of HN. Philosophy is hard -- much harder than one would think. And people that contribute are incredibly smart -- far smarter than software engineers, by comparison. On the other hand, it's very political, and a lot of it is mental masturbation. Philosophy of Science, I think, is almost a completely bogus field. Philosophy of Mind, apart from a few great minds (Chalmers, Nagel) is also equivocal.I went into undergrad with a pri

One suggestion is to try and first familiarize yourself with the different types of philosophy. Philosophy is a pretty broad topic, so find something that is interesting to you (such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc..) and then read the relevant philosophical works. A great resource to get a general overview of many philosophical concepts is the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/

sounds like you don’t know what philosophy is and why it’s dope, so rather than me try to explain in a comment on hackernews, I would say try reading Plato

Just read the plato.stanford.edu article on a certain Philosopher instead of watching these pop-philosophy School of Life videos

I find that philosophy becomes dry and irrelevant when only treated as a field of study as opposed to a way of living.My suggestion is to find a school of thought that you find useful enough that it can actually guide you in your everyday life.For example, many people on HN find Stoicism easy to understand and fairly applicable - but maybe not always easy to apply - to their daily lives. I can recommend "The Daily Stoic" by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman [0] as a good

Stupid question: What do you gain from reading philosophy instead of just thinking and coming to these conclusions by yourself?

This is not a very good article. Like a lot of writers in the Lesswrong-rationalist sphere, the author is very smart and describes her thought process in great detail, but has too many erroneous premises and ends up with wrong conclusions.I understand her conclusion as "people study old philosophers, not to learn about their views, but to learn about their thinking techniques". In contrast, I would say that the primary reason for studying old philosophers first-hand is to properly u

I studied philosophy at the undergraduate level only, so take these opinions with a grain of salt.Philosophy is a cosmos, the same way that science is: you study particular fields within it based on what you want to get out of them.The "questions of life" fall into several categories (not exhaustive): biological, phenomenological/experiential, emotional, moral, existential, absurd. Do any of those interest you?Edit: I also want to say that I strongly