Letter to a Young Philosopher

by Michael Flood (December 2015)

Dear Student,

Congratulations on choosing philosophy as your major. I hope you will find it a rewarding and life changing field of study. It has certainly been so for me and many of the people with whom I was privileged to go through undergraduate and graduate school.

Whether you decide to go on to take an advanced degree or leave after obtaining your Bachelor of Arts I wanted to pass along a few points of advice that will make the next few years of your studies more profitable (intellectually, at least). Most of them were taught to me by professors by whom I was strongly influenced, while a few I derived on my own from observation and contemplation.

There Are Answers, But You Have To Find Them

More than a few of your philosophical peers are going to be aimless, uncertain what to do, and find no satisfaction in their studies. This may discourage you from pursuing philosophy but you should realize that the problem is with them and the way they have chosen to study the subject rather than with the subject itself.

These students would have been better studying theology or Eastern (Buddhist/Hindu/Taoist) philosophy, were it not for them having an allergic reaction to anything that smacks of faith or mysticism. They came to philosophy expecting to be given answers, and when the answers are not clear, and the courses are taught in a dialectical rather than didactic manner, they became disappointed and disillusioned.

We study the works of great philosophers not for their particular answers but to observe some of the most brilliant people who ever lived grappling with ultimate questions and to find models of inquiry to emulate in our own studies.

*Do not take this as a mark against Nietzsche or Sartre: no thinker is responsible for what their audience ultimately makes of their ideas or who is attracted to them.

How To Tell Other People About What You’re Studying

I was originally going to call this section “What Is Philosophy?” but you’ve probably encountered, by this point, more than enough attempts at a definition. Instead of giving you yet another one I’m going to provide you with something a bit a more useful: a guide to explaining philosophy to other people.

Try explaining why you study philosophy this way:

Everything we do in life depends on a large number of accepted and unquestioned ideas. Engineers build bridges and skyscrapers using mathematics without having to ask what numbers are. Doctors treat illnesses without (as doctors) inquiring what exactly health is and how it is distinguished from sickness. Police enforce laws without having to question what a law is or what distinguishes a law from a mere preference or best practice.

I’ve found that one reasonably effective. It at least gets people to stop asking you about what you do or bothering you with their life maxims.

How To Study Philosophy

When reading great works of philosophy make an effort to learn about the time and circumstances in which the philosopher wrote. Though there are perennial questions that recur throughout all the ages, they are addressed in different ways with different assumptions depending on local circumstances. You don’t need to become a professional historian in addition to being a philosopher but it makes a great deal of difference for understanding what a philosopher means if you understand the intellectual climate they are working within. This will particularly help you with the denser, more opaque philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein.

Never settle for reading just the excerpts from great works of philosophy your courses (particularly in first and second year) provide you with. Read the entire work on your own time, making the time to absorb what the philosopher is saying. If at all possible, reread each work. You’ll find your comprehension grows by leaps and bounds after having gone through the text just once and passages that were obscure will become clear.

Understand When And Why To Argue, Not Just How

Be Wary Of Non-Debates

Be warned: your attempts to show a debate is ill-founded or unnecessary will not be appreciated. People build entire careers upon arguing for positions in non-debates, developing elaborate intellectual edifices with epicycles within epicycles to defend their positions against equally well prepared opponents. To question the soundness of an entire debate is to question the value of someone’s entire career and, by extension, life.

You Are Not A Psychologist

Take It Seriously

You’ll meet a lot of people in your philosophy department and in grad school who are really historians or cataloguers of ideas, not philosophers. They teach students, go to academic conferences, and publish papers and books but are not affected by what they study in the least. That’s a comfortable way to live, but it is passing up an opportunity to take both your subject and life itself seriously.

As an example of taking philosophy seriously I was taught Plato and Aristotle by a brilliant lecturer who was happened to be a vegetarian. Her vegetarianism was not for health or financial reasons but because she believed, on the basis of argument, that animal suffering was indistinguishable ethically from human suffering and thus one should not contribute to its perpetuation. I didn’t agree with her, but I respected (and still respect) her willingness to live life by what she thought was true.

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Michael Flood is a freelance writer living in Western Canada. He holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Alberta.

 

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