Administration Guide

8. How to Read Philosophy

In general, philosophy works cannot be read like novels, straight through in one hit. Indeed, I wouldn’t usually recommend reading even one chapter of a philosophy book in a single hit. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read what philosophers write at all - or even that your reading this semester is especially difficult. Let me explain.

As you will soon find out, doing philosophy consists mainly of learning how to take a piece of reasoning and stretching it out, as it were: how to lay it out on a long table, sometimes a very long table, with the individual parts teased off from all the others, so that they be seen and assessed more clearly. What you will be reading the entire semester are mainly arguments and the "stretching out" of them. Each Lecture of Sober will consist of a large number of such exercises of stretching out. The Readings he includes to amplify his Lectures will often be announcing or discovering which bits of some theory or problem or concept merit some stretching out, which others need more stretching out than the Lecture itself provides, which bits have been stretched out enough to make the important point plain as it stands. The Study Guide fills in some road signs: "here is the bit Sober is stretching out when he is talking about so and so", "here is where Hume ends his stretching out of that bit", "here is another stretch" and so on. Early on, it does a lot of the stretching out jobs itself.

Accordingly, my best advice for reading philosophy is never to try to read a whole week’s worth of material at one sitting.

When reading Sober’s own stuff, read a single Lecture and then stop. Each of his Lectures is nicely designed for a single gulp (there are exceptions). This is one of the reasons we chose Sober to replace the previous textbook for 134.101 in the first place. But if you try to digest much more than a single Lecture all at once, you will almost certainly stagger out at the end of the session bewildered at what exactly the key concepts and arguments and counter-arguments were all doing, and which ones you do and don’t need to memorise or master more fully.

For the Readings in the book, I would be even more brutal. It will make for much more rewarding study - and who knows it may even get a bit exciting! - if you read at most five to six pages of these at a time. Then go away and have a think about it, let it percolate, try to imagine additional examples or counter-examples, write down the structure of the piece of stretching out you just saw done. Next day, take up another stretch of argument and try to appreciate the further stretching out of it which is done in the next four or five pages. And so on.

This means, of course, that you should pace yourself to do something small each and every day. For heaven’s sake, do not let it pile up at the end. [Fine role model I am!] Reading the textbook a couple of nights before the essay is due is a sure-fire way to get absolutely nothing out of it. No guarantees, of course. But reading small has usually worked for other students in the past. Reading long usually hasn’t.

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