Why are there no commonly accepted philosophy textbooks?
When someone wants to learn about evolution, he won't read Darwin's original works, but instead a modern biology textbook which explains the current knowledge in a comprehensible and condensed form, including newer evidence, newer modifications of the theory and excluding the mistakes of the original seminal publications. Similarly, no physics student is obliged to read Newton's "Principia Mathematica" and no math student has to read Cauchy's original texts, because there are modern physics and math textbooks.
So why is it that with regard to philosophy I am always being recommended to read the original texts? It seems to me, that philosophy as it is taught today, is still more about worshipping historical people than about actually discussing their theories. Or else surely someone would have made the effort to extract the actual theories and arguments and publish them in condensed form and in modern non-antiquated language?
Am I just being ignorant? Please help, /his/.
>>859386
We used Sophie´s World in my school
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie%27s_World
And apparently it works as text books in other countries too.
When I have to took some classes at the uni we have to read The Passion of the Western Mind.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Western_Mind
>>859439
Sophie's world was so fucking boring jesus christ.
>>859386
>So why is it that with regard to philosophy I am always being recommended to read the original texts? It seems to me, that philosophy as it is taught today, is still more about worshipping historical people than about actually discussing their theories
There are a lot of papers that comment on the philosophical books. But this stuff is not entry level, it assumes you already intimidatingly familiar with the core text books.
You don't get to jump straight into reading papers on theoretical quantum physics after learning highschool basics.
Hegel's Introduction to phenomology also is a good explanation for this. Philosophy needs to be digested as a whole concept, you can't study an individual part of it independent from the rest without butchering it. This means that yes, you need to be have read dozens of different books front to cover in order to get into the deeper stuff.
>>859532
To add to this. Highschool level philosophy no more allows you to judge, understand, or contribute to the field than highschool physics allow you to contribute to that.
There is no easy quick-fix path to understanding philosophy to the point of actually being at the level of contributation. I know this is part of a generation that wants everything explained in a 5 minute youtube level but advanced thinking doesn't work that way.
>>859386
Have you ever done Philosophy in an academic setting ? Most first year courses involve textbooks rather than original works. In courses based around an actual subject you will get a few foundational texts from history and a bunch of contemporary papers on the subject. History of Philosophy is more popular among philosophers than historical studies of other disciplines, because philosophers are more in tune with how authority and mass opinion tends to determine which theories are considered "outdated" or superseded, as opposed to right reason, so they are always encouraged to go back to old texts and judge them for themselves. One reason I always recommended original texts is because often modern philosophers get ancient arguments wrong, and posit worse versions of them. I don't know how many times I've seen people in 4chan use the premise " everything must have a cause" while supposedly explaining Aquinas' cosmological argument. Even though he never once uses that premise. This comes from bad modern philosophy of religion textbooks misrepresenting his argument. First year undergrads should be reading condensed and accessible snapshots of philosophers ideas, and this is what they usually do.
>>859532
Your post only highlights the problem once again. Why is philosophy so centered around historical persons and their books instead of discussing the ideas, theories and arguments independent of who wrote them? In physics you won't see people saying "I'm a Newtonian" or "I'm an Einsteinian" but instead they'd say "The theory of gravity has a lot of evidence and is mathematically sound", irregardless of who invented that theory. Physics doesn't depend on Newton or Einstein in the same way philosophy depends on Hegel or Kant. If you want to learn philosophy, you cannot just read a textbook, you have to read the original texts. And this bothers me, since it makes philosophy appear more like a cult than like an academic discipline.
>>859566
Okay, which textbooks do you recommend?
>>859588
If you want a through explanation here it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXfhUYPYZR0&list=PL4gvlOxpKKIgR4OyOt31isknkVH2Kweq2&index=2
Philosophy is not divided into binary truth and false, and any given philophical idea must be understood as part of a greater whole. You can study one part of physics without knowing the other parts and it won't affect your learning, but you can't do that with philosophy.
I'll say this upfront if you are expecting philosophy to work like emperically you will never understand it. And yes we already went through attempts to make philosophy into something empirical, it was called positivism and all it did was refute itself.
Watch the Hegel video and don't worry if it's difficult to understand at first. Reflect on it a little.
>>859386
There are accepted textbooks, but only accepted in academics. You don't see recommendations for them elsewhere because everyone else knows a textbook for philosophy would be no more beneficial than reading a Wikipedia article, which you could just fucking do instead of buying a textbook.
>>859784
So you're basically saying philosophy has no intellectual merit? I mean what academic discipline can be learned by only reading wikipedia articles?
>>859829
You won't learn philosophy from wikipedia.
You also won't learn it from textbooks.
You will get a summary.
If you want to learn philosophy read the actual books, that's the entry level stuff. Than the advanced stuff is reading the commentaries on the ideas in the books.
You have essentially talked to yourself into thinking if something isn't written in a text book it's not academic without bothering to explain to anyone here why you came up with such a stupid idea. If the ideas are already contained in the origenal book, the only purpose of a 2ndary book would be to expand the ideas or abridge. The books that expand the ideas already assume you read the origenal books so it's not for novices. The books that abridge the material are not going to give you the full picture anyway, they are stepping stones to the actual material.
You've gotten 5 different and you've rejected them all because they do not fit into some arbitrary idea you've convinced yourself about how books should distributed.
>>859566
Which textbooks do you recommend?
>>859886
If the original books have any valuable content, it should be doable to extract said content and present it in modern language. The factual ideas should not depend on the original author. As I said, nobody studies physics from Newton's books or evolution from Darwin's books anymore. So why would I have to force myself through Kant's or Hegel's antiquated language when allegedly only the ideas matter and the ideas are timeless? The ideas should not depend on whether Kant or Hegel or anyone else discovered them. Or else you'd have to admit that philosophy is not actually about discussing ideas but about worshipping historical authors.
>>859920
>it should be doable to extract said content and present it in modern languag
Are you saying that you are having trouble reading books?
> Kant's or Hegel's antiquated language
Dear God. You suck at reading. Are you the same type of person that complains in classic literature classic that the writing is 'too old' and 'hard to understand'
Dude this problem isn't about philosophy. It's about you having trouble with reading.
>philosophy is not actually about discussing ideas
How would you know. You outright admitted you can't understand the very books you are criticizing. You are no in position to criticize ANYTHING if you can't even understand it. "Oh since I can't understand them they must be meaingless"
>>859965
>Are you saying that you are having trouble reading books?
No, I just don't have time to waste with reading tedious old shit instead of learning the actual contents faster and more professionally. This is what textbooks are about.
>Are you the same type of person that complains in classic literature classic that the writing is 'too old' and 'hard to understand'
Nope. I like classical literature very much. Philosophy however is of no literary merit but should be about the contents, i.e. the theories and arguments. Are you sure you are aware of the difference?
>you can't understand the very books you are criticizing
Ad hominem, straw me and projections won't help you make a point.
>>859990
>No, I just don't have time to waste with reading tedious old shit instead of learning the actual contents faster
I already gave you a link to an excellent professor that summarizes Hegel. Which you do not seem at all thankful for. There are also numerous books summarizing Hegel which you could found with about 30 seconds of google. If all you really want is a summary you got one in the link 3 posts ago but are still bitching.
If that's not fast enough I think John Green has some philosophy videos. If you want to approach philosophy casually, you should expect to be treated like a pleb. Reading anything less than the original texts is casual.
>>860028
>I already gave you a link
I didn't ask for youtube videos, I asked for academic textbooks.
>Reading anything less than the original texts is casual.
With statements like these you only make yourself look like a fedora cultist.
>>859829
>So you're basically saying philosophy has no intellectual merit?
Quite the opposite, it's one of the few subjects you can't condense into a series of formulas and paragraph summaries in a textbook.
I mean, some philosophers can be summarized better than others, and there ARE textbooks in the field, but not all of them can be, and you're still much better off reading the original materials because any kind of summarization will lose crucial details along the way.
>>860111
Not to mention you should be weary of reading third-hand accounts of the majority of philosophers.
>>859990
please stay out of philosophy, you'd clearly turn into an analytic sperglord in five minutes
>>860217
Not at all. I despise the so called "analytic" philosophy. To me it appears to be nothing but autistic pseudo-intellectualism.
The objects of study in philosophy classes are philosophical arguments, which it makes sense to study in their original form. There still are textbooks and readers in philosophy for different areas.
>>860225
so you understand why you can't just suck out all the content of a philosophers writing and then rewrite it better than they did in a hacked-apart decontextualized frankenstain book right
if they're good enough to seriously tackle odds are they're smart enough that the best possible source of the ideas is going to be the work itself instead of some pale imitation by some academic hack (because if they were a worthwhile philosopher they wouldn't waste time boiling down phil. literature for schoolchildren)
>>859386
>It seems to me, that philosophy as it is taught today, is still more about worshipping historical people than about actually discussing their theories.
This is exactly what the fuck bothered me. Why are we learning about philosophers? I mean, we could even just not be learning about existing philosophies at all, we could just ask questions and then reward students for having the best arguments, defenses and explanations for the conclusions they came to, or something, but why the fuck do the people who came up with this stuff even matter? I have, just by sitting at home and thinking, come up with at least half a dozen "schools of philosophy" on my own, not because I'm a genius (unbelieveable, I know), but because they're not really that complicated and just require you to ask a good question. Someone must've thought of this before them, and people will come up with it after them.
Except Nietzsche. That guy was just fucking nuts as fuck half the time. You can't make shit like that up.
>>860260
>so you understand why you can't just suck out all the content of a philosophers writing and then rewrite it better than they did in a hacked-apart decontextualized frankenstain book right
No, I don't understand that.
>>860225
And yet you're behaving exactly like them, not wanting to actually put the time in to read what past generations wrote, trying to assert that a textbook read would be professional and thinking that philosophy can be simply summed up in theories and logical statements. This is what the analytics fags are about and why they're a joke, their rigid academic style completely forbids them from mentally accessing the serious philosophical works of the past and is what gives birth to their skepticism in the first place.
>>860269
because philosophy is extremely difficult, and about the only books guaranteed of not losing anything are the source works themselves
studying philosophy in a textbook is like attempting to do science research from a computer simulation someone else made, i.e basically impossible
just read the fucking books you lazy cunt
>>860266
>Why are we learning about philosophers?
Because some of them are fucking genius and they wouldn't have been had they not read the philosophical works of hundreds of others that came before. You can't just throw out a fucking history of thought and expect to replicate it so easily by randomly and blindly asking questions or sitting in your computer chair at home. Chances are humanity wouldn't reach the level of genius again for thousands upon thousands of years, until another culture like the ancient Greeks came around and restarted the whole thing.
>>860266
All those philosophers had answers and objections of their own. Why not stand on the shoulders of giants?
I actually still my own upper secondary school philosophy books. It's called "Filo" (i'm a finn, one course of philosophy is compulsory to us)
the contents are:
1. What is philosophy?
2. What exists?
3. What can be known?
4. What is a good way to live?
and and excerpt from a random page:
"When we're discussing information, you can't avoid mentioning facts. Information and facts seem inseparable. If information is not factual, or at least probably correct, it can't be information! Knowledge of the truth does though bring up an interesting dilemma, that the concept of information itself requires a fact just like the classical definition of information states. This seems to lead to the idea that something needs to be declared factual before it can become human knowledge. So only things which we know before hand can be considered information"
This book was made to be a book that teaches philosophy to 16 year olds.
There's nothing wrong with reading summaries or modern textbooks instead of the original works of famous philosophers. Many of those original works are very badly written (great philosopher does not mean great writer), and often the person's views developed over the course of their life so that reading their earlier works won't actually give you a very good idea anyway.
If you want to be an expert on, say, Kantian philosophy, then obviously you need to read Kant (in addition to lots of commentaries). But if you just want to understand in general terms what Kant thought, reading Kant is not an especially good way of accomplishing that. You're likely to get a clearer picture much more quickly from other sources.
The distinction between 'original' or 'source' works and summaries is also difficult to maintain. All philosophers build upon the work of those who have come before. And philosophy textbooks are themselves written by philosophers. It's not nearly as black and white as some of the posts in this thread would suggest.
>>859386
Pop philosophy is called religion and controlled by the occult, which is the science of mass social control. In the modern age ideologies work with pop philosophy to form despotisms and totalitarian control systems.
Philosophy was invented to be criticized, with a critical mind, not popularized IMO.
>>859588
They don't depend on the personae but their concepts
They use the personae as some kind of hook to bundle together the concepts easily, especially regarding authorship (where to find the book, the specific argument, the criticism, etc.)
Don't think too much on it, you'll get bald
>>860266
You can
In fact, we do that too in the academy
Why choose when you can do both
Your sentiment is a typical freshman philosophy student's angst, by the way
>That no one apart from philosophers is really capable of understanding philosophy can be seen by considering how they teach it at the universities. Being unable to sort out what is right from wrong, they simply teach everything. Now imagine how things would fare with any of the sciences if they followed the same prescription, and the state of modern philosophy — and the public's utter disdain and ridicule of it — should not be that hard to understand and sympathize with.
>>860597
when are we going to get some fresh orgyposting material
Well, I'd assume because philosophical theories and very much personal. In physics, one studies models for the world and either it is a good fit to the data or not.
In philosophy, there are hundreds of different perspectives that contradict each other and can't really be all that falsifiable, so it doesn't make sense to learn a person's theory through the words of other people because there's no objective stick to measure, no dissociability between the person and his ideas.
There are introductory philosophy texts, but the best way is to deal with arguments directly. That is what philosophy is essentially, arguing.
>>860597
>claims to be the heir of Nietzsche
>endorses scientism
>>860660
how is that scientism
>>860646
>so it doesn't make sense to learn a person's theory through the words of other people because there's no objective stick to measure, no dissociability between the person and his ideas.
This right here. Separating the philosophy from the philosopher is the NUMBER ONE MISTAKE. To approach philosophy in any other way is to not approach it at all, you turn it into something other than philosophy.
>>860672
Isn't this "everything is narrative" tier bullshit?
>>860476
Got a link to the book in English please? Sounds so interesting to read.
>>860476
Can't find anything on Google
>>860672
>Separating the philosophy from the philosopher is the NUMBER ONE MISTAKE.
Nietzsche pls leave
There used to be standard books, but right now we live in an era of relativism so they are no longer considered standards
>>861040
Blame Marxists and their 'feels'
Everything is class or identity interests now
>>861055
>>861075
While I don't think the Marxist tradition is quite as pernicious as it's being cast here, it's definitely right to say that not all philosophers are post-modernists or critical theorists. The bulk of academic philosophy certainly is not. I'm not a huge fan of what's been labelled as critical theory in the last several decades, even there I think there are worthwhile insights. But I'm happy to say that most philosophy isn't critical theory, and in fact, the days of critical theory driven philosophy are numbered and on the wane. It all hit its high point, in my estimation, in the 90's and first years of the 2000's.
I should also mention that what branded itself as critical theory in the first half of the 20th century is historically related to what branded itself as critical theory in the second half, but there are huge differences that go beyond mere disagreements; the differences are much larger, encompassing basic assumptions about the nature of truth and our ability to say interesting and coherent things about the good life. Frankfurt School critical theorists weren't typically as hostile to notions of truth and attempts to say things about the good life that later critical theorists take as naive endeavours.
>>861773
>It all hit its high point, in my estimation, in the 90's and first years of the 2000's.
lol America
Critical theory has been a laughing stock in leftist circle since the 60s in Europe. Even Habermas flirted towards liberal democracy.
>>861795
I should have been clearer--by high point I did NOT mean that that's when critical theory was at its best, I meant that that's when it there were many who dogmatically asserted it or unquestioningly (and often stupidly) advanced or accepted it (that said, of course there were PLENTY of dissenters). I think the critical theory of the '90s and early 2000s was typically just awful. In other words, by reaching it's high point, I meant so in terms of quantity, not quality (which was at its low point then).
Habermas is one of the folks I had in mind when I said that what's meant by critical theory shifted. Adorno--Habermas's forebear--would have been completely shocked by what French critical theorists were bandying about in the closing decades of the 20th century. The critical theory I tend to like is in the tradition of the Frankfurt School--Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas, etc. Even then, I tend to prefer completely different philosophers--I just like some of these guys and think they had interesting things to say that occasionally hit upon a profound insight.
>>861853
I've been saying it all the time: Critical Theory is (a) dead(-end), which is why people either use it as a punching bag strawman or putting it on a pedestal beyond criticism. Everyone uses the corpse because the corpse doesn't talk back.
They are only somewhat relevant in aesthetics, but even then because it's >a e s t h e t i c s aka shit only money launderers care.
>>861893
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying about critical theory, but I think the Frankfurt School had interesting things to say about society, and since I don't think aesthetics is an entirely bankrupt field of philosophy, critical theory has something to offer on that front too. I do think that what the FS had to say needs to be heavily reworked--little of it is value in its original form, but there are IMO insights worth taking seriously and expanding upon.
>>859386
>philosophy
>science
>>859386
what? no. That is what you are getting, some faggot says something, the some other faggot twenty years later goes "what he said but also this" that's one of the reasons why you start with the Pre-Socratics, because each successive generation builds upon the ideas of the last, unless you know what the basis of their ideas are or what they're trying to get at themselves, you won't fully grasp it
http://www.philosimply.com/philosopher/hesiod
>>864659
Why do I have to read about gods fucking people over in a war, humans murdering each other and Zeus being a dick to get philosophy?
>>864729
the homeric epics is pretty much the greek bible in terms of how important it is for their civilization
all greek philosophy came from greek culture so it's good to understand the context (and pretty much all of the other western philosopy is indebted to the greeks)
>>864729
He literally just fucking said, dude, right here:
>because each successive generation builds upon the ideas of the last
Also, because philosophy starts in ancient Greece.
>>859588
>Why is philosophy so centered around historical persons and their books instead of discussing the ideas, theories and arguments independent of who wrote them?
Because ideas don't exist independently of people.
Unless you're a platonist, in which case how do you expect to learn about ideas from a textbook?
>>865833
I think he's more interested in complaining about having to read philosophy than actually reading philosophy.
One would just have to read a bit of say Anti-Oedipus or some other nightmarishly in depth book to realize that modern philosophy cannot be understood without first learning older philosophy.
