Skip to main content

To a 15 year old

  



From Quora, question and answer

How should I get started with philosophy? I'm 15 years old.

That is a very good time for it. You might want to try to define for yourself what kind of philosophy problem most interests you and cluster your readings (and your early manuscripts) there. Many young people are driven by social/political concerns. Can philosophers say something foundational about these concerns? Can it help us get a Big Picture into which the day-to-day headlines and debates will fit? If that is what you mean by philosophy, you might want to look to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and older figures like Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke.

Others are feeling a more existential angst. What is the point of even getting out of bed in the morning? Do my actions matter? Are they determined anyway, so that I am just a ping-pong ball bouncing around? If those questions are what philosophy means to you, I suggest the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a follow-up with the work of William James and his great interpreter, Jacques Barzun!

Or perhaps you’re the more epistemological type of 15 year old? How do we know anything to be true? After all, it could all be a dream, or a Matrix, right? You may choose to dream, then, that I give you this answer. Jônadas Techio’s Threat of Solipsism (2021) is very up-to-date on this. It will send you back to Wittgenstein for further guidance — a valuable reference, When you’ve satisfied yourself you do live with a world, look to early modern figures like Pascal and Locke — two very different writers — for understanding what understanding is.

Those are three roads for you. You will surely find your own.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

A Quote from Parfit

Recently  I wrote a little about ethicist Derek Parfit. I've been doing further research on him since, and will now describe his Big Picture as I've come to understand it. Parfit believes that the western world only started taking ethical philosophy seriously (as a domain separate from theology) around the time Nietzsche declared that God was dead. There are only three possibilities, in terms of the God/morality issue: 1) You believe that God exists and that His commands define morality 2) You deny that God exists and, like Nietzsche, infer from this that in the absence of commands there is no right or wrong, or 3) You deny that God exists yet persist in believing and attempting to discern right and wrong. From a certain point of view there could be a fourth category, for people who believe that God exists but that His existence is irrelevant to morality, He doesn't issue commands at all, etc.  Still, from DP's perspective that sort of God ...
1 comment
Read more