my normie friend wants to get a philosophy degree. what do i tell him.
He says he wants a philosophy degree because he really enjoys Youtube channels like School of Life and wants to be a thinker. He wants to build his own smart watch but does not know anything about electronics or how to program. He thinks JP and Ben Shapiro are unironically the greatest thinkers of our time, thinks Joe Rogan is a really intelligent and thoughtful person. I mentioned to him the Zizek (marxism) vs Peterson (capitalism) debate and he groaned at the thought of Peterson having to be on stage with a Marxist libtard like Zizek, whom he had never heard of. He is uninterested in reading or learning about Marx and Nietzche because of their anti-conservative, left-wing, godless values.
>being friends with a normie. >thinking anything he says has any weight to it. If he actually goes through with it he'll drop out in a matter of weeks, just lend him some of Plato's dialogues, he won't read them and he'll likely drop the topic entirely.
Landon Torres
Give him a small list of introductory books(starting with How To Read a Book by Mortimer Adler) and tell him that he can educate himself for free, and if he doesn't like it then he can fuck off with a different hobby(philosophy is clearly not a career).
Matthew Watson
he doesn't trust second hand sources. He has pdf's of a project gutenberg translation of "Critique of Pure Reason" and some "Phenomenology of Spirit" pdf downloaded to his phone (Spirit is a Christian concept so that one is probably going to be good!) I am not joking.
He started scrolling through the preface to critique of pure reason during a road trip, which is more philosophy than i have ever read. So he has already surpassed me, so I can't hate, really.
anything i say around him makes me feel like a arrogant pretentious prick bully because he is so uninformed
Noah Fisher
>He thinks JP and Ben Shapiro are unironically the greatest thinkers of our time This is why he needs to study philosophy. If it's a good program it will teach him how retarded he is. If it's a bad one he will end up a more effective sophist.
Robert Bailey
this is true, he is pursuing skills. he will either fail or become more convinced of himself.
he is just such a charlatan i cannot help but vent about him on here. he also is trying to be an instagram celebrity,he spends a lot of time in lightroom editing pictures of him looking out over some cliff with his back turned to you. he thinks everything is easy, i hope he fails catastrophically and publicly at everything he has ever wanted of and walks away a humiliated, exposed and broken man like me
OP this sounds like a (you) problem. Not a literature one.
Connor James
Literally nothing to do with books or literature. What the fuck even is Yea Forums at this point? A place for pseuds to complain about those stupider than even them?
Mason White
My ex-girlfriend had a philosophy degree. She was completely retarded and fell for Pinterest-Christian trend memes about traveling and following home decor trends.
I had read a few philosophy books for my undergrad degree at the time, so I tried talking to her about philosophy and she had hardly actually read any philosophy books. Just second hand sources about philosophers.
These types are generally hopeless, just let them be retarded and have a chuckle at them
Angel Gonzalez
that's really depressing i had hoped a philo degree would filter people like that out
Dylan Brooks
this is your friends only hope
Isaiah Moore
>Spirit is a Christian concept so that one is probably going to be good!
university is like 6th hand sources filtered through contemporary idiotic politics in most of the humanities. it's hard to overstate how bad it is
Sebastian Flores
>university is like 6th hand sources filtered through contemporary idiotic politics in most of the humanities. it's hard to overstate how bad it is Yep I couldn't believe how little she knew about philosophy
Why the fuck wouldn't you just read first hand sources of philosophy for a PHILOSOPHY MAJOR. That is mental and cringe.
John Moore
unironic question, how can you possibly productively get "up to speed" on the vast amount of philosopher's ideas if you don't predominately consume second-hand sources and summaries? there's just too much material, and most of the source material is probably extremely difficult to parse, hegel and kant are the classic pleb examples. theres no way a lay idiot off the street could possibly interpret them raw
Bentley Adams
i've been reading vast majority primary sources only for 3-4 years now and I've gotten through a pretty large chunk of the history of philosophy (in detail). from the pre-socratics all the way up until nietzsche-kierkegaard strictly speaking but i've read a bunch of other sporadically placed philosophers too
it seems like you've got a longgggg way to go right at the beginning reading plato and aristotle but it goes by pretty quick.. before you know it you're critiquing avicenna's concept of soul through fichte's transcendentally social "I" as expounded in his foundations of natural right
Brody Nguyen
speaking of hegel and kant specifically; they're definitely extremely difficult for the lay idiot to interpret raw but they shouldn't be touching kant/hegel at this point anyways. thats kind of the beauty of starting off from the beginning and working your way towards them; by the time you actually get to them its way way way way easier to understand them. you get the problems that kant and hegel are trying to pose, you get the language that theyre working with, you know how to read and interpret philosophy better
and this will be way way way better than getting to know hegel through a second hand source as a lay idiot. trust me
Robert Fisher
>these people actually exist. Yes, and also I suspect that your buddy boy is not really all that sincere about those views, he's doing it to manipulate you and get a bit of a rise out of you. Try and convince him you are or have become naive and I bet he'll start trying to convince you of the most preposterous bullcrap.
A lot of people like these take on philosophy degrees.
Xavier Phillips
Fuck off w this bait
Carter Nelson
maybe just read the shit the guys actually wrote you fucking faggot
Colton Mitchell
I came here just a few months ago and were mostly interested in politixd and economy but Yea Forums together with Wealth of Nations and Plato's Republic made me interested in philosophy.
I am currently reading Beyond Good and Evil and I regret not having read any Kant. What should I read before reading Kant?
Aaron Watson
Hume, but you can sort of just read a fair amount of Kant. He writes so autistically that it's often straightforward to work out what he's saying. I think Descartes as well.
