People who "knows everything" about philosophy

How did you go about learning it? Where did you start? Writing it in steps would be appreciated.

I have started reading philosophy right now, and am thinking about reading at least the greeks first.

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(1/2) i started reading literature generally first and then got into kierkegaard at some point. he was my first philosopher, and the writer who got me into philosophy.

after that, I read a general overview of the history of philosophy (I think I read the one by bryan magee), which was quite useful, just to see the broad strokes from an otherwise daunting history.

i started reading from the greeks from here and have been going through the canon chronologically ever since; I'm about up to nietzsche strictly speaking but i've read several texts around the edges (e.g. I've read quite a bit of analytic phil + very modern philosophy) + secondary literature here and there so I have a good footing.

my tips would be to start with the greeks but skip reading all the auxillary stuff such as the iliad etc etc. UNLESS you already have that internal impetus to read them anyways. i wouldn't read them for the sake of learning philosophy. just start with plato + aristotle

it is completely okay to not understand shit early on, I imagine you'll read pages and pages without understanding anything. that is okay, and the sooner you learn that the better. a lot of people will tell you to read slowly as fuck so you can understand everything but fuck that. you have to learn how to think philosophically and that comes with experience. each philosopher you read will change the way you think, they'll revamp concepts you thought were set in stone, and it'll be difficult. but don't worry, keep going, the pages and pages of stuff you won't understand won't stop the flashes of understanding that will appear every now and then (much like reading poetry). my best tip for understanding shit is to try your best to understand the problems that philosophers pose first and foremost. these concepts that philosophers create don't pre-exist, they have to be created, but why? every concept has a problem as its corollary, without which it would cease to make sense. it is your job to find this problem, and then the concepts will start to make more sense

once you've read plato and aristotle you can go on to the stoics, epicureans, neoplatonists, or scholastics. the stoics and epicureans are good reads, especially if you're interested in the question of how one should live their life. but the neoplatonists and scholastics can get a bit more obtuse; I would skip for later on unless you already have a vested interest or you have an interest in theology, in which I would recommend to read the scholastics (don't forget islamic phil as well as christian phil)

from there it gets a lot more straightforward, you read the rationalists and empiricists

descartes --> spinoza --> leibniz

locke --> berkeley --> hume

though desu I would recommend just reading some stanford article on locke instead of reading him because he takes 700 pages to talk about the simplest ideas in the most frustrating prose. in any case, here's where you will start to really develop as a philosopher

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(2/2)
things start to click, ideas start to make more sense, you'll get better at picking out the problems that philosophers pose, you'll start seeing everyday things in the terms of philosophers. and then once you're done with these guys, you read kant! kant will be the most difficult philosopher to read but by this point you will be well equipped to deal with him compared to people who try to read kant raw. after him you go on to the german idealists who, likewise, will be easier to read since you've read all this other stuff already.

of course, you do not have to read everything strictly and chronologically though. keep this as a base route but feel free to jump around, read stuff from random philosophers, read some schopenhauer, read some sellars, read whoever interests you. but it's good to have a basis for yourself, philosophers often refer to each other, and reading a lot of early philosophy will teach you how to philosophise which is an underrated aspect of reading all that stuff. but I don't want you to have to force yourself and slog through works you find extremely boring; of course you should push yourself outside of your comfort zone and try difficult texts (aristotle will give you a run for your money) but if you're finding something dry, try something else for a while and come back to it!

the more you read, the more you'll figure out what interests you, and then you can go on to read whatever you want. maybe at some point you will start writing philosophy yourself, posing interesting problems and creating concepts. reading all these philosophers is simply your apprenticeship

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just to make the idea of figuring out the problems philosophers pose more concrete

a small example would be something like descarte's cogito... why does he create this concept of the self? the problem he poses is that he challenges any objective presupposition towards truth that is made (sense data, for example) and so he needs to create a concept that presupposes nothing objective but which truth can be determined as pure subjective certainty

hence the cogito. i think therefore i am. without seeing this problem first, the cogito is a floating solution. people arguing about the cogito without first seeing this problem are talking nonsense

its like this for all philosophical concepts, sometimes philosophers will make them very explicit, and sometimes not so much. but figuring them out makes things 10000% easier

>Where did you start?
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my suggestion is to stay way from anything greek. they were misogynistic thus nothing they have ever said is worth reading about

Read Sophie's World, and don't ever tell anyone.

Decent content on lit, what a shock

I just don't think it's for everyone. I'm elitist because I've devoted my life to it but I make a very hard distinction between people who "make use of" philosophy and philosophers. The vast majority of people who think they are philosophers are just making use of some philosophy that suits their preconceptions, whether those are moral, political, aesthetic, scientific, or religious views. For me, being interested in philosophy means being interested in metaphysics and epistemology as such, and that means at least a decade of digging and acclimating yourself in existing traditions to develop your own standpoint, and refine your own consciousness to the point that it's even capable of a standpoint.

Along the way to that level of competence are a million pitfalls and cul-de-sacs that most people will fall into, for various reasons. Those people can be good "social theorists" or art historians, I guess, but they aren't philosophers.

99% of Western philosophy is trash. I am honestly better than most Western philosopher.