Does anybody actually start with the Greeks?

Does anybody actually start with the Greeks?

It has recently occurred to me that we are going to die one day, so I ask you all: is it worth doing? Or is my time better spent focusing on giants like Ulysses, Moby-Dick, etc.?

it's worth at least reading the homeric texts if you're going to stick to fiction. starting with the greeks is more for people who want to get into philosophy

>Does anybody actually start with the Greeks?
Their traditions and techniques in literature are still followed that day. You'll rarely find prettier descriptions than Homer's. You'll rarely find a philosopher who didn't care for Plato or Aristotle. Starting with the greeks is starting from the beginning and the true classics, if you plan on being serious in your pursuit for literature, then the greeks should be one of your priorities.

>It has recently occurred to me that we are going to die one day, so I ask you all: is it worth doing?
Are you a nihilist? If so, then there's no need for philosophy, greeks, Ulysses, nothing because nothing in your life makes sense anyway.

Oh, by the war, 'starting' with the greeks doesn't necessarily need to follow that image you posted, it's needlessly long unless you actually enjoy reading about their history, society etc.

Just a good history of philosophy (Coppleston's good), Homer, some introduction to Aristotle and Plato (Like Plato: A Very Short Introduction) and then Plato and Aristotle, but just some selected reading, doesn't need to be all of them if you find them boring.

I really want to get into philosophy... I guess I am just wondering if it's worth the time. I am a 24 year old filmmaker/author/whatever, and it seems like it would add value to my life.

yes most of philosophy builds if not on the greeks directly then on people who were responding to the greeks. but if that chart looks daunting to you just read iliad, odyssey, plato, and aristotle. the rest is supplementary material

You seem very well read. Could I email you?

It does seem like Edith Hamilton's book is a necessary one to get through. I know *nothing* of mythology whatsoever.

I am not a nihilist at all! I don't know about Heaven... I think it is more likely that this is all we get. I just want to make the most of it. But I am starting to believe in God. Anna Karenina turned the tide for me, as well as Fear and Trembling. But still - death looms...

>but if that chart looks daunting to you just read iliad, odyssey, plato, and aristotle. the rest is supplementary material

This is the type of advice I was searching for! Thank you, user.

no problem. the first chapter of hamilton's mythology too. don't pay for the whole thing just pirate it

Absolutely I would pirate it! I just got an iPad and it works well for that type of shit. Half of my books are physical - half on there.

>tfw read the entirety of Plato's Complete Works and both volumes of Aristotle's Complete Works
I'm dead inside but it may have been worth it

Did you gain anything? I am impressed that you read that much, user.

Getting acquainted with greek mythology is good, I just don't know if a really long book about it is needed, but if you feel so then go on. There's no definitive guide, anything that is on the Syllabus of the best universities is good enough.

Now, about philosophy, some people say you need to dedicate yourself entirely to Plato and Aristotle or know everything they said etc, but I don't think any of that, of course they're extremely important, but reading them and understanding them is extremely demanding and time consuming, people dedicates their entire academical life to the study of their works, how can an enthusiast read and understand all of Plato's and Aristotle's works? Stick to the most importants for now and if you feel attracted to their philosophy then read their other books.

Another thing you should keep in mind is that you shouldn't try to understand them alone, nor read aimlessly their works. People will tell you to start by some book by Plato, but it's important to first be acquainted with what he said before reading his books, that's why Plato: A Very Short Introduction is a great book for beginners. You might ask why you shouldn't go directly for Plato, the reason is that you might fall into the traps of interpreting incorrectly his words, and it's quite common for beginner to do that because they're mostly young and intellectually immature, it will be the first impressions of a newborn mind. It's extremely important not to try to tackle Plato or Aristotle alone without introduction and commentaries.

Now for commentators on their works, I believe the Cambridge Companions would be good for now (You don't need to read the entire Companion, just the articles you find most important and interesting), then, when you start to get the hang of it you'll find more famous commentators with entire books based on Plato's and Aristotle's words.

I think that's all, reading a History of Philosophy in parallel is also important. The best one I've read was one in spanish, I could give a link if you can read in spanish, but Coppleston's one is pretty good also if english is your only language.

Ulysses is a character in the Greeks.

Thank you for the comprehensive and thoughtful response, user. I will definitely look into the things you have shared with me.

I am a modest Spanish reader, but certainly not fluent enough to read about philosophy in it.

Hi this is very very helpful. I'm just about to finish this semesters study then I'm going to dive into Plato. Are there any other general introductions/commentaries on Plato you would recommend? Thanks in advance.

I actually started with the greeks, read everything on that chart minus the supplementary stuff, and I found it to be incredibly rewarding. There's a reason why so many people across time admired them, and they truly are the foundation of Western culture.

>just read iliad, odyssey, plato, and aristotle
Yes and no. Definitely Homer and at least some Plato. A few tragedies (I'd recommend maybe half of Aeschylus, half of Sophocles, a third of Euripides), Hesiod, and SOME Aristotle.

Yes Aristotle is crucial if you're going to understand later philosophy. Yes you will probably gain something from every Aristotelian text you read. No you will probably not find it worth your time as a casual reader, in terms of effort/output. Some texts are skippable for amateurs, some can be skimmed or summarized. Again, they will ALL teach you something, and you likely won't know what that "something" is until you've done all the reading. The problem is that, as OP said, you have finite time and the benefits you gain from reading everything will likely not measure up to the opportunity cost of spending all the time reading those texts.

Add on to that the fact that Aristotle MUST be supplemented. Expect about a 1:3 ratio of pagecounts for Aristotle himself:commentaries on Aristotle.

Basically don't even think about Aristotle until you're done reading Plato (or whatever parts of Plato you intend to read). Frankly I would be surprised if you got to that stage. I have heard from maybe 5 other people on lit who have read Plato cover to cover, and few if any bother reading Aristotle beyond the Ethics.

I've been reading Aristotle start to finish since February, am exactly halfway through, have so far read 17 volumes of commentaries/essay collections, and expect to read about 20 more for the second half of the texts. You don't want to go this deep, trust me.

calm down. If this post was shorter, i would think it was a joke. I still kind of think it is.

There's different levels to these texts. You don't need to 'get' everything or know all possible interpretations. I think it's better to revisit after having read more when you want to get a deeper understanding. If philosophy undergrads studied every philosopher at such a deep level they would go insane i think. There's broad courses and specific ones.

If OP is interested in philosophy I would suggest following along with videos of uni lectures (for example I use gregory sadler, he goes over things a bit slowly, but you can do other things in the meantime), they provide context and help to understand the text.

Start with the Descartes

Anyone serious about learning philosophy ought to start with Kant.

You can always trace your way backwards to Hume or as far as the Greeks, the same way you can follow ideas in Kant as far forward as Dennett or Searle.

Kant draws on so much of the Western tradition, and influenced so much of philosophy today, that it sounds silly to pick Plato because "first." He wasn't even first; Anaximenes, Anaximander, and Thales were.

I was dead serious. I totally agree with you; that was the main point of my post. I regularly see people planning to follow the Greek chart through "aristotle complete works," and I also see people recommending "read all of aristotle" or a very vague "read some Aristotle," and it's pretty obvious that they haven't done the reading, themselves.

It's deceptive because Plato is fairly easy to work through, so you're left thinking "well the complete Plato is 1800 pages, and the complete Aristotle is 2500, so that won't be too much harder" until you open Aristotle and get kicked in the nuts by Categories, with the beatdown only getting worse in the Analytics, and weirder in Physics, Caelo, GC, Meteorologica, etc., until you find yourself reading 400 pages about cephalopod reproductive and dietary habits and turning into an antiquarian misogynist because the Female is obviously an inferior deviation from the pure Male as the former lacks the heart heat to concoct blood into semen and provides only the material but not the formal, efficient, or final causes of generation, making Female an unnatural monstrosity yet necessary for life.

All I'm saying is that nobody on this board should be recommending "read it all" to someone who hasn't started Aristotle, and anyone whose advice is too vague to recommend specific texts and accompanying commentaries is no better than the guy saying "read it all."

Which commentaries/essay collections have you been reading?

It's varies a lot in accordance with which underlying texts I was looking for commentaries of, as there aren't really any series of commentaries that do work on the entire corpus (except Loeb intros and the Clarendon Aristotle series which has commentaries on many of the works). If you don't have a prof guiding you, you're kind of going in blind and there are definitely a few duds out there, especially for an amateur student.

100% recommend Telford's intro on Categories/De Int. just to get some ground to stand on.

Keep an eye out for Hackett translations whose intros have been good to me so far (only read An. Pr., will also get their Politics).

Any commentary by Aquinas is worth reading. He appears to be respected as one of the most lucid and historically significant commentators. Have read three so far (An. Post., Physics, De Anima) and intend to read those on NE, Met., Politics.

Clarendon Aristotle Series stuff is very thorough and fills some gaps in Aristotelian commentary (one of few commentaries on An Post., the only ones I know of for Topics, GC). However it's expensive and gets very advanced (sometimes too advanced to be comprehensible) for an amateur. Sometimes presupposes experience with 20C philosophical methods, questions. Great commentary on De Anima (the 2016 one; they have two with different scopes).

Would recommend Wilson's commentary on Meteorologica IF you're going to bother reading the treatise in the first place.

In general I'd recommend just being smart and considering how much time you want to spend studying something. For example I would heartily recommend the ~200 page aquinas and ~250 page Clarendon commentaries on the 80 page De Anima, but I would not recommend the ~550 page commentary by Polansky. At a certain point it's just too much info that will probably not stick unless you're a pro who's already very comfortable with the underlying material and shorter commentary traditions.

Also would not recommend Oxford press essay collections like "essays on aristotle's physics/de anima/whatever" or book-length treatises like "nature change and agency in aristotle's physics." Way too much for a beginner reader, expensive, hard, time consuming, not very fruitful. MIGHT be worth it for an amateur after getting a lot more aristotle under your belt, but not at all helpful for clarification immediately after reading the underlying text itself. Often presupposes reader familiarity with the whole corpus.

Currently going in blind to selection of essays by Lennox on the bio works; not sure how it'll turn out but there are really no alternatives.

Haven't read these but will be reading them given my experiences with their work on Plato:
-Cambridge companions to Aristotle/Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (enjoyed their companions to Plato/Plato's Republic)
-Cambridge critical guide to NE (ed. Miller) (enjoyed their guide to Plato's Laws)
-Relevant section of Copleston's history of philosophy (was a must-read for Plato).

Also Loeb editions usually have hefty intros and (sometimes) great footnotes. Somewhat hit or miss, usually worth the shot for less-frequently-commentated works; I have the Loebs of Caelo, Magna Moralia, and the first volumes of HA, PA, and GA for this purpose. Average ~60 page intros, would recommend.

A lot of references are made in Modern books (Moby Dick, Les Misérables, Ulysses) that call back to the greeks, since most of the authors of these books were trained in classical literature.

Is it necessary? Not really. But if you wan't a deeper depth of understanding, you most certainly should read some Greeks and understand some of the mythos surrounding that period.

This is incredibly helpful. Saved, and thanks for taking the time to write this.

most people probably start with kids books

The main problem with starting with the Greeks is that you're extremely unlikely to have a well developed set of "deep" reading skills. Most people who are just starting to read more "serious" literature (either fiction or non-fiction) come from a reading background where they mostly just read on a very surface-level. This makes it rather difficult to read the Greeks and have a good experience with them. If you go in to Homer and are effectively reading for the plot you're just going to get bored and regret ever trying to read him.

That's not to say it's not possible, I just think most general readers would have an incredibly difficult time getting any degree of enjoyment starting with the Greeks, rather than more contemporary entry-level texts which would leave room for deeper reading while still being enjoyable to read on a more surface level.