Do you have to read full books to understand philosophy?

I'm having a small argument with a friend about this. He insists that with philosophy he does not see the point in reading entire 300+ page books by a philosopher, when he can get the gist of their "message" from a bit of reading online or a few videos.
He thinks that it's hard to believe that these books are actually hundreds of pages of pure great philosophy. He says surely there is always a gist or a few important parts with the rest being unnecessary to understanding their ideas. He believes that going through the effort of reading it all is more for the people into it to take a good look in a historical or academic sense, and not to actually think about philosophy.
I just said I like reading the full books and I think you cannot say you "get" a philosopher til you've actually read their work, and even then it's hard to say that.
Do you agree or disagree with my friend?

Every. Single. Word.

*to add a big part of his argument
he said that reading the entire book is of no more use to him than getting the general ideas of it

You have to read it 87 times in a row, or you haven't even read it at all.

not even in relation to the OP, thats a very specific number
how did you get to that

Ask your friend specific questions about a religion he only has a cursory knowledge of and show him how stupid that idea is.

>"Only from their creators themselves can we receive philosophical thoughts. Therefore the man who feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the quiet sanctuary of their works The principal chapters of any one of these genuine philosophers will furnish a hundred times more insight into their doctrines than the cumbersome and distorted accounts of them produced by the commonplace minds that are still for the most part deeply entangled in the fashionable philosophy of the time, or in their own pet opinions."

You're right OP. Your friend is a retard.

lol he told me "I would think someone who really seeks wisdom would go off of some opinions of their own rather than just what is in a book"
he believes that an idea and not its context is important, and that actual philosophy is finding the gist of these ideas and using your own brain to come to your own conclusions

Depends on what you/he want(s).

If all you care about is that thinker's most influential idea(s), you can probably just read one (1) history of philosophy textbook and stop there. That will give you enough insight to appreciate their basic prescription for how to live. Of course, that's receiving philosophy, not doing philosophy, but if that's your friend's prerogative, more power to him.

If you want to engage with a thinker's ideas, you can't just understand their conclusion; you need to understand how they arrived at it. Thus, the need to read the whole book. Most philosophy is 80 or 90% reasoning with 20 or 10% conclusions. To really "get" philosophy, to an extent that you can have a productive conversation about it, you need both the reasoning and the conclusions, and if that's your prerogative, I encourage you to read all you can.

What it ultimately comes down to is two (2) different approaches to philosophy: "Tell me what to think" vs "Tell me why I should think it." You could argue that the first isn't really philosophy, but, then, your friend doesn't really want to be a philosopher. It sounds like he just wants to dig up old smart people who agree with his worldview.

>he believes that an idea and not its context is important, and that actual philosophy is finding the gist of these ideas and using your own brain to come to your own conclusions
I agree with him.

An idea cannot exist sans context: even an idea as basic as Good needs Evil as a via negativa to establish that which is wholly Good and other to it. You agree with him because you're as pants-on-head retarded as he is.

he agrees with him because he’s a different type of “free thinker” this variety in the OP is a consumerist faggot, user probably means they deduce the ideas on their own and skim to see what the thinker in question was on about. im assuming. OP’s friend is literally an emptyheaded vessel

>lol he told me "I would think someone who really seeks wisdom would go off of some opinions of their own rather than just what is in a book"
This should be interpreted as "I don't want to do all that reading because it is tedious and distasteful to me, so I'm going to convince myself that I'm already too woke for it."

But don't let stupid disagreements come between your friendship; take what he has to say on philosophical matters with a dash of salt. Don't make him feel stupid over it, though. It bespeaks an insecurity on your behalf if you do. Just let him do his thing.

>This should be interpreted as "I don't want to do all that reading because it is tedious and distasteful to me, so I'm going to convince myself that I'm already too woke for it."
This.

i disagree with the idea that you can "get" a philosopher with just a quick summation of his work. however i would agree with the idea that one wouldn't even need to read even a single book to understand philosophy or even be a philosopher, even a good philosopher.

Honestly, don't believe all these memers that you always have to read the full book to understand a concept.

You don't need to read all of Kant's CPR to understand transcendental idealism. Just the first 30 pages and a lot of secondary material. Your time is better spent reading the secondary material than the second half of that book.

This is just an example but it holds true for a lot of other ideas in philosophy. Not all of a philosopher's text is worth your while. Another example that comes to mind is The Second Sex where almost half of the book is unnecessary to understand the aims and ideas expressed in the text

>he said that reading the entire book is of no more use to him than getting the general ideas of If what you're using philosophy for is to get the gist of some ideas I guess. But philsophical argument often relies very technical "small ideas" that are foundational to larger systems of throught. Like most people who took a phil 101 course understand why materialism is, they get the gist, "everything is matter". But you have understand a pretty nuanced technical argument to address what something like, say, Chalmer's argument for against physicalism implies for it.

If you want to make an argument in acedemic philosophy, famililarity with primary material in your field is mandatory. If you want to take in some lofty ideas and sound sorta smart at parties you can probably get by on youtube videos.

This really kills me. I think a lot of people are under the impression that philosophy is about the content of its final conclusions rather than the form of life required to constantly submit your beliefs and experience to creative interrogation. A similar phenomenon would be reading a wikipedia summary of a novel and thinking that you've understood it. You need to somehow convey this to your friend instead of getting mad as that is also a value of philosophy: explaining to people where they've gone wrong with reasons taken to their terminus.

Hate to say it but if I had to place a bet on 2 people who were about to debate general philosophy with only 2 years of preparation I'd go with the guy who learned via youtube and cliff notes than the person who read 4 Hegel books in that time frame. I'm sorry but understanding concepts doesn't have to be correlated with reading the original texts, generally.

Your friend has a problem if he thinks '300+' is a chore. Probably some kind of ADHD-riddled millennial snowflake, aye?

You don't need to read the Origins of the Species to understand evolution. In-fact, reading other material is even better. The same is true for a large chunk of philosophy. Especially for all the snobbish and/or edgy 19th and 20th century "philosophy".

your friend is right, stop wasting time

Do you need to read the whole 700 pages to “get” the work? No, generally not.

Is a couple YouTube videos and forum posts an adequate substitute? Absolutely not, not even close.

There is typically going to be some set of excerpts which will give you the core meat of a piece if you can find somebody to specify passages or chapters for you. In most philosophical works if you read the Preface/Introduction you will at least get the author laying out what the goal of their project is, and how they plan to do it in their own words, so I’d say that is nearly always important to read. And then beyond that, reading at least a couple secondary sources is ususally going to be important.


But no YouTube video is going to actually be a substitute for doing the reading of those secondary sources. Maybe you get the gist of what a person thinks, but you aren’t going to recognize it’s significants and implications unless you actually bother doing some work.

I’m not going to say ‘just read the primary works in their entirety’, I think people who are super against secondary lit are stupid. Books and essays which are consistered important secondary lit are typically going to be written by people smarter than you, but at the very least are written by people who have a better understanding of the relevant background in which something was written and will have spent more time thinking about the work than you are ever going to be willing to spend.

philosophy is just common sense stretched out to absurd extremes.

>stemfags actually believe this

obligatory start with greeks footnote to plato comment

Your friend is probably just an idiot, but there is a small chance that he's Plato.

>Not all of a philosopher's text is worth your while. Another example that comes to mind is The Second Sex where almost half of the book is unnecessary to understand the aims and ideas expressed in the text
But how could you know this w/o reading the entire text? How do you select whose opinions to follow regarding what passages in a work you should disregard? How do you know if a secondary work is actually misinterpreting Kant?

just shoot him

I agree with this. If you are an academic, the primary sources are necessary. If you are a shitposter on Veeky Forums, there's nothing stopping you from reading primary texts, but the value of secondary texts is understated. The routledge guide to Heidegger is really helping me get through being and time.

just the thing everyone needs. some idiot reading a dictionary page on the internet because he cant stop playing call of duty, that tries to be "smarter" than everyone else, competing against idiots that deny racial science by reading continental philosophy.

man, this planet is fucking fantastic

what the fuck does this have to do with my comment?

I think you mean to say that philosophy is sustained thinking about what passes through quickly most people's minds. There isn't an ounce of common sense in philosophy...

>full books
You have to read them more than once and then read even longer books of people talking about it.

>Do you have to read full books to understand philosophy
To really understand it, yes. You could read the Sparknotes page to Crime and Punishment and get the gist of it, but it should quickly become obvious to anyone who's read it that you either carelessly skimmed through the book or are regurgitating from another source. Philosophy is no exception. You need to read deeply to understand any field, and reading deeply isn't substituted by watching videos or reading secondary sources.
Your friend's right that some books, of course, aren't going to be hundreds of pages of pure great philosophy. Almost any writing is going to have something at least a little redundant or unnecessary in it; Plato's Republic doesn't become incomprehensible if you take out a page or two. Shorter works really can be pure, great philosophy though, like Fear and Trembling or The Sickness Unto Death.
It sounds like your friend just doesn't want to do the work and has tricked himself into thinking that he doesn't need to if he wants to really understand these things.

I think that If you really want to understand 100% X philosophical idea and its implications then you need to read the full book. But philosophy doesn't always need to be like that. Someone who isnt really well-read on philosophy can read the introduction of Being and Time and get a pretty good idea of whats going on there, and it can surely make that person look at everyday life with a diferent perspective. As long as this person doesn't go around talking about Heidegger all day I see nothing wrong with doing this. Then, that person may ask for help to someone who is wellread in Heidegger and discuss stuff and resolve misintepretations and stuff like that. And maybe after that said person may get more involved in a more in depth study of Heidegger and philosophy in general.
I think little or 'mediocre' study of philosophy is better than not caring about philosophy at all, as long as that guy doesn't go around then talking like he knows shit.
I think your friend is delusional in thinking you can TOTALLY get a philosopher by just reading certain passages and some secondary sources, but doing this may give some insights to the everyday man and it may even improve his life in some sort of way.
We all get attached to some ideas from certain philosophers more than others, those are the ideas that stick with us and and which may give us different, new insights, wether you are an academic or not. So the real problem may be wether we consider really knowing a certain philosophical idea in depth or activily engaging with certein ideas more important. The ideal would be being able to do both, but unless you are a big brain academic thats quite hard and time consuming. Is it wrong to misintepret a certain idea out of ignorence if this misintepretation somehow made some artist create something beautiful inspired in said misintepreted idea?

For friend thinks he is smarter than he actually is, but he is right at saying that maybe not all the pages from the book will have a valueble impact on the reader.

Borges on Ulysses

>I confess I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

>when he can get the gist of their "message" from a bit of reading online or a few videos.
There's a big difference between Borges reading only a few parts of Uysses, and some random schmo thinking that he can understand the thought processes and contexts of a philosopher. There's a big difference in general between Borges reading something and everyone else reading the same thing.

I wasnt comparing it with op's dumb friend

it was a joke obviously

I have a degree in Philosophy and I can absolutely assure you that while you can feign learning and pass tests with most thinkers, certain thinkers like Kant NECESSITATE that you actually read their entire works

I love that image

It's pretty much only Kant desu

58/60 are white. And people here don't think there's a problem with that?

Averroes was actually just a white Muslim

Not at all, Plato, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger. Most of the important names simply can't be reduced to wikipedia articles

>plato
lets pretend to be retarded and bait everyone into saying stupid shit. also literally invent 99% of philosophy. also something about caves
>hegel
lmao dude dialectics are like a ladder dude also its all gonna combine into the absolute also im a pseud

i havent read thew iki articles of the other two though

Yeah see you just sound like a clueless retard

None of them can, dumbfuck

Nietzsche totally can. Generally pseud philosophers fall square into the wikipedia is sufficient bracket

Christ alive, that greentext is such a pompous meme. Try repeating that to yourself when you’re slogging through to the 900th page of Aquinas or trying to keep yourself awake whilst Kant reiterates the conclusion he already came to 10 pages ago. The real response to OP’s friend is that a healthy mixture of summary/secondary texts and a sensible approach to reading important sections from primary works is the best way of engaging with philosophy.

>None of them can, dumbfuck
It totally depends on the educational background of the reader. If the reader is already on the precipice of a revelation then the brief allegory that a philosopher makes regarding a concept may be all the reader needs. If the reader is ignorant of the topic then he will need the full text to baby step him to the conclusion being posited.

>The best way to engage with philosophy doesn't involve reading everything you're trying to engage with
Surely you jest

To me it's like formulas for math.
You can get along just fine knowing the basic rules if you practice with examples, and be able to use them on a superficial level. However, you don't gain the value that comes with understanding how and why the formula works. Thus, if you are trying to reach one answer you can get there quickly, but if the problem becomes abstract or needs multiple formulas layered over top each other, you're going to be useless and will need a person that actually put in the work.
Its the gap between psueds and people that know their shit

Plus they're really fucking good books so why not.

>N
>pseud
bash your jaw against a countertop as hard as you can 3 times

Holy shit
I know this thread is a "psueds pretend they're not brainlets" episode but Jesus dude read a fucking book

We have to support the 2 here user be nice

This guy gets it

If yo just want to sound smart at parties, sure. But if you want to understand philosophy than you need to understand how philosophers think, to do that you must read the entire book. Also your friend sounds like a tool.

Respect for fear and trembling deserves it's recognition

Reminder that sounding smart at parties is a meme.
Almost nobody with a beer in their hand is ready to opine about Plato's republic and the few that do are more likely to discuss than be impressed, which is only good if you want to talk jargon with the resident neckbeard for an hour when you party.
When I get super drunk I basically start lecturing people and my gf has to reel me in.