Why should I start with the Greeks?

But then wouldn't I need to read the pre-Greeks to understand the Greeks?

My recommendation is to do this:
>read a decent history of western philosophy
>jump right into the moderns with Descartes' Discourse on Method and Meditations
>read Francis Bacon's New Organon
>read the major works of Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume

Now you've arrived at Kant, and the training wheels are officially off. Now you go back to the Greeks and read as much Plato and Aristotle as possible, and some medievals at least. If you can, find the Oxford volume "The First Philosophers" to start you off properly.
The reason I recommend a path like this is because the early moderns are really fun to get into. Descartes abandoned every overt dependency on past philosophers and the rationalist-empiricist banter mostly followed this, basically constituting a new tradition. However, when you get to the Germans you need a proper understanding of the Greeks and traditional metaphysics to see what they're doing.

I love ancient peoples and history as much as the next guy, but when it comes to books their manuscripts, they have huge holes in them, missing sections (entire chapters, be them pages or tablets), etc. The farther you go in the past, the worse the conditions of the available texts, and the more you have to rely on secondary literature and attempted reconstructions. No matter how many more versions we get our filthy hands on the Epic of Gilgamesh, however worthwhile the read, remains incomplete.The Greeks themselves didn't have access to these texts as they couldn't read hieroglyphs, they couldn't transmit them to us, etc. Think of the state of egyptology before and after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. M. L. West, huge scholar of the Greeks did everything he could in The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth to show traces of Gilgamesh in the Iliad and Odyssey but concludes it's just conjecture and he has no real evidence of oral or literary contact between this very ancient tale and a historical Homer collecting myths from the Hellenes to create their national poems. By all means, if you want to read about frustrated translators informing you that the text was eaten by some creature and they can't even think of a way to fill the gaping all, go all the way back. Perhaps we will never know what Enkidu told Gilgamesh about the afterlife. But if you want to read a book, start with the Greeks.

There are comparatively more resources on Greek philosophy than on stuff that came before it. If anything not starting with the Greeks would be more difficult.

well that depends on whether your goal is to understand the greeks themselves with all the available context, in which case sure, read everything, or if it's about understanding the greeks as a basis of western culture in which case the sumerians or whatever will not be very relevant since what's actually crucial is how the christian west understood the greeks and that understanding did not include any knowledge of the sumerians.

also keep in mind that the former goal is much less realistic than the latter because we still have access to most of the ancient material that influenced later european culture whereas when trying to understand the greeks themselves you'll be constantly frustrated by the fact that we only possess a sliver of their full output, and for any older cultures it will get even worse. so we can easily talk about what "prometheus bound" meant to the european romantics but who knows what it meant to the greeks that watched it performed in athens because we only have tiny fragments of the second part which seem to suggest that aeschylus (and we don't even know if it was him!) might have immediately backpedaled from the the seemingly radical "zeus is a bloody tyrant" message of the first part. fuck knows what the complete thing actually added up to.

Is this chart actually a good way of starting with the greeks?

you forgot to actually post the chart but i can preemptively tell you it's stupid and wrong

you mean this one? these threads are really repetitive.

Why do people say "start with the Greeks"? Are you implying that you can finished the Greeks?

bump

Stupid shitpost. You still have to start something to not finish it.

But you never get off them

>You still have to start something to not finish it.
Damn, that's some Zuangzhi type of shit

this. if you don't read every word written, you'll never understand the world and you'll fail

>the epic of gilgamesh was a big deal that influenced the bible
Uh, no. The story of a mass flood have been reported in multiple civilizations throughout the world. This is to be expected if there was in fact a flood that filled up the entire world. If there was such a flood you'd expect people to make fables about it and writes stories. It's not like the children of noah just left this to themselves and never told their children and their children's children about this.

Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

They liked sex in the bum-bum and so should you.

You don't start with the Greeks, you end with the Greeks, after absorbing the moderns and going back to understand the primal genius of the ancients. The mass amount of anglo analysis has greatly helped in understanding the Greeks better in the context of contemporary philosophy.

It's basically propaganda that's been carrying on for at least 2000 years. The Greeks weren't that great but some assholes got a hold of their texts and decided to hold their authors up as superhumans. There were probably better philosophers out there than fucking Aristotle or Plato, but because their texts didn't stand the test of time, we don't know about them.

>a flood actually filled the entire world
This is retarded. How would these people know that the ENTIRE world was covered? They probably just had a bad rainy season.

this. if you've heard about it or know others know about it, then it's trash. only read things you know other people have no knowledge of. we have been mislead our whole recorded history long with this greek nonsense.

Because these were legends of the past and what I'm asserting is that they got this all from the sons of noah. After they got off the ark they started spreading stories and these stories were told to future generation.

nice gif

Okay, some guy used this word once in a thread about how people put too much emphasis on starting with the classics and moving upwards but I can't remember it.

It was something like primitism or primarism, I can't remember what it was.

can somebody explain to me what the logic is behind this pic telling people to read homer > sophocles > hesiod? why the hell would you wait until after attic drama to read hesiod?

The graphics are put together by people who have no idea what they're talking about

i know but he manages to put aristotle after plato and thucydides after herodotus so he at least did enough googling to understand the basic chronology, which makes me wonder if he had some actual justification for the achronological placement of hesiod.

Nobody actually follows these charts. Just pick up Plato and fucking read him, if you don't understand something then skim through secondary literature / SEP / Peter Adamson's giraffe podcast. You don't need to know the entire history of human thought to pick up Plato.

you could just say "i don't know" instead of typing random shit that has nothing to do with my question.

floodposting is a meme, don't respond to these people

I'm fighting against the chronologist school on Veeky Forums, this is very important.

Because it is a short work that can be thought of as a summary or reiteration of what you've read. It's a nice capstone.

anyone?

common sense

primitivism?

Hi Veeky Forums let me be honest:
I want to start reading philosophy but I'm completely lost on which order of content is better for me.
If you give me some cornerstones, checkpoints and goals to aim I'll be really thankful.
>Foundations:
A-Tier books/essays
>Checkpoints:
AA-Tier books/essays
>Goals:
AAA-Tier books book/essays

Western and Eastern philosophy welcome. I can read in English, German and Spanish if that helps. Im not a pro novel reader (1 book/novel per 1.5-2 months) but I read Wikipedia for fun.
Thanks in advance

docs.google.com/document/d/1y8_RRaZW5X3xwztjZ4p0XeRplqebYwpmuNNpaN_TkgM/mobilebasic?pli=1

>some random story
>inlfuencing the Bible

You got that backward there bud. The world's religions are similar because they derived from the Bible, not vice versa.

i would respect your position if i didn't know you were a degenerate memer engaging in ironic christian roleplay

Read my post here I think starting with the moderns and retreating back to the ancients once you have a good grasp of pre-German phil is the best way. Also for the historical overview you can go either Anthony Kenny or Copleston volumes.

bump 2

You wouldn't jump straight into calculus without knowing basic arithmetic. That's basically what you would be doing if you want to get into more modern philosophy or literature that isn't meme of the month YA or page flippers you find in airport book stores.

Don't get me wrong, if you're brilliant enough you can skip over the greeks and have no problem. But considering the fact you're here and made a thread this fucking stupid the chances are you should definitely start with the greeks.

you shouldn't. you should start with what people have written on the greeks, they're far more interesting. you see, the greeks weren't really special in any way over and above the other civilisations of the time. the only reason you should care about them at all is because the former barbarians of england, germany and most of france, having gained tremendous wealth during the industrial revolution wanted to feel like they had descended from nobility. and thus the myth of greeks being the progenitors of civilisation was born.

Autism