Anyone else here Started w/ the Greeks? It's been at least 5 months and I'm still starting with the Greeks

Yeah I've been reading almost exclusively greek/roman content for 18 straight months and still have a long way to go.

>5 months
>babby's first greek texts

How pleb are you? You can read two plays or (short) dialogues a day the greeks shouldn't take more than six months if you actually read.
>inb4 im not NEET
thats why you are still pleb

this is what neets actually believe . jpg

well they have to get by somehow and not try to suicide everyday

Should've used that time to just learn ancient Greek.

>calls someone else a pleb
>outs himself as a pleb

kek

Can you blow through "the Greeks" as presented on one of the lit charts in 6 months? Yeah, probably. But that almost certainly forces you to spend little to no time:

>annotating
>rereading primary sources
>reading secondary sources
>reading critical commentaries
>moving beyond the very limited group of writers presented in the chart
>reading Romans
>learning an ancient language

There is literally more than a lifetime's worth of reading from the ancient world. If you think you'll be "done" with the Greeks ever, let alone in six months, you missed the point. If you spent so much time trying to "finish up" the Greeks, you failed to see the references and developments which offered you the opportunity to explore new avenues of primary sources, and to develop your skills of finding and critically evaluating secondary sources. You didn't see the forest for the trees.

If you didn't like the Greeks, you could move on after a bit. But for someone who does like them, it makes no sense to just "be done" after, what, fucking Aristotle? kek. There is literally an entire world of ancient content that came after him.

I hear you, I had read a couple of these books before I even started (the list). just feeling bogged down by this and wondering if anyone else is doing it. trying to give them some motivation to keep going. I kinda feel like I'm almost at a point where I can take a step back from reading the greeks for a while and try something else (after I finish plato and the second part of fragments of the pre-Socratic's)

Honestly that sounds like a great idea. I love the hell out of the Greeks and seem to enjoy them more than most people do, but even I need to take breaks.

And if you can give yourself reprieves but still revisit the Greeks later, rather than just slamming the book shut on them forever, I think you'll be the better for it. They're valuable, and I think you'll always manage to learn something new from them, but they're undeniably more tough than just reading novels.

Anyway I hope you stick with it. But don't burn yourself out! Also consider reading Copleston's "History of Philosophy" for his sections on the pre-socratics and Plato. If you read no other commentary on those Greeks, at least read this one. Especially with the pre-socratics it'll help you justify why the hell you spent so much time reading about fire and air, and will shed light on why they're valuable to read.

Fredrick Copleston thanks for the rec user ill look into this

What are some other good secondary sources?

Yeah well I'm still contemplating whether virtue can be taught or if it's a divine gift from the gods. I'm currently mining the earth around the Parthenon in Greece to see if there's some lost palimpsest with the answer. I'm 83 yrs old.

Anyone know any book on pre-socratis and sophists/early philosophers that I can find in the internet?

1. go to libgen.io
2. search for The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy The Complete Fragments
3. click around until you find a good download link.
4. download and read

Based user. Thanks very much.

Glad I could help!

Would very strongly recommend the bloomsbury companion to Plato:

smile.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Companion-Plato-Companions/dp/1474250912/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=

Whereas Copleston is a single writer maintaining a single narrative (while addressing various parts of Plato's life and work), the Bloomsbury companion is 300 pages of very brief essays--about 2 pages on average, with about 150 different essays that touch on an extremely broad assortment of areas of study about Plato as a man, the structures of his dialogues, the topics of the dialogues, and, finally, how he's been studied from his own time up to the 20th century.

It will be "shallow" in the sense that none of the essays are very long, but for studying Plato specifically I would recommend it above all else, as it introduces you to the vocabulary that is used in studying Plato (which is not necessarily the vocabulary of Plato himself) and gives you tons of new angles of approach, so you can see the nuances of the dialogues, and understand what it looks like when professional academics study him. It's "shallowness" makes it an insanely good initial secondary source for Plato. Even Copleston uses a lot of vocabulary, and references ideas, which will be totally unfamiliar to you even if you're read all of Plato but haven't read academic criticism of him.

Also Bloomsbury is one of only two books I know of (the other being AE Taylor's "Plato: The man and his work") which give overviews of every dialogue, peeking into their context in the corpus, the subjects they delve into, their significance to the overall corpus, etc. Most other secondary sources will have essays focusing on a single dialogue, or a single topic as addressed through various dialogues.

If you want to go deeper, check out the cambridge companion to Plato, and the cambridge companion to the Republic. The essays vary in quality and how interesting they are, but basically all of them have some value. They're also longer (20-40 pages per essay), so they offer a very different dimension of study from the very brief Bloomsbury and the very broad Copleston.

Also I haven't read these yet, so can't totally vouch for them, but have heard enough good things about Vlastos' 1973 "Platonic Studies" and Taylor's "Plato the man and his work" that I bought (but haven't yet read) both of them. Vlastos is apparently one of the 20th century's top Platonic scholars; Taylor gets referenced fairly frequently in the secondary sources I've read so far, and got a generous nod from Copleston (see note in bottom right of pic).

You might like Waterfield's "First Philosophers." It's not as comprehensive as the Graham book, but is a great intro. Would recommend reading Waterfield before Plato, Graham after Plato to revisit the ideas.

PS: Besides the Taylor book, anything I've mentioned above I can give you guys as ebooks if you're interested. Just let me know.

Hope this helps!

Yeah I went back to start over with the Greeks in philosophy and that's my major.

A few weeks in and I am still on Plato. I'll have read half of his dialogues by the end.

Pretty good decision, though four of the dialogues I read were trash.

universal literacy was a mistake

>Even Copleston uses a lot of vocabulary, and references ideas, which will be totally unfamiliar to you even if you're read all of Plato but haven't read academic criticism of him.

Is this true? If even Plato wouldn't understand what these guys are taking from his works what's the point? Would I really get enough out of these to be worth it even if I'm a /smartguy/?

Thanks for the write up btw

oops I forgot to (you)

Congratz op. You've been successfully memed into a complete wastage of time. After another 5 months there will be virtually no sign of all that effort.

Sorry, I worded that badly. It's not that these secondary sources use academic-speak just to show off, but rather that they use terms which may never have been explicitly written in Plato, but which he would have absolutely understood, as they refer to ideas which are critical to his works.

For example: "Ontology." I could be misremembering, but I don't recall a single use of this word in any of Plato's works. But it's not pulled out of thin air; it refers (in the context of Plato) to his division of particulars/Forms, the visible/intelligible worlds, etc., and the process of deciding what "thing" goes in what "realm." You don't really need to know the word as you read Plato dialogue by dialogue, but if you're going to look back and review his overall metaphysics, "ontology" is going to be a convenient catch-all term for a big part of what Plato is trying to do.

And on a somewhat different note, some terms in secondary sources will be new because they're specific Greek words. Likely your copy of Plato will have a footnote saying, for example, "this is our translation of the Greek word akrasia," but there are so many of those that you won't always appreciate which of those words are important. So, for example, "akrasia" is the "weakness of will" which pops up in Protagoras (when Socrates says anyone not doing what is good for him is not "overcome by pleasure" but is simply ignorant of what is truly good, so he DENIES the possibility of akrasia), but then pops up in Republic (where the tripartite soul leads to a rejection of that earlier "ignorance," and the conflict between the parts of the soul ACCEPTS the possibility of akrasia).

Honestly there aren't that many issues with vocabulary, but overall I would still recommend the Bloomsbury, just because learning the specific terms which refer to some of these key concepts is valuable not just for reading secondary sources (which you might not even want to do, nothing wrong with that), but for getting a better grasp on Plato's own writings, connecting things you may have missed across numerous dialogues, and improving your understanding of his overall ideas--how they started, grew, finished.

Maybe that was just me, but I definitely needed the helping hand of recapping some of the big ideas, connecting them, and encapsulating them under specific terms. For example, see paragraph 2 in pic related (Copleston again), especially the connection of Plato's epistemology and his ontology:

>The development of the human mind on its way from ignorance to knowledge, lies over two main fields, that of opinion and that of knowledge. It is only the latter that can properly be termed knowledge. How are these two functions of the mind differentiated? It seems clear that the differentiation is based on a differentiation of object.

So "how" something is known (epistemology) depends on "what" it "is" (ontology).

Thanks high effort poster. I was hesitant on relying on secondary sources so much that I don't really have to think for myself, but I can see the value and if they're only 2pp each what's the harm.

I got Herodotus, Thucy, Waterfield, and Plato last Christmas.

Currently on Waterfield :^)

>5 months

Well, you've only got another 2.5 years to go to have read most of the major stuff

You only forget things completely if you had no interest in them in the first place. I can remember the complete sequence of events in the Odyssey and Iliad (geneologies notwithstanding), majority of the myths in Metamorphoses and Aeneid, most of Seneca and Aurelius (yeah yeah not Greek), and most of the Plato and Euripides I read. I can remember the general scheme of thought and some specific ideas of most of the Presocratics and even some neoPlatonist shit. And I haven't read most of those books in 5 years

nigger