So I fell for the meme Veeky Forums

So I fell for the meme Veeky Forums

I have read the five dialogues (euthyphro, apology, crito, meno, phaedo), where should I go next with Plato? And where should I start with Aristotle?

Start with the Greeks

Philosophy is a meme. You're not actually supposed to read any of it

5 dialogues -> symposium -> republic -> rest of corpus in any order > aristotle->middle platonists->neoplatonists->muslims and medievals

Go to Thailand and "tutor" some young boys to get in the right headspace

Why the fuck do people do this?
Just read books you like.

Why the fuck do people make posts like this?
Just reply to threads you like.

>where should I go next
Read the rest of Plato, then read a bunch of commentaries.

>where should I start with aristotle

lol don't even think about aristotle now, if ever. There is so much ground to cover with Plato that is so much more approachable and rewarding that you are basically better off reading literally all of Plato before starting with Aristotle, if ever reading him at all. At that point MAYBE read the nicomachean ethics, but to understand any of his physical/metaphysical works you should really read the organon and the physics, which is an investment miles ahead of where you are now. You MAY end up doing that, but for now just keep reading Plato.

This is stupid advice. You should keep reading Plato, definitely. And a sophisticated scholarly understanding of most of what Aristotle says does, indeed, require understanding not only Plato but also several other Greek philosophers. But much of what Aristotle says can be understood, at a reasonably deep level, independently of Plato. (Examples: the theory of the Categories is pretty standalone, though of course in the background it is motivated by a critique of Plato; the arguments in the first third or so of Posterior Analytics are targeting, among other things, the Theatetus; but Aristotle's point can be seen without a strong understanding of that, at least in outline.)

Starting Aristotle, my advice is as follows. First, read an overview. I am partial to Christopher Shields' Routledge overview (available on LibGen). Aristotle's corpus is extremely self-referential. To understand any one text, it's helpful to have an antecedent grasp (however fuzzy) on his overall theories of change, predication, explanation, constitution, etc. Then, I would start off with the Categories, then De Anima, then Nichomachean Ethics (if you care about his ethics), then the first half of the Physics, then the Metaphysics (brace yourself.) Somewhere along the way, you should read a primer on the Analytics. But probably an experienced teacher of Aristotle could suggest a better intro list.

Aristotle is orders of magnitude more difficult to read than Plato. If you want to understand him at any sort of deep level, you will have to consult scholarly and secondary texts. Cambridge and Oxford Companions to Aristotle are great places to start. Jonathan Barnes, Myles Burnyeat, and Richard Sorabji are probably the three most all-around prominent Aristotle scholars of the latter half of the 20th century. Their scholarly opinions may be wrong; reading them and thinking about them is always enlightening.

And, as always, remember: Veeky Forums is a garbage board full of garbage opinions. You're better off seeking guidance by Googling around for syllabi from university courses (there are /many/ floating around.)

>But much of what Aristotle says can be understood, at a reasonably deep level, independently of Plato. (Examples: the theory of the Categories is pretty standalone

The Categories is literally the first work in Aristotle's traditional ordering. That's like saying English is an easy language to learn, just because its alphabet is simple.

>Aristotle's corpus is extremely self-referential.

This was my whole point. Like I said above, you could probably read at least NE, maybe some stuff like rhetoric, poetics, etc., but you won't understand as much as you would if you had first read organon/physics, and you certainly won't understand the physical/metaphysical works if you haven't read organon (at least cat, de int., and the two analytics) and physics. Also the minor physical works poke into (still relevant) corners which are touched on but not exhausted in the physics, and are decent practice for the tougher stuff.

>de anima before physics
absolutely not

I think I agree with most of what you say, actually. I maintain that the Categories can be read without mastering all of Plato. I agree that the foundational Aristotelian material should come first. But I think trying to understand the organon/physics without having some kind of skeleton-key (provided in my post by the Shields volume, but there are probably better examples) is needlessly painful. You can engage in the texts more fruitfully if you have some understanding of the texts in broad strokes. I mean, for God's sake, just read a modern introduction to the syllogistic, it'll make your life so much easier---and /then/ go back and read PrAn. I agree with you that De Interpretatione should come early, probably after Categories. And yeah, Physics comes before De Anima, I suppose. Physics is really hard so I thought it better to back-load it, but De Anima is hard too, and really makes no sense without a detailed understanding of Aristotle's theory of change.

Yeah I think we're converging onto agreement over the same points. I misunderstood your comment, and as for

>I maintain that the Categories can be read without mastering all of Plato

I worded my earlier comment poorly, but what I meant wasn't "you must read all of Plato to understand any of Aristotle whatsoever" but rather "you'll gain more from reading another Platonic dialogue than you will from skipping some Plato to jump ahead to Aristotle."

Like you said, Aristotle build on himself so much that you can't just pick a treatise at a whim; you have to make it a long term project. So my point was just that, until that non is ready to commit to a long(er) term endeavor, he's better off just reading another Platonic work.

I'm still relatively new to Aristotle, but I already definitely agree that he needs way more secondary analysis, and needs it more immediately. I read all of Plato and only afterwards read essays/commentaries on his works; I think I had only finished Categories and started Interpretatione before thinking "what the fuck is going on, I need help." I'm only like 1/4 through Aristotle and have already read as much secondary lit as I did for all of Plato.

Also idk about you but with Plato I only occasionally found myself going into the "deep end" and unwittingly picking up a commentary that was too advanced for me to understand; with Aristotle that's pretty much the norm, especially for the less-commonly-read works; I think the commentators presume that only scholarly types will be reading the treatises, let alone secondary works. Some of the commentaries are fucking tough.

OK I see. Should have construed your comment more charitably.

I am also relatively new to Aristotle. I've just picked it up over the years out of (a) course requirements (I'm doing a philosophy PhD program), (b) talking to my friends who are Aristotle scholars, and (c) curiosity. I too find it extremely hard to read.

For reasons I no longer understand in retrospect, I spent a lot of time reading some of Aristotle's lesser works (in particular his lesser works in biology.) I highly recommend the scholarship of James Lennox. He has an excellent collection of essays (unfortunately not on LibGen, although another collection of his is) on Aristotle's biology. Extremely helpful and, imo, admirably lucid for Aristotle scholarship.

I've read basically no secondary literature on Plato, but I have definitely tried to read too-advanced scholarship on Aristotle. It is unfortunate that scholars can't write more clearly or accessibly.

Yeah I've read enough secondary stuff so far that a few names have kept popping up, especially certain names with reference to specific aspects of Aristotelian study, and Lennox is pretty much "the" guy for the biological works, from what I can tell. I've had two of his books on my radar for a few weeks/months ("aristotle's philosophy of biology: studies in the origins of life science" and "philosophical issues in aristotle's biology"). Besides those two, the excessively priced and annoyingly carved-up clarendon aristotle commentaries, and the decent but not spectacular intros in the loeb editions, I've been struggling to find commentaries on the bio stuff. I don't expect the bio to be super interesting and am not sure if I'll read it all, and doubt that I'll want to go further than the one or two Lennox books which are just essay compilations anyway.

Are those the Lennox books you had in mind? Any other commentaries on other treatises you'd recommend? I spent about six weeks on Physics, just wrapped up de caelo and am finishing a (probably too scholarly) commentary on generatione et corruptione now. Hoping to not spend too much time on meteorology and de anima before hopefully tackling the bio works.

I definitely reached my "I've had enough" point with Physics even though the commentaries I read were all pointing to Ross' ~700 page behemoth companion work. Maybe one day, but IMO if you're not literally going to be a scholar in the subject you have to be judicious in knowing when you're not really gaining that much for the time you're spending.

Yeah Lennox is "the" Aristotle's biology guy. The essay collection I had in mind is "Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Sciences." Those essays, together, systematically answer a lot of the questions one might have about how Aristotle envisions the extension of episteme ala Posterior Analytics to biology (and, I think, other special sciences.) The latter collection you cite is more specialized in the interpretive questions it asks (at least, as far as I can tell; I haven't read it all.)

As for other secondary literature, I have only really dived into the secondary literature on Aristotle's biology, Analytics, and theory of perception. For Posterior Analytics, there are some classic articles by Barnes that I found extremely helpful; if you have any background in formal logic, work by Corcoran is pretty good intro imo for stuff in Prior Analytics. (If you have very strong background in formal logic, work by Maarko Maalink and his students/collaborators is extremely interesting.) All of the secondary literature on his theory of perception is a confusing godawful mess.

I've never read any full-dress commentaries. I tried reading two commentaries on De Anima (one by Ross IIRC and another that was published in the past ~10 years.) I found both indecipherable messes and gave up.

You're right about being judicious with your time. That's actually why I stopped reading Aristotle. I never really seriously engaged with the Metaphysics or Physics, as texts. I noped out of those pretty quick, so rats off to ya for slogging through.

Sweet, glad to hear I'm not gonna be taking a wrong turn with Lennox.

As for the logical works, honestly I'm out of my depth. I think it was good for me to have read them, but from what I could tell when reading my commentaries, they're way outdated, especially in light of 20th century progress in logic. Considering that I have no background in modern logic, I think I'm just about done with the analytics for the foreseeable future. It wasn't exactly heartening to read a comment by a modern scholar which basically amounted to "yeah Aristotle's modal qualifiers are a fucking mess; we can't figure this out so don't you bother trying to, either."

>I tried reading two commentaries on De Anima (one by Ross IIRC and another that was published in the past ~10 years.) I found both indecipherable messes and gave up.

I'm not gloating, I just want to say that it's really nice that someone else with decent philosophical background feels this way sometimes. I just end up worrying if I'm a fucking moron because I'll be 200 pages into some criticism nobody ever reads with a bullshit title like "nature agency and change in aristotle's physics," maybe gleaning something valuable from 1/4 of the text, wondering what the hell is going on. It might be because I'm not reading this stuff in an academic setting, but I have a tendency to give academics a ton of unearned credit just because they're academics and got something published by oxford or whoever. I'm only now starting to realize they publish shit, too.

Also if you ever want to give de anima commentaries another shot, try Aquinas'. I haven't read it yet (coming up real soon, my copy is in the mail), but I've read his commentaries on the an. post. and the physics, the latter being particularly helpful, and Aquinas' commentaries in general apparently being considered by modern scholars as some of the overall best and most insightful companion pieces ever written to their corresponding treatises.

But why would you read Aristotle when he's so fucking boring and Plato already got everything right anyway?

Yeah, Prior Analytics is fucking hard, and it's hard to see the point of slogging through. Without a background in formal logic, it can be hard to appreciate what's going on. And there are, indeed, decisive advantages to 20th century logic over Aristotle's (thanks, Frege). One of the amazing things, though, about Maarko Malink's work is that it is a both formally perspicuous and textually responsible reading of Aristotle's modal syllogistic, on which it is consistent and coherent. But it's a real fucking mess, yeah.

And yeah, man, most of what academia produces is absolute fucking garbage. Scholarship is no different. There are a handful of excellent and helpful scholars; the rest make mediocre contributions in a desperate attempt to publish enough for tenure.

I will say, though, it seems to me a lot of Anglophone scholarship presupposes some familiarity with modern analytic philosophy. I mean, it's hard to describe. But scholars and historians are trained in the same departments as contemporary philosophers, and they are conversant with the categories, debates and positions in contemporary philosophy. And, whether consciously or not, those categories/debates/etc come to define, in their minds, what a clear and satisfactory interpretation of a text even /is/. I know a lot of scholars of medieval philosophy, and they often conceptualize interpretive issues in contemporary semantic terms. Same with people who work on Aristotle's theory of, e.g., future contingents. And a lot of work on hylomorphism just assumes a Weltanshaung (for lack of a better term) steeped in contemporary styles of doing metaphysics. Now, of course, if you take this too far, your interpretations become anachronistic, and the best scholars strive to keep things grounded solely in the texts and the history. But the way they think through issues, and sometimes the way they clarify difficult passages, is still in largely contemporary terms. So there's a lot of scholarship where the author is trying to clarify some issue, and his audience would probably unconsciously think "ok, he's thinking about the contemporary de re/de dicto distinction, that's why he thinks Aristotle's argument is valid and has the form it has."

Or, anyway, that's been my experience with the scholarship. Obviously tons of it is not like that. But I think that's one reason it's easy to feel really unsatisfied with a lot of it.

I definitely feel you on Aquinas. Reading through some of his stuff has definitely helped me understand Aristotle. He really is a ridiculously good reader of him. I haven't looked at his commentaries on De Anima but thanks for the heads up.

If you want to learn about a field, it's best to do it properly. While it's good to read what you like, you shouldn't do it all the time; if you do, then you'll end up being completely uneducated. Philosophy and Science are difficult in the fact that you can't just start anywhere, like you could with, say, history.

Also, what if he likes Plato, and is asking for suggestions?

I think you nailed it with your comment on using contemporary problems/terms to interpret philosophies which were written with no intent to address those problems with those terms. I mean it makes sense from the angle of trying to harness previous philosophies for the sake of attacking whatever, now, are the problems at hand; but like you said, it just isn't relevant or even really intelligible to someone looking for the original, older perspective, especially when that desire isn't so much a choice as it is a necessity stemming from not knowing the contemporary state of philosophy. Like I try to understand Aristotle for Aristotle's sake not ONLY because I want to understand Aristotle, but because I have basically no understanding of modern philosophers, and certainly not of any from the 20th C.

It's funny that you mention de re/de dicto because that was one of the more modern issues which reared its head in a commentary I read on one of the analytics. Understanding of re/dicto was presupposed by whoever was writing, and I had to scramble to get even a cursory grasp on what he was talking about, really just what problem he was addressing at all. I maybe half understood it even then, and certainly don't understand it now.

On one hand that's frustrating, but on the other hand I prefer it to just "maxing out" and understanding everything. There's a decent bit of less-advanced stuff which is still valuable, and the harder stuff is available out there for when/if we decide we want to really get into it. The hiccup only comes when we think we're getting something accessible and it knocks us on our asses. I remember seeing Gregory Vlastos get a ton of mention as the 20th C's top dog Platonic scholar, so I read a compilation of his essays and was almost immediately bowled over with modern modal logic. One of the essays was a response to an essay which had originally been in German; the German philosopher then responded to Vlastos' essay; Vlastos then responded to the response, appending his second response to his first in this compilation, translating none of the German OR the Greek. That's when I really knew I was just the dumb spectator in a debate I couldn't hope to understand.

>the five dialogues

>not starting with the pre-socratics

whelp, another mind ruined by ((socrates))

Symposium, then Republic are the only other required readings for Plato. Anything else you should only do out of intense interest.

For Aristotle, I recommend Metaphysics, then The Nicomachean Ethics, then Politics, then Poetics.

Skip the rest of the Greek and Roman Philosophers and skip to Augustine, but there is some other great literature in there that I recommend reading.

He's not boring, he's just rigorous and his density is an artifact of that rigor. He takes care to define the elements that make up his syllogism and he sets out to construct a systematic philosophy that synthesizes the pre-socratics, Plato, and himself using a predicate logic.

Just because he's not poetic doesn't mean he isn't interesting. You just got pleb filtered because you came into philosophy expecting it to be a poetic experience and think everyone writes like Plato and Camus. Face it kid, philosophy isn't for you nor for anyone who thinks like this.