I’m always looking for tips on learning I’d be curious to know your approach to it?
A little bit about my own current learning style. I’m a software developer today but I original studied electrical engineering. You can’t just randomly jump into using differential calculus to get the waveform you want for your circuit. It’s not like clicking Internet hyperlinks to get to some easily understandable compact piece of information. There is a sequence that needs to be followed. You need to understand simpler concepts to get to the deeper ones which is what book format offers. When specializing in some scientific field you have to read full books or at least some similar methodological approach.
On the flip side of that, sometimes I just need a snippet of code to do something. I don’t always need to get bogged down reading a full book to get information that is good enough. Google is my friend (and AI now), There are a lot of books. And we don’t’ have time to read them all. And most of them aren’t worth reading entirely or at all. Do I need to read all Islamic jurisprudence to “really” understand Islam? Do I really have to pay for all the Scientology courses to ” really” understand Scientology? Do I have to read every communist intellectual’s views on communism to understand the concept? Do have to buy all Ayn Rand’s books from ARI to understand Objectivism? And so.
In theory philosophy should be more like physics but its not… or at least not in this moment in time. And that IMO is due to aforementioned complexity. I have never read a single philosophy or political book that has ever impressed me. Even the classics are all mostly junk…. but with some brilliant thoughts in the mix. IMO what people that adopt various canned ideologies are mostly doing is adopting those limited but captivating thoughts. Even most that claim to be very religious don’t know their own religious books very well if you ask them finer questions. So my approach to reading philosophy is about getting highlights of different views rather than delving too deep into a particular view. I find it is far more effective way to learn philosophy. You miss some of the details but you cover a lot more useful ground.
The Internet is perfect for this. click. click click. You read the highlights of x then cross correlate with y and z’s views somewhere else. It’s same approach I take to reading journalism from competing interests to help fine tune my philosophical views.. I look for common points of agreement. For contradictions between the different views. For major omissions. For unprincipled arguments. Abuse of analogy, Framing. Sophistry. And other sorts of inconsistencies. You can’t do this sort of broad philosophical analysis if you get too bogged down in a particular corner.