Philosophy — Susan Rigetti

Introduction

April 27th, 2021

Six years ago, I wrote and shared a little guide to studying physics called “So You Want to Learn Physics” in the hope that it would help anyone who wanted to learn physics on their own. As it turned out, people found it pretty useful (as of today, over six hundred thousand people have used it!), and ever since I published it, I’ve found myself wondering what else along those same lines I might know that I can share with others. Writing similar guides for philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and classics — all subjects that I have studied in depth both formally and informally — has long been on my to-do lists. And here, at last, is a guide to studying philosophy.

There is a kind of intellectual joy that comes from studying philosophy, and it has everything to do with the nature of the discipline. At the heart of it all is the desire to make sense of the world and our place within it — a painfully deep human desire to know who we are, what it means that we are beings that think and feel and perceive, how we should live and how we should treat others, and to know what is the nature of every other field of study (language, science, mathematics, economics…). (Note: It is no accident that so many other formal disciplines — math, linguistics, science, etc. — were originally considered within the realm of philosophy until they were mature enough to branch off on their own.)

In short, philosophy is so rewarding because it is concerned with the questions that are most fundamental and universal to the human experience. There is great satisfaction in thinking through fundamental, important things deeply, and I promise you that studying philosophy will completely change your life.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a roadmap so that anyone who follows and completes it will walk away with the knowledge equivalent to an undergraduate degree in philosophy. General philosophy education in the United States is split into undergraduate-level coursework, which is comprised of a series of overview courses of increasing difficulty that each focus on a different branch of philosophy (such as philosophy of language, or ethics, or metaphysics), and graduate-level coursework, which is generally comprised of highly specialized and narrowly-focused graduate seminars that focus on, for example, specific philosophers or philosophical theories.

While I was putting this guide together, I went back and forth quite a bit on whether to focus only on undergraduate-level philosophy coursework or to provide both an undergraduate and graduate curriculum (the way I did for the physics guide). While I would have loved to provide the latter option, I ultimately decided to only offer an undergraduate curriculum simply because of just how highly specialized many graduate seminars can be (for example, there are many that focus on just the work of one philosopher or, in even more extreme cases, just one book or paper). But this doesn’t mean you aren’t getting an advanced education in philosophy when you study the courses in this guide: One key thing to know about the undergraduate curriculum, especially once you get into the more advanced courses, is that in many philosophy departments, the upper-level philosophy courses (such as philosophy of math and philosophy of science) are cross-listed as graduate courses and these classes will have students that are junior and senior undergraduates and will also have MA and PhD students.

Another important thing I should note is that there are two main traditions or approaches to Western philosophy: analytic and continental. While I have included an introduction to continental philosophy as an elective course at the end of the curriculum, most of the courses in this guide (especially in the second half) are courses in analytic philosophy. I decided on an analytic-focused approach for two reasons. First, most undergraduate and graduate programs in the United States have analytic-focused philosophy curriculums. Second, I strongly believe that a primarily continental-focused education supplemented by analytic electives is incomplete in a way that an analytic-focused education supplemented by continental electives is not. Logic, mathematics, and science and our philosophical approaches to them are so incredibly fundamental to the world we live in that to not study these in the way that they are taught in analytic-focused programs would lead to what I would consider an incomplete philosophical education.

Remember that anyone can understand philosophy. The joy of living an examined life is accessible to anyone who has (1) the desire to think about things a little more deeply and (2) the humility and curiosity to learn from the philosophers of the past and present.

Godspeed!