<p>Wow, damn, I just wanted to know what job you could get in philosophy and now I gotta leave? bummer…</p>
<p>or I could jut rehash a comment and stay!</p>
<p>um…</p>
<p>Read it in Tina Fey’s voice</p>
<p>Don’t feign ignorance and play the victim card Woody. You are way too transparent to pull it off and its very unbecoming. You always making snide comments about majors that YOU deem useless and stupid so seriously doubt your intentions were sincere.</p>
<p>Your right…</p>
<p>Please forgive me! I do not wish to anger the great and mighty kmazza! I apologize…</p>
<p>Of course, I also really did not know what job you could get with a philosophy major and now I do.</p>
<p>*You’re</p>
<p>I’m too grim to anger easy so you are better off saving snide remarks.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter what undergrad or grad degree one gets, the person still has to market themselves as the product of their education. There is no red carpet laid out.</p>
<p>Reading philosophy, as I’ve been told, is primarily about intent aka where the person is going. This may mean not completely focusing on every little minute detail of every sentence (yes I’m saying this as an English major). So don’t necessary skim, but don’t let yourself get bogged down by the verbose language. Hopefully that should make reading go by faster and make your assignments a little less painful!</p>
<p>Okay, the problem persists.</p>
<p>I tried to pick up Husserl again tonight and I read 10 pages, coming out just as ignorant as I went in and significantly more annoyed.</p>
<p>The concepts are difficult for me, but I’ve been able to piece them together so far through the lectures and office hours and discussion with others in the class. It’s the writing. He uses conventional terms in unconventional ways (well that’s technically the translator’s fault) and doesn’t bother to let us know what they MEAN!</p>
<p>I really want to do the reading to be responsible, but I feel like I’m wasting my time because I literally come away with nothing. If we had a pop quiz, I’d get the same grade whether or not I’d done the reading.</p>
<p>^Well usually if you have a quality textbook (and I assume most are) that they’ll go over the concepts mentioned in the reading, if not summarizing the reading itself. I think for my accelerated Philosophy 100 class (ironic how I could somehow take classes that required Philo 100 as a pre-req before FULFILLING said pre-req, not quite sure how I pulled that off) we’d have to read LARGE portions of Descartes’ 6 Treatise… suffice it to say it took me 2 hours and I don’t remember bull about it. But what I remember is the book had explained a lot of it so effectively I could run through the readings and glean only the most important pieces. The issue with some of the “big picture” Philosophers is that they get really bogged down in the like… “To prove my Point A, I need to hold Laws A, B, and C constant. I can hold C constant but Law A requires me to prove Subpoints 1-5 and B requires it’s own Subpoints 1-7… and each subpoint requires 3 Proofs…” okay maybe not quite that bad but the idea is they have to keep referencing the infantesimily small to make the general statement about the world they want to use as the crux of their Big Picture… so a lot of it is just trudging through the Socratic dialogue. I used to like Kant more than I do now… someone you might like is Marx - at least on the topic of Death he’s able to make his point without so much of the droll language… and the point he makes is just a wee bit mindblowing (my professor called it being Gobsmacked) in such a great profound way.</p>
<p>Or…long story short? Take as many Philo classes as you can online where you’re allowed to keep the book, google, and even wikipedia open on your browser. You’d be amazed at how well you do when someone else can just simplify each of those 12 page Treatise down to “Okay, this is what he’s saying and this is what he means by what he’s saying, now how can that be extrapolated to these questions?”</p>
<p>I know I complained in another thread but if I can read about ideas as dumb as ecofeminism then you should be able to read about your major…</p>
<p>Maybe you can find somewhere online that helps summarize it for you. Like a sparknotes for philosophy</p>
<p>Anecdote: One of the 20th century’s top Kant scholars once taught a graduate seminar on Hegel. After several meetings, he closed the book and said - in his Atlanta southern drawl - “Gentlemen, there’s nothing here.” And they all decided to go read someone else.</p>
<p>Moral of the story: sometimes you don’t get philosophy because there is nothing to get. Don’t use it as an excuse, but it’s not always your fault.</p>
<p>There’s always something to get, though it may be outdated or have no real application. For instance, I believe Plato’s idea of the kallipolis to be absurd, but there is an idea and thought process that goes along with it nonetheless.</p>
<p>Read the texts and secondary sources and go to the lectures to clarify and connect the ideas of the texts for you.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed in philosophy classes that during a lecture, people may have their intuitiveness get in the way of what a philosopher may be saying. It happens to me when I’m reading some of this stuff. You have to read arguments within philosophy without letting your outside opinions or notions get in the way.</p>
<p>I personally enjoy reading Philosophy, but it took me awhile. I would say ask a tutor to explain what all of the terms mean to you. Philosophy is actually a language of its own, and if you don’t know the terminology (substance, particular, individual, true cause, privation, etc) it can seem like gibberish. Once you get those down, the texts actually become quite easy to decipher.</p>