Episode 36: Worries About Wasting Time And Effort Studying Philosophical Works

I had an interesting but short conversation today in Facebook that I'm going to use as sort of a launching point for thinking about some bigger picture issues having to do with how you study philosophy, particularly if you're doing it on your own, if you're somebody who can't do it full time in a school with the guidance of professors (which, by the way, is probably a bit overrated. It's kind of a grab bag. But that's a conversation for another time.)

So this person was commenting on a post that I made, where I was linking to the piece that I wrote last night about Alasdair MacIntyre and some of my memories of interactions with him that, to me, revealed a kind of character that I've talked about before in this podcast, specifically with MacIntyre. So I don't need to go over any of that again.

The person probably expressed themselves poorly because what they were asking for is something that I'm asked for an awful lot in comments and emails and AMAs. Which is: tell me what works of a philosopher are most important or essential for me to begin with.