Self education as a hobby - how to properly do it?

[YourStepDad]

As far as your interest in history is concerned, I wholeheartedly recommend BBC Radio 4's In Our Time with Sir Melvyn Bragg. A new podcast is released every week, but if you're able to make it you can just tune in at 9 PM GMT. The show has dealt with a plethora of subjects; very few of them pertaining to military history, which I'm grateful for. They always treat one particular subject and invite three renowned scholars who know a thing or two about it. A few random topics they've had broadcasts on: Hadrian's Wall, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Ice Age, Custer's Last Stand, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, Dante's Inferno, The Druids, Arab Conquests, The Black Death, ...

Programme's website
Episode archive

Thanks Orchid, guess I'll have to give another chance to podcasts.

 

[kurczak]

Is philosophy useless in materialistic grounds (unless you are a philosophy teacher/writer)?

You can get some ***** with tirades about how the simulacra of phenomena in itself are intrinsically linked to the immanence of the prevalent discourse of essence of knowledge.

It's usually pretty hairy and judgy though.

 

[Mage246]

Philosophy is what happens when you eliminate anything even remotely useful in a statement.

 

[Suspicous Pilgrim]

I like this thread. Posting mostly because i want this thread added to the tracker, but i also have a question.
What the hell is philosophy? How do i get introduced to it?
Is philosophy useless in materialistic grounds (unless you are a philosophy teacher/writer)?

For starting to learn philosophy you should try out "The History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps)" podcast and read further about what interests you. Whenever you read any philosophical treatises you should have annotations at hand so that you don't misinterpret the text.

Philosophy is the behind-the-scenes guy of modern science and culture. It started off as blended with science to create pseudosciences such as in the case of alchemy or astrology. Rationalism and empiricism, the two "philosophies" science practices nowadays, have replaced all the nonsense such as homeopathy however.

Philosophy is what created political systems like Marxism, ethical systems like utilitarianism, and some ideas in philosophy has been used or misused to create ideologies like fascism (ubermensch, for example, is a Nietzschen concept). These systems are constructed for the sake of finding how society can live justly (like Plato's Republic) or happily (communism, utilitarianism).

Philosophy influences pop-culture. Philosophy is read by highly educated people who create plays, movies, and music so you'll see ideas like absurdism in the theatre and existentialism and postmodernism in the movies, and so forth. Philosophy itself doesn't directly influence anything - it has more of a "trickle down" effect that can have wide effects on the spirit of the age and society's mood. Because of that, in my opinion, it functions as an analysis of society.

But yeah if you happen to have a degree in philosophy you're doomed to academia.

 

[Swadius 2.0]

I like this thread. Posting mostly because i want this thread added to the tracker, but i also have a question.
What the hell is philosophy? How do i get introduced to it?
Is philosophy useless in materialistic grounds (unless you are a philosophy teacher/writer)?

I don't think you'll get a universal agreement about what philosophy actually is, I guess one of the things you notice first while doing it is how much disagreement there is about almost every topic, and the meaning of philosophy is not safe from this either. To me I guess it's kinda like very sincere, very engaged, and very rigorous argumentation on just about anything. This rigor often turns the arguments to the more "general" side of things. The unspoken rules, common understandings, and the underlying premises of arguments are scrutinized. This might cause passerbyers to exclaim in that this is dumb because these things as obviously true or false and dismiss the arguments altogether. But what I find to be often the case, even if some of these things are often agreed to be either true or false, is that not a lot of people agree about why the reasons it is so, and philosophy is more or less the parsing of these views to find the strongest and most robust ones.

I'm not so sure if that's a particularly good description of what philosophy is, rather because reading back now it just seems like I'm just describing what philosophy does instead. But I suppose if you're thinking about practicing it, it's probably just about as relevant.

I got introduced to it by reading some of the great number of amateur philosophy books that's put out there. In particular I quite like Stephen Law's not-so-serious The philosophy files. Philosophy might seem like this huge and/but obscure monolithic thing, but a lot of people specialize themselves around one or two particular topics which mostly remain quite separate from one another. The Philosophy files represents this very well, it grabs some of the more robust, hardier, but also weird view points from each of these branches and presents them in colloquial language.

Mostly you pick a philosophy branch that interests you. No one that practice philosophy covers everything in philosophy, except Bertrand Russel. Theory of mind; philosophy of law, of politics, of religion, of ethics, of math; meta-ethics; meta-physics; Logic; Epistemology; etc. One of the things about philosophy, or western philosophy anyway, is that it strives to be as open as possible. There's a lot of free writing and encyclopedic knowledge online, most events and gatherings are as well, and there's nary an admittance fee.

The arguments used in philosophy and the breakdown of them into logical bricks and how they relate to every other is a little bit like how law is argued. Philosophy students often go to law school ; they their philosophy major as pre-law from where I'm from. The argument about The Forms might not be of any use, but it's logical structure, or bits of it, can prove handy as can the knowledge of how other people argued their points. I guess you learn how to not instantly disregard exotic claims, or just don't do it as much, nor do you take some of the views that holds your world together that seriously since it's going to change a lot.  It's also touted to help your writing style be succinct in the face of incredible complexity, although as my writing style attests I personally doubt this point.

Otherwise, it's like the mental stat, it certainly not bad to have, and it helps out with a lot of other work or not, but it probably won't do anything for you in the hard bread-to-table world on its own. You could go around and use it to annoy important people in your city, but they'll probably lynch your ass somewhere down the line.

Edit: Apparently, philosophy graduates' salary rank higher than you might expect. http://www.payscale.com/2008-best-colleges/degrees.asp

Doing what exactly, I'm not quite sure .

 

[FrisianDude]

I totally read 'hobby' as 'baby' just now.

 

[Sound Chaser]

You could also attend university lectures. At least where I'm from, they are public events. Also, if you don't know which way to progress, you could refer to a university course curriculum and see what material they use.

 

[crodio]

Thanks Pilgrim and Swadius, i think i'll take a look at the podcasts and see if i can find that book or a similar one.
And yes Sound, lectures are public here so i might find myself there maybe, if i can withstand the smell of wine and weed at my university's Faculty of Humanities 

It's usually pretty hairy and judgy though.

***** is *****

 

[Untitled.]

This should be common knowledge by now, but if something puzzles you, type in "site:.edu" and "type:.pdf" or "type:.ppt" in your Google searches. This yields university lectures in PDF or PowerPoint, respectively.

 

[Vraelomon]

I searched for "bananas:.edu" and ended up Here.

 

[YourStepDad]

I totally read 'hobby' as 'baby' just now.

Well, I'm trying to make this hobby my baby so it's not all wrong.