Mastering ! If so, no one would get around to primary texts! My answer would be: it depends on what is the student’s purpose in reading. As your question suggests, there are two sides to this issue. One the one hand, what does it matter if you have read Aristotle (for example) if you are unaware of how Aristotle’s work is understood and put to use in contemporary philosophy? Otherwise, you are studying history rather than philosophy (nothing wrong with history, but it’s a different subject). This last argument conceives of philosophy as a contemporary subject matter, like physics or sociology. If the purpose of reading philosophical books is to learn philosophy, then starting with the secondary material is at least efficient and perhaps even necessary. On the other hand, suppose the purpose is not to master the subject content, but rather to learn to philosophise. That means, I suppose, to think critically and carefully about problems, examine one’s assumptions, draw...

That's a lot of fascinating questions. I'm not sure, though, that your initial empirical observation is valid. Sure, there have been many novelists with an interest in philosophy; but there have also been many philosophers with an interest in literature. You only have to look at Plato and Aristotle for clear examples. Nevertheless, the relation between philosophical activity and literature generally, and the novel specifically, remains a matter for debate. Some interesting questions in this area are: what is it about literary types of language use that either can serve, or get in the way, of philosophy? Is the idea of a fictional world, narrative or character a useful resource for philosophy or, precisely because it is fictional, an irrelevance? And, in the reverse direction, what literary devices are already, and perhaps inevitably, at work in philosophical writing? What is not very often asked, though, is the question you raise. Namely, whether philosophy completes itself in...

To be sure, there may be a performative contradiction in philosophy, insofar as to ask the value of the question is to ask a question. However, that bit of circularity does not mean that no philosopher has ever pursued the issue. On the contrary, many philosophers have asked the question of questioning. When Socrates claimed that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ this was not simply a statement, but part of an argument that pursued the issue of what type of life has value – indeed, what is value as such – and whether or not specifically philosophical questioning should be a part of it. In other words, it was not an assumption, but something argued for. Similarly with Kant in the famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger also tackle the issue, and do so in a way that seeks to uncover a mode of philosophising that is able to avoid traditional forms of questioning. The former in investigating the value of belief in truth, the latter in investigating whether the...

An interesting question. Your observation seems accurate. I don't know why people (I assume you mean the non-philosophical public) feel as you describe. However, I can explain why philosophers might be more willing to take a 'faith-based belief system' seriously. A scientist is professionally incapable of taking faith seriously. Scientific method, at least as it is frequently understood, begins by excluding faith as a proper object for scientific enquiry. Philosophical method, however, does not do so. Faith can be philosophically investigated, evaluated, perhaps even in some way justified. To be sure, many philosophers, at the end of their enquiries, arrive at a rejection of faith, but that is not a point from which philosophy commences.

An excellent question. There are two ways of answering this. First, historically, a philosopher like Sartre developed over his long career, and the ‘pure’ existentialism that he espoused in the 1940s is greatly modified in the political thinking of the 1950s and later. However, this is probably not a very interesting answer. I mention it only because sometimes we can fall into the trap of asking ‘what does Sartre (or Kant, or whoever) say about X?’ without specifying which Sartre or Kant. A more interesting answer concerns the type of political, psychological and social illusions that go, it is argued, hand in hand with capitalism, and which are dispelled by socialism or communism. Insofar as existentialism develops a metaphysics of the true nature of reality, of the self, and of social relations between selves, then an authentic existence would be one that implicitly or explicitly, recognises these truths and in particular does not take a falsehood as an excuse for abdicating...

An excellent question. Let us think this through just considering the ordinary usage of these words in English. Although the terms seem to overlap in the way you describe, in fact they appear to belong to entirely different realms. A ‘right’ is generally taken to be a moral claim that anyone who wishes to perform a certain action, or maintain in a particular state, ought to be allowed to do so. Rights may be protected by laws, but we normally do not think of them as created by laws, or that they should only apply in certain places, times, or for certain people. So, if there is a right to free speech in one nation, people there would believe that citizens of another nation ought also to have that right. A ‘privilege’, on the other hand, tends to be used as a legal or social term. It refers to the fact that some action or course of events is permitted within a local place or time, and only because of some particular property of the person involved. Someone who belongs to a particular club...

'Nature' is a difficult concept, with a long and varied history. Thus, whenever someone comes up with an argument that something is ‘natural’ or ‘un-natural’, the first question that should be asked is ‘what do they mean by ‘nature’, and how can this concept of nature be justified?’ Broadly speaking (very broadly) there are two conceptions. First, nature as ‘of this world’, and thus as opposed to ‘supernatural’ (for example, pertaining to God). Under this conception, human activity would generally count as natural, along with rat-behaviour, tulip-behaviour, and granite-behaviour. However, if we take away the possibility of the supernatural (if we argue that, at least for these purposes, we can discount the realm of the divine), then natural is everything, and thus doesn’t really have much meaning at all. Second, nature is the world insofar as human beings do not interfere; as opposed to, say, ‘culture’. It is this second meaning that would be in use in the kind of argument about genetic...

See the note to page 122 of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. He writes '...the arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction.' The point is not quite what you take it to be. Hume is considering the nature of scepticism (here he considers Berkeley to be a sceptic), and he claims it to be perfectly possible rationally but perfectly impossible psychologically. 'Conviction' is a psychological claim, about what I expect to happen next, for example. Your notion of bigotry is interesting. Why is Hume not just being stubborn, even pig-headed? Broadly speaking, it is because he believes that reason, on its own, is quite useless. Its purpose is to help us analyse our experiences, and modify our beliefs on that basis. Reason, for Hume, serves experience and the psychology of conviction, rather than the other way around. Since he is always happy to look at new empirical evidence, he certainly hasn’t got the closed mind of a bigot. It’s just that he has no truck with the...

The quote is from Twilight of the Idols , first section, and not quite accurate but close enough. To be sure, Nietzsche was not afraid to exaggerate, when he could get some rhetorical mileage out of it. Here, his point is not unrelated to the Darwinian idea that competition among species means that only those species or variants that are best adapted will survive. In the case of human beings, Nietzsche argues, I can change my way of life, habits, and so forth -- and these changes make me stronger in the sense that I am able to out-compete other humans (taking ‘compete’ in as broad a sense as possible). (Significantly, the same reasoning applies to groups of people with respect to other groups.) His point is supplemented by the observation that generally among animals (and, he would claim, among earlier human societies) the sick are not protected and cared for as we believe is just today. For a gazelle, say, being weakened is essentially the same as being dead. Today, we tend to think of this...

It is worth noting that Descartes' version of this problem is made all the more difficult by the fact that thinking-substance and material-substance were considered to be of radically different types. Accordingly, it is not just the case that access to my thought, and proof of my existence as a mind, are accidentally in the first person, but necessarily so. Thought is not the kind of property that a material object could exhibit. From this is also follows that if a material object does exhibit clear signs of rational thought, then it could not but contain a mind. If Descartes is able to observe in himself actions of the body that necessarily depend upon thought, he could then looks for such actions in other bodies and thus prove other minds. The problem is proving the necessity of the dependence relation. However, this notion of two distinct types of substance is by no means universally accepted! If, in some way, thought were a feature of our bodies (of a physical brain, say), then the...