How To: Philosophy

I'm so almost done, I can almost taste it, except that's probably actually just the Milkway chocolate-y goodness that I ate, but the end of the school year probably tastes the same way.

Anyway, I still have a philosophy reading/debate/paper to write, and also a Spanish final that I really should study for, but no one actually taught me how to study so that's out of the question, and also a linguistics take home final/paper to do. And I still have to clean things. I hate cleaning. But what I'm here to talk about today, while I'm procrastinating like a crazy person, is philosophy.

I don't understand why philosophers have to write like the goal is to get as few ideas across as possible in the most pages as possible. Especially modern day philosophers. Like, I maybe understand (not really) why people from the 12th century write word upon word upon word of the exact same thing, and I also acknowledge that most of these are originally written in Japanese, and so it could be lost in translation, but if you're writing in 1995, like my current philosopher, maybe you could speed it up a little bit? This is the age of technological freedom and not spending more than five minutes reading a thing lest you bore yourself to tears! Get with the program, um, Merold!

His name is Merold Westphal. Let me know if you know what he's trying to say about religion and postmodernism.

I guess there's probably a reason I'm not going to be a philosopher. I do like thinking about things and concepts and ideas, especially when I can understand them, but I do not think I could spend my life writing and analyzing texts about life. So I give lots and lots of credit to those people who can.

Anyway, when you start out reading a philosophical text, you should always have your highlighter handy. Because if highlighting passages doesn't make you feel like you're making progress, nothing else will. Be careful, though, because unless you have one of those fancy highlighters with the clear tip, you might accidentally highlight too much and then you'll wonder what you've done to deserve such anger.

Also, highlighter related, you should probably actually read the entire thing you're highlighting and decide where to stop. Because I just did this: I was highlighting a sentence that was seemingly very relevant to my thoughts, but I didn't read the whole sentence, and I was highlighting, but all of a sudden, the information wasn't important any more, but I had already colored half of it bright neon yellow and how could I stop now, in the middle of a sentence, because either it would look horrible, or the last half of the sentence would think I didn't love it and I would be the creator of a huge familiar tragedy! So I highlighted the entire ginormous paragraph and it's not even important. Snerbs.

I also advise that you, once you've read the first couple of pages, go to the last page and read the essay backwards. Because the last paragraph actually has some important summarizing information in it. And, writers, tell me this: Why don't you put the essential informative summaries AT THE BEGINNING of the text? Is it because you hate me? I could have saved myself half an hour of trying to figure out your argument on the first page if I had know you put the important stuff at the end! I don't understand your irrational abhorrence of clarity.

But, you really do need to start at the beginning. Because then, at least you've tried. Effort is 93.7% of the battle. I calculated that. In my head. Because I'm a math major.