Reading Philosophy Texts
Reading and Understanding Material from the History of Philosophy
The following text is a guideline for students. Other teachers should feel free to use and adapt this material if they find it helpful. Please cite me when it is appropriate, and if this guideline was helpful in your teaching or did not work at all, I would like to hear it. You can contact me at rima dot hussein at jhu dot edu. If you have not read the basic entry on reading philosophy texts, I recommend doing so first.
When we are confused about what a contemporary philosopher might mean in their writing, we have two valuable tools: linguistic intuition and common sense. We can ask what a reasonable person in this, our current world, could mean and probably get far with whatever we guess. When reading texts in the history of philosophy, we are not afforded such a luxury, so we have to acquire additional skills to understand what an author meant. In the following, I will review a few basic things to consider when dealing with texts from the history of philosophy.
I. The Primary Source
The primary source is the original historical text in which an author states a position. A secondary source is a source about this text. The process of reading primary source is in principle no different from reading a contemporary text, there is just more uncertainty and there are more puzzles. I will demonstrate this with an example:
“Of those who declared that the first principle is one, moving and indefinite, Anaximander […] said that the indefinite was the first principle and element of things that are, and he was the first to introduce this name for the first principle [i.e., he was the first to call the first principle indefinite]. He says that the first principle is neither water nor any other of the things called elements, but some other nature which is indefinite, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them. The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time, as he says in rather poetical language.” (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 24.13-21 = 12B1+A9)
The first step is to read the passage once superficially and note down what you understand from the text. In this passage from Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics the topic is something called “first principles” and Simplicius claims that Anaximander thinks that they are “indefinite.” This is not how we speak or think about things anymore. I immediately had many questions that I wanted to answer in order to understand what was going on. What is a first principle? Why would it be moving and indefinite? Who is Anaximander? What are things that are? Why does Anaximander rule out that they are water? What are elements? What is a nature? What did the Ancients think about the heavens and the worlds in them? How do things perish? Necessity, in which sense? What does it mean to pay penalty and retribution? What did the Ancients think about the order of time? And who is Simplicius and what is this Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics?
So, the second step would be to note down what is unclear and find out about it.
You may of course use google to find out about some terms. But I recommend finding sources which explain terms within their historical context. Here is why:
For instance, when typing "first principle" into google the first result is this text:
A first principle is a basic, foundational, self-evident proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. In philosophy, first principles are taught by Aristotelians, and nuanced versions of first principles are referred to as postulates by Kantians.
What is the problem with this definition? Google tells us that first principles are assumptions or propositions, linguistic phenomena. How could they be moving?
When consulting the academic literature which is more sensitive to context, a lot more nuance appears. This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which deals with Anaximander's notion of first principles:
"[...] there is an original (and originating) indefinite stuff, from which all the heavens and the worlds in them come to be. This claim probably means that the original state of the universe was an indefinitely large mass of stuff that was also indefinite in its character. This stuff then gave rise through its own inherent power to the ingredients that themselves constitute the world as we perceive it." Full text here.
The first principle is some stuff which is the origin of the world, rather than a proposition. It is an entity with physical features, not some idea. The Stanford Encyclopedia also contains a lot of further explanations that sensibly contextualize the passage and explain many of the questions I had. The main point here is that the sense in which people used certain core technical terms might be strange seeming to us. It is strange to us to think of a principle as something that can have material existence. In short, we have to be extremely sensitive to historical context.
Good sources to consult: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a Cambridge Companion on your topic.
II. Getting Oriented in the Larger Context
Here is where it gets hard. We may not find answers to our questions in primary sources. Why?
Unfortunately, as is common with historical texts we may not be able to fully understand the problem at hand and the context of the debate. The core difficulties are (i) the semantic availability of the language, (ii) incomplete textual evidence, and due to these uncertainties, often much (iii) disagreement in the scholarship.
(i) A difficulty for interpretation is that the meaning transported through language is not clear. The meaning of these text will evade us if we do not read Ancient Greek, and even for someone trained in the language, it will be impossible to say with certainty what is meant. Ancient languages are lost and so is the meaning of the words in them. Further, there are frequently many translations available, but the differences in translation matter. It is important to use a so-called “critical edition” which usually involves an edition of the primary material that includes notes on terms that may not be clear, and when such editions are translated, they include a translation that has been approved by experts.
(ii) The most common first approach to clarifying what could be meant, is to look for contextual cues in the very source you are reading. What inferences does Simplicius draw from the idea that first principles are “indefinite”? What properties does he assign to indefinite things and what associations does he seem to have? This is often successful, so we should start there. But there are also simply sometimes gaps in what we have available. Sometimes all we have are two snippets of text one of which is philosophy and the other a shopping list. It will not be easy to articulate a coherent context for what is said, when we have so little material.
(iii) At this point, we should consult what other scholars have thought about this specific text. There often are incredibly clear interpretations available, which will go a long way for our purposes. But with historical texts, it is often difficult to find a definitive interpretation. There are frequently competing interpretations, and we have to make a choice which of these interpretations fits the text best.
In my own research, I try to make this choice by going through a few further steps:
First, I look at the author’s other works, to get a general cursory picture of their view, if I can.
I look into other authors’ works of the time and with whom the author is debating. Maybe Anaximander is just replying to a contemporary’s theses without explicitly mentioning him (in this case, he is indeed answering to Thales).
I will look for cues within the larger intellectual and social context of the time, to figure out what society, science, and life might have been like.
I consult the secondary literature on Simplicius and Anaximander to see what their relation was and others read the content of this work.
Finally, I repeat the whole process. After that, I would be ready to give an expert account of the passage.
Fortunately, that is not what you need to do as a student. This is the task of us, historians of philosophy and we are here to clarify these contexts as best as we can. But you might share with us the initial confusion while reading and it is important to be aware that an interpretations involves many moving parts. At minimum, you should flag and underline what you don’t understand and bring your questions to the lecture or to discussion section.
Good luck finding your path through the text!