Approaching philosophical reading
Introduction
Why this page?
Advanced students in philosophy will discover that reading philosophy is time consuming. Yet a good undergraduate degree in philosophy comes inevitably with a significant reading list. Our reading lists at the University of Cambridge require students to trawl through hundreds of articles and book chapters per academic year.
At graduate level, many students may in addition feel the need to start keeping up with the professional literature in specific areas.
The most obvious approach to reading is simply to sit down and read an article in full, from beginning to end, and move on to the next when done. This is typically not the best use of your time, and it will not allow one to cover a lot of ground. Moreover, this approach to reading tends to be rather passive, which is not conducive to memory and retention.
Accordingly, an advanced approach to philosophical reading has at least two aims. The first is better time-management, the second a more active engagement with a piece of reading.
On this page I offer some of my own ideas and strategies for improving your philosophical reading skills and meeting these two aims. Any suggestions for improvement are welcome at ms2416@cam.ac.uk. For those familiar with GitHub, feel free to suggest changes by making a pull request.
What makes philosophy special
The guidelines and strategies I will present here are intended to help students to develop their skill at reading philosophical texts. You might wonder why I am pitching this so specifically; why focus just on philosophy?
On the one hand, it is true that much of what we will say may be useful for people studying in fields other than philosophy. On the other, however, philosophical texts tend to have distinctive features that demand a very specific approach.
One example is the extreme focus on argument. The argument of a philosophical text is not, as in most other forms of writing, a mere means to an end. It is not a way—perhaps the best way—of convincing a reader of a conclusion or theoretical outlook. In philosophy, the argument should be approached in the way the sciences think of the data presented in a study. It is where the action is. This focus on argument is characteristic of philosophy, and it requires you to approach a philosophical text in a specific way: you are primarily interested in finding where the argument is, how it works, and why the author bothered to include sections that are not directly involved in making this argument.
This is just one example of what is distinctive of philosophical texts. Perhaps you can think of more yourself.
Reading tips
Why the advice to ‘take notes’ is at best incomplete
Often you hear people advice students to take notes while they are reading. This is easier said than done. What should you note down? How detailed should your notes be? It is easy to ignore that good note-taking is question driven. Only if you know what you are trying to answer can you assess whether the notes you take—notes you take in the service of formulating an answer to your question(s)—are good notes. So instead of focusing on the notes, let’s focus on the questions you should ask of any philosophical text.
The 25-Minute Encounter
The aim of the following structured set of question is to generate a page or two of notes on the reading you want to do. It is designed for reading journal articles or chapters in collections. (If you plan to read an entire monograph, or to read a chapter of a monograph, these questions might not all make very good sense. Perhaps we will add a separate plan for those pieces of writing.)
In due course I will make this questionnaire available as a downloadable PDF-file.
The First Glimpse (5 minutes)
The first questions you should ask yourself are superficial. They deal with the paper’s structure and ‘metadata’. What kind of work is this? How many pages do we have? How many sections? Answering these questions can be done on a first glipse of the work. Don’t ignore this step, because it will give you a first impression of what to expect of the paper when you start actually reading it. Also, if there is an abstract, don’t read it yet—that’s better done in the next stage.
- What kind of work is this?
- How many pages?
- Who wrote it?
- What is the title?
- Based on the title, what is the paper is about?
- How many sections?
- Based on the section headings, what is the debate the paper engages in?
- In which section can I find the heart of the argument?
Mining, Searching, Scanning (15 minutes)
Now it is time carefully to read the abstract, if there is one. Answer the following questions based on a selective scanning, searching, and mining of the text.
- What is the central claim defended? (Paragraph answer desirable)
- Who is the main opponent?
- What is the main argument? (Paragraph answer desirable)
- Is there a technical innovation that makes this argument possible?
- Does the paper make a negative or a positive point? (Or both?)
- Does the author consider objections to the main argument? If so, how many?
The Network Placement (5 minutes)
Take a minute or two to revisit your answers to the ‘First Glimpse’ section and revise where needed
- What was new to me?
- What seems useful to remember?
- What other articles did I read that made a similar point or addressed a similar topic?
- Do I need to schedule reading this article in full?