How To Learn

The first step: Pick the right material. Read Hume, Reid, Kant in original texts. For beginning students, this might not be easy. It may also be discouraging. Whenever I had this issue in class my suggestion was: Read Nietzsche. He was the best at combining digestible ideas with an engaging format. The reason is because he wrote through art and not just through analytics. He also had a more complex way of understanding how the human brain learns and he came to the conclusion that it was through art and through aphorism, or sudden bursts of understanding. In a sense, he rebelled against rote. I think he called it "decadence."

Lou Salome wrote in her own artistic style of Nietzsche's art, "One senses here the close entwining of mutual contradictions; one senses the overflowing and voluntary plunge of over-stimulated and tensed energies into chaos, darkness and terror, and then an ascending urge toward the light and most tender moments."

The problem with him is that he relies on a lot of cultural information that can inundate young readers. He was an historian of words and ideas and so his writing comes with a lot of baggage.

Another way to do it is to reach out to the real books. One could read easier texts on Hume and Kant and this can go a long way. My personal suggestion is to watch David L. Robinson on YouTube in his 8-part series on the debate between Reid and Hume. Robinson clearly sides with Reid, as I do, yet he presents the debate in a way that really teaches and clarifies the 17th Century.

More overview books are: The Passion of the Western Mind, by Richard Tarnas; The Hidden Roots of Critical Psychology, by Michael Billig, and The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. The latter text, to be honest, is indispensable and that is why you see it pop up in everything I write. Again, reading Russell, though its intended to be digestible, can be arduous.