Posted: Dec 23, 2018 10:03 pm
scherado wrote:No one, nobody should do anything other than read the actual works; NOT second-hand analysis.
What's wrong with second-hand analysis? I for one am not sufficiently arrogant to imagine nobody's comments could teach me something or at least give me something to think about. That's why I did not just read David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, but also the introductions by A.D.Lindsay (Everyman, 1911), D.G.C.Macnab, P.S.Árdal, (Fontana 1962), A.Flew (who also annotated the text) (Collier, 1962) and R.Wollheim (Collins, 1963). All of them are sufficiently knowledgeable to make comments on the primary material that are worth reading.
Sometimes it's even unavoidable. Everything we know of the arguably most famous and influential western philopher's works is second-hand.