Posted: Jul 11, 2010 12:26 pm
Comte de St.-Germain wrote:
From there, read primary works of authors - don't be afraid to read diagonal, skip chapters or not understand stuff.
You would recommend diagonal reading of philosophy? 
I'd always been under the impression that I had to get everything the author was saying, and this can be slow and hard work*, especially with the more recent ones, with the whole cumulative history of the field behind them. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that "don't be afraid to not understand stuff" is probably the best advice that can be given to a beginner in philosophy.
*especially when you're desperately trying to make sense of things that don't necessarily make sense - that this can happen was a major revelation to me
A quick note on reading philosophy in translation ... much depends on which translation you pick. A number of things may happen in translation that can affect your understanding of the text: the translator may put a slant on the text; or the translator may simply have misread certain bits, got the grammar wrong etc., and this can change the meaning of a sentence quite radically; it can also happen that a translation can be even more complicated and convoluted to read than the original, which can put you off an author, for entirely wrong reasons! English speakers are lucky in that many essential texts are available in more than one translation, so you can, in principle, cross-check passages that look confusing.
