Getting Better at Philosophy

[Tanay]

I want to become a decent philosophy player, but I don't quite know how to get there. I've made a few observations about issues that inhibit my success at Philosophy, and I'm hoping someone can tell me some better ways to study for the subject, rather than my current method of knowing twenty-odd philosophers and trying to fraud linguistically until the giveaway mercifully drops a title that I just might remember from somewhere.

1. Resources: Is there a good encyclopedia or other book on philosophy? I have seen books that are thousands of pages long that cover philosophers both minor and major, but at this point, I'd rather have a concise source of the most important philosophers. Any suggestions?

2. Writing Questions: How do you write a good philosophy question? It's taken me several hours to do the last few, because I'm not sure what information to take from each work that I cover in the question. I have yet to find a solid online resource that will give me a summary of the fourth or fifth most important work of a philosopher that I can use in a question, and I certainly don't intend on reading two or three philosophical works to make one tossup. Furthermore, at what point is it appropriate to have an essay, rather than a book by a philosopher, and how do you determine whether something is a "hard part" or a "middle part" of a tossup? This concern extends to writing a tossup on a work of philosophy, since it would involve substantial research to determine what chapter of the book would be a first clue and what would be a middle clue, especially for someone like myself who isn't yet philosophy-savvy. In other words, how is the process of writing a Philosophy question different from writing a Literature one?

3. Becoming A Better Philosophy Player: Is there a specific means of remembering philosophy material that some people find most efficient? I have found that the names of philosophical works rarely contain distinguishable elements. What I mean is that on a Literature tossup, I could generally reflex-buzz if I heard a title with a word like "Aspidistra" or "Phalarope", whereas the titles of works of philosophy are often very similar to those of works by other philosophers (for example, Burke wrote "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" while Kant wrote "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"). Is title-memorization actually the best way to go in this case? Since most philosophical works don't really have distinct "plot summaries" the way literature does, and since it would be possible for the writer of a tossup on a philosopher to use any of 10 different clues to describe a work, I'm not sure I understand the value of reading full works of Philosophy to get questions right. Is it conventional for decent players to read full works, or are there more efficient methods for this subject?

[at your pleasure]

This book contains some useful sketches/outlines of the major philosophers, although it's rather limited:
http://www.amazon.com/One-Hundred-Philo ... 459&sr=8-1

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

Both Antony Flew (he's craaaaaazy) and Bertrand Russell wrote very highly regarded histories of Western philosophy. I've read neither, but Amazon reviews are both overwhelmingly positive and they seem to be both broad and deep. Otherwise, there are a non-zero number of works of philosophy that are actually pretty short, easy reads. Platonic dialogues go really quickly, so if you want to go all real knowledge on us, you could probably bang out 4 or 5 of the most important in an afternoon. As far as titles being really same-y, I experience the same problem and I have yet to find a solution.

[Auks Ran Ova]

Both Antony Flew (he became craaaaaazy)

Fixed.

Also, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy can be quite helpful.

[Stained Diviner]

Basically, you want to learn about the people on this list. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good source for that. If you want to study questions, go here.

[marnold]

Getting better at philosophy is way more trouble than it's worth. Buzzing on non-title clues is often impossible because descriptions are often so vague as to be useless, and even when they are precise, it's hard to know that this is one of the questions where such clues are actually useful. Also, philosophy doesn't come up that often - over the college canon, it generally seems to increase in frequency as events get harder, and I can't imagine it coming up that much at all in high school. If you still want to do it, the advice above is good. Read a general survey text of philosophy (there was one I had that was aimed at young people that was short, illustrated and glossy and actually quite good - I can't find what it is right now, though; Russell is more thorough and is also good). Skim a few of the texts that come up all the time but then use the Stanford Encyclopedia and Wikipedia as your primary tools.

On your number 2, none of these are easy questions. In terms of concise summaries of works, I've found nothing equivalent in breadth and conciseness to MasterPlots or Benet's, so you just have to scrounge on SEP or the internet more broadly. If you have access to JSTOR, there are often plenty of papers about particular philosophers or their works that will start with a general summary. Questions with 4 or 5 works used as clues make accurate summary of the works themselves all the more important. I'm not sure whether to actually recommend this or not because it's a technique that could result in truly awful questions, but I actually find the Table of Contents to be a solid place to go to find clues. It helps to show how the book is divided into an argument and often unique section names point out important examples or include terminology that makes a good clue. Obviously, try to use your best judgment whether the chapter name sounds unique or relates well to the work being described; that said, section titles are unambiguous which make them much better than someone who's lost in the material trying to give a one sentence summary of what's going on.

[Mechanical Beasts]

Often you'll be able to find volumes with titles like "The Philosophy of ____ _____" that serve as pretty effective summaries of some dude's work. This has a bunch of advantages. For one thing, each major book will be devoted a chapter in some of these works; in others, each major theory or area of thought the philosopher contributed to will get a chapter.

Also, reading these works will give you a feel for a philosopher as a whole. You can often suss out things like "okay, this tossup is talking about denoting and stuff, it's probably one of these four dudes" or "this tossup is alluding to Cartesian dualism; it's one of these three."

[Ondes Martenot]

I've always found the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quite useful when writing my small amount of philosophy questions