I majored in philosophy and I think one of the biggest missteps in how I approached my degree was what I thought I would get out of learning philosophy.
I thought I'd learn about "truth" from my degree, and I was initially very disgruntled when learning about very incomplete philosophies. I learned eventually that the goal of a philosophy degree was not to find "truth", but to learn about the myriad arguments and models people had for "truth", and how to critique and understand truth.
If you're on your journey to developing your personal philosophy, then a basic understanding of philosophy will help you escape pitfalls and traps a lot of annoying armchair philosophizers fall into. A lot of people read a single philosopher and think they understand everything.
What is your goal for developing your personal philosophy? It might be faster and more meaningful for most people to start with theology/spirituality, books on justice (Rawls, Nozick, feminist literature), or carefully selected business books than to start from the basics because that road is long and full of fallacies.
I think it's very important that for every philosophy you learn about, learn the critiques of those arguments. You kan't learn about all the great critiques of Kant from reading Kant. This is where professors and peers are really useful with discussions to tease out nuances of particular arguments and models.
My personal favorite philosopher is Iris Marion Young. I think her work on intersecting democracy and feminism is wonderful.
That is a funny thing about young people. A lot of the time they want to find a silver bullet in area that they are interested in. It is not bad of course because maybe they can.
People would like to have nice simple answer for life, universe and everything. This seems like a likely trap for "developing personal philosophy". Where one is building up his perfect system and then things happen in life and it falls apart.
In my opinion best what one can take out of learning philosophy is understanding of other non philosophic works. Reading author that has nothing to do with pure philosophy and finding out patterns and themes that were already worked out by philosophers but have slightly different sprint.
> That is a funny thing about young people. A lot of the time they want to find a silver bullet in area that they are interested in. It is not bad of course because maybe they can.
I agree with this; once upon a time, I used to be one of those young people. And I think, this unsubstantiated confidence is a good thing for young people. That was an important source of motivation for me when I was jumping into waters that were way deeper than I envisioned. If I knew "better" I would never do that. But I'm glad I did it. I did not discover a new continent, no, but if I did not have that courage (the courage coming from "ignorance", if you will) I would not have learned what I have learned along the way. I am no longer that courageous young man, but I'm mostly happy he did what he did.
I thought I'd learn about "truth" from my degree, and I was initially very disgruntled when learning about very incomplete philosophies. I learned eventually that the goal of a philosophy degree was not to find "truth", but to learn about the myriad arguments and models people had for "truth", and how to critique and understand truth.
If you're on your journey to developing your personal philosophy, then a basic understanding of philosophy will help you escape pitfalls and traps a lot of annoying armchair philosophizers fall into. A lot of people read a single philosopher and think they understand everything.
What is your goal for developing your personal philosophy? It might be faster and more meaningful for most people to start with theology/spirituality, books on justice (Rawls, Nozick, feminist literature), or carefully selected business books than to start from the basics because that road is long and full of fallacies.
I think it's very important that for every philosophy you learn about, learn the critiques of those arguments. You kan't learn about all the great critiques of Kant from reading Kant. This is where professors and peers are really useful with discussions to tease out nuances of particular arguments and models.
My personal favorite philosopher is Iris Marion Young. I think her work on intersecting democracy and feminism is wonderful.