Best philosophy methodology books according to redditors

We found 20 Reddit comments discussing the best philosophy methodology books. We ranked the 12 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top Reddit comments about Philosophy Methodology:

u/Khjuu · 9 pointsr/BadSocialScience

I really like Little's Varieties of Social Explanation as a good primer on the (justified / justifiable) methodology of social science. Which is good: I like this point, but it mostly points out the problems with trying to prove social science doesn't work, rather than build an explanation of how it does work.

Also, crackpot theory time (kind of ironic in context, but anyway): I blame neoliberalism for a lot of the anti-intellectualism aimed at the social sciences. I think the background cultural assumption that planned economies fail because of their inability to gather together and mobilise sufficient knowledge (thanks, Hayek!) morphs into a "but how can you even ever prove that 'institutional oppression' exists?!?!" when reactionaries get their hands on it.

u/Sich_befinden · 5 pointsr/askphilosophy

So, as far as I can tell Laruelle is putting non-philosophy as something running alongside of, and outside of, what he thinks philosophy is, and has been, doing. The summery of non-philosophy helps characterize what he sees philosophical thought as; the 'decision' to create dual pairs which engage in dialectics (matter/form, subject/object, etc). To this end his non-philosophy is trying to get at the moment prior to that decision, prior to the dividing of being into two. If I had to guess, his work isn't going to make sense without being contrasted with Derrida's differance. It sorta seems to be exactly a Katian heresy, as 'trying to say what comes before language' or 'experience what comes before experience', I guess.

This review gives a decent picture.

PS: I wouldn't feel bad about not getting this. His writing style makes word salad seem sensical and Derrida a good 'intro to philosophy.' Check out his Principles of Non-Philosophy if you want a larger account in his own words, it ain't too expensive. Maybe with his dictonary as a companion. (This man is insane.)

u/TheMadPoet · 2 pointsr/IWantToLearn

Former grad student in humanities checking in. You're asking the right question! (IMO anyway...) You are very organized and it looks like you are interested more in the humanities than science.

IMO, the fundamental clarification to make is what field (and sub-fields) you want your intellectual foundation in: linguistics, philosophy, literature, religion, history, rhetoric, political science, etc. For each of these there are any number of methods to their study and focus on different aspects of the topic.

Let me explain: my field is the academic study of religion and sub-field is South and East Asian Religion. My sub-sub field Hinduism (and some Buddhism - Indian, Chinese, and Japanese) and my sub-sub-sub field is so-called "Tantra" but of a specific species non-dual monistic Shaiva tantra so-called Kashmir Shaivism - as opposed to other schools of tantra such as the more widely practiced dualistic Shaiva Siddhanta tantra in 9-10th century North India.

This demands - primarily - a study of the language of surviving texts: Sanskrit and also the geography, history, and literature, measuring months, years, seasons, etc. from that point in time and space - in addition to the actual philosophical tradition. This is more than a life-time of study.

Hopefully the swamp of detail above makes my point is clear - the better you discover and articulate what you want to learn about the better for you.

Also, what are your practical goals? Do you want to become a lawyer, get into politics, government, teach, work in a museum, for a religious organization, wander the world and have adventures - what?

Knowing this will help structure your program of study. I guarantee you that developing a methodological approach to your studies will be very valuable. Having a methodology will tell you why you are reading a particular set of books and what you are reading them for. Plato's Republic can be read for all sorts of reasons, but you will gain the most benefit by understanding what you want out of it.

A great way to get there is to go to major universities websites like Harvard, Columbia, Stamford, etc., and look at the various departments, courses, and for those courses that appeal to you - the syllabus of that course - and follow the reading list. Also, no problem contacting a professor asking for the reading list or some recommendations. Some uni's like Harvard have free videos of lecture series.

If you just want a list of books I can't do any better than the list provided by u/alistar373 - only I would recommend Gadamer's Truth and Method because it includes a summary of 19th and 20th century German thought Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger. Gadamer includes an interpretation of Classical Greek thought so that might be a good intro to Plato, et. al. Also some Derrida to go with your Nietzsche as an intro to 'post-modern' thought.

IMO starting with more contemporary material like Gadamer gives a foundation for going back to Plato, Aristotle, etc.

u/OctaShot · 2 pointsr/Catholicism

>only that they cannot establish with certainty

Knowledge "is the grasp of an object"; therefore we must begin with objects, not ideas. Thought "is only the consciousness of an act of knowledege". I'm going to take a long shot here and identify your disagreement as stemming from some idealist notion that begins with thought as the first principle of being. To cure that, I recommend this book.

>is irrational

Not quite irrational, but flawed in their reasoning. They have reached an incorrect conclusion as it is all too easy to do.

u/SnakeGD09 · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

You might also check out The Philosophy of Philosophy which is meta-philosophy with an analytic slant. It's concerned not so much with empirical proof, but just what sort of standards can be said to apply to proofs (ie if a philosopher uses hypothetical examples to prove a point - so what? What does that mean? Has that proved anything, and if so, how?).

u/thelukinat0r · 2 pointsr/Catholicism

Edit: Never think that your study is getting in the way of your devotion. Your pride might, but learning is not the problem. My theology and scripture professor always tells us students to "take our homework to the chapel" and to "take it to prayer." That said, here's some important aspects of prayer, which as an intellectual, you should find especially suited to your spirituality and devotion.



I already posted this in another comment today, but its extremely relevant:


I recommend checking out these sections of the Catechism:


The Life of Prayer

Vocal Prayer

Meditation

Contemplation

Summary of the Life of Prayer



In addition, here's an excerpt from Guigo II's work The Ladder from Earth to Heaven (full version can be found here)

> Reading seeks the sweetness of the blessed life, meditation finds it, prayer asks for it, and contemplation tastes it.^1 Reading places solid food in the mouth; meditation chews and breaks it; prayer extracts the flavor; contemplation is the very sweetness that gives joy and refreshes. [The function of] reading is in the bark, meditation in the pith, prayer in the request for what is desired, and contemplation in the enjoyment of the sweetness obtained. That one may grasp this more clearly, I will give one of many possible examples.

>In reading I hear: Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. Behold, this saying, brief but packed full with a sweet and multiple meaning for the soul to graze upon, provides, as it were, a cluster of grapes, and when the soul has diligently examined it she says to herself: “There could be something good here. I will withdraw into my heart and see whether perhaps I can find and understand this purity. For [most] precious and desirable is that thing whose possessors are called blessed, to which the vision of God—which is eternal life—is promised, which is highly praised by so many passages in sacred Scripture.” Desiring, therefore, to elaborate this more clearly for herself, she begins to chew and break this cluster of grapes, and places it, so to speak, in a wine press by arousing the power of reason to search out what this very precious purity is, and how it can be possessed.

>As diligent meditation goes to work, it does not remain outside, does not linger on the surface, but climbs higher, penetrates the interior [truths], and probes each one. Paying close attention, it considers that he did not say, Blessed are the pure of body, but the pure of heart; for to have hands innocent of evil deeds is not enough unless we be cleansed in mind from wicked thoughts. It confirms this by the authority of the prophet, when he says, Who shall ascend the mountain of God, or who shall stand in his holy place? He who is innocent in hands and pure of heart. It also considers how much that same prophet longs for this purity of heart, praying, A pure heart create in me, O God, and again, If I have contemplated iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. It thinks how anxious blessed Job was to guard [this purity] when he said, I made a covenant with my eyes that I would not so much as think about a virgin. See how much the holy man restrained himself: he shut his eyes lest he should see vanity, lest he should carelessly gaze upon what he would then unwillingly desire.

> After [meditation] has studied these and similar [truths] regarding purity of heart, it begins to think about the reward, how glorious and delightful it would be to see the longed-for face of the Lord, beautiful above the sons of men, no longer downcast and despicable, no longer clothed in the appearance given him by his mother, but wearing the robe of immortality and crowned with the diadem given him by his Father on the day of resurrection and glory, the day which the Lord has made. It ponders that this vision will offer that satisfaction of which the prophet says, I will be satisfied when your glory appears.

>Do you see how much juice has come from the smallest grape, how much fire has arisen from a spark, how much this small mass, Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God, has been stretched out on the anvil of meditation? But how much further it could still be stretched if someone experienced approached it! I perceive that the well is deep, but I am still a clumsy beginner and have scarcely found a small amount to draw from it. Inflamed by these fires, incited by these desires, the alabaster broken, the soul begins to have a presentiment of the ointment’s sweetness—not by the sense of taste as yet, but as it were by the sense of smell.

> Thence she infers how sweet it would be to experience this purity, if simply meditating upon it is so delightful. But what shall she do? The desire to have it consumes her, but she does not find within herself the means of having it; and the more she seeks, the more she thirsts. When she takes up meditation, she takes up sorrow, because she does not experience the sweetness that meditation shows to be in purity of heart without itself providing it. For to experience this sweetness belongs neither to the one who reads nor to the one who meditates unless it be given from above.

> For to read and to meditate is common to the good and to the wicked. Even the Gentile philosophers discovered what the main part of the true good consisted in, guided by the power of reason; but since when they had known God, they did not glorify him as God, and placing confidence in their own powers, they said, We will make our tongue great, our lips are from ourselves, they did not deserve to obtain what they were able to see. They became vain in their thoughts, and their wisdom was swallowed up—the wisdom that the pursuit of human learning gained for them, not the Spirit of wisdom, who alone gives true wisdom—that is, savory knowledge^2, which delights and refreshes the soul that possesses it with an invaluable flavor.

>Of this [wisdom] it is said, Wisdom will not enter a wicked soul. It comes only from God. And as the Lord has bestowed the faculty of baptizing on many, but has reserved the power and authority to remit sins in baptism for himself alone—hence John said, speaking antonomastically^3 and by way of distinction, This is he who baptizes—so also can we say of him, “This is he who gives the flavor of wisdom, and makes knowledge savory to the soul.” Words are given to all, but wisdom of soul only to a few; the Lord dispenses it to whom he wills, and when he wills.



> ^1 A 15th-century manuscript found at the abbey of Melk contains the following wonderful insertion: “Hence the Lord himself said: Seek, and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you (Matt. 7:7). Seek by reading, and you shall find by meditating; knock by praying, and it shall be opened to you by contemplation.”

> ^2 Guigo alludes here to a popular etymology according to which the word sapientia (“wisdom”) is formed from the combination of sapidus (“savory” or “sweet”) and scientia (“knowledge”).

> ^3 Antonomasia is a figure of speech whereby a title or epithet is substituted for a proper name; in this case “he who baptizes” replaces “Jesus.”



I also recommend this book


And this prayer

u/mrfurious · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

Del Kiernan Lewis' Learning to Philosophize. Pity it's so much more expensive than it used to be.

u/RealityApologist · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

Metaphilosophy is to philosophy what philosophy of physics is to physics (or philosophy of biology is to biology): it studies questions at the foundation of the field. Questions like "what makes an argument uniquely philosophical?" or "why should we do philosophy?" or "what kinds of questions should philosophers spend their time on?" or "is there a meaningful distinction between analytic and continental traditions?" are all issues in metaphilosophy. The Cambridge "introductions to philosophy" series has a great survey of the field, if you're curious. I also like to point to Philip Kitcher's article "Philosophy Inside Out" as a nice example of metaphilosophical work.

u/jambarama · 2 pointsr/AskSocialScience

Beyond intermediate texts, my classes ended up just reading papers from econ journals. You may want to pick up an econometrics text, get familiar with the methods, then read papers (here is a list of the 100 most cited).

I wrote my opinions on econometric textbooks I've used for another reddit comment, so I just pasted it in below. If you get into it, I'd recommend reading a less rigorous book straight through, then using a more rigorous text as reference or to do the practice stuff.

Less Mathematically Rigorous

  • Kennedy - survey of modeling issues without the math. More about how to think about modeling rather than how do it. Easy to read, I liked it

  • Angrist - similar to Kennedy, covers the why & how econometrics answers questions, very little math. Each chapter starts with a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy quote, which is fun. Just as good as Kennedy

  • Long - this book is more about just "doing stuff" and presenting results, absolutely non-technical, but also dodges the heavy thinking in Angrist & Kennedy so I wasn't a big fan

  • King - covers the thinking of Angrist & content of Maddala. It is more accessible but wordier, so give it a go if Kennedy or Angrist are too much. It is aimed at Poli Sci rather than econ.

    Middle of the Road

  • Gujarati - I used this for a class. It wasn't hard to follow, but it mostly taught methodology and the how/why/when/what, and I didn't like that - a little too "push button" and slow moving.

  • Woodlridge - a bit more rigorous than Gujarati, but it was more interesting and was clearer about motivations from the standpoint of interesting problems

  • Cameron & Trivedi - I liked the few chapters I read, the math is there, but the methodology isn't driven by the math. I ddin't get too far into it

    More Mathematically Rigorous

  • Greene - lots of math, so much it was distracting for me, but probably good for people who really want to learn the methodology

  • Wooldridge - similar to Greene, you need a solid understanding before diving into this book. Some of the chapters are impenetrable

  • Maddala - this book is best for probit/logit/tobit models and is somewhat technical but dated. My best econometrics teacher loved it
u/softservepoobutt · 2 pointsr/TrueAskReddit

Honestly - through rigor. I would suggest studying logic, some philosophy (this is about the structure of arguments, and deduction in a general sense) and then something applied, like policy analysis or program evaluation. <- those last two are just related to my field so I know about them, plenty of others around.

Some suggested books that could be interesting for you:

Intro to Logic by Tarski

The Practice of Philosophy by Rosenberg

Thank you for Arguing by Heinrichs

Policy Analysis is instructive in that you have to define a problem, define its characteristics, identify the situation it exists in, plot possible solutions (alternatives), and create criteria for selecting the alternative you like most.

Program Evaluation is really just tons of fun and will teach a bunch about how to appraise things. Eval can get pretty muddy into social research but honestly you can skip a lot of that and just learn the principles.

The key to this is that you're either very smart and can learn this stuff through your own brains and force of will, or, more likely, you'll need people to help beat it into you WELCOME TO GRADSCHOOL.

u/s7th6 · 1 pointr/philosophy

>Whenever we're talking about a thing, we're talking about our conceptions of that thing. It's all we have once the external world is filtered into our minds.

Alright, I don't really wanna get as deep into metaphysics and epistemology as you're taking us right now. I could start going "no the thought of a tree is not the same as a tree" and so on, but I'm just gonna say I don't agree with all this "rigid meaning" and "we can only talk about our concepts" stuff. The "conceptual analysis" model is way outdated IMO. But hey man where's your philosophy education from? I'm curious who's producing these hardcore conceptual analysis types.

Anyway just so I don't short-change you completely, here's a few things.

One, I know conceptual analysis probably is one of the things philosophers can do. But it just ain't the main thing. Philosophy is fundamentally about the big questions, life, the universe, and everything. Reducing it to just "How is this term to be defined?" is such a disservice to it, it ignores the big questions like how we can live good lives and what it all means, which don't have the same form at all. It's really an anti-philosophy view-- it's the view that philosophy's enemies often have, which enables them to say philosophy is "semantics" or mental masturbation.

Two, if you wanna know about the particular anti conceptual analysis view that I have (I called it realism), it's basically Timothy Williamson's in The Philosophy of Philosophy. That might be the most cited work in recent metaphilosophy, so it's not exactly a minor view, and I regularly see it crop up elsewhere. (You could probably just read the Amazon preview.)

And about "green is tasty": fair enough, there's a sense in which it's meaningless, and that's the one you intended, sure. It's still not like talking about being "fully human" though. This view you have where "human" is just a biological designation is itself a particular controversial philosophical view, so disagreeing with it is also philosophy. I would call it scientism but hey.

u/endless_mike · 1 pointr/philosophy

This exists already, but not in the form you are imagining. Timothy Williamson has written a book titled just that. It is about the method of philosophy, among other things.

u/Curates · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

Aside from uncontested logical constructions like modus ponens, there are some commonly used heuristics, like inference to the best explanation, the principle of sufficient reason, appeal to intuition, ontological parsimony, Bayesian epistemology, Ockham's Razor (there are more). All of these may be questioned, and their applicability is dependent on context. Metaphilosophy, or the Philosophy of Philosophy, studies philosophical practice and its justifications.

u/byrd_nick · 1 pointr/xPhilosophy

Abstract

In this paper, we reply to Tom Sorell’s criticism of our engagement with the history of philosophy in our book, The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy. We explain why our uses of the history of philosophy are not undermined by Sorell’s criticism [based on claims that using the methods of psychology (or any other field) is incompatible with philosophy and that experimental philosophy tries to distinguish itself from philosophy] and why our position is not threatened by the dilemma Sorell advances. We argue that Sorell has mischaracterized the dialectical context of our discussion of the history of philosophy and that he has mistakenly treated our use of the history of philosophy as univocal, when in fact we called on the history of philosophy in several different ways in our text.