Zack Brown
We’re going to work our way through, we’re going to 100% speed-run, although it’s not speed-running, it’s very slow running, our way through various philosophical texts. Today, it’s going to be Being and Time. Today, and for probably many months.
So I hope there are at least two things you can take away from this. One, you’ll be able to see how I read philosophy. Not to say that that’s the best way or the only way, but I do think that it is a way that has been very successful for me, and that I learned from teachers for whom it was very successful. If you follow this learning strategy/technique, I think it can help you take books like Being and Time for instance, that might seem impenetrable or obtuse or overly difficult and in fact find that you can read them, as long as you read slowly and carefully, you can read them, and you can read them. This is one value: this model. Because often you get philosophy lectures where the instructor has already digested the material and now has packaged it in a neat little container that they are going to give to you, pass the information from their brain into yours, at least that is the idea. Whether or not that is successful is debatable, though it might be some of the time. But to do it this way is to show you one way of how you might approach the material. This is one way that you might look at a difficult philosophical text and start reading carefully. No matter which reading style you use in your approach, you cannot sit down and just read it like you might read Harry Potter. It requires active engagement from you, and not just passive consumption of the text. So one advantage of this is to show you one way of reading or one way of approaching reading a text like this. Another thing is that you are welcome, if you are watching this live, or if you’re watching this on Youtube in archive form, you can still comment, but especially if you’re watching live on Twitch, you can write in the chat, and this can be a virtual reading group, and we can talk with each other, especially because if you’re discussing a text, and learning about a text, and working on a text, you’re doing the work of thinking through a text. Not just thinking through, and this is an important point, not just thinking through what a text says, but also who is it responding to, what kinds of answers is it giving to those questions, why are they compelling or why are they not, and also it invites you, which is so important, to not just let a philosopher give their ideas to you, but also to let you respond to that philosopher, and even debate with them, so to speak, see whether they are right are wrong. So that is also something that could happen here in the chat.
As far as I know I am the first one to do it on Twitch.