Category: Studiousness
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Whitehead on Education and Information
Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1929) begins with this paragraph: Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing…
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How to Take Notes
Peter Suber offers good advice in his Taking Notes on Philosophical Texts.
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Too Old to Learn?
This just over the transom from a reader in Virginia: I stumbled across your blog a year or two ago, and since then I've periodically dropped in to see what's going on. I enjoy what I understand of your material but, to be honest, I find much of it quite difficult to follow. I think…
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A Method of Study
From a reader: I have a few questions, they're very practical in nature. I was hoping if you could give me a brief outline of your method of study and how you read books? How do you keep track of such a vast amount of resources? I'm on information overload because, well, I'm a 21st…
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Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age
The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook…
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More on Texts and Translations
A regular reader responds to On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages: Nice piece on the necessity of studying texts in their original languages. The very question puzzles me. Why would someone assume he knows what Kant said and meant by reading Kemp Smith? I don't know what shape the Kant MSS are in—are there…
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On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages
From the mailbag: What are your thoughts on reading philosophical texts in the original language? Do you think it's preferable — or do you suppose it even makes a difference? The idea of reading philosophy in the original is very interesting to me, because I've found that when you study texts in the history of…
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The Pleasure of Study and Old Age
The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook…