Episode 13 - Giving Philosophical Texts And Authors The Time You Need To Understand Them Well

How much time do you need to give to a philosophical text in order to adequately understand it? That is a question I get asked, both in general and with respect to specific texts and authors, very often. There isn’t any good precise answer to a question like that. It depends on so many different factors. How complex and difficult is the text or the thought of that author? How well-equipped is the reader for grappling with philosophical texts? Are they already familiar with the author, or are they coming to the text “cold” as it were? How deep or extensive of an understanding are you hoping to develop?What I can say, as a rough and ready rule of thumb, though is that texts require what they require. And often our initial ideas about that amount can be way off base. We have to find this out through experience. Or rather, experiences, since no one single experience of reading will be enough to conclusively tell us that we’ve understood matters well enough (except with authors who have little to offer us).How long should it take you to read and thoroughly understand a massively important and influential work like Rene Descartes’ Meditations On First Philosophy? Is giving each of the meditations one quick read enough? Some of my students mistakenly assume that is the case, and then find out they were in error when it comes time to explaining what is going on in the text, even at a beginner level.Descartes himself suggests by the format of the Meditations that each of them should be read and thought about for a day, so that working through the six meditations would then take a little less than a week. But interestingly, in one of this responses to objections, he tells his interlocutor that each of the short meditations really ought to require a month, or at a minimum a week.That’s the author himself writing to people who have a solid education in philosophy, so presumably he would have a good idea about what his own work requires! That might be a useful caution to us, not to try to cut corners or “optimize'“ our reading, speeding through philosophical texts quicker than we ought to. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe