Charlie Huenemann has an article up at "Psyche", How to Read Philosophy. It's not bad, but if you get ten philosophers together and ask them how to read philosophy, you'll likely get twelve completely different approaches; Huenemann's approach is the adversarial method. My own view, to put it in a nutshell, is that while you might use such an approach for narrow specific purposes, as a general approach it is highly detrimental and often leads to very poor reasoning, so I thought I would say something about his claims.
He notes:
The point is that each giant of philosophy was a human being trying to figure out life by doing just what you do: reading, thinking, observing, writing. Don’t let their big words intimidate you; we can insist that they make sense to us – or, at least, intrigue us – or are left behind in the discount book bin. They must prove their worth to us.
This comment captures, I think, a problem with almost all of Huenemann's argument, which is confusion between the individual reader, humanity as a whole, and the philosophy profession as a whole. The 'we' here is unclear, but 'we' do not read philosophy texts -- that is, if there is reading going on, the individual readers doing it -- and individual readers are not what determines whether philosophy texts "are left behind in the discount book bin". The giants of philosophy don't have to prove their worth to each individual reader. They strictly speaking don't have to prove their worth to anybody, but we can say that they have to prove their worth to 'us' in the sense that some kind of 'we' (the kind varies) is responsible for carrying them forward, teaching them, discussing them, building on their ideas. The fact that we are talking about 'giants of philosophy' means that they have already done so. Individual readers can decide whether they themselves want to read, or keep reading, this or that philosopher, but this is a matter of personal taste and circumstances, and has nothing to do with the worth of the philosopher or their texts. The best general approach is not to come to them demanding that they satisfy your tastes and interests but to come to them willing to learn, if you can. Sometimes this might involve objecting to and arguing with them and trying to think through how they would respond; more often it won't.
Huenemann then gives specific advice on reading philosophy:
(1) "Reconsider your expectations of philosophy." Huenemann wants to distinguish philosophy from self-help. This would surprise both Socrates and the Stoics, I think, but is probably a common view among academic philosophers.
(2) "Philosophy requires active, adversarial reading." In reality, sometimes it does but more often it doesn't. A lot of philosophical reading is just trying to understand what is going on and how it relates to other things, which is not adversarial at all. Good philosophical reading is usually active, but sometimes it's not; there's a lot to be said for occasionally just letting yourself be guided through a line of thought. For a lot of texts (Kant, for instance), I recommend that students just read through the first time -- no stopping for notes or comments or objections, just take a stroll through without stopping or letting yourself be bogged down. Many philosophical texts need to be read multiple times; some, like those of Plato, are famous for the fact that you can read them hundreds of times and still be discovering new things. You can usually afford to read them in lots of different ways, and it's usually beneficial to do so. But the thing with active, adversarial readings is that they only really work properly if you've already developed a good idea as to what is going on in the text. Adversarial reading without prior understanding is almost always shallow.
It's also the case, I think, that adversarial reading is harder than most academic philosophers seem to think it is. Academic philosophers over time develop tricks for doing it that non-academics often have never developed. In addition, it's always easier to do adversarial reading if you know the lay of the land, the various possibilities on the table, and as a lot of academic philosophy is specifically about that, so academic philosophers are usually better prepared for adversarial reading by being able to compare what they are reading to other things. For instance, it is easier to read adversarially an argument for nominalism if you already know something about different families of nominalism and about various alternatives to nominalism.
This is quite universal. I've often complained that academic philosophers read and reason about certain things very, very poorly. Divine command theory is a consistent example -- and the reason is not difficult to find. Academic philosophers are almost always reading the relevant texts adversarially, but very few academic philosophers have training that covers the history of divine command theory, with the result that they don't understand the possibilities available to divine command theorists or how various divine command theories are related to possible alternatives. Therefore their adversarial reading mostly just results in useless trash. This is not because divine command theory is particularly resistant to objection; it's because reading adversarially in a fruitful way requires already understanding the abstract field of philosophical positions within which it is situated and to which it is relevant. Adversarial reading is hard. You have to have a lot of scaffolding in place to do it very well. And it has to be the right kind of scaffolding, too, or you are just going to be misreading.
There might, again, be particular reasons why you might even so read a text adversarially, in a limited way for a specific purpose -- to help think through a particular argument, for instance, you might approach it adversarially as one of the ways you try to think through it, without putting much weight on the adversarial reading itself. But there are many easier ways to read a philosophical text that have many valuable benefits.
(3) "Philosophy is dialogue." This is probably the point on which I most agree with Huenemann. Philosophy is dialogue, but this is in part because most learning of anything is dialogue, and all reading is dialogue.
(4) "Philosophy is about you." And so it is, except when it is not.
(5) "Make use of secondary sources." This is not, I think, essential to philosophical reading itself, but it is true that there are many resources to aid in philosophical reading, and it is sometimes absurd the extent to which even professional philosophers fail to make use of them. This is particularly true since we live in the twenty-first century and entire research libraries with free access (or free access through library subscription) are literally only a few keystrokes away. Some of the resources are good, some not so good, but all are potentially useful to the thoughtful reader. And Huenemann is right, of course, that friends are sometimes the very best resources for thinking through anything.
