Mary Midgley

The first bit of philosophy I ever picked up, even though I didn’t know that it was philosophy then was Mill’s On Liberty back when I was in JC. The road from there to me doing my PhD now has been a 15 year long winding one which took me through doing lifesciences first as an undergrad then doing an MA.

I had not heard she died! Very sad.

Her book “Beast and Man” was deeply important to me in a number of ways. (I had never heard of her prior to picking it up … wow, has to be close to 25 years ago now.)

She wasn’t officially, as it were, “one of the great philosophers” … but somehow what she wrote often had a stronger impact on me than many of the official “greats.”

I don’t think we read him “as a philosopher” per se, but in a high school AP European History class I read Machiavelli’s _The Prince_ and _Discourses_. I suppose if King counts as a philosopher then Machiavelli does, too. It’s now hard for me to remember the order I took my undergrad courses in, but I think the first philosopher I read in a class there was Epictetus (the “handbook”) for an interdisciplinary humanities class, “Views on Human Nature”, team taught by a philosopher, and English professor, and a historian. It was a good and useful book for an undergrad to read, I thought.

I find I can’t remember what I first read when, but reading that article about Mary Midgley I have to say that failure to recognise metaphorical language seems like a bit of a worry.

Marcus Aurelius – Meditations… and a smattering of Nietzsche.

Anything to counteract the mainline conservative Protestantism I was raised in.

The first philosophy book that I read, and which changed my life was The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary. Seriously, especially with hindsight, because the entire thrust of Western philosophy, theology, religion & culture in which it is done, is quite literally the suppression of Ecstasy.
In one way or another he pointed me to Alan Watts, J Krishnamurti, and the very unique non-dual philosopher/realizer Franklin Merrell-Wolff.

Novakant – apparently the character of Naphta in “The Magic Mountain” was explicitly based on George Lukacs (who Mann knew well), so you were getting even more philosophy than expected.

My first philosophy book was the Tractatus. My A-Level economics teacher, Mr. Ross-Smith, gave it to me, and read it with my during lunchtimes. It was riveting but I didn’t understand it at all. Then he gave me Quine’s On What There Is, which I found thrilling. I decided that the only way I’d ever learn how to do Philosophy would be if I studied it at university and was taught it. But for him, I would certainly have studied History. In the light of all that I can identify with Mary Midgeley’s sense of existential horror at the thought of being presented with Spinoza. (Or, maybe it would have made me me even more resolved!).

When I think about that, it seems to me my teacher was very discerning. It was exactly what I needed, and not at all what anyone else thought I needed (they all thought I needed more of what I wanted: politics).

MisterMr (14),
“Do high school students in other countries have philosophy or history of philosophy classes?”
I’d be interested to learn more about this too. I think that in the US, it varies a lot by school. I think probably most public high schools don’t even *offer* any philosophy, and I’ve never heard of one that *requires* any. But lots of private schools have it and I think some snazzier public schools probably do too.
I know only a little bit about the role philosophy plays in primary and secondary school curricula in countries outside the US. (I briefly looked into this once because I was thinking that the discipline would be more diverse along lines of race and gender if it were introduced earlier. The argument for thinking that is, roughly, that an earlier introduction would encourage people to think of it not as a thing that one is either innately good or innately bad at, but rather as a thing that one learns to do; and that an earlier introduction would lessen the opportunity costs of giving it a try.) My sense at the time was that it’s becoming more common for high school students to be introduced to philosophy.

Ah, picking up philosophy books from the bookshelf…

I picked up Plato’s Dialogue at my school library when I was 12 or 13, I think, I can’t recall why exactly, though plausible explanations are 1) I had to translate an excerpt from them in my Classical Greek course (a mildly popular elective in France) and wanted to know what happened afterwards or 2) my parents were reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and praising it and at the time I could not read English so I tried to go to the source material or 3) I was curious, meaning I was eager to climb up the ladder of intellectual respectability. In the following three years or so, I was quite into it so I read about 5 or 6 dialogues and was keen to discuss them to whomever. My friends and would-be girlfriend at the time were surprisingly OK to discuss Plato’s arguments at length for a bunch of teenagers. Or they were just nice to me. I also read Unended quest (Popper’s autobiography) when I was about 15 but I have no idea why (most likely explanation: the book was lying around in my house) and remember enjoying it a lot (but contrary to the Socratic dialogues, I don’t remember anything about it except that Popper pitied a blind boy when he was a kid). The idea of falsifiability certainly made an impression on me because I remember trying to explain the concept to a (female) friend of mine in the first year of high-school and that somehow turned into an unpleasant experience for the aforementioned would-be girlfriend* (don’t ask!). Like MisterMr, I tried Kant in I think my last year of high-school, but to no avail. On the other hand, I remember absolutely loving Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who can see, (a short essay that my teenage self recommends very warmly, I haven’t re-read it since). That’s it before higher education, I think. Like all French high-school student, I had a mandatory Philosophy class in high-school, but we weren’t assigned any full-length book to read (also my teacher was an alcoholic, and that happened to be its least character flaw, as teacher). Oh no, wait, I spent a summer trimester in an American high-school when I was 16 and there, they made me read Thoreau’s Walden and Emerson’s Self-reliance, and I read Poe’s Eureka, but I don’t know if that counts as philosophy.

A strange consequence of my early binge reading of Plato and the fact my teenage peers were quite open to it was that for a long, long time afterwards I could not quite believe that some people would mean it literally when they said they did not know the first thing about Plato. I mean, surely they had read a couple of dialogues in junior high-school, or at least discuss them with a friend?

*So falsifiability doomed my adolescent romantic hopes. On the other hand, positivism played a key role in my first date with my wife so, everything considered, I’d say philosophy was worth it.

Plato

Do high school students in other countries have philosophy or history of philosophy classes?

In my school nobody seemed to know what it was (which may have been why I wanted to study it).

I’m a bit surprised at all the hating on Spinoza here. I’d had several philosophy classes before I read him, but I _loved_ the Ethics and even more the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I certainly have always enjoyed him more than the endless shaggy dog stories and question-begging in Plato! This is one place where I’ve long agreed with Wittgenstein: ““Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?” Spinoza is much more fun than that.

Re Spinoza-hating: The left wing of the Enlightenment is far too left for today’s acceptable politics. Determinism abstracted from the new image of the world provided by science offends the self-image of the thinker changing the world by thinking, rather than the world changing thinking. Religion shorn of superstition and bigotry leaves out all the fun bits. A politics that smells of majority rule doesn’t seem to fit a model of the world taken from the lecture hall. And, the notion of knowledge contradicts epistemic skepticism, the last but greatest defense of reaction devised by philosophers.

one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

To quote Estragon: ‘let’s go!’

As my younger daughter has this year taken the Bac, I am a little better informed about it than my English education left me. Yes, there is a gap between what is formally asked and the practice: but that is inevitable, and partly built into the requirements. One is not in fact asked to come to grips with the whole of the – or a – Western canon: that is the point of the thematic approach. A good prof will avoid any “encyclopaedist” tendency, rather asking their students to think for themselves, using the tools which have been offered them – and drawing in examples from authors outside the canon: besides the predictable Mme Bovary, my daughter, either of her own accord or prompted, drew on instances from Molière, Jane Austen, Baudelaire, Malraux … as well as looking at how historians practise thinking about history.

This is in fact much as you note in your explanation of the Bac, rather than a : and that is surely the purpose of studying the subject at school. Would that I had had such an introduction – to ideas and to thinking.

Regrettably the current French government, and particularly the blinkered and, I would say, morally corrupt conservative in charge of education, are set to change this approach, both to reduce the hours given to philosophy (and indeed to deprofessionalize education, to suppress teaching posts and also the already too few assistants of various kinds, to be replaced by policemen, perhaps) and to move away from themes to a review of authors and their major (dare I say, “great”) ideas.(cf. https://blogs.mediapart.fr/simon-perrier/blog/271018/une-etrange-tribune)

For my own part, and coming back to Mister M @ 14, I cannot speak for the UK, but the official national curriculum at gov.uk does not mention it – though it does have religious education, and maybe some teachers smuggle in something of philosophy. I went to an Anglican public school (it was a wholly charitable school, my parents had no money), and one year managed to come bottom of the hundred or so boys in my year in Divinity: this surprised me, as I took a keen interest in “knowing the enemy”. Philosophy there was none, but I found a copy of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy in the (rather good) Library, which kept me amused for days. Later, while reading literature, I did do a paper in moral philosophy in my last year, so had at least some professional introduction to the subject.

However the UK government has neglected to give a curriculum for 16-18 year olds (“key stage 5″), so perhaps they don’t expect them to learn anything at all. Harry B, @15, was, I would guess, very lucky – cf. Cian @16.

I have to speak up for Spinoza. It’s a matter of filial piety. The year before he died my then 92 year old father told me that he had read Spinoza at UCLA in 1930 or so and been convinced that he was basically right. He kept quiet about it for 70 years, presumably to keep from rising my mother who was a conventional Christian. Spinoza, like Marx and Nietzsche, remains virulent and frightening to many people. Jonathan Israel’s enormous books on his influence document how knowledge of his ideas was actually promulgated more by the umpteen attempts to refute him than by his actual writings, which were banned for a long time. If you’re going to dismiss somebody like that, you ought at least explain why somebody who is obviously wrong continues to attract so many readers.

ardj — Oh, yes, lucky beyond belief…. He was our third economics teacher, the first having I think gone to prison, and the second (who was useless) having, I think, been fired. He was more interested in Philosophy than in Economics and somehow discerned that I would be more interested in it than in History. I think of the time he devoted to me when I spend time with my students.

besides the predictable Mme Bovary, my daughter, either of her own accord or prompted, drew on instances from Molière, Jane Austen, Baudelaire, Malraux … as well as looking at how historians practise thinking about history.

This looks like a pretty outstanding Bac in Philosophie… Hope it went well for her.