How To Keep A Philosophy Notebook

Today, we're going to talk about keeping a philosophical notebook or log. First, I want to talk about the notebook itself, and then I want to talk about what to take notes on or how to go about taking notes of a philosophy text.

So first, let's talk about the notebook itself, and I'm going to start with a negative by telling you what not to do. That is, I don't recommend that you type your notes into a computer, iPad, phone, or anything like that, a tablet. Because the physical act of writing your ideas down will build a kind of relationship to philosophy that is much more enjoyable than if you put things on a computer.

I don't know, call me old-fashioned, but I think I'm still going to recommend that you write things out by hand, with a pen or pencil, on some sort of writing surface. So let's talk about the writing surface. It shouldn't be anything too precious. So don't go out and buy a super expensive leather-bound notebook because you don't want to have it be something that you're afraid to mess up in or write stupid things, which we all do, or tear it up or cross out things.

Buy or get yourself or use a notebook that you already have around. It's just a common notebook. What's going to make it special is that it's going to be a place where you're going to record your journey through philosophy and through the philosophy text that you will be reading. And it will be something that you'll get to enjoy for all the years to come.

So, yeah, there are several options for what kinds of writing surfaces you can use. A typical composition notebook is what I use when I am at home. I have also been known to use legal pads when I'm working on a particular project because I want to be able to shuffle around the pages. So I will use a legal pad, the normal yellow legal pads, and then I'll punch holes in the pages and put them into a binder.

You can also use, of course, loose-leaf sheets that are already punched. But that only works if you're at home and you're working at a desk or something like that. If you are using your reading time during a commute or if you're working at a cafe, you might also consider using a portable notebook, something like a Moleskine, although those also tend to be a little expensive, so I don't know, Meade makes a fat notebook, which I really, really love because they're very portable, they fit in practically any jacket pocket, and even though they're fat, the lines are pretty thick, so they fill up quickly.

And that's the other thing about your notebook, is that you want to pick a notebook that isn't too wieldy because you want to be able to fill it up quickly and get the satisfaction of having filled up your first philosophy notebook. That will be a big boost to your continued engagement with philosophy.

And when you're done with your first notebook, as with any other notebook, what you'll do is that you'll sit down with a highlighter and take a little trip down memory lane and use that highlighter to underline the best ideas and the most interesting ideas that you came across during your time filling up this notebook.

And that will help to reinforce your memory and to bring together your thinking across time. So say that it took you a couple of weeks to fill up your notebook, you'll begin to remember what you were thinking while you were reading this passage early on in the text and start making connections that will really spark your future. So, the funnest part about creating this notebook for me is really at the end where I get to sit down and revisit my thinking and really enjoy the work that went into recording my progress through a text.

The last thing that I want to say about your philosophy notebook is that you should number the pages at the very top. And you can do that as you go along, or as I do when I start a new notebook, I just go through and number all the pages, maybe I get tired around 50, but I number a bunch of them upfront and that way you'll have a better memory of where things are at because if you look up and in the upper right-hand corner where I put my number, page number 13, I'm writing about Heidegger on dwelling, I will remember that it was page three or around page three.

And I do this when I'm reading as well. I'm always referring back to the page number that I'm on, and that has helped me over time to create a bit of a photographic memory, where if I think of a paragraph, I associate it with a page, and I can usually go right to it. I think that takes a little bit of practice, but that's what you're building up, is a sense of the spatiality of the text itself.

In creating your philosophy notebook, a sense of the spatiality of how your notebook is laid out. And of course, it's laid out linearly and then page by page. So, yeah, numbering pages is really, really helpful for that. And also, to be able to refer back to your ideas as you create more notebooks.

And also, if you're writing in your text, if they're not library books, and you're making notes within your text. Then you can jot down the number of your philosophy notebook that, for that month, say, and you'll be able to refer back to your thinking on the same subject across time.

So when you began versus several months later or a year later or whatnot. So, yeah, that's what I wanted to say about the notebook itself. So get yourself a notebook and something to write with, pencil or pen, doesn't matter. And let's get started.

What To Write In Your Philosophy Notebook

So, what to write about in your new notebook. I guess the first thing that I want to say is that I wouldn't worry too much about getting it right to begin with.

I was, when I was preparing for this blog post, I was thinking back to the first time that I picked up Heidegger. I was reading Heidegger as an undergraduate, this little text called, What Is Metaphysics? I thought it would be a simple book, right?

And it is deceivingly simple sounding, like for Heidegger, at least you pick it up and it's, it's understandable. I was able to follow it and I was really enjoying myself going through the text and seeing what ideas sparked me. And following sort of his thinking along with my thinking, and so on and so forth.

Looking back, I realized that I was bringing a lot to that text. And that when I began, I … it… what I was reading wasn't Heidegger, let's just put it that way. I wasn't really that concerned or really able at that point to understand what Heidegger was laying out in that little, seemingly simple book.

But I, I totally dug it anyhow, and I had a great time reading it. So, I would say, especially when you start out, that you don't need to worry too much about getting it right. I think your first job is really trying to figure out what interests you, what sparks you, what bothers you, what makes you curious, what is really making you think other things in your life, and what kind of connections you're making.

When you first begin, you bring yourself, all of you, to the text. And then as you begin to read more and to go deeper into the text and to build more of a context for reading philosophy, then you'll expand and be able to get a sense of different kinds of authors and different philosophers and what they're up to, and read it at a different level.

So, enough about that. What should you take notes on? I'm going to give you a little acronym here, which hopefully will help you to remember how to get started. It is just three points. And the acronym is C.I.A. C is for content, I is for intentions, and A is for assumptions.

Read First For Content, Nail Down Big Ideas and Technical Terms

So first of all, you're going to read for the content. So just like you would with a foreign language, right? You have your little dictionary out and you might even, say you're reading Aristotle, have an Aristotle dictionary next to you, or a Heidegger dictionary next to you. They make these kinds of dictionaries for particular philosophers, especially if they have language that is different.

Rather technical in that they don't define, but is context defined? So, yeah, first of all, read for content, and your first task or your first stopping point will be to identify what key terms keep appearing in the text. So if you're reading Heidegger, it might be dwelling, or it might be Da-sein. If you're reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, it's going to be virtue, right? These are the big concepts that they're working with. And you'll see that they're repeated over and over again. And these are technical terms, or they're using these terms in a technical way, usually in a fairly precise way.

Sometimes philosophers will give you an actual definition, or, and they'll revise that definition as they build their arguments or as they build the conceptions as well. So, if a philosopher actually gives you a definition, first of all, celebrate because that is not all that common in philosophy. And that is something that you should or can jot down in your notebook so that you can refer back to it as you keep encountering this concept or word.

And different versions of the definition. And you can begin to think about, Oh, he started with this definition or she started with this definition, and then she got to this definition. So this was added to it. Oh, okay. I see how this whole argument is about adding this part of the definition, right? So you can begin to see by tracking these concepts how a philosopher is building momentum and how the text itself is carrying through ideas as it develops and adds more bulk to certain concepts or problems it's addressing.

Okay, so first of all, we have technical terms. Sometimes they are defined and sometimes they are not. And sometimes they are compared and contrasted to other terms. So for example, in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, there's a whole discussion about courage and the difference between courage and being brash, right?

If someone runs into a house that is on fire in order to rescue someone and does that successfully, or even if they don't succeed, right? We think of that as a pretty courageous act. But if someone runs in to get their favorite teddy bear, that same act is not necessarily thought of as courageous, it's thought of as impulsive or brash or not so smart, right?

Because the risk that you took to do this is not comparable to the reward or to what you achieve by taking this risk. So there's, this is not Aristotle's own example, but there is a big discussion there about differences between courage and brashness. By taking a term or an idea like courage, which is a prime virtue for Aristotle and testing it against other cases of things that may be courage or may look like courage, but in fact turn out to not be courage.

This is a key way in which philosophers tighten up their definitions and their ideas and narrow the focus. So as you begin to pick up on technical and important terms and concepts, you'll begin to see that this compare contrast mechanism for creating ideas is very, very common in philosophy.

The other thing that you will begin to notice as you pick up on these terms are inconsistencies that any philosopher will, if they're dealing with a really important, all philosophers deal with really important questions, but when you get into complex ideas, it's almost impossible to define something or to deal with a complex problem or question without at some point being inconsistent.

And these inconsistencies that crop up in philosopher's works have to do with the underlying assumptions. So given the underlying assumptions of a text, certain inconsistencies are built into those assumptions. If you become puzzled over why a definition of courage in one part of Aristotle's text seems to contradict a different one that he's working with in another part of the text, this is somewhere where the text can really open up to you, and you can begin to reach at those core assumptions that are underlying the discussion.

So it's by tracking these concepts, the way they're compared and contrasted, and the way in which inconsistencies start to crop up, that we begin to get at the arguments and the assumptions underlying the text. And we're going to get to that because it's the A of our C.I.A. But before we do that, I want to do number two, which is intentions.

What Does the Philosopher Do With What They Say?

So there are the things that the philosopher says. So those are the words, the terms, the concepts, the arguments. And then there are the things that the philosopher is doing with what they are saying. And while we are reading for content, we're reading the text in a fairly local way, assuming it's a closed system for what it is saying.

Once we step out to talk about the intentions or what the philosopher is doing with what they're saying, we are opening up to a broader context, so that we're reading for what is it that the philosopher is responding to, or who are they responding to when and as they lay out their concepts and their ideas and their arguments and their reasoning, right?

And in order to do this, you need to have a little bit of a context or an understanding of where the philosopher is coming out of or who has talked about this issue, problem, or concept before. So this does require that you build up a little bit of a sense of the history of philosophy, reading any good introduction to a philosopher should give you this kind of context to allow you to begin to read, not just for what the philosopher says, but for what he's trying or she is trying to do with what they are saying.

So let me just give you an example. Aristotle argues against the existence of void in the Physics and also in the Metaphysics. And he is there responding to pre-Socratic philosophers who argued for the existence of void. And this was a heated argument in ancient metaphysics. There's a reason why he begins the argument there in that he believes that that's one of the most important things that he can accomplish in talking about questions of metaphysics.

If you read, for example, Jonathan Lear's introduction to Aristotle or the introduction that comes with the book that you're reading, the physics or the metaphysics, that context, part of the job of the introduction is to give you that context so that you don't come to a philosopher cold, but you have some sense of the broader context of what is at stake, what are the larger questions that the philosopher is addressing, and why does the philosopher begin where they do. So, that is reading, what I call reading for not just the content but the intentions. Not just for what the philosopher says, but what the philosopher does.

Ferret Out Assumptions

Okay, now we can talk about three assumptions, and this is about going deeper in the text. We've read very locally, then we've read broadly, and now we're going to go deeper in the text. In order to get at the assumptions of the text, which are usually not stated, assumptions are usually left unstated, what that requires, I think, is probably reading a text more than once. So that you first have to get a sense of the architecture of the text and what are the arguments that are being made before you can get through to the assumptions, but you'll start to get a sense of that as you start to track concepts and ideas as well.

So, I guess all that I want to say about assumptions at this point is that you should start to think about what is the author, the philosopher here assuming that she is able to say X, Y, and Z? Where is that coming from? We'll do another blog post about how to go deeper in a philosophy text, how to get at the assumptions, how to get at the inconsistencies a little bit further, and how to start to engage with the secondary literature on certain authors. So I'll say more about that in a future blog post.

Going Deeper

The last thing that I want to leave you with is this idea of rereading. I've already said that reading philosophy is unlike reading fiction or other kinds of nonfiction, and part of it is because it tends to be linguistically dense. It does require that you read it more than once if what you want to do is to actually understand what the philosopher is saying and doing in the text. If your goal is to enjoy the philosophical romp and to riff off of it, to see where, what sparks you.

I don't know, I can imagine many situations in which we just want to pick up a philosophy text and enjoy it for whatever you are bringing to it and what that creates. What that reading philosophy plus you creates, and maybe you're going to do a piece of art on it on whatever it evokes for you.

And that's great. I think more people should read philosophy and just riff off of it in whatever way they choose and please. But if what you want is to develop a deeper understanding of philosophy itself and the history of philosophy, you're going to need to read things more than once.

So, it's really at the rereading level that you begin to get at the assumptions and more of the intentions and more of an understanding of what hangs on the questions that these philosophers are addressing. Okay. I want to leave you with that. I think I've given you enough to think about. Don't forget C.I.A.: content, intentions, and assumptions, and I'll see you on the other side.

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