I have been reading Plato and Aristotle intensively for the past two days or so and in between sessions of doing so I’ve spent some time reading about Ancient Philosophy on the Stanford Encyclopedia, a resource many fellow philosophy students swear by but one which I have not used much at all myself, preferring to rely on the content of my reading lists.

I had begun to think recently that my interests in philosophy lie more in the direction of epistemology and metaphysics, knowledge and reality: how we ought to think about learning and knowledge, and how we ought to view the fundamental structure of what is. This was reinforced by how much harder I find it to study ethics than to study theoretical philosophy (a useful term for this sort of stuff, adding in things like the philosophy of language).

But the platonic Socrates has been encouraging me to reassess these priorities. Nevermind that the question ‘how should I live?’ is only interesting within a certain set of ways of looking at the whole project of ethics, and uninteresting in others: it seems to me to be almost self-evident that for a rational being this question must be pursued.

I should blog more about the philosophy I’m studying and the related thoughts I’m having, not worrying about them being unpolished, for looking back on such scraps is intensely valuable.