Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
This is one of the things that makes reading philosophy both more interesting and more difficult: constantly reminding yourself to be critical (in the sense of thoughtful analysis) rather than merely accepting of what you read.
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We should of course always analyse philosophical ideas, but a teacher once gave me the advice (which I think has merit) to try to accept an author's views when reading a work, and then, once you've read it, subject what you've read to critical analysis. If we start off by rejecting something outright because the author's views are unpleasant to a modern audience (which a great many works written in the past of course are), we are likely to miss the gems of wisdom that the work contains.
An example would be Aristotle's book "The Nicomachean Ethics". One of the foundation works on ethics, but the modern reader is likely to be horrified by Aristotle's views on slavery that are expressed in the book. You'd be doing yourself a disservice, though, if you avoided reading it because of that.