You don’t have a good appreciation for what it is to do philosophy or what it is to be a philosopher. That’s fine. Your conception of it will naturally change over time the more you read and take classes and get a feel for what’s out there. To start, you may find Routledge’s “The Arguments of The Philosophers” series to be of use. For Hume, in particular, reading Barry Stroud’s contribution helped me immensely. Fairly comprehensive, and well written.

Also, don’t buy books new. Buy used Hackett editions, which are super cheap, and use Anna’s Archive online. They have a pdf for virtually every book that’s been published.

P.s. you ought to condense your writing yourself. Found your post interesting but nobody will want read it all

Oh im sorry its by Timothy Williamson. Mixed up the Tims

All I can find is philosophy of physics?

Not really “contemporary” but Rorty was amazing. Nussbaum wonderful and very broad.

Tim Maudlins book philosophy of philosophy

Easiest way to find stuff like this is just to go to the website of publishers like OUP, CUP, etc. and see what they’re advertising. But off the top of my head, check out Kate Manne, Down Girl, OUP. I believe she was a student of Haslanger.

All of Valerie Tiberius’s work that I’ve read has impressed me.

Your questioning reminds me a bit of how my thinking changed after reading, eg, Canguilhem, Pathology or Deleuze & Guittare, Anti-Oedipus.

i never claimed that the DSM-5 is to be the product of unprecedented scientific rigor. it maintains a heuristic framework at best, that reflects historical sociocultural biases. however, you are conflating the DSM's classification system with this underlying dysfunction. the labels are socially constructed, but the disorders in the current DSM are not. i would like to know what casual human behavior we are pathologizing.

this is also why i mentioned dimensional approaches. my point is that the DSM and its history have highlighted the limitations of its categorical model, which has allowed for the development of more nuanced diagnostic approaches.

Lol, man, DSM-5 has finally managed to pathologize a significant chunk of what we deem casual human behaviour to such an extent that even its staunch proponents started to lament over it recently. The behaviours classified within the DSM may be observed, but the framework that sanctions these behaviours as disorders is rather arbitrarily established against the backdrop of sociocultural decisions, and it is thus inevitably fictional, assuming that you contrast this term with a sort of true grasp of things. The data that „we“ allegedly acquired reflects the presumptions of this very framework, not dissimilar to the observations of those 19th century scientists you have mentioned, so I fail to understand what makes you think that DSM-5 is the product of an unprecented scientific rigour.

As others have indicated, there are introductory textbooks. They are commonly used in college classes like Introduction to Philosophy. They attempt to do what you are describing. However, there is a high likelihood of there being some errors and oversimplifications, as the person writing the text is almost certainly not an expert on everything. Nor will there be space for giving every interpretation of every aspect of every philosopher's position, so much will be omitted from such a text.

I will give a "classic" example of a book that has been used as an introductory text, and you can do a search for reviews of it, as there are plenty who complain about it, though it also has had plenty of people liking it: Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. The Wikipedia article gives some samples of the reactions to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy

Other introductory texts will have less written about them, because they generally are less famous, but you would have criticisms of them getting things wrong if enough philosophers read them and reviewed them.

However, few are as engagingly written (Russell won a Nobel Prize for literature for good reason). One thing that gets Russell more criticism than many such works is the fact that Russell does not engage in a pretended objectivity; he freely expresses his opinions. I personally like that, as it is more honest than pretending to have no opinion when one does (the author's opinions will affect what is written regardless of them pretending otherwise), and also it tells you who you might want to read about in another book that is more sympathetic to them, to see if they are worth more than Russell suggests.

As for David Hume specifically, the difficulty is primarily a matter of how English has changed since the 1700's. Once one gets used to reading texts of that era, one will find that Hume is an engaging and interesting author. His History of England was a popular standard history of England for about 100 years for good reason. But, if you are not accustomed to reading works of the 1700's, then he is difficult to read, as English has changed since his time.

Also, for specific philosophers, you can look them up in an encyclopedia. For the simplest take on them, you can use a standard encyclopedia, like Wikipedia or The Encyclopedia Britannica or whatever you prefer. If you want more detail and more exactness, you can use an encyclopedia of philosophy, starting with a more basic one and moving on to a more academic one. So, you could read about Hume, for example, at these links, in this order, from simpler to more complex:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume

https://iep.utm.edu/hume/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/

But if you want an exact knowledge of Hume, you will have to read Hume. So, what one should read depends on what the objectives are that one has, and also what sort of background one has. For some, the Wikipedia article will be as far as they go.

Normally, people start with an introductory text, and later move on to reading the original texts, when they want a more full and more exact knowledge of what the philosopher had to say. Though one might read selected passages of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in an Introduction to Philosophy class, I doubt that very many such classes have the student read that entire book. A more advanced History of Western Philosophy class, however, may have the student read it, as it is a very significant work of philosophy and Hume has been extremely influential. (And as an aside, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is itself a mostly simplified version of Book I of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, though there are also some differences in content.)

So, if you are just starting out, using a textbook may be the best beginning. However, you should keep in mind the limitations of such a beginning, that some philosophers and some ideas may not be properly represented.

Philosophy is different from other subjects like Biology (to use your example), because the methods used in biology are more agreed upon by biologists than the methods of philosophy, about which different philosophers disagree. How to engage with the subject is disputed among philosophers, whereas biologists have a greater agreement about what the right way is to go about studying biology. This makes it easier to write an introductory book about biology that will be acceptable to most biologists than it is to write an introductory book about philosophy that will be acceptable to most philosophers.

Human judgment informs the categories of the human sciences.

do you think that someone scientifically determined that homosexuality should be defined as sociopathy or is a form of sociopathy? that decision was determined by human judgement, based on the values of society at that point in time and political interests. i clearly disagree with that. the DSM is not perfect and likely never will be, however it has changed quite substantially since the first version

I truly don’t see the distinction you’re drawing between ‘sociocultural’ or ‘human judgment errors’ and scientific decisions, when the categories themselves readily determine what clinicians and laypeople ‘see’ as behavior.

i must have misinterpreted your mentioning of PMI in the philosophy of science then. forgive me; that's not something i have learned much about. i thought you were positing yourself as a biological determinist of sorts.

i'm aware of the previous DSM classification of homosexuality; however, I think that evades my point. classifying homoesexuality as sociopathy was a more of a sociocultural decision than a scientific one—a human judgement error so to speak. the DSM is not like pholigston... i find that to be a category error.

the behaviors classified within the DSM are not fictional, regardless of the fact that they have been subject to change as we've gained more data. freudian psychoanalysis is like phlogiston. freud lacked empirical grounding at times, yet we have built off of his work, reforming our understanding of psychology and psychiatry. we have different perspectives and i will leave it at that.

The way to learn how to read philosophy is to read philosophy and try to work it out. The more you do the better you will get.

You can also take a picture of a page of confusing text and ask an LLM questions like “what does he mean by information”. Most philosophy hinges on precise language use and often inherited use (like “intentional” in phenomenology.

Thats not really how they work nowadays

Yeah this would be true without any reinforcement learning, semantic clustering, or contextual pattern-matching, all of which modern LLMs would be applying. Yes it has recipes and twilight fanfic in the training data, but all of that will be filtered out pretty quickly.

If you take a random paragraph of Hume and ask the LLM what it means, it’s comparing it to its entire corpus of text from recipes to vampire erotica not doing what a human who knows the Hume scholarship does. Even if you ask it to explain Hume, it’s answering based on an unweighted mix of everything from actual Hume scholarship to random memes that someone who took intro made and put Hume into to things like this Reddit thread.

I think the advice to start with primary texts is usually quite bad. I’d recommend beginning with a good intro textbook instead, either a general one like James Rachels’ “Problems from Philosophy” or “Elements of Moral Philosophy”. In your case something like Harris’s “Hume: A Very Short Introduction⁠” might be a decent starting point.

I wouldn’t actually recommend SEP for most beginners either. It tends (on most subjects) to be quite dense, eg describing the main beats of arguments rather than working through them (though of course it depends somewhat on the individual entry). The IEP tends to be a little more accessible for beginners, but beginner textbooks are there for a reason.

Well, yeah it did, because it's just scanned a bunch of documents to summarise opinions which are themselves founded on decades of scholarship.