No, this is not about the decline of the occident, just a note about a curiosity in academic philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline in which reading is a key competence, not least in that philosophical exchange often focuses on the precise formulation of a premise or an argument. But while there are numerous guides on writing philosophy or on reconstructing arguments, there is next to nothing on reading. Given that different people reading philosophy often end up with contrary takes on texts (be they historical or contemporary) and given that much energy is spent on singling out proper takes, it is astonishing (to put it mildly) that there is so little reflection on reading. Or perhaps not? One of the first things I took in as a philosophy student is that philosophy is, by and large, an implicit culture where the rules of the game are not expressed but handed down by emulation. However, reading practices are not just about the rules of a specific game. Arguably, such practices make the often unreflected fabric of our intuitions and ways of life. So understanding our (current as opposed to some other) reading practice will not only yield an understanding of our particular ways but also of why we prefer certain texts and forms of reading over others in the first place. So why do we care so little? Preparing a larger project and a workshop on the issue of reading, I would like to share some encounters and musings.
Text production. – Having been educated as a historian of philosophy, first as a medievalist and, then, as an early-modernist, I have always been intrigued by the fact that texts have to be produced (before they can be consumed) by the historian. Becoming aware that the texts we read in books have come a long way (from picking and transcribing manuscripts into readable Latin, to a critical edition after choosing a leading manuscript, while referencing deviating manuscripts and sources, to a translation, a translation competing with other translations, being published), the material basis of reading and its availability, for whatever ideological or financial reasons, was already a thing to be pondered on. So, long before we can set eyes on a text, a number of decisions are made that include and exclude authors and whole traditions. When colleages say, they alter the canon by putting a new text on the reading list, I often want to ask why they think that the text is not already part of the canon, especially if it’s (fairly) readily available. But that’s by the by. The upshot is that reading presupposes the very availability of texts, and that’s a highly ideological matter already (or else tell me why everyone referencing medieval philosophy just references Thomas Aquinas).
“Why bother? – I just read.” – Still at Groningen University, I once asked colleagues whether we shouldn’t compose a reading guide detailaing how they approach their respective readings. The standard response was: “Why? I just read. There’s nothing much to say.” Asking further, they would often detail ways of reconstructing and formalizing arguments that were at once highly technical and subject to change. So, if you’re one of these poor souls thinking that there is one good way of reconstructing an argument in a text, just forget about it! It’s hard and ongoing work – no matter whether the text is by Plato or Ted Sider. The bottom line is that, no matter whether you’re a historian or a staunch analytic philosopher, any reading is highly contestable. Shouldn’t this fact give rise to a discussion of how readings are or should be constrained? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But there is literally nowt (which is why I thought it timely to run a conference on the why and how of doing history of philosophy).
Texts versus arguments. – In my first year as a student of philosophy, I was asked to reconstruct an argument by Leibniz. We were supposed to use decimal numbers. My instructor (for those who care it was Lothar Kreimendahl) was not happy: Rather than presenting a list of numbered propositions, I gave what is nowadays called a narrative. I proudly rejected being graded for my supposed failure. But what this taught me was that the distance between the the text and its reconstruction can be very long and varied. I got out ok, but I still worry about the poor souls who think there is one true reconstruction or reading of a text. The upshot is that there is no clear way of getting from the text to a reconstruction of an argument. In fact, the text has to be seen in a certain context as speaking to a certain issue in the first place. But how is that known or established? Well, first of all it needs to be established, be it by your instructor, interlocutor or the stuff you’re reading about it. So there is no argument to be read off a text. The way of dealing with texts (as e.g. containers of arguments) has to be established already.
Who cares? – Of course, scholars dealing with different periods in the history of philosophy or reading cultures have to care. Doina-Cristina Rusu and Dana Jalobeanu, for instance, taught me that recipes and descriptions of experiments form a specific reading culture that needs to be studied in its own right in order to understand how things were understood and transmitted. The same goes for current philosophy, or so I think, but the implicit culture suggests otherwise. Yet, as long as this culture or cultures remain implicit, I think we’re not even doing proper philosophy (if doing philosophy includes studying the preconditions of one’s thought). So my guess is that we’re mostly doing what Kuhn took to be normal science. We unthinkingly emulate our teachers. But while doing so, we encounter the uncanny: students who don’t care about reading and even produce their writings with the help of LLMs. But funnily enough, in this very situation we insist on a proper distinction between the text reflected on and the text written. My hunch is that it’s our implicit reading culture that leaves us with very few responses to such misgivings. The bottom line is: We need an idea of how texts relate to thoughts etc. in order to handle the situation. But for that, we need to understand the preconditions of reading.
Not even didactics of philosophy? – While practitioners in different philologies and related disciplines seem to care greatly about reading practices, in philosophy the situation is so bad that not even didactics of philosophy have much to offer. Really? Obviously, or so I thought, philosophy teacher education would go into reading, no? Talking to some highly accomplished and experienced scholars in didactics like Vanessa Albus or Laura Martena, I learned that reading is not only thought of as problematic but often even actively pushed to the fringes in teaching philosophy. But why? Well, part of the reason is that philosophy is already taught in primary school, a level at which you won’t rely on texts. For later stages, a common resource is provided, amongst other things, by so-called sets of post-texts (Nach-Texte) which present summaries of a philosopher’s opinion (as one among other opinions). This way, a text by Kant might be reduced to the opinion of a talkshow guest in class. Not quite as drastic, but perhaps similar in spirit is Jonathan Bennett’s famous initiative of providing translations of classic texts from the early modern period from English into English, “prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.” This way you get, for instance, a simplified version of Locke’s Essay. (More than 15 years ago, I was involved in a translation project in which someone mistook these translations for proper texts and handed in a translation of a classic text from the simplified English into German. Luckily, we caught this in time.) The upshot is that (again, with notable exceptions) even didactics makes do with the miraculous move from the textual surface to the supposed argument or position – without much thought about interference by different possible reading strategies. At the same time, didactics is, strangely enough, a fairly young discipline that was still pushed to the sidelines during my student days.
Do philosophers still take pride in claiming not to have read that much? – Perhaps, then, the often rehearsed assumption that “thinking for yourself”, our supposed originality, doesn’t require or might even be hindered by too much reading still has great currency. Remembering school days, texts were often taken, not as a place of thought, but almost as a mere occasion for thinking. At the end of the day, I can only begin to suggest (in the time to come) why thinking about reading matters greatly and why it might still have been sidelined nonetheless, at least as a philosophical topic. But while my recent survey across philosophical disciplines on this issue was somewhat disconcerting (except for a few classics mainly from the French and some practicioners in the larger phenomenological tradition), I have high hopes when it comes to neighbouring disciplines.
Handling Ideas 
Heh, I literally wrote on a post with advice on how to read philosophy a eek and a half ago: https://diaryofdoctorlogic.wordpress.com/2025/10/16/advice-on-how-to-read-philosophy/
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Yes! I saw that. You’re one of the very few who care.
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This is indeed a very interesting topic. It may not be entirely relevant, but even when learning to play jazz or rock instruments, people are increasingly turning away from listening to masters (whatever they may be) and transcribing their ideas, and are instead turning to YouTube videos or published exercise books. “Creative reading” and ‘creative listening’ – “problem-solving listening,” as I would call it – are falling by the wayside as a result. People’s own personal view of the world is thus becoming increasingly alienated, narrow and AI, by establishing a status quo of “what really needs to be known,” is unlikely to improve the situation.
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Many thanks! Yes, I easily see that. On the one hand, all these tutions or vlogs on Youtube are very instructive (I really like Adam Neely, for instance). But they often suggest straightforward “interventions” for piece-meal practice topics, steering away from the actual music they came out of. A bit like eating vitamin tablets instead of fruit & veg.
By the way: If you ever want to write a guest post on this issue, I’d love to host it. I tried to do a couple of posts on music myself. Although there might be more interesting outlets than this blog.
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Oh, Adam Neely is truly remarkable and stands out as a positive YouTube example of how he manages to broaden people’s understanding of music. In a way, he reminds me of Leonard Bernstein with his lectures.
Thank you very much for the invitation. Yes, I would be happy to write a guest article on the topic of “Reading as a social practice” and related aspects from the perspective of a musician and music educator. I have been thinking for some time about “oral culture” versus “Western art education” and the special nature of artistic insight, and a guest article would give me the opportunity to explore this topic in greater depth.
All the best
Andreas Wildenhain
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This is a thought-provoking post. I’ve always thought it was odd that, as university faculty, we wanted research ‘output’ documented and quantified. But when we assess each other, or interview candidates for jobs, we never (I think it safe to say) ask about someone’s ‘reading program’ or ask what reading is part of their ‘research program’. Though all of us know that reading is part of all research work at some level. I post the following, from VOX, just to underscore the importance of turning to reading.
https://www.vox.com/culture/466858/lord-of-the-rings-conservatives-right-republicans-elon-musk-jd-vance-peter-thiel?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email_acq&utm_campaign=trump100daysroundup&ueid=68e973966afae6f8526eb9f2e12e0c61&utm_term=All%20recurring%20%28Memberful%20%2B%20Paypal%29
This post looks at ‘right wing’ uses/readings of ‘Lord of the Rings’. And it underscores the way in which the reading of a popular narrative can function to legitimize particular political aims (and, I would argue, a certain gender idolatry).
I really regret not being able to participate in the reading conference. I would love to attend. As my background i(and PhD field) is actually in religious studies, I’ve long felt that the widespread failure to notice that reading is an intrinsically social activity (even for the most individual of readers) for which there needed to be an ‘anthropological’ account. I came to this view much earlier in my career when I was more regularly in communication with biblical scholars, and tasked with teaching undergraduate-level courses (in a regional public university in Appalachian United States). I recognized, at one point, that the inarticulate impression that reading was an utterly individual and essentially ‘private’ and passive activity did a great deal of unacknowledged work in biblical hermeneutics, in spite of a significant body of often philosophically informed hermeneutical reflection.
I also realized two related things (about reading) that I thought needed exploration. The first is the rather more obvious ‘next thought’–if reading is an intrinsically social activity (as language is an intrinsically conventional exchange–I had always fallen under the spell of widespread reading of Wittgenstein, popular in religious studies 30-40 years ago–the social practices of reading were going to vary across communities. And the second realization was that, as ‘flesh and blood readers’, we brought all the factors that conditioned our ‘face to face’ communications with others to bear in our reading, especially where imagination plays a critical role in ‘grasping meanings’ of texts—always a critical component of any sort of ‘religious’ reading of ‘religious’ texts.
I will leave off here, as I am not really forwarding a philosophical argument clearly enough in response to the post. I simply put forward what I have said as a plug for ‘caring’ about reading, and finding some way of making a discussion of one’s ‘reading program’ and how it is related to research activity a self-reflective feature of our thinking about (and ‘assessing’) research. Again. . . I would love to participate in the reading conference/seminar; and I would do so if I was actually working on a project related unambiguously to the conference’s agenda. I simply put in a plug for an “anthropology of reading” that we will illumine how we communicate philosophical ideas, and the sorts of texts that we produce and read.
Keith Green: East Tennessee State University greenj@etsu.edu
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Dear Keith,
Wonderful to read you (at least) again! Your points (and the text you link to) really resonate with me. If you would ever like to send a guest post following up on these issues, I’d love to host it (not least your anthropological approach to biblical studies). In fact, my own approach (according to which reading is determined mainly through interaction) is also drawing on Wittgenstein – and Davidson’s triangulation argument. (By the way, I now look forward to supervising an MA thesis on Wittgenstein’s own remarks on reading in the PI.)
All best wishes, Martin
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Hi Martin
I’m surprised you didn’t mention David Conception’s work https://philpapers.org/rec/CONRPW
on how to read philosophy. It is well known among folks in the philosophy pedagogy scene.
best,
Chris Stephens
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Dear Chris,
Many thanks for this! Yes, it’s a fine piece (even if it mainly serves the substantiation of a hand-out) along with some others by Daniel Whistler, Russell Marcus and a couple of papers in German, for instance, by Anne Burkard.
Actually, it was Conceptión’s piece back in the day that alerted me to the fact that there does not seem to be a philosophical discussion about issues concerning reading. That said, me and my team are currently preparing an annotated bibliography on the topic.
By the way, there’s another short piece by Conceptión featured on Daily Nous, but sadly there weren’t many responses.
All best, Martin
PS. I thought your name was familiar and now I saw that you actually kindly commented on another piece about three years ago: https://handlingideas.blog/2022/11/07/how-to-read-some-basics-part-one/#comment-28651
Thanks again!
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There is an episode on reading in the Overthink-Podcast. I found it very inspiring.
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Thanks! I guess it’s this one. Very good indeed.
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Dear Martin,
Your reflections on reading philosophy semed to me very interesting and appealing. Thinking about it, two things came to my mind that perhaps might contribute a little bit to the discussion. First, I remebered a quote from Goethe in a book o Pierre Hadot « Les gens », disait Goethe, « ne savent pas ce que cela coûte de temps et d’effort pour apprendre à lire. Il m’a fallu quatre-vingts ans pour cela et je ne suis même pas capable de dire si j’ai réussi » (Exescises spirituales, p. 58). In short, Hadot believes that we must learn to read ancient philosphy as a form of spiritual extercise. Interestingly, reading would also be one of these.
Second, don´t you think that hermeneutics deals, in some broader sense, with reading? Some of your points, (specially when you say “Well, first of all it needs to be established, be it by your instructor, interlocutor or the stuff you’re reading about it. So there is no argument to be read off a text. The way of dealing with texts (as e.g. containers of arguments) has to be established already”), made me think in Gadamer idea of tradition, horizon, and so on.
All the best,
Mario Narváez
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Dear Mario,
Many thanks, not least for the Hadot/Goethe reference!
Re hermeneutics, Gadamer and indeed much of the hermeneutic tradition are in the background of my musings. Sadly, they are hardly invoked these days, which might be why thought about reading is such a fringe topic now. It’s sad not least because we now have so much work in neighbouring disciplines (literary and media studies, history of ideas, psychology etc.) and could really get ahead.
All best, Martin
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