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Just read Nietzsche. If you don't get anything out of him then don't bother with the others. He represents the "continental mind" at its best.
Never heard of him.
Think of philosophy as being like one big internet argument. (It basically is that, quite literally. Many of the questions we discuss regularly on TheMotte are philosophical questions.) There has never been any time in history when someone made a forum post on a non-trivial political question and everyone thought "yep, that's correct, there's nothing to clarify or add, he simply got it right". At minimum, there will be a dozen replies telling the guy how he actually got everything wrong. Frequently, these posts will wade into interpretive matters -- asking for further elaboration or clarification on point X, asking if in this particular sentence he meant Y or if he really meant Z, asking if his arguments really support W or if that's really what he even wanted to argue for in the first place, etc. Undoubtedly you've seen this play out many times. This is just what happens when you discuss complex matters using natural language. So it goes for philosophy in general.
Think about how people still, after all these decades, can't agree over whether pro-lifers "really" believe that abortion is murder. I mean, they even say in very plain language that they think it's murder, and people still can't agree what such utterances "really" mean! Skeptics will say, well they can't actually mean that, because it's not consistent with their other beliefs/behavior, or their arguments clearly don't support that conclusion, so they have to mean something else. On and on it goes.
Sometimes the interpretive difficulties with a philosophical text are literally at the level of "I don't know what this sentence is saying". Typically they're more subtle than that though. There's a persistent interpretive difficulty with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for example over whether his metaphysics is a dual substance theory (two types of objects, appearances and things-in-themselves) or a dual property theory (only one type of object, but it has phenomenal and non-phenomenal properties). Kant was an unusually meticulous thinker, the CoPR is 800 pages of densely pedantic arguments, but on this one (rather fundamental) issue he simply never addressed it explicitly. When we're writing, we can't predict every question that every reader will ever come up with; sometimes we think something is perfectly clear even when it's not, or it just never even occurs to us to ask that particular question at all. I'm sure you can again think of many examples from your own experience.
That being said, although interpretive difficulties in natural language debates can never be entirely eradicated, some interpretations of a text are clearly better than others, and Russell was notorious for not being a particularly careful reader of the thinkers he profiled in A History of Western Philosophy. See this for example for a criticism of Russell's interpretation of Kant.
I feel like Nietzsche is cheating a bit. I'm familiar enough with some of his ideas to know he had some interesting things to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard
I have. Which is why I know continental philosophers seem to lean in to making it worse, as if obscurity and complexity is the point.
I'm glad some people like you do the reading to pass on some level of understanding.
Yeah, I mean I can see why you wouldn't say he's continental continental, but he's obviously not analytic either. If someone was coming from an analytic background and wanted to broaden their perspective on what philosophy is capable of being, I'd tell them to start with him.
Thank you! I'm glad there are people who enjoy these exposés.
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