How To Read Philosophy (Or Anything with Arguments in it)

Reading philosophy is very different than reading most other subjects.  To get anything out of a philosophy article, you, as a reader, need to actively and critcally engage with the material. Here is a (partial) list of the kinds of things you should be doing when reading the assignments for this course:
  • Read S L O W L Y
  • Read MORE THAN ONCE
  • Read Aggressively
  • Write comments and questions in margins
  • Circle words that you don’t know and look them up
  • Identify the main ideas, supporting arguments, and supporting examples
  • Try to draw connections between one part of the text and another
  • Summarize the argument when you are done to see what you still don’t understand
  • Reflect about what the author is saying: Ask yourself if you agree with the author.  If you don’t, figure out why.
    • To see these suggestions in action, let's examine the following passage from Mackie:
    "First I should query the assumption that second order evils are logically necessary accompaniments of freedom.  I should ask this: if God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good?  If there is no logical impossibility in a man's freely choosing the good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion.  God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right.  Clearly, his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and wholly good."
    From "Evil and Omnipotence" by John Mackie
    Anthologized in Philosophy of Religion edited by Brian Davies
    Oxford University Press, 2000. Page 588
    This is a difficult passage. It isn't immediately obvious what Mackie is saying.  Let's re-read the passage again, this time following the list of suggestions above.  (The right hand column contains the paragraph from Mackie, while the left hand column illustrates the sort of things you might think and ask as a reader):
    Mackie
    Reader
    "First I should query the assumption… First what?  What's he doing?  Giving a list of objections?
    that second order evils are logically necessary accompaniments of freedom. Wait.  What are "second order evils" again?  Are there "first order evils"?  What does "logically necessary accompaniment" mean?  Perhaps it means that there couldn't be freedom without this kind of evil.
    I should ask this: if God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good? Does that make sense?  If you always choose the good, then do you really have a choice?  Hmm… Does he mean that God could make it so that we only have good options or does he mean something else?
    If there is no logical impossibility in a man's freely choosing the good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. There's that "logical" thing again.  Is there some other kind of impossibility?This is an "if-then" statement.  Is it true?  Let's see.  He seems to think that's it obvious, but it isn't clear that just because it's possible for something to be the case some of the time that it must be possible to be that way all of the time…
    God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: What's an "automata"? 
    there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Regarding my earlier question: it doesn't look like he's thinking of a situation where God limits our options to strictly good things.  He's thinking more that the bad options are available, we just don't ever take them. Why is this the "obviously better" option?
    Clearly his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being omnipotent and wholly good." O.k. so this is just the problem of evil again.  But I'm not convinced that Mackie has shown that there is this "other possibility."  I'll have to look for some defense or clarification of this claim….
    For more advice on reading philosophy: