How to study philosophy in college: arguments, texts and concepts

If you're looking up how to study philosophy in college, here's the short answer: you study it by reconstructing arguments, not by memorizing opinions. Knowing that Descartes said "I think, therefore I am" gets you nowhere on its own. What your professor wants is for you to know what problem he was trying to solve, how he got to that line, which premises he relies on and how other philosophers pushed back. Every thinker is a reasoned answer to a question, and your job is to rebuild that reasoning in your own words.

What makes the major tricky is that the readings are short in pages and very long in hours. A chapter of Kant or Aristotle can eat a whole afternoon, full of words that look ordinary (substance, form, reason, experience, subject) but mean something precise, and different, for each author. Add lecture slides that squeeze an entire school of thought into one screen, a history of philosophy sequence organized by period, a logic course unlike anything else in the major, and exams that are almost always essays, orals or a term paper.

It isn't my major: I study computer engineering. What follows comes from looking closely at how philosophy is studied and graded, and from what we know about how people learn. It also works for the philosophy courses that show up in other majors: ethics, epistemology, political philosophy or intro to philosophy as a gen ed.

Every argument, as premises and a conclusion

This is the habit that changes the most. When you finish a reading, don't summarize it. Try to write its main argument as a numbered list instead: premises on top, conclusion at the bottom, one sentence each.

Here's Descartes' method of doubt from the Meditations:

1. If something can be doubted, it can't serve as a secure foundation for knowledge.
2. The senses sometimes deceive us, and I could be dreaming.
3. So everything I know through the senses can be doubted.
4. But while I'm doubting, I'm thinking, and I can't doubt that I think.
5. Conclusion: that I exist as a thinking thing is the first thing I know for certain.

Laid out like this, you can see where the weak spots are: premise 1 (do we really need absolute certainty to know anything?) or the jump from "I think" to "I exist as a thinking thing". If you can't number the argument, you don't understand it yet. And almost every critique you'll read later goes after one specific premise, so having them in front of you tells you exactly where each objection lands.

Do this for every reading on the syllabus. It feels clumsy at first; by midterms it takes you ten minutes.

Reading philosophy: slowly, with a question, and from memory at the end

Philosophy texts don't work as a straight read, and rereading them three times cover to cover doesn't work either. What does work is a slow read in three passes:

1. Before reading, the question. Check the lecture slides or the syllabus and write, in one sentence, what problem the text is answering. "Where do our ideas come from?" for Hume, for instance.
2. A quick scouting pass. Just to see the structure: where the thesis is, where the examples are, where the author argues with someone else. Mark the key paragraphs, not the pretty lines.
3. A slow pass through those paragraphs. Sentence by sentence this time, noting in the margin what each one does: claims, gives a reason, offers an example, answers an objection.

Then close the book and write the numbered argument and the new terms from memory. Only after that, go back to see what you missed. Writing without looking is the step that makes it stick: in Roediger and Karpicke's experiment, students who practiced recalling remembered more days later than those who restudied the same passage. Highlighting and rereading, on the other hand, are among the techniques that scored lowest in a major review of how students study: they make you feel like you know it without the knowing.

One more practical tip: read the translation your professor assigned. Technical terms change from one translation to the next, and the exam will expect the ones from the edition used in class.

A glossary per philosopher, not one for the whole course

In philosophy, the same word means different things depending on who's using it. An "idea" for Plato is an eternal form that exists beyond physical things; for Descartes, anything in the mind; for Hume, a faint copy of an impression. If you keep one general glossary with a single definition of "idea," you'll blend authors together on the exam.

Build a glossary for each philosopher, with one entry per concept:

• The term and how the author defines it, with the page number from your edition.
• Your own version in one sentence, no copying.
• An example that shows it, even one you make up.
• What it gets confused with, especially if another author uses the same word.

The last line of each entry is the one that saves you. It's what reminds you that Kant's "a priori" isn't the same as Descartes' innate ideas, or that Aristotle's "virtue" isn't Machiavelli's.

Philosophers, organized by problem

History of philosophy is usually taught by period (ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary), but it makes more sense by problem. Build a chart for each big question on the syllabus, with one column per philosopher and the same rows for all of them:

What the chart gives you is what professors want to see on an exam: not what each one said in isolation, but how two answers to the same question differ. It's the same format I recommend in how to study sociology and political science, where you also compare theorists row by row. And if your course is organized by period, place each philosopher in context the way you would in history: what was going on, who they were answering, what came next.

Logic: problem sets, not reading

Logic is the exception in the major. You don't learn it by reading; you learn it by working problems, like a math class. Truth tables, translating sentences into symbols, proving whether an argument is valid, spotting the fallacy.

What helps most:

• Work the problem set without looking at the solutions, and only check at the end.
• Come back to the ones you got wrong a few days later instead of moving straight on.
• Mix problem types when you review, so you practice recognizing which technique each one needs.
• Formalize arguments from your other courses. The Descartes one above, for example. That way logic stops being its own island.

The exam: write it, say it, defend it

The typical philosophy exam is an essay prompt ("Explain Hume's critique of causation and assess Kant's response"), an oral where you present a philosopher and field questions, or a term paper with a thesis of your own.

All three can be practiced ahead of time:

1. For written exams, collect prompts from past exams or write your own from the syllabus. Sketch an outline in five minutes (which concepts, which philosophers, which argument) and write the answer on a timer with your notes closed. Then check it against your glossary and your chart.
2. For orals, explain each philosopher out loud for five minutes, as if to a friend who hasn't done the reading. Wherever you stumble is what you haven't understood yet.
3. For the term paper, the structure that works is thesis, argument, the strongest objection you can think of and your reply to it. A good objection makes your paper stronger, not weaker.

In all three, define before you use. If you write "substance" without saying in which sense, your professor will assume you don't know.

Lecture slides, with the explanation put back in

Philosophy slides tend to be what the professor said, squeezed into three words per line: "Kant: Copernican revolution," "pure intuitions: space and time," a diagram of arrows between sensibility, understanding and reason. It made sense in the lecture hall; in the PDF you're left with, not so much.

For that part you can use Filmina, a web app that explains your lecture slides out loud, one at a time, pointing at the part it's talking about. It also looks at each slide as an image, so it explains a diagram along with the text. If something doesn't click, you ask Mina, the chat that answers from your own material ("what does it mean that space is a pure intuition?"), and then you can practice with questions built from that lecture. Your PDF readings go in too, so you can read them and ask about a passage, though those aren't explained out loud. It has limits: it needs an internet connection, the free plan has a monthly cap on minutes, and with a scanned photocopy it recognizes the text, which can go wrong with small print or a crooked page. The numbered arguments, the glossary and the charts are still on you.

Frequently asked questions

What do you study in a philosophy major?

History of philosophy from the ancients to today, logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy, among others. Depending on the program, also philosophy of language, science or mind, plus courses from other fields like history or literature.

Is philosophy a hard major?

There's no calculus, but it asks you to read difficult texts slowly and write clear arguments. The hardest part at first is using each concept in the precise sense each author gives it instead of the everyday one, and the logic course.

How do you read a philosophy text?

Start with a question, do a quick pass to see the structure and a slow one through the key paragraphs. When you're done, close the book and write the argument from memory as premises and a conclusion.

How do you prepare for a philosophy oral exam?

Explain each philosopher out loud for a few minutes, with no notes, as if to someone who hasn't done the reading. Wherever you stumble is what you need to review, and it's worth practicing questions that compare philosophers too.