I think the most basic philosophical skill is understanding past arguments. Reading Plato and Aristotle is good practice for this, because their books have a lot of subtle arguments that don’t require much previous tradition. Then maybe you’ll start reading later stuff, making your own arguments and tracing them through the literature, talking to people and so on.
Or if you don’t find the fun in reading all these arguments—then maybe just leave it. The same thing could happen in any other area, like math or physics or programming. Feynman famously said about physics that “it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it”. Annie Dillard makes a similar point:
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…. Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.”
For me personally, some arguments from classical philosophy are fun (learning as recollection and so on), but not so much fun that I’d like to do it as a career.
I think the most basic philosophical skill is understanding past arguments. Reading Plato and Aristotle is good practice for this, because their books have a lot of subtle arguments that don’t require much previous tradition. Then maybe you’ll start reading later stuff, making your own arguments and tracing them through the literature, talking to people and so on.
Or if you don’t find the fun in reading all these arguments—then maybe just leave it. The same thing could happen in any other area, like math or physics or programming. Feynman famously said about physics that “it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it”. Annie Dillard makes a similar point:
For me personally, some arguments from classical philosophy are fun (learning as recollection and so on), but not so much fun that I’d like to do it as a career.