[mcphilip]

I spent a good 5 or 6 years reading philosophy and psychology in my spare time. I don’t claim a formal understanding of the subject that would come close to what you would get from a college degree, but I do feel like I understand the zeitgeist a lot clearer than before.

I preface with that to say that my recommendation is to pick and chose which parts are of interest to you and then dive in further to the source material. If you take the approach that you must start at Aristotle, you run the risk of burning out before getting to areas that might be life changing to study.

I got my start by grabbing all of the “Introducing...” [1] series of graphic novels about subjects I commonly heard referenced but didn’t understand. From there, I dove into the underlying texts of everything I found interesting.

Again, I didn’t gain an academic understanding of the subject, but I came away with a wildly different worldview than when I started. Life’s too short to be an expert at everything, but that doesn’t have to stop you from exploring on your own.

[1] e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Postmodernism-Graphic-Gui...

These books have some pretty deep illustrations, not just cartoon drawings of the subjects. One favorite of mine was a scene showing Monet painting haystacks, frustrated that a worker had left a ladder on one he was studying — I think the implication was Monet wasn’t _really_ trying to capture impressions of the haystacks as they appeared throughout the days and seasons, just his preferred impression.

[njsteblay]

Start with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The Great Courses has some good materials for the adult learner. You can branch out from there.