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How do philosophers read books these days?

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Chad Engelland writes with an interesting query:

A friend who is reading my CUP Divine Hiddenness book manuscript suggested that readers today tend to skip right over introductions and to start reading in earnest with chapter one. He points out that I do too much important stage setting in my current introduction and hence he recommends I rename it chapter 1 in order to signal to readers its importance.

Does that sound right? Is it common to skip over the introduction and begin with chapter one? Or, to put it another way, is it the trend for writers to do very little in the introduction other than to preview the book's contents?

I'll speak only for myself:  I always read the introductory chapter, or whatever chapter gives an overview of the project.  That often tells me whether I want to read more, or whether I want to skip ahead to particular chapters.  But maybe I'm an outlier?  What say you professional philosophers?  Academics in other fields are welcome to weigh in too, but please indicate your discipline.

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24 responses to “How do philosophers read books these days?”

  1. Jc Beall

    Ditto Professor Leiter's comment.

    Reply
  2. Dean C. Rowan

    Not a philosopher, but a librarian, and so this is right up my alley. Generally, I have always begun at the beginning with the Foreword, Preface, and Introduction (or introductory chapter), but lately I've changed course with translations or special editions. So, for volumes from the Northwestern-Newberry Edition (the "authorized" edition) of Melville, I skip the preliminaries not by Melville and proceed with his own, then at some point midway through the work I attend to the editors' introductory matter. Same with the Fowkes translation of Marx's Capital, which commences with Ernest Mandel's Introduction, Fowkes' Preface, several Prefaces and Postfaces (by Marx or Engels), all of which occupy something like 120 pages before Book 1/Part 1/Chapter 1. Two or three hundred pages into it, I'll return to the preliminaries. In these cases, where the introductory material is not integral to the work itself, I prefer not to have my hand held until I have my own sense of what the work is about and my own questions. In fact, for Marx I have only barely consulted Mandel's contribution; instead, I use our blog host's recent Routledge Philosophers series volume co-authored by Jaime Edwards, and I plan to consult Robert Paul Wolff's Understanding Marx.

    But these are different kinds of books than the one that instigated this post. They are old texts revived by new translations or editions after scholars have worked to illuminate our reception of them. Prof. Engelland's manuscript (not the CUP Element volume of the same title, I observe) would deserve cover-to-cover perusal by an interested but not expert reader like me. The Introduction is likely to described the structure of the book and characterize the relevant concepts. Take, for example, Wesley Salmon's Causality & Explanation, which commences with a Preface that identifies the sources of the chapters that follow. Next, the Introduction "is offered as a conceptual map of the broad territory" covered by the book. "It offers a general impression of 'the lay of the land.'" Following the Introduction is a Part consisting of Introductory Essays, Chapters 1 through 5. Again, I'm not an expert, but I'm interested and mildly informed. I read Salmon at first beginning to end, skipping nothing. On occasion, I dip back into the collection to reread a chapter or two. Isn't that how works like this are supposed to function?

    Reply
  3. early career scholar

    My background is in literature, but I was recently speaking to a colleague from history. She mentioned that, for book awards, the unspoken practice is to only read the introduction and then skim the rest of the book. My sense is that historians, literary scholars, and philosophers are all trained to read books differently, and perhaps the perceived importance (or lack thereof) of a book's introduction reflects these disciplinary divisions.

    As for me, I usually read a book's introduction and then decide which chapter(s) are worth my attention.

    Reply
  4. JDF

    I find introductions which consist of a high level summary of the argument of each chapter intensely boring and wish they'd just get on with it. I read them but always wish I hadn't.

    Reply
  5. A young rural philosopher

    I like my introductions to give me three things: (1) a sense of how the writer conceptualizes and articulates things, (2) a sense of the big idea that will be argued for, and (3) a sense of why the writer thinks the big idea is worth arguing for. What I find useless is the "here's how I'm going to proceed" stuff.

    Reply
  6. James C. Klagge

    I was talking with a PoliSci prof and noting the high volume of reading he assigned his seminar (multiple books a week). His reply was roughly–oh, well, I don't expect them to read it all. Just read the intro and the conclusion, and then if they are interested to read the rest.

    Reply
  7. Brian

    Not a philosopher but still read philosophy 😉

    I typically skip introductions as they’re tedious and I don’t like approaching the main text with my mind already colored by the perspective of the introduction. I enjoy returning to the introduction after reading the text to see how it lines up with my thinking, or not.

    Reply
  8. Michel

    If I'm only interested in one chapter, then that's usually all I read. But if I want to read the whole book, then I read it in order, from first to last page, usually about ten pages or so at a time.

    The only time I skip an introduction is when it's a novel with an introduction by someone other than the author, because I don't want spoilers or analysis before I've read it. I then go back and read the I tro once I've read the novel.

    Reply
  9. Brad

    I would hate to think that philosophers are not reading (or have not yet read) the introductions to my Kuhn's Evolutionary Social Epistemology, Resisting Scientific Realism, and Kuhn's Intellectual Path. The introductions in the two Kuhn books, in particular, really add value to the reading experience. They are not summaries at all.

    Reply
  10. Josh Alexander

    I just figured that everyone opens the index, looks for their own names, and then judges the quality of the book based on whether they've been cited a sufficient number of times. Or is that just me? 😉

    Reply
  11. John Rapko

    The question has led to several minutes of reflection, with the following result: it depends upon the book, and what I hope to get from it. For great works of philosophy, I follow the advice given to me by my first philosophy professor, the recently deceased Jim Friedman: read a section quickly, then re-read it slowly (for me 5 or so pages per hour), then read a commentary, then read it a third time at whatever rate seems best. This works well for an initial orientation to Plato, Confucius, Aristotle, Nāgārjuna, Hume, Kant, et alia. If it's a newish academic product, I look at (in order) the table of contents and the index, then skim the introduction, then look at a couple of pages in what looks to be the most interesting chapter. If the word 'worry' (as in, "I have two worries about X's argument for eliminative eliminativism") occurs, I figure the author is an academic paper-churner and discard immediately. If the author seems intelligent, and if someone I respect has told me that the book is important, then I'll start the first chapter and with the intention to read cover-to-cover. Otherwise, I'll read or skim whatever sections or chapters look interesting. For academic products, I think I can honestly say that I've read them in that manner hundreds of times and without regrets.

    Reply
  12. Monte Johnson

    My process usually goes something like this: (1) Open to bibliography. If no bibliography, throw it away. Skim through bibliography to see what literature is being engaged (foreign language literature? primary source texts? older stuff? my own work? obscure work I know of?); (2) Open to index. If no index, throw it away. Skim through index to get a general idea of topics. Follow up by looking at pages in the main text covering topics I'm most interested in. (3) If there are sufficient topics I'm interested in, and the discussion is sufficiently interesting, then turn to the introduction, read it. (4) Follow up by either abandoning the effort, reading straight through, or reading select chapters of interest.

    Reply
  13. s. wallerstein

    Not a philosopher or academic, but I always read the introduction and even whom the author or authors thank because I like to get to know the person behind the text.

    As I proceed in the text, I skip or skimp stuff that doesn't interest me much and as I've gotten older (78), my interests have become more and more specific and idiosyncratic.

    I realized a while ago that there's no final exam in life and no one is going to judge me in the afterlife for what I've read or haven't read.

    Reply
  14. CD

    The unfortunate reality is that most books have about two papers' worth of ideas in them (maybe three) and are therefore about three times as long as they ought to be. So I approach a book by looking at the table of contents, attempting to identify where the author moves beyond whatever lit review or scene setting they in the first part of the book and starts to offer a novel argument, and then reading from that point to wherever they get bogged down in objections or applications I don't care about. Then I am done with the book unless I get some evidence later that I have missed something important, in which case I return.

    Also I sometimes look at a short review of a new book in a major journal like Phil Review if it's by someone I trust in deciding whether to give the book a read in the first place.

    I should say: occasionally one meets a book that is interesting new arguments from front to back e.g. (Knowledge and Its Limits, Reasons and Persons). It's fairly clear when one has encountered a book like this. These get read from cover to cover.

    Reply
  15. Nqabutho

    My field is linguistics, but, unlike most linguists, apparently, I read a lot of philosophy (because if one is interested in what is called the "meaning" aspect of language use, the contribution of philosophy to understanding problems such as "how does language hook on to the world" (Putnam) is essential).

    My approach to newer books in philosophy is the same as my approach to books in the older tradition. I prefer to read the important books cover to cover, and I not only value introductions, if they are substantive, but also especially the prefaces and forewords. The authors will have a complex system of understanding behind their work — problems, interests, terminological repertoire, previous influences, etc. — and I want to understand how they look at things and how it relates to my own interests. E.g., I've loved reading the prefaces of Michael Dummett, since it seems like he's never at a loss for something more to say, and you never know whether it's going to be in the preface or on p. 413 where he says something really interesting. I'm looking forward to reading, when I have some free time, the preface to his "Truth and other Enigmas", which runs to 58 pages. I think it's important, from time to time, to reconnect with the fundamental ideas, and intros and prefaces are good places to do that.

    BTW, a good example of a substantive foreword and introduction is in Carnap's "The Logical Syntax of Language", where his failure to appreciate the ambiguity of the terms 'form' and 'formal' (which I distinguish, roughly, with the terms 'logical form' and 'figural form') and his inadequate analysis of the semiotic structure of the act of language use, including formal language use, makes evident that reading the rest of the book is something one would do only for historical interest. (Wittgenstein and Frege, for example, had made the necessary distinctions.)

    Reply
  16. Dean C. Rowan

    Thanks to Monte Johnson and John Rapko for reminding me of bibliographies, a.k.a. cited works or references, which I do read, if not right away, at least during the course of reading the body of the text. I guess one would examine an index because a good one will reveal the range of subjects covered, but I'm not sure it would be more efficient or valuable than reading an Introduction. I certainly use the index for the purpose for which it's designed. After read a bunch of Melville, I turned to my collection of literary critical/historical essay books and explored their indices at the M section.

    Reply
  17. V. Alan White

    Introductions can perform a lot of different tasks depending on the genre too. I and two colleagues published a book in the Blackwell Companion series on free will, and we felt that instead of wasting the intro on brief overviews of the contained chapters, we would integrate some of that task into a larger one–providing a glossary of terms that attempted to both respect classic terms used in the debates as well as revising distinctions among them to clarify what disputants might mean in a clearer language. In other words use the intro to try and contribute to the current debate by offering clarifications of terms that we saw as muddled. Only a volume like that can offer such an opportunity, and we took it. Generally speaking I'd think that intros should be contributions to a book even if only providing helpfully non-technical overviews.

    Reply
  18. Stephen Krogh

    If people have given up on introductions, I think we can fairly blame the Germans. Did the Prolegomena really need an introduction *and* a preface? Did Being and Time need *two* introductions? For as well as many seem to think Trump would have fit comfortably in interwar Germany, I think we all would have benefitted from his turning his purported bloat cutting eye that direction!

    Reply
  19. Dean C. Rowan

    On the other hand, a trend-bucking scholar might consider emulating the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band by writing a book with an Introduction and a Conclusion, but no intermediate text.



    Reply
  20. Charles Cuddlesworth

    I am a professional philosopher (working in mainstream analytic) and regularly publish in top 5 journals, have also written several books (OUP, CUP) but I have not actually *read* a book in 20 years. A lot of what I read is journal articles but of course when it comes to books, my view is pretty close to what CD says above: just focus on the part that gives the main argument (or at least to the part you need). I give this part a really close engagement (even if just what's going on over a couple of pages), extracting quotations, getting citations correct, etc. All of this would be done online (although I've got access to Oxford scholarship online, it's formatted ugly online, so best to just check libgen first and get a pdf in proper form). Close engagement with the part of the book that you need (and likewise, with the part of journal articles that you need) is better for doing research than just sitting there, as I used to do as a grad student, reading a philosophy book cover to cover, — very inefficient research wise. p.s. I am not a hypocrite, I don't expect anyone to read any of the books I've written cover to cover; I would just hope the part they need is read carefully.

    Reply
  21. Adam Sloane

    These comments are worth the price of admission! I recall that in Graduate School many years back (in Political Theory), my history grad student friends said they were told that they were expected to develop the skill (?) of finding the golden nuggets in any book–a kind of intuition, I guess. (I believe Lawrence Stone may have been the source of that wisdom.) The assumption was that no sane person would actually read all the reading that was assigned. The legendary Judith Shklar may have had similar expectations, because former students of hers described the vast amount of reading that she assigned weekly. I'm one of those people who tend to read from cover to cover, but I have the time and am not under pressure to publish, prepare for classes, or go to work and be useful. I have come to view my compulsion to read every word as a character flaw, or maybe several character flaws in one. I have just gotten through David Womersley's 100+ page introduction to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and while it is brilliant, I did find myself muttering, "Geez, he do go on and on." Then again, I probably have eight paperback editions of Hobbes' Leviathan, each of which I bought for the introductions and notes. One other note: When I was a lawyer, I regularly scored points by reading cases in their entirety. It's amazing how many people read only the snippets of cases spit out in response to a Westlaw or Lexis search, ignoring the rest of the decision, including the parts that may have undermined other aspects of their argument. I would sometimes have to point out to associates that, although a given case had a great statement to quote, the holding actually was contrary to our position. So being a bit obsessive has its virtues.

    Reply
  22. Larry Udell

    I don't have a stock answer for this; sometimes I read them, sometimes not (especially when I'm familiar with the topic/issues). But I often assign students the Free Sample of Kindle editions and there the Introduction is what you get (if that). I thus find a good Introduction to have more pedagogical value than research value.

    Reply
  23. Student

    I am curious as to whether those of you who admit to skimming books from within your discipline also write your books anticipating they will be skimmed. The day is surely coming when my AI will write a book so your AI can summarize it.

    Reply
  24. Kenny Easwaran

    It's rare for me to read a book that I'm not reviewing. But I find book reviews very helpful, and I sometimes read parts of other books. But when I do intend to read a whole book, I usually start at the beginning (I'll sometimes skip a preface if it looks like it's just a bunch of thanks to people that I don't know, but I'll also sometimes read those if it looks like it'll include thanks to some people that I do know, so that I have a sense of who the person's influences are).

    And regarding Student's question – I always try to write things in a way that people who don't want to read the whole thing can find the parts that are relevant for them, and also so that people who do read the whole thing can come back later and find the parts that they want to review. I think this is also helpful for getting readers to take a moment to remember the big picture between each of the details.

    Reply

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