Dennis asked:

I'm from a small town and have been in the military since high school graduation. With all this in mind,
I am having a hard time with philosophy. My PHIL 101 VCR course is kicking my brain in to overdrive
and I usually understand everything that is thrown at me, but this subject is very interesting and also
confusing. Basically, I was just wondering if others have initially have this problem and one day will all
the reading and intense studying make me click and understand it all? I do not want to give up
because many have studied this subject and have found it to be useful and some day I want to use
this knowledge in my life too.

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In direct answer to your first question: yes. Others have this problem. To your second question: no.
You will not understand it all. But hey, no one does, so relax. If someone did, then we'd all read that
person and wouldn't have any more questions to think about, right?

Here's one take on it. "Mastery" of various fields, from taxi driving to game playing to learning a
science, has been studied (sorry for lack of refs), and what has been found is that it takes human
beings 5-10 years to master an area, i.e., to get to where they see patterns in it rather than
disconnected precepts. So you can count on a) not understanding it as a set of unities for that long,
and b) getting some grasp of it after that long. But mastery does not imply that you understand
everything; chess masters, for example, can be beaten.

Here's another take on it. Philosophy, in the West, is roughly 2-3000 years old. To reasonably
thoroughly understand it you need some grasp of that much knowledge and thought, because it all
interconnects. Is that possible? Yes... after about 5-10 years of study.

Now, what you coulddo, and what lots and lots of people do, is fasten on one person (Hegel is
popular for that sort of thing, for example; so is Schopenhauer) and read him (or her) exhaustively
(for, say, 5-10 years), embrace their philosophy, and interpret everything else in those terms. A big
mistake, in my opinion. You get an extremely biased and narrow viewpoint on what is an enormous
and hugely varied area of human thought.

Take a look at some basic sources, and read, read, read. Write extensive comments on what you've
read. Show your comments to someone, and welcome their pointing out your inevitable mistakes and
misunderstandings. Um... that sounds like going to school, right? Right. A very old tradition in
philosophy, starting with Socrates and Plato.

Steven Ravett Brown