Self-studying philosophy
If you were to start from scratch to study the fields of philosophy like epistemology, logic, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of religion/science/mind etc., not to just know them, but being able to establish knowledge on any ground, to establish a ground you can build your beliefs on, how would your ultimate planning look like?
(If you could include details like, what subject you would start with and/or what materials and platforms you would make use of, I would appreciate that)
I welcome well-thought and, strategically smart answers.
(If you could include details like, what subject you would start with and/or what materials and platforms you would make use of, I would appreciate that)
I welcome well-thought and, strategically smart answers.
Comments (35)
Basically, follow your interests and the horizon will broaden.
If you’re talking about more ‘academic scholarship’ then there are several ways to approach this to have a broad understanding of philosophical development. Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy is a pretty good place to start, and it can lead you into other more refined studies.
I think it is pretty foolish in the current age to lack a decent understanding of science. Perhaps looking into ideas about economic, political and educational development over human history would be a fruitful approach too.
Like I’ve said many times before a must read for anyone interested in philosophical discourse and writing should certainly read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but I wouldn’t recommend beginning with that text as it would likely put people off the entire field of interest in the first few pages.
Note: Logic is certainly the bedrock of philosophical pursuits so a thorough study of that is sure to set the person up with something more tangible.
1. Should I have children?
2. Should I get married?
3. What kind of career should I pursue?
4. What does it mean to say that one’s quality of life is good?
5. Do I have any duties towards anyone and what are those duties?
6. Is being alive a good thing overall for you?
7. If not, could you do something to make it a good thing?
8. If not, is it worth trying to commit suicide?
9. If being alive is a good thing overall right now for you, could it ever become a bad thing overall?
10. If so, how?
11. Is there an independent badness to death that is unrelated to the badness of the process of dying or the badness of losing out on more of the good things in life?
12. What kind of house should you buy?
13. Is it preferable to try to work harder or is it better to focus more on trying to save more money?
14. What kind of romantic relationship, if any, should one pursue?
15. When is it acceptable to take on financial debt?
16. What kind of friendships should you try to develop?
17. Do you have any bad habits that you should eliminate?
It’s kinda difficult to try to find philosophical content that deal with those questions. Because of this, I started a YouTube channel a while back that focuses on these types of questions. I would also strongly recommend Shelly Kegan’s lecture series on the subject of Death on YouTube. This lecture series has been most influential to me since it introduced me to Axiology. Here’s some other good lecture series that I recommend:
1. Robert Sapolsky’s Human Behavioral Biology series
2. Robert Shiller’s Financial Markets series
By this I mean that you should avoid this the first time around and come to your own conclusions about the text written by the philosopher before being spoon fed someone else’s interpretation. All philosophers are basically working from others anyway so why bother to distance yourself fro the text by seeing it through the lens of another? I understand that this is generally necessary for university students as they simply don’t have time to read through anything themselves.
Note: I do use reading guides, and read introductions, after I have made up my own mind about a text. It’s not the quickest method but I believe it’s the most honest approach if you keep in mind your understanding in and of itself is limited (that changes once your horizons open up a little more and come to understand the landscape a little better).
An anecdote - I was browsing one of the better bookshops in my city some time back, and I happened to overhear a conversation between a gentleman who was apparently a pretty bigshot metaphysics lecturer and someone who was considering graduate studies. Fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, whoever this guy was - wish I’d found out! Anyway, one remark he made, kind of tongue-in-cheek, stuck with me. ‘The Greeks, the Medievals, and the Germans - that’s all you need to know. The rest is rubbish!’ As I say, not meant entirely seriously, kind of a rhetorical device, but made an interesting point.
The other crucial meta-question that I think is necessary to grapple with is the meaning of modernity. When I studied philosophy formally - two undergraduate years - Descartes was introduced as ‘the first modern philosopher’. Crucial to know why that is, and to read Descartes, then Hume, Berkeley, Locke, and - absolutely central - Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (see this OP.)
It’s a vast territory but well worth exploring. In my opinion philosophy is one of the great treasures of Western culture.
The vast majority of humanity made it through life without ever cracking a book on philosophy, and without giving the discipline of philosophy a conscious thought. Which raises the question, given the lack of necessity or even the obvious usefulness, what does the study of philosophy actually do for those indulging in it? Seems like it would be nothing but a source of somewhat more than trivial information, with respect to how those writing the books, think. In short, merely a matter of relative interest.
Experience will always be the prime determinant for philosophical understanding, but understanding itself, as a purely cognitive faculty, is always theoretical. Every human has experiences, which makes explicit every human already has a philosophical understanding, however unknown its constructions may be to him. It follows that the study of theoretical philosophy with respect to pure thought, as the foundation of how the ground for the building of beliefs became established in the first place, is all one really needs.
And, as everybody knows, there is only one such speculative philosopher worth mentioning, that being the Privatdozent in mathematics and physics, and The Esteemed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg. One may read whoever he wants for background, but he should get seriously involved with Kant, to obtain the standard on which all subsequent cognitive philosophy, whether affirmation or negation, is obliged to follow.
My opinion only, of course.
Socrates (via Plato)
Plato
Aristotle
Aquinas
Descartes
Locke
Kant
And then you should acquaint yourself with the foremost thinkers in the fields of:
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Art
Philosophy of Mathematics
Ontology / Metaphysics
Philosophy of Mind
Epistemology
Philosophy of Education
Philosophy of Religion
Metaethics
Philosophy of will
Ethics (especially utilitarians and deontologists)
Political philosophy
Existentialism / “philosophy of life”
In my formal education I overlooked the middle of that historical list (Aquinas and the Scholastic generally) and the beginning and end of that topic list (the first three and the last one), and only later realized their place in the big picture and wished I could go back and give myself this general study structure to work from.
My knowledge of philosophy is limited, but I recall my prof giving the opposite advice after I tried reading several of the well-known philosophers like Kant in their own words. Some of those icons wrote poorly.
The "philosophy of X" is much easier to grasp than "general philosophy", especially if you already have a reasonable understanding of X itself.
In that sense, philosophy can be seen as a set of one-argument functions, with X being the argument:
ontologyOf(X) and epistemologyOf(X)
You can pick any X, really.
Say that you want to explore the philosophy of tennis (X=tennis). It would undoubtedly work, but you will need a good understanding of tennis.
Ontology (What is it?) and epistemology (How do we justify knowledge?) are in my impression the only sub-disciplines that make sense.
There are serious issues with the other sub-disciplines.
Logic is a part of mathematics. It is not philosophy. It has been successfully axiomatized now. Ethics competes and then spectacularly loses from morality, which is grounded in religious law. Metaphysics amounts to an utmost dumb exercise in infinite regress, which has has never produced anything of value or anything worth knowing.
Non-mathematical logic and non-religious ethics are childish, inept, and incompetent, while metaphysics is clueless.
Only ontology and epistemology make sense.
Quoting I like sushi
One stands on the shoulders of the ancients.
I'd start with a comprehensive history of philosophy in order to acquaint myself with the most general questions & intractable conceptual problems major philosophers (in the West) have preoccupied themselves with for the last two and a half (plus) millennia. To that end I'd recommend Peter Adamson's podcast & book series A history of philosophy without any gaps:
• Classical Philosophy, vol. 1 (2014)
• Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds,
vol. 2 (2015)
• Philosophy in the Islamic World, vol. 3 (2018)
• Medieval Philosophy, vol. 4 (2019)
(Subsequent volumes to follow ...)
Generally, philosophy consists in understanding (i.e. reflective criteria for discriminating knowledge claims from non-knowledge claims) and does not "establish knowledge" (e.g. explanatory theories re: sciences, arts, histories, politics, etc) itself.
Preparatory (A-B-C) studies, which IMO are indispensable, for studying & using philosophy: (A) elementary logic, (B) elementary set theory & (C) cognitive psychology.
I somehow can't believe philosophy can study its own self. I am very much on the opinion that a human must get involved there somewhere, somehow, in the process.
I think Kenneth Burke's Unending Conversation metaphor pretty much captures what any approach comes down to in the end:
"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."
That may not seem satisfactory for anyone seeking a structured approach... but I'm afraid he captures the impossibility thereof. The Conversation has been going on too long with too many voices addressing aspects of too many things in too many ways for there to be anything but a "dive in and see where the current takes you" approach, even with the best laid plans.
As others have mentioned, establish what interests you (which conversations would you care to join?) and then seek out the biggest ideas and and thinkers in those areas, read them, and keep reading from there. Oh, and Cambridge, Norton, and others write pretty good introductory-summary texts of most fields that keep up to date with the most important developments.
Yes. However, he implied that anyone beginning a study of a particular philosopher should read not only those works, but other's critiques as well.
Applied philosophy is much more accessible than general philosophy.
The philosophyOf(X) is straightforward if you have a reasonable understanding of X, while X could be anything, really.
So, learn something else first, i.e. some kind of applied knowledge (X). Next, figure out the philosophyOf(X). If you grok that properly, only then try to figure out general philosophy, i.e. philosophyOf(X=philosophy), i.e. self-philosophy.
The other way around does not work.
That is why most philosophy majors understand almost nothing about philosophy.
Theory emerges from practice. It never works the other way around. That is why majors in almost any subject will graduate with close to zero understanding of that subject. The only ones who understand the subject are people who have been confronted with solving practical problems in that subject. Everybody else invariably sounds like an idiot.
This seems a bit harsh and I do not agree. However, I will admit that working in an area may clarify and solidify the knowledge gained as an undergraduate. In the academic world the problems don't necessarily have to be practical to have this effect.
Well, I got recently confronted with how clueless education can be. It defies imagination.
I sent my brother-in-law to a supposedly practical training centre where he was supposed to do a 6-month training in mobile android (phone) development, because that should allow him to get an internship at a software company, with a view on doing a real-world, hands-on project.
For mere paperwork reasons, he will also start later this year a four-year bachelor course in computer science taught during the evenings. That curriculum is supposedly more theoretical, but it actually isn't. It is just more useless.
So, at the software training centre, they insist that he must first do a class in C/C++ because hey, "C/C++ is the core language in computing". So, yes, the operating system's kernel and a small core of libraries in any system may be written in C, but there is no way that any software company will ask a recent training graduate to write any C/C++ code for them. It is just too tricky and too bug-prone.
So, he does not need this skill for his internship in mobile development. Furthermore, very, very few libraries for Android phones are ever written in C/C++. As a developer, you will only see the Java interfaces anyway. So, it is not needed, and they are simply wasting 8 weeks of my brother-in-law's time (which is way too short to learn it properly anyway).
Next, I looked at the source code he was trying to run, and it contained the mention:
#include
What!?
That program is supposed to compile against the Microsoft Windows environment of libraries, which are not present on an Android phone. So, I asked my brother-in-law if he intends to deploy that joke to his phone? No. He doesn't. They just run it on their Windows desktop. It is obvious why. That thing cannot possibly run on an Android phone.
So, what does that course have to do with Android mobile software engineering?
The teacher obviously does not know how to write C/C++ libraries for Android because in that case he would use the proper compiler for that work, which is the gcc crosscompiler, and not Microsoft Visual Studio. So, I assume that he is not even capable of compiling one functioning line of code for Android. He clearly cannot do it.
Still, he insists that what he teaches is "foundational" for mobile development. He is just an arrogant retard who is unaware of his own ineptitude and incompetence.
Most teachers in the academia are like that.
They cannot solve the simplest practical problem in their field, not even to save themselves from drowning, but at the same time, they insist that the bullshit they talk, would be of any interest to their students. It isn't.
I’m assuming the OP is asking in general not looking for advice about how to get a degree in philosophy. There is a big difference.
The authors I recommended are because in the history of philosophy, there is a tendency for there to be periods of two opposing camps or trends or schools, and then one philosopher or school of philosophy to unite them, and then two new opposing schools to branch off from that again, back and forth like that. The authors I selected were to give an overview of those opposing schools, and the figures who united them and from whom new ones were formed, as illustrated here:
We don't have a lot of material from Thales, the other Ionians, or the Italiotes (collectively the Presocratics), and their work was really primitive and not super relevant today, so I skipped them entirely. Socrates is really where philosophy as we think of it begins, and his student Plato and Plato's student Aristotle were the founders of the two main opposing schools during the Classical period of philosophy. In the Medieval period things were largely reunited into one school, the Scholastics, of whom Thomas Aquinas is the preeminent figure. The Modern period began with Rene Descartes, the first of what would come to be called Rationalists, and their opposing school, the Empiricists, got their beginning with John Locke. Then Immanuel Kant once again reunited philosophy, until it split again into this Contemporary period's still-unreconciled divide between Analytic and Continental schools, who are too numerous and recent and ongoing to pick preeminent figures for. So that's why I recommend those authors for a historical overview.
The reason I named the philosophical fields I did is because I think they give a thorough overview of the range of topics philosophy discusses, which all inevitably interrelate with each other. At the most abstract is philosophy of language, and two only slightly less abstract fields that are kind of opposite one another, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of art. I missed all of those in my formal education and I regret it.
Instead I focused on the two halves of what I'd call core philosophical topics, roughly ontology and epistemology on one hand (about reality and knowledge), and ethics on the other hand (about morality and justice), which I would subdivide into fields analogous to ontology and epistemology (that are also roughly related to utilitarianism and deontology, hence why I emphasized those in particular) but that's not standard practice so I won't go into that here. Metaethics is an especially important part of ethics that ties in closely to philosophy of language, so I recommended that in particular.
Philosophy of mind ties in really closely with ontology and epistemology, and I think free will fits into a similar place regarding ethics because of the connection between free will and moral responsibility. Political philosophy has its obvious connections to ethics as well, being in essence the most important practical application of ethics, and though there doesn't seem to be a single established field that's perfectly analogous to it in relation to ontology and epistemology, I've found significant parallels in both philosophy of education and philosophy of religion, so I recommend those as well.
And lastly, the biggest thing that I overlooked in my formal philosophical education, opposite those abstract fields at the start, is the practical application of philosophy to how to live one's life meaningfully, which Continental schools like existentialism and absurdism address. This topic doesn't seem to have its own name, that I'm aware of, but I colloquially refer to it as "philosophy of life".
The bottom part of this illustration from my philosophy book illustrates the structure I think these fields have to each other:
For these purposes you can ignore everything above Metaphilosophy on that chart, as those are particular views of mine and not philosophical topics (this is actually a chart of the structure of my book, the latter part of which is structured after this same array of topics).
Speaking of which, add Metaphilosophy to my list of fields worth studying. What even is philosophy, what is it trying to do, what constitutes progress at doing that, how can we do it, what does it take to do it, who should do it, and why does it even matter?
Your brother-in-law's experience is, unfortunately, all too common. As a recently retired programmer I can speak from experience. The ability to be a good programmer is something you either have or do not have. Many of the people I worked side by side with had non-technical backgrounds - musicians, English majors, people from other science disciplines, and even (gasp!) philosophy majors.
That said, a good education can help. I got my graduate degree in CS. Very little of what I learned in school had any direct bearing on the things I encountered in the real world - and with 20/20 hindsight I could have stopped after I got my first job. However the courses I took in data structures, programming languages, math (e.g. set theory) gave me an advantage over my compatriots.
This is excellent.
If I were to start over, I would start not with what's often called "philosophy" but with learning history, dwelling especially on the Greeks. Read Homer, learn the Greek language.
As far as texts -- start with Parmenides' poem and the fragments of the presocratics. Then Plato and Aristotle. Once you get to Plato and Aristotle, with a decent understanding of the Greek language and the general historical context, then everything else in Western history and philosophy has been basically determined, from the Christian thinkers to Descartes to Kant to Hegel.
Then I would start on the most relevant for modern times (in my view):
Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Russell, Wittgenstein, and Chomsky.
If you really want to "establish a ground you can build your beliefs on", you need to avoid reading ancient philosophers, and indeed most modern ones too. All they do, in the most part, is set up possibilities with hand-waving arguments that amount to little more than religions beliefs; which is fine if you like the religion and can buy into its tenets, but otherwise not.
For example Aristotle's claim that things fall to the ground 'because that is where they want to be' is really quite useless for understanding the physics of gravity. The early philosophers were just scratching at the surface, like an early botanist might start by classifying plants according to the colour of their flowers.
Later philosophers ask questions about whether something 'exists' or is 'right' or 'moral' or 'art'; but they are just playing with words like children play with toy bricks.
No, if you want firm foundations for your beliefs you will need to delve beneath the surface, beneath the level of words, beneath the level of the colours of flowers to the fundamental logic of what an idea is and how one can be created; to the very DNA of philosophy.
To my knowledge there is only one book that deals clearly with this topic and that is "The Pattern Paradigm" https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Paradigm-Science-Philosophy/dp/1477131728 , of which I am the author.
When you have grasped the fairly straightforward ideas in the book you should have a handle on processes to evaluate other philosophical ideas. Or subsequently you could read the sequel to the book which is entitled: "Making better sense of the world".
Agreed.
I have indeed warned my brother-in-law for that problem. Programming requires some kind of talent which is probably innate. It will be up to him to discover if he has it. It is a bit unfortunate that I did not have time to guide him at an earlier age, because in that case, I would have made him discover this much earlier. Still, not everybody in IT needs to be a highly-talented programmer. There are also things like quality assurance, support, product management, consulting, and sales. Even relatively mediocre programming skills are still useful in these ancillary activities. It makes the difference between being just clueless and having some kind of understanding of what it is all about. In that sense, even mediocre programming skills are professionally still useful.
Quoting EricH
Agreed.
Data structures and algorithms are at the core of the job. Furthermore, it also makes quite a bit of sense to pick up set theory (relational databases) and serious number theory (for cryptography). Unfortunately, they don't teach compiler construction nor mathematical logic.
At the same time, the university seems to be hellbent on getting first-year freshmen to "study" gender studies, political science, and that kind of nonsense. The first year is almost entirely unrelated to computer science. It looks much more like an employment programme for manipulative social-justice warriors to lecture the kids on culturally-Marxist, radical-left ideology.
The universities have become hotbeds of communist agitprop. I find them not only useless but nowadays even outright dangerous.
Political correctness is something I do not miss since retirement. :brow:
That's part of the problem with at least some autodidacts whom I've talked to. To many of them, philosophy (or philosophers) who seek to unsettle or destabilise our accepted systems of thought are either useless or dangerous, because philosophy is conceived of (in the first instance) as a way of reinforcing prior beliefs. If I already believe in Empiricism (or what I think is Empiricism), for example, and my purpose in approaching philosophy is to find a way to justify that belief, then I'm not going to read critics of Empiricism, or if I do it'll be uncharitable readings, and I'll probably end up confused when I read Hume and discover that he discredits the law of causality from an Empiricist framework.
It's one of the dangers of autodidacticism: because you aren't being examined by someone with experience and expertise in the field, and because you aren't having your views, arguments and interpretations challenged and critiqued by scholars and fellow students, the risk is that you end up constructing elaborate arguments upon poor foundations to shore up your previous commitments.
Teaching yourself philosophy is possible. But it's difficult to navigate those risks. How are you supposed to be made aware of, for example, the best critiques of Kant's metaphysics if you haven't got someone who's spent decades researching Kant's metaphysics to guide your reading and point you in the right directions? It's also how you end up with those who have never actually studied philosophy at degree-level criticising 'post-modernists', 'neo-Marxists' and all the other boogeyman they've constructed in order to vilify anyone who dares to subject accepted patterns of thought to a critical lens.
That said, I generally recommend that people start with a few texts. Plato's Republic is a good starting point for at least three key reasons: It's arguably the foundational text of western philosophy; It's relatively accessible due to its conversational style; and it touches on a wide range of areas in philosophy (ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology) which can help you figure out what it is that you're interested in and where to go from there.
This is a really good post and I'm not really in disagreement with any of it. I do think though that on a practical level just self-teaching oneself philosophy is really, really suspect. I've just seen too many of my co-workers (I work in a field completely unrelated to philosophy) just pick up Hegel or Metaphysics of Morals one day and try to break into the field that way and you and me both know what happens there.
Talking on forums like this is a nice start, but until you've had your work critiqued and evaluated by an expert in the field I really think it's tough. I have a BA in philosophy and for the first two years of it I felt like I was wandering around in the dark even with these PhDs guiding me. I get that some people catch on quicker, but I feel like until you're actually writing those papers and getting the feel for what they expect of you it's just completely different from self-study which is mostly just you in your own head or talking to random people who are probably in the same place as you. You need to familiarize yourself with the norms and expectations of the field. Good philosophy, at least in the analytic tradition, is often much more narrow and specified than most normal people outside the field would expect and this can come as kind of an unpleasant surprise to amateurs.
But back to the OP: Find a subject that your interested in, read relevant literature, talk to people, keep an open mind, leave your ego at the door and compare many perspectives. You can entertain an idea without accepting it. Also try to seek out someone with experience if possible.
I think that this is pretty good, and it lines up with my experience. I am an engineer who never had a hint of what philosophy was about until I had time - meaning retirement - to think about the big picture.
The way that I got exposed to philosophical notions was by listening to a history of philosophy via a set of audio lectures, which surveyed philosophical thought beginning with the pre-Socratics and going up to the present. From there I had a lot of questions I wanted to further study. I was not systematic, which means I was not efficient in my use of time. I just poked at this and that. And that’s all I still do, really. So it has taken a long time - years - for me to sort out a personal view of the world. Strong curiosity is a real asset to self-study success.
A point about the learning process: What I find similar about philosophy to science and engineering is the confusion of terminology/language. Every discipline has its own priesthood, which revels in obscurity. Fine, I get that. And I get the fact that there are deep and difficult thoughts going down any intellectual avenue. What is different is that in science and engineering there is the constraint of such things as experimental results and keeping the airplane in the air - exceedingly strong empirical underpinnings.
OTOH, a lot of philosophy is nothing more than sophistry wrapped up in big words that have obscure and personalized definitions. This makes it harder for the unwashed to wade through the nonsense and focus on the insights. Anybody who spends time with philosophy and really wants to get to the bottom of things, to achieve some clarity of thought, has to understand this and not be frustrated and give up. There are plenty of sources that make the important notions of philosophy reasonably clear, but it takes effort to find them.
Many thanks, and welcome to Philosophy Forum.
Quoting Torbill
Of course! That's why in our age of technological marvels, it's easy to see why philosophy is thought of by many as empty words or parlour games - which is true in the case of a lot of academic philosophy. And actually I am very much an advocate for science and technology, I have made a career as a tech writer, which I still pursue, and have a keen interest in those subjects.
However, philosophy is concerned more with self-knowledge - I regard the story of Socrates' encounter with the Oracle and the command 'know thyself' as being foundational to philosophy. But clearly self-knowledge, and indeed knowledge of the kinds of problems that troubled Socrates - the nature of justice, virtue, and piety, among them - are much less clear-cut than technological and scientific issues. And I think they're less easy to deal with in the lexicon of today's technological culture.
There's an interesting scholar and historian of philosophy named Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), 'best known for his conception of ancient philosophy as a bios or way of life (manière de vivre).
...According to Hadot, twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic philosophy has largely lost sight of its ancient origin in a set of spiritual practices that range from forms of dialogue, via species of meditative reflection, to theoretical contemplation.
These philosophical practices, as well as the philosophical discourses the different ancient schools developed in conjunction with them, aimed primarily to form, rather than only to inform, the philosophical student. The goal of the ancient philosophies, Hadot argued, was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos.'
I found similar attitudes and practices through my engagement with Buddhist philosophy and the practice of meditation, so that when I later encountered Pierre Hadot's work, I felt that traditional philosophy, in the way Hadot depicts it, was much more like Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, in that it was embedded in a set of disciplines aimed very much at the attainment of emotional equanimity - a kind of 'living philosophy' rather than technical discourse.
But you also do see that concern, albeit rarely, in modern Western philosophy, I think foremost in Wittgenstein. However the problem is that from the viewpoint of the typical anglo-american analytic philosopher, it sounds uncomfortably close to religion, and the attitude of secular philosophy forms a barrier against ideas of this type. (For an excellent overview of some of these issues, have a look at Thomas Nagel's essay Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (.pdf)).
Anyway - I'm still studying, I got a great synoptic text, "Plato for the modern age" at Christmas and am intending to start on it in my remaining summer break.
Hadot's excellent Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision is overdue for a rereading.