How important is it to read other philosophers before reading

>>8596058

probably should Kant bra as he builds on what Kant said. Things like his essays on aesthetics you don't need to read anything else but i would strongly recommend reading A Critique of Reason and/or A Critique on Judgement.

>>8596081

Ok thanks, can I just start out by reading those two works by Kant or is there anything that I need to read first to be able to understand them?

Passing familiarity with Buddhist metaphysics, particularly the veil of maya, and decent familiarity with Kant's transcendental division of Ding an sich / fur uns and Fichtean/Hegelian wrangling with that concept

Honestly he's not that hard at least in broad strokes, if you want a kind of aesthetic appreciation of Schopenhauer's worldview, which it's fair to say is just about all most of his indirect disciples ever had

But if you want to delve into real conceptual and logical subtleties, really mush idealist architectonics together, you're obviously gonna have to become a philosopher, more or less.

>>8596104
To be honest you can read Kant and Schopenhaeur outright and still get it roughly, like this anon said>>8596108, but the beginning of the World as Will and Representation states outright that you should know about Kant's metaphysics. The idea of having to build up to a certain work is a bit of a meme, but it's a good rule of thumb though you really don't need to start with the greeks.

If there were two things to read before Kant, Locke-An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Hume-an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are probably all you need. Hill and Zweig do a good translation of Kant and add a lot of supplementary material. Online resources are your friend, Stanford encylcopedia of philosophy and online lectures (Wes Cecil or Yale open course, for instance). Also r/askphilosophy and r/philosophy have some pretty legit people on them.

Strong props anon if you read Kant and Schopenhauer, I read them as coursework.

>>8596058
Jump right in. It's great!!!

I started on Volume two and bounced around to sections that looked most interesting. I ended up inferring most of the foundational elements of the ideas, although I missed a few things and ended up with a unique interpretation--i hadn't even read Kant or Plato.

It blew open my mind. I started seeing and feeling things differently. It was was more of a total experience than an intellectual exercise.

A couple years later, when I was 25, I went through things systematically, starting with his dissertaion (which he reminds you to read a million times instead of just summarizing it) in WAWAR.

>>8596081

I see that Kant wrote separate critiques of pure reason and practical reason, did you mean to imply that I should read both or just that one of them was important?

>>8597127
pure reason is the one Schopenhauer builds on, practical reason would be a good counterweight to good ol' Schopenknecht.