I can't really speak with respect to a lot of these philosophers because frankly I've felt my socioeconomic status has always forced me to put intellectual pursuits on the back-burner in favor of either an education which had/has tangible career prospects or the cheap thrills of being an adolescent/young adult in
the greatest city on planet earth and all the curvy baaaaad jawns up in Manayunk the throes of a late-stage capitalist dystopia. Nonetheless, at least for me I've found the most useful way to learn about them in a useful manner was via applying them either in an academic setting or to my own personal experiences.
For example, I understood Kant only after having to analyze the movie
The Insider for an Ethics elective I was taking to pad out my course-load. The Insider is a dramatized biopic on Jeff Wigand's crusade against Big Tobacco, and the latter's endeavors to keep him silent. The relevant concepts I applied were while Brown & Williamson, a tobacco company, had a hypothetical imperative to follow their fiduciary duty and deliver a profit to their shareholders, they have zero categorical imperative as their business model revolved around preying upon tobacco smokers as a means unto Brown & Williamson's own ends. Their attempts to conceal the harmful nature of tobacco violated the categorical imperative of providing transparency and honesty. Furthermore, Wigand despite signing an NDA had no obligation to follow the categorical imperative of "do not make false promises", as the criminal investigation into Big Tobacco superseded this, and I created my own
categorical imperative of "If one enters into an occupation, they accept the ethical duties and obligations consistent with such.". Finally, , Wigand only signed the NDA under duress of needing to pay for his kid's meds. And of course, consent is central to Kant's concept of reciprocal altriusm.
You can repeat the above framework for Aquinas, Aristotle, Stirner, Rosseau, et al. The theme is I found the best way to understand different philosophical lenses was to apply them to various real life situations. Which is um..... WHAT THEY'RE PHUCKING MEANT FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU PHUCKING NERDS.
From the examples of the worker drinking too much due to alienation and the peasants being confused on what to do with the landowner they kidnapped, Freire provides pretty self-explanatory examples and he even states why they act the way they are.
This right here embodies so much of my issues with Atlas in one post. Y'all had to READ about alcoholism to understand how quarterly capitalism deprives certain occupations/socioeconomic groups of a quality of life, whereas I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. My own abuse of codeine and xanax as an adolescent, my mother's continued struggles with alcoholism as a single parent during the height of the Great Recession, and my former Toyota mechanic of an uncle committing suicide via opioid overdose because he figured his Social Security/life insurance payout was worth more than his own life to his children taught me all I needed to know. So it is a rather laborious task to engage Atlasians on issues of poverty when so few of them possess any firsthand experience with how the other half lives.
