Organizing my thoughts

Coming from a Computer Science background, the most complicated thing that I found while studying the humanities was to organize my thoughts related to all the different authors and also all the different subjects I had studied so far. In our current society, it is usually more important to show how many books you read rather than how much knowledge you actually acquired from them. What I will try to do here on this blog will probably slow down my reading pace, but I believe it is essential to actually understand what I am reading and give me some tools to go back to these ideas in the future.

After several years of reading philosophy and theology (and even a master’s degree in between), I decided to organize my own notes and articles in the following topics (used here as tags):

• Biblical Theology: Old Testament
• Biblical Theology: New Testament
• Historical Theology (and World History)
• Philosophy and Apologetics
• Practical Theology
• Systematic Theology

I am open to adding more topics to this list, especially for ideas that will come when reading fiction books or non-Christian sources in general. There are also three main types of text that I expect to write:

• Book summaries: dissect arguments and main ideas from a given book, no matter if I agree or not with them (pointing the possible problems, though);
• Essays: make an argument for a given conclusion, i.e. my contribution with a tentative answer to a given question;
• Study notes: present the main ideas of a given subject, summarizing important authors, and its development throughout history.

For all the readings, a skeptical approach is taken by default. From the advice given by a professor from University of Toronto, you should first try to understand the questions being addressed and concepts; think critically about the arguments; and develop your own answers to those questions. For me, I tried to come up with a short sequence of steps to be taken in this skeptical reading: find the hidden assumptions; doubt the premises; live the conclusions consistently.

In order to absorb more of the content, I’d like to try to take notes while reading the books. I’ll start with the first two steps described here: preview and question. In the preview, you just skim through the next chapter and look for bold / italicized words, charts, and tables. Then, you would try to come up with a few key questions and the answers you think are being given. For the read and study steps, I really liked the tips given by this philosophy professor on how to take notes:

• Take notes on important terms (and exactly how they are defined by the author);
• Take notes on the arguments and how they reach their conclusions;
• Take notes on how a specific passage fits into the bigger picture;
• Take notes on doubts and questions that you have while reading, making sure you will clarify them later;
• Take notes on how the author’s ideas relate to some previous authors that you have read (important to trace historical influence forwards and backwards);
• Write down your own thoughts about the ideas presented, but make sure they are clearly differentiated from the author’s points;
• Write down the main ideas using your own words, to make sure you understand what is being presented;
• Make charts, diagrams, tables, and pictures to help visualize the ideas better.

Finally, for every chapter read, try to restate everything that was written in the notes as precisely as possible. This needs to be revisited from time to time in order to keep the information fresh on your mind.

I hope that these ideas can help me organize my own thoughts about philosophy and theology, and how they relate to our daily lives. Besides, I hope to help others that are reflecting and struggling with the same topics to understand them better.

PS: As you may have noticed, I was not writing in this blog for a while. I tried to start a separate blog using my own domain, but I gave up on that. Medium is a really good way to get the word out and provides a good blogging tool as well.