Comprehensive Philosophy Hacks

How to actually use Comprehensive Philosophy Hacks without wasting months

Most people approaching philosophy resources online hit the same wall: they find scattered notes, dense primary texts, and second-hand summaries that contradict each other. Comprehensive Philosophy Hacks is not a single book or course. It is a methodology for organizing, cross-referencing, and rapidly building working knowledge of philosophy using deliberately chosen tools and workflows. The version I use has been refined over roughly four years of reading, teaching, and writing.

The core problem this solves is retrieval. Philosophy moves fast when you need it to. You read one paper, it cites three others, each referencing a debate that stretches back to the 1920s. Without a system, you lose track of connections. With a basic setup, you can usually find what you need in under a minute. That matters more than people admit. Start with a Zettelkasten-style note system. Not the aesthetic version with fancy templates. The functional version. Every concept, argument, counter-argument, and citation gets its own card. Link them by relationship, not by subject. I use Obsidian for this because it handles bidirectional links without forcing a rigid folder hierarchy. Philosophy does not fit neatly into folders anyway. Here is the method I actually follow. When I encounter a claim worth keeping, I write it in my own words on a single note. Then I link it to at least two existing notes: one that supports it, one that contradicts it. If I cannot find a contradiction, I search for one deliberately. This forces me to engage with the material instead of just hoarding it. The first month feels slow. By month three, I have about 400 interconnected notes and I can trace an argument chain from analytic philosophy of language back to medieval semantics in under two minutes.

The download part of this is straightforward. I maintain a public vault export that includes the core structure: a set of template notes, a citation mapper, and a batch of pre-linked foundational entries across metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind. You can grab it from the GitHub repo linked below and import it directly into Obsidian. It takes about ten minutes to set up if you are already familiar with the software. Now the thing nobody puts in tutorials. This system breaks down completely if you treat it as a storage solution rather than an argument-mapping tool. I learned this the hard way in 2023. I had accumulated roughly 1,200 notes across various topics but realized I could not reconstruct any actual line of reasoning without re-reading everything. The links were there but they were shallow. Every note linked to its category but not to specific arguments within that category. The fix was adding an argument structure template. Each major note now contains explicit fields for premise, conclusion, inference type, and primary objection. This added about 30 seconds per note during creation but cut my research time down significantly when I needed to defend or critique a position. The system went from a library to a workshop.

There are tradeoffs. The initial investment of time is real. Expect to spend about 15 to 20 hours over your first month building the foundation. Most people quit before then because they confuse volume with depth. You do not need 500 notes on Utilitarianism. You need ten notes that accurately represent the strongest objections and the best responses, properly linked. I still maintain only about 600 active notes after four years and I revisit the same dozen constantly. Another limitation: this does not work well for purely historical study. If your goal is to understand the chronology of ideas rather than to engage with live debates, a standard reference system serves you better. Comprehensive Philosophy Hacks is designed for people who want to think, not to catalog. There is overlap between those groups but it is not complete. Here is a counter-intuitive point that took me a while to accept. The most valuable notes in the system are not the ones about famous philosophers. They are the ones about your own confused thoughts. When you write down why a particular argument is bothering you, that note becomes a permanent record of your actual thinking process. Future-you can trace exactly where a shift in perspective happened. I have dozens of these and they are worth more than the summary notes on Kant or Quine.

For the citation side, I pair the note system with a simple Zotero collection tagged by philosophical subfield and argument type. This lets me export bibliographies in any format and cross-reference them with my conceptual notes. The workflow adds maybe five minutes per reading session but prevents the disaster of having good notes with no sources attached. If you are just starting out, do not try to build everything at once. Pick one area. Four weeks. Build about 50 notes in that area using the template structure. Then evaluate whether the system is actually helping you think faster or just giving you the illusion of progress. Most people find that out around note 30. That is normal. Adjust the level of detail accordingly. The vault export includes a quick-start guide that walks through the first week. I recommend following it exactly before deviating. The structure matters more than the individual components. After you have the rhythm, feel free to modify anything. The system is yours once you stop treating it like a product to install.