‘Woah, what’s this?’ — It’s clearly a difficulty rating designed to help you determine whether you are reading philosophical works without the prerequisite knowledge, or whether you are actually mentally incapable of understanding this pillar in the history of philosophy and therefore no longer suitable to remain in Graduate school.
If instead you mean, what does one star mean in comparison to two stars and so on, then the answer lies here:
★ —- You have never read anything related to philosophy before
★★ —- You are familiar with some philosophical topics and terminology (e.g., you understand what ‘metaphysics’ is compared to ‘epistemology’, or what the difference is between ‘ethics’ and ‘meta-ethics’).
★★★ —-- You’ve read quite a few SEP pages. You are still unsure whether you want to commit to reading an entire 24 page paper that is about a deeply nuanced topic that you can’t skip parts of since they begin to get boring.
★★★★ —- You have read a chunk of philosophy papers and a few philosophy books, but only have read secondaries or basic primaries (such as introductory works of the Early Moderns or Hegel’s Philosophy of History).
★★★★★ —- You are substantially familiar with a couple of subdisciplines of philosophy (such as contemporary philosophy of mind, contemporary philosophy of language, Husserlian phenomenology, etc.), but have not yet gone into the niche questions that lay behind these studies.
★★★★★★ —- You are actively studying philosophy and are familiar with many topics and traditions throughout the history of philosophy. Some papers or books might halt you, but this is only because you lack certain terminological or semantic knowledge. A couple days spent using Oxford Bibliographies Online will easily brush you up enough to understand the philosophical work.
It is very likely nothing will ever go above ★★★★★, since I don’t think I come near enough to the capacity described in ★★★★★★, but I hope to get there.
Perhaps the separations between stars is too narrow in places, and wide in others. It’s only the vagueness of language to blame for not making rating systems universal in their construction (how many of what are you rating it out of, and which criteria must be met for each level of the rating?). So we have companies like IGN giving most games a score in the range of about 2 points. Yet, the higher rated games are far more fun than most games rated just 1.5-2 points lower, to the point where I do not have time or interest to play something with factors that make it a worse game. The reality is that we should use more of the range and have OK games really correspond to the most average number: 5. Just look at that number: it scream mediocre. This is where games like Genshin Impact should be placed. Or maybe not, because these ratings could very well be completely fucking subjective and there’s no point in any of this if we just have competing intuitions.
The point is basically that under my system, ★★★ should reflect the average reader of this Substack. So, if you are reading this, it’s likely you can easy understand a ★★★ section, and get most of a ★★★★ section, but really start to struggle with ★★★★★. And, when this happens, leave a comment! Start a discussion about it, and let me try to help you out. And, if you know the answers to anyone else’s questions, please answer them.
Anyways, there’s the rating system.