Journal like a Renaissance Philosopher

commonplace books are some of my favorite intellectual tools I've used them all throughout my formal academic career through three master's degrees but I also use them in my own personal study my own autodidactic journey to self-learn a bunch of stuff that I want to know about now in the past few years commonplace books have been having a moment here on YouTube lots of people searching for commonplace books lots of people making videos about them I've seen lots of substack pieces on how to keep them but if you've watched a lot of these videos or read

a lot of these articles then you have seen that we're not super clear on what a Comm Place book actually is some people give you a whole method for how to keep them others say just grab a notebook and throw down your favorite quotes so who's right now some of you may not think this is a big deal it's just a commonplace book keep it however you want to keep it that's cool but there is an answer to who's right these are historical objects that have come down to us from Renaissance humanists from ancient philosophers

like Aristotle and boethus from Roman rhetoricians like quintilian and Cicero these styles of notebooking actually have historical roots and yes you can mix and match them to serve your own intellectual Journey but by getting clear on what a commonplace book is in distinction to other methods you might consider using them the way that our intellectual forefathers used them and that may be more beneficial for your own intellectual Journey welcome to park notes I'm Parker setticase I'm a philosopher and theologian and this is a channel where I help you study think and read more deeply in

this video I want to help you get clear on three styles of keeping a notebook one is a pocket catchall notebook the second is a zibble dona journal and the third is a commonplace book so I'm going to help Define these terms terms for us I'll give a little characterization and then I'm going to share a snippet from my conversation with Roland Allen author of The Notebook a history of thinking on paper this is a fantastic book and this is where I learned about the zibal Don Journal I highly recommend you grab this book if

you want to support this channel then grab it from the link in my description and if you want to hear our full hourong conversation on my podcast Parker penes then check this link up here or you can find it in the description as well so in that snippet from our podcast episode Roland is going to help us with the history of commonplace books and zbl Don journals and then after that I'll go over some pros and cons of keeping a commonplace book versus a zbl Don vers a catchall pocket notebook so again like I said

maybe you want to mesh all these categories together that's cool but if you're like me and you like to have things organized and get clear on Concepts then I think this video is going to be really helpful for you you can keep one of these styles of notebooks or all three I use all three and it's immensely beneficial for my own intellectual life but the goal of this video is just to get clear on these methods so you can find which one is best for you okay so let's Jump Right In with a pocket catchall

Journal so when some people talk about a commonplace book they think of it as a common place to toore all your ideas and your favorite quotes and your to-do lists and your grocery lists they think of it as a One-Stop shop for all of your thoughts that's not really a commonplace book that's more of what I call a catchall notebook or a catchall journal A catchall is exactly that it's something that catches all I use it as my working memory that way I don't have to have these to-do lists and tasks and ideas and quotes

rolling around in my head all fighting with each other vying for my attention I put them in my pocket catch all and then I reflect on them throughout the day and definitely before bed so I've been keeping pocket catchalls for at least the past 12 years and it's been super beneficial for me now I can sleep peacefully because I don't have all these ideas rushing through my mind I'm not trying to remember them as I'm going to sleep I know they're in here I have them I can refresh myself on those ideas when I wake

up in the morning so everything I need to remember goes in here people's names phone numbers grocery lists to do lists task lists favorite quotes if I'm listening to an audio book or a podcast episode and someone says something really profound that's going to go in here and then from this catch all I can disperse the quotes or the ideas or the tasks out to a different notebook at a later time I really like using pocket notebooks like a mol skin this is a mydy creative cover on here here's a smon of Bond Street I

also use field notes memo books or Lo term 1917 A6 I'm still figuring out which pocket notebook brand is best but I think actually different ones are going to serve you for different occasions so like this memo book is going to go nicely into my suit pocket where a Lo term would probably be too thick so I mix and match these it doesn't really matter but what does matter is that it's a pocket notebook I can bring this with me it's not too bulky it goes with me everywhere I go and I catch all my

ideas I catch all my quotes I catch anything that I need to remember into my pocket notebook and this is not actually a commonplace book so next up we have a zbl Don Journal this is what I think a lot of people think a commonplace book is is now I'm probably pronouncing that wrong it's probably like zon but I feel really embarrassed saying that I'm Italian but I don't speak Italian so I'm sorry if that's grading on anyone's ears but this is pretty similar to a commonplace book in that it's a place where you collect

your favorite quotes and sayings but you're not using any formal heading in order to categorize different sayings so I actually think this is what most people think a commonplace book is because a zalon is just a place where you collect your favorite says and poems and riddles your own story ideas your own thoughts your own ideas everything goes in one spot they call it a zibal Don because that has its roots in salad so this is like your salad book all different things go into one spot and then you can pull it out to reflect

on it or share it with friends and family so I just started keeping my own zi Don thanks to Roland Allen and his book The Notebook in here he gives this beautiful history of paper and the modern codex which is like what a book is when it opens in the middle the codecs came from the west and paper came from the East and they met in the middle in Afghanistan and from the modern paper codex we got the notebook that made its way to Florence where bookkeepers started using notebooks to keep track of their business

dealings but then the people of Florence caught on and started using those notebooks for zibal dones they started using them to collect their favorite sayings their favorite quotes books were still being made of parchment or if they were made of paper they were really expensive to get so if someone did have a book and they let you read it you would copy down your favorite quotations in your zibble Dona you'd bring that back to your family and you'd share those quotations with with each other these things are super cool and no two zbl dones are

going to look the same because what they look like will be wholly dependent on the interest of the one using it so my zalon is a collection of miscellaneous thoughts I've been adding quotes from podcasts I listen to I have some outlines of my own science fiction short stories in here I have some portions of my favorite poems and I've also been adding my own aphorisms in here so for me this kind of functions as an intellectual catchall I'm not putting grocery lists in here I'm not putting tasks or time bound time sensitive things in

here but I am using it as a catchall for my intellectual life there's no real Rhyme or Reason but if it inspires me if it makes me think if it's a quotation I definitely want to use in my own life or in my own papers I'll put it in here if I can't find a place for it in any of the commonplace books that I already keep so that's a bit about a zal Don you're going to hear more from Roland Allen in the clip that's coming up and like I said after that clip I'll

share some pros and cons of keeping one of these okay so that brings us to commonplace books I've done a lot of thinking about these I've made a bunch of videos about them but let me try to summarize what I think about commonplace books here a commonplace book most fundamentally is a collection of quotations you collect these quotations for particular purposes now there are at least four different ways that you can keep a commonplace book so the purpose that you have in mind will determine which one of those is best for you they're called commonplace

books because there's going to be common places common headings that you use in order to track all of your different quotations so if you're using a commonplace book to store your quotations maybe you're a public speaker maybe you write a blog maybe you are a student you're going to come up with common places or headings that you're going to use to catalog all the different quotations that you're storing so maybe you're into political philosophy one of the common places or headings that you might use is justice so as you're reading different political philosophers or philosophers

in general or maybe even fiction books and you come across a great quotation on Justice you add that to your commonplace book under the commonplace or the heading of justice and then when you want to come back and reflect on that you can find the Justice headings or the Justice common places and you can go back to reading that quotation so that's why they're called Common Place books now the language of common places goes all the way back to Aristotle in the classical Greek it was cooi tooy and Aristotle was trying to make a compendium

of logical arguments he originally did not include quotations in his cooi tooy but then the Roman rhetoricians like quintilian and Cicero started adding in quotations with their analysis of logical argumentation they did this so their students could actually have an example of this argument or this rhetorical method actually in practice so that notion of common places and the commonplace book continued on all the way into Renaissance education where Roland Allen said that commonplace books were actually the backbone of a Renaissance education so I've personally been using commonplace books for 12 or 13 years now and

it was pretty informal for five or six of those years I didn't even know the term commonplace book I was just doing it without knowing what I was doing I think a lot of us do this we reinvent the wheel of a commonplace book only to discover that this is an ancient method and it's actually pretty cool to find yourself doing what ancient philosophers in invented or what Renaissance humanists used in their own education so that's a basic understanding of a commonplace book that's the kind of genus of commonplace books but there are also two

differentia two things that'll help differentiate different styles of commonplace booking the first differentia is going to be the scope do you want a general commonplace book or do you want a specific commonplace book so I keep General and specific commonplace books I think specific ones are going to be most beneficial to me in my intellectual life I have things like my artificial intelligence commonplace book I've come up with my own common places my own titles based on my study of artificial intelligence common places like artificial general intelligence or Turing machines or machine functionalism or sentience

and then when I find important quotes that fit those common places I add them to my AI commonplace book so the scope is limited to artificial intelligence when it comes to this one now I also have one General commonplace book if I find a quote that doesn't quite belong in any of my topic specific commonplace books I throw it in my general commonplace book so I call this my general treasury commonplace book because I'm just adding quotations in here it's just a treasury it's just a storehouse for my favorite quotations and that brings us to

the second differentia the second thing that's going to differentiate our different styles of commonplace books and that is treasury or manuscript a treasury commonplace book is just your collection of quotations under different common places a manuscript commonplace book is going to include your own thoughts about those quotations my manuscript commonplace books are where I write my papers and my blog posts so I find a really interesting quotation that I want to execute that I want to comment on that I want to analyze that I want to abstract an argument from I put that into one

of my specific manuscript commonplace books and then I do my analysis right there in the notebook so now I have a collection of quotations as well as my own thoughts about those quotations and I usually end up turning those into a blog post or a journal article or when I was in graduate school I would manuscript those out into my papers so by using those two differentia of scope and purpose we come up with with our four types of commonplace books a general treasury commonplace book which is just a storehouse for some of your favorite

quotations and again you're going to categorize those according to different common places which is different than a zial Don where you just throw in random quotes all over the place you have a general manuscript commonplace book where you're just manuscript out your blog posts I use one of these for my substack pieces you have specific treasury commonplace books where you're collecting quotes according to a specific topic so for me I have a philosophy of Mind commonplace book or an AR arcial intelligence commonplace book these are topic specific I'm only adding quotations based on that topic

and it's a treasury commonplace book so I'm just adding quotations I'm not adding my own thoughts and then you have a specific manuscript commonplace book where you're manuscript out papers based on a particular topic so there's my quick analysis of commonplace books so now we have catchall journals we have zbl Dona journals and we have commonplace books I found these to be some of the best tools for your intellectual life and if you're interested in growing in wisdom knowledge and understand understanding if you are interested in adding new skills to your skill set then you're

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my podcast episode with Roland Allen we're going to discuss a little bit more of the distinction between a zibal Don and a common Place book and he's going to share some of the history of the two with us I'm going to butcher this I've been trying to say it cuz I don't want to like give it a real Italian pronunciation but it probably has one but it's like the zibble zalon zalon Parker I'm going to give you some advice right imagine you're in a an Italian restaurant and you're trying desperately to fit in with the

with the locals and so you just charge at it zalon okay I'm I am Italian so my ancestors probably rolling in their grave you know my last name is uh is setticase but you know real Italian is s so it's like all right so in in that in that way exactly okay so zon and it actually restaurants is a good setting for it because it seems to have meant salad actually that's the derivation of it and like a salad a zaloni was a notebook where you just filled it with tasty stuff anything you wanted to

keep hold of and read later now remember you mentioned print this is 200 years before printing arrives uh so no not many people have got complete books in their house if they've got a complete manuscript copy of a book that's expensive and unusual but in Florence what they do is they take the business notebooks home and they just start filling them with poems esops fables stories from ID their favorite stories from the Bible their favorite prayers Public Announcement recipes weird cures for diseases anything like this which anything which they think is going to be useful

or fun and there's no Rhyme or Reason to it they just write down whatever they want want to keep hold of and I love the I just love them they they doodle in them as well they they illustrate their their own stories as well and what you get is this real love of reading and Florence at the time was super literate like nearly everyone could read and write unlike nearly all of Europe and they really enjoyed it you know they took a huge amount of pleasure in in reading poetry and stories and keeping them and

passing them around and sharing them and I think this is this is something which we can all learn a bit from I think everyone should have a zalon definitely Amen to that I I I had such a longing for these people I was like man the the whole the whole city like everyone had one and they would pass them to each other and they' write in each others and they would share their favorite quotes with each other and I'm like that to me is so much more beautiful than just being like well let's talk about

the weather let's talk about you know the the sports game like let's talk about like no here let me share you this is a beautiful say saying write this down in your don't I like yeah Proverbs were very common exactly and I just love the fact that it's fun just fun yes totally and it's a fun hobby that makes you literate that makes you well read that makes you someone who can give a proverb and a wise saying because it's on your tongue because you just read it in your in your book like a second

ago and of course it helps you remember what it was that you read exactly yeah yeah that's another important point it's actually writing it down by hand and and like transcribing it helps it get up in here and stay in there um um on my my my other YouTube channel exploded it's almost 200,000 subscribers and that's all because uh I make a lot of videos about commonplace books and YouTube loves commonplace books but most people uh in the popular level think a a commonplace book is a zbl Don and they're like yeah you just it's

a common place for all your ideas and it's like well not not actually I I don't want to be Mr like technical or whatever but these are historical artifacts that that people have used forever and a a commonplace book is uh they have places so it's like here's a here's a title and that's how I find the quotations if I'm going to go write a paper if I'm going to go a speech they're under common places and that word has become common place you know that's like oh it's so obvious but really it was like

a special moner that would you would put quotes under so can you can you because I you read about commonplace books in here as well can you give us a characterization does that make sense to you or would you what would you add to the distinction between a zal dona and a commonplace book that that's the distinction is really important and that you're right it's just got completely lost over time and that was one of the really fun moments when I was coming back over the history was to sort of discover that loads of books

which are described as being commonplace books aren't and that this is the common placing is a kind of if you like it's kind of software which you apply to the hardware of the notebook yeah so um as you say what you do is you it depends what you're interested in typically uh commonplace books were kept by students um or or uh school boys um and they might be studying quite serious thing so the headings they would be interested in would be things like justice or Vengeance or tyranny so what you'd do is you'd stick a

headword like that like tyranny at the top of a page and every time you came upon something in your reading which is relevant to that topic you would just find the most interesting bit the useful quotation the the bit which sums it up or the most you know the pest the most poetic part the best definition and you just write it down along with where it came from so it might have come from the Bible it might have come from um a history book it might have come from again eso's fables or anything like that

and or the classics and so you would build up over time on the page which was headed tyranny a little mini encyclopedia about the topic and after a few years of doing this with every book you read which was what you had to do at grammar school and sorting out all the topics very very carefully you would end up with this quite large notebook which is absolutely packed with useful wisdom or thought provoking stuff you didn't have to agree with that you just had to find it interesting um and this kind of encyclopedic jux Theos

of ideas but in quite an organized way it's hard work to do but it's so rewarding I think and for hundreds of years this is like the backbone of a serious European education or rather the humanist uh Humanities education so um we have lots and lots of them that survive some of the most fascinating we have people like Milton's um so we know exactly what uh the young John Milton read on his way through to writing Paradise Lost Etc um we know that that whole generation of playwrights around Shakespeare Johnson Marlo they definitely would have

kept um quite extensive commonplace books when they were at school at grammar school so we know when when we look at a Shakespeare play and say okay this plot comes from Holland's head and this comes from ID and this image comes from um another place Marshall we know that he probably collected all of those influences as a young man he probably had them in a bank you know which he could then refer to for his entire writing life and the same goes actually for many of the people who are watching him of of course so

that you have this amazingly sophisticated audience as well as sophisticated playwrights um putting stuff on the stage for them so commonplace books are just amazing the everything suggests that they were really hard work to make and keep and no fun there are quite a few commonplace books which are broken off at the halfway stage or not even then um but also everything suggested if you persevere with them then they become incredibly useful yeah well that's that's so beautiful and that's um I I didn't know about commonplace books until I'd already been keeping them for six

years through through my own studies because I wanted to remember them I wanted to have quotes while I was doing public speaking all all sorts of stuff like that and then I discovered it through um through a theology degree and and finding out that uh Meenan Luther's like understudy called his work loide communes and it's probably the wrong totally use the term wrong but the term's been bastardized throughout history the whole time which is wild yeah ah yeah well that generation so he would have been one of the very first because it was actually Luther's

great rival arasmus who popularized the the idea of the commonplace book I think also if you're looking at the history of print it's a reaction to the sudden number of books in print in that period so you're talking about the early 1500s and it's when print is completely exploding and it's the first time I think in European history where there are more books around than you could Poss possibly read right like right up to about well certainly up until Gutenberg you you could read all of the books you know you might have trouble getting hold

of them but you had enough time you know in your life to read all of the books that survived 100 years later that's not the case everyone's overwhelmed by the sheer number of books and the amount of stuff that there is to read so then you have to start organizing your knowledge and discriminator okay so there you have it there's a bit more history on the zibal Don and the commonplace book and a little bit more distinction between the two Roland Allen was great to talk with his book is fantastic I definitely got to get

him on the podcast again okay so now let me finish this video by going over some pros and cons of keeping a commonplace book and a zibble Don and a pocket catchall notebook so keeping a catchall is a really great way to remember your best ideas it's also a great way to remember quotations on the go maybe someone you're talking with gives a really beautiful quote you want to write that down or someone gives you a book recommendation or you're listening to a podcast and you want to Mark a specific Tim stamp so you can

come back and and listen at that point whatever the casee keeping a catch all is a great way to extend your working memory but a major con of these is that it's really hard to find stuff in these because it's so sporadic because you have so many different types of things going on in here it can be pretty challenging to go back and find exactly what you're looking for especially when you've been doing it for a while so what I like to do is once I fill one of these up I'll go back through and

Abstract all the quotations or the good ideas and I disperse those into different commonplace books or compendiums so a catchall is like the first stop for a rotation or a good idea but it's not where they go to live now I haven't been keeping a zbl Don very long but I've thought about this concept a lot because a lot of people confuse this with a commonplace book some of the pros of this is that it's really easy to use you just add your favorite quotations your favorite ideas in here it's pretty haphazard it's a pretty

low bar for entry just add them into a notebook you can draw a line to kind of separate them you can add the date if you want but that's pretty much it you can just pull this back out to reflect on it and so it's super easy to use but it shares one of the Cons with a catchall in that it can be be difficult to find a quotation once you've put it in here because you're not aggressively formatting your zal Don it's really easy to use but it becomes difficult to retrieve information when you

need to I think one way to get around this is to reflect on this often to read back through your zibal Dona like every day or at least two or three times a week so you know exactly what's in here I think that'll become more difficult once you have multiple notebooks that are serving as your like extended zibal Dona I think it'll be difficult to remember was that in this one or this one where was that quotation so maybe if you have a particular idea or aphorism or quotation that you keep coming back to maybe

you take that out of your zibal Dona and put that into a commonplace book so then lastly we have the pros and cons of keeping a commonplace book a pro would be that your information is organized according to different common places different Loi different categories different headings so it becomes much easier to find information in your commonplace book if you keep a specific instead of a general commonplace it becomes even easier so I know I can look for my artificial intelligence quotes in my artificial intelligence commonplace book and then I can look through for specific

loai and find the exact quote that I'm looking for people often comment here on YouTube and say isn't it hard to retrieve the information isn't it hard to find your quotes in your commonplace book wouldn't it be better to do a digital version so that you can search I've just never had this issue of retrieving information from my commonplace books because I keep so many specific commonplace books I know exactly where the quotations and the information and the arguments are so it becomes very easy to retrieve that information when I need it but one of

the cons of keeping a commonplace book is that it's more work just as you heard Roland say in that podcast clip it's much more difficult to keep a commonplace book than a zbl dona but there could be a bigger payoff in that your information is actually organized and more readily retrievable okay so there you go there are some pros and cons of keeping a catchall and a Zeal Don and a commonplace book that's probably way more analysis and information than you were looking for but if you made it this far into the video then you're

awesome leave me a notebook Emoji so I know who the real ones are and then I want to hear from you guys what do you think about the distin between a zbl dona and a commonplace book and a catch all are we just straining at Nats or do you think it's actually a helpful distinction leave me a comment and let me know all right that's going to do it for now I'll catch you guys next time