system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Learning Philosophy vs reading Philosophers

Is reading philosophers important at all? And if so, how much?

In context I ask because if we want to learn philosophy and use it as a way of figuring things out and thinking about the world better then how important is reading philosophers work as opposed to just learning philosophical skills. For example I am interested in the idea of personal identity so I find it interesting to read David Hume and Buddhist works but are these for me to use philosophical techniques and neuroscience etc to try and figure out the concept of personal identity and whether it even exists at all? We study logic so that we can spot whether an argument is valid or invalid, and if valid is it sound. But we don’t need to read any philosopher to learn this skill, except for the one who wrote the curriculum. The skills of philosophy allow you approach any subject better, whether philosophical or not. So if someone is interested in learning philosophical skills as a way to approach things then how important is reading the works of philosophers?
gpt
So you want to learn to philosophize, or more exhaustively, you want to learn how to use the tools and methods for reasoning to arrive at generalized statements of some truth value, about topics that empirical study won't yield meaningful results. How do you do this? By practicing these skills in some manner. People have been doing this for ~2300 years already, though. Do you set out on your own, and build up your skills from the ground up, or do you take advantage of the fact that there is ~2300 years of work on this subject to use as a guide? 

If you try to build your own system from the ground up, you'll probably make some mistakes and errors, and the chance is that someone in those intervening thousands of years made those same mistakes. So learning to philosophize by learning about the theories of past philosophers is beneficial for at least three reasons: you get to see examples of philosophizing done by experts, you can correct certain errors and pitfalls you would have made on your own by seeing how past thinkers have run into those problems and corrected them, and you can see how *not* to do things, based on errors or holes in their reasoning they did not correct.

Many subjects are taught like this. In art you study and copy works by the masters before you can break the rules and forge your own path, in music you learn the compositions of great composers before you can compose your own pieces, etc.