The Very Best Tool for Intellectual Growth

A Brief(ish) History & Analysis of Commonplace Books

Commonplace books are the best way to master your favorite topics or learn new subjects. Many of us stumbled into reinventing commonplace books (CPBs) in our own personal study only to later find out that this is a common practice amongst some of the finest scholars in human history, stretching back through the renaissance, through ancient Roman philosophers, and all the way back at least as far BC as King Solomon.

This post is long and probably boring. If you want to watch my videos on CPBs—they’re way more exciting—then feel free… no feel constrained to watch this playlist of all the videos I’ve made specifically on CPBs:

ParkNotes Commonplace Book playlist

If you want to find the resources where I found out all this information on CPBs or If you want to grab some materials to start or continue commonplace booking, then check out my Amazon Storefront Commonplace Book Idea List. Buying books or stationary from my store helps support my work and justifies me writing this long post. Check it out here: Parker's Amazon Storefront

Here’s some more affiliate links before we get started, check them out for discounts and to support my work:

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I started my first commonplace books back in 2013 after God woke me up to a new love for education. I began listening to lots and lots of philosophy lectures, apologetics debates and presentations, sermons, theology lessons, podcasts, and just about anything I could get my ears on. I also started teaching myself (forcing myself) to actually read for comprehension and to complete the books and papers I started reading. Slowly but surely, I began to grow as a reader (and I mean slowly! I used to fall asleep after reading just two pages).

But with all this new information coming in, I needed a way to collate it for future reference. I thought about all the authors and public speakers I was listening to and I marveled at their breadth of knowledge and mastery of gnomic sayings. I figured the best way for me to become a person like them was to create collections of quotes and ruminate back on them in order to make them my own. If I could just keep them in one spot, then I could read them over ad nauseam and never get caught without an aphorism on my lips. So that’s what I started doing.

It wasn’t until five years later when I entered seminary that I discovered the rich intellectual history of the CPB. Now, I want to briefly recount this intellectual history, but first, just what exactly are CPBs? CPBs are collections of quotes curated for gleaning wisdom, mastering concepts, memorizing quotes, metabolizing information, and gaining propositional knowledge (I guess you can gain ‘know-how’ knowledge as well insofar as one comes to know how to make a commonplace book).

In the rest of this post I’m going to cover a quick history of the concept of CPBs and then give you my four-fold analysis of the categories of CPBs. I’ll also scatter in some of my ParkNotes YouTube videos where I cover the various aspects of CPBs.

The History of Commonplace Books

CPBs had a huge moment on YouTube over the past couple of years and I caught what looks to be the tail end of the wave back in August 2023—it did wonders for my ParkNotes channel. But this recent explosion of interest online has led many of those unfamiliar with the history of CPBS to view them as merely the latest fad in the “productivity space”. But they’re wrong… and dumb… and they gotta stop leavin’ me such silly comments on YouTube. CPBs aren’t just the ProductivityTube flavor of the month, rather this spike in interest represents a rediscovery of a most beneficial and ancient intellectual tool.

I cover some of the history of CPBs in my video on my pocket proverbs CPB here: Pocket Proverbs Commonplace Book

Throughout history, scholars have used CPBs for their own personal wisdom treasuries but they’ve also curated CPBs to print—and mass print after the advent of the printing press—for the sake of their students and/or the general public. One of the oldest CPBs in the tradition was collated by the philosopher-king, King Solomon, and we know it as the Book of Proverbs. This is a collection of wise sayings, gnomic statements, riddles, aphorisms, etc., both generated from and collected by Solomon for the sake of his sons, who desperately needed wisdom. Consider the book’s introductory passage:

The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel:

2 To know wisdom and instruction,

    to understand words of insight,

3 to receive instruction in wise dealing,

    in righteousness, justice, and equity;

4 to give prudence to the simple,

    knowledge and discretion to the youth—

5 Let the wise hear and increase in learning,

    and the one who understands obtain guidance,

6 to understand a proverb and a saying,

    the words of the wise and their riddles.

7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;

    fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Solomon’s Book of Proverbs is a CPB which was created in order to instruct his sons in the way of wisdom so that they might live the good life along the grain of God’s reality. He does this by collecting wisdom gleaned from others as well as that which he generated in and of himself (though we Christians and Jews think it’s actually divinely inspired wisdom and the whole book is actually a God-breathed commonplace book of wisdom).

But while the concept and practice stretches back at least to philosopher-king Solomon, the actual name ‘commonplace’ book has its origin in Aristotle. Artistotle’s κοινοι τοποι [commonplaces] (later called loci communes in Latin) first appeared in his Topica sometime around 335 to 323 BC. The Topica is found in his 6 volume works on logic called the Organon. Aristotle’s commonplaces were collections of forms of argumentation systematically arranged all in one spot in order that the argumentation schemes could be standardized and studied to help us live out our telos as rational animals. Over three hundred years later, Cicero, the philosopher and rhetorician, penned his book, De Oratore (~55 BC) wherein he introduces and expands on Aristotle’s notion of commonplaces to the Roman world. Cicero expanded the concept of commonplaces from a kind of compendium of information about argumentation schemes, meant to be comprehensive in scope and systematically presented, to include quotes from authoritative figures which accompanied the schemes as case studies and proof of concept.

Fast forward to ~95 AD when Quintilian penned his Institio Oratoria where he expanded the concept out even further. Quintilian argued that the orator ought to commit an arsenal of arguments as well as sententiae (wise sayings) to their memory by using commonplace books which can serve as an artificial memory (queue the “second brain” folks). Quintilian also extended the pool of quote harvesting from rhetoricians and logicians out to include moral philosophers as well. It is this expanded conception of commonplace books which picks out what the philosopher-king Solomon was doing in his Book of Proverbs over 900 years earlier and it is this same conception which carried on throughout intellectual history up through modern times and which found itself having a massive moment in the journaling and productivity niches on YouTube and Reddit just recently.

Not everyone was happy with Cicero and Quintilian tampering with the purity of Aristotle’s commonplaces, however. Sometime around 510 to 523 AD, Boethius, in his De Topicis Differentiis, pushed back against the Roman rhetoricians’ “liberal” notion of commonplaces arguing that appealing to authoritative texts and quotes is actually more like the informal fallacy of appealing to authority, rather than an improvement on Aristotle’s collection of syllogisms—indeed it’s amongst the feeblest forms of rhetorical and logical proofs, or so says Boethius. But Boethius’s efforts were in vain and the Roman/Solomonic notion of commonplace books lived on, because it is awesome, and useful, and so intuitive that most of us reinvent them without knowing that’s what we’re doing until someone tells us. So suck it Boethius.

But this where I’d like to end this excursion into the historical roots of CPBs. There is much more than can and perhaps will be said by me about the intellectual history of CPBs between Boethius’s failed attempts to quash them in the early 500s (again suck it dude) and my YouTube videos about them ~1,500 years later. I will just slip in one more factoid, however, and that is that the great empiricist philosopher John Locke wrote a short book dedicated to his own method of keeping commonplace books (!!) and you can find that book in my Amazon Storefront Commonplace Book idea list.

Okay, so that ends that. If you were bored by that then blame the YouTube comment section dummies who make the kinds of foolish remarks which forced my hand. CPBs are really really really old. They’re not a fad. They’re not “just a notebook”. Don’t be dumb.

Which Kind of Commonplace Book is Best (for you)?

I covered some of the intellectual history of CPBs, but how does one go about making their own CPB? Well, as it turns out there are at least four different species of CPBs and your goals will determine which one is best for you—I personally use all four but I’m also kind of obsessed with ideas. Since we thumbed our nose at Boethius for trying to protect the sanctity of Aristotle’s commonplaces, I’ll use Aristotle’s classification scheme to categorize the four methods I have in mind as a kind of homage to Aristotle (or is this like an insult to injury type thing I’m adding to Boethius by using his hero’s method to further destroy his notion of commonplaces?).

I cover the following material in this video here: The Four Kinds of Commonplace Books

When it comes to definitions and classifications, the terms ‘genus’ and ‘species’ have different meanings than they do in the biological sciences. ‘Genus’ is just the main category of a type of thing and the ‘species’ are just sub-categories (we’re speaking loosely here, historians of logic are salty right now).

So our genus is commonplace book. That’s the thing under consideration which we mean to further analyze by carving up into smaller, more specific things. So let’s get a better definition to work with:

Commonplace book (CPB) = a bound collection of quotes used for garnering wisdom, knowledge, and understanding in general or on a particular topic.

Why “bound”? Because typically, CPBs have been comprised of parchment, papyrus, or some form of paper, and they’ve been bound in a codex form (our modern books which open to a left and right page) or a rotulus (verticual scroll) or a volumen (horizontal scroll) prior to the codex. Today, we have lots of digital systems like Notion or Obsidian which we can use as digital CPBs but even still, they will be bound in some fashion to keep your quotes and thoughts organized. It’s not a CPB if it’s a pile of loose leaf paper. It’s not a CPB if it’s an unbounded string of code (per impossibile). So a CPB needs some boundaries. I love the bounds of a physical notebook and I like to use leather covers to protect them. But do what works best for you. Not loose leave.

Why quotes? Because that’s what a CPB is. At its core, it’s a collection of quotes used for a particular intellectual endeavor. Whatever the endeavor is, it will in some way or another be aimed at providing you with more wisdom; it will aid you in gaining, collecting, analyzing, storing, retrieving, utilizing, (propositional) knowledge (and information (insofar as those are different, I’m not touching that here)); it should help you understand what you’re collecting more fully as you reflect back on what you’ve gleaned.

So that’s the genus, a CPB. But there are different ways to keep a CPB based on different purposes. There are four ways to be exact. We can specify these four by utilizing two sets of differentia, that is, two sets of criteria which help us differentiate the species of CPB from each other.

The first set of differentia has to do with the scope of the CPB.

(1)  Scope: is it (a) a general CPB or (b) a topic-specific CPBs?

Is the CPB meant to capture a random smattering of quotes or is it meant to focus on one particular topic? I most keep topic-specific CPBs because I love to compartmentalize and having one notebook per topic helps me get into the right headspace. I recently started a general CPB, which I see most CPB enthusiasts are using on YouTube, and I use it for gathering my favorite quotes which don’t quite fit into any of my topic-specific CPBs. These general quotes usually come from the fiction books I read or from movies and TV shows. I have many topic-specifics ranging from theological topics like the Authorial Analogy for the God-world relation, to the philosophy of mind, to Artificial Intelligence, logic, philosophy definitions, wisdom, and the Simulation Hypothesis.

So that’s the first question to answer: do I want this to be a general catch-all treasury for quotations or do I want my CPB to be a topic-specific? And why?

The second set of differentia has to do with your intended purpose for the CPB, the telos, the goal for which you want to make it.

(2) Telos: (a) is this CPB for reflection, contemplation, rumination, memorization, etc., call it a ‘treasury’ CPB, or (b) is it for a constructive task like manuscripting an essay, book, script, sermon, speech, etc., call it a ‘manuscript’ CPB.

Again, I have CPBs for both of these purposes. Some are just for memorization and reflection like my Settecase Book of Wisdom and my pocket proverbs CPBs. I collect wise sayings, I read back through them and try to commit them to memory in order to make them part of me. I will pass these down to my children and children’s children. I also have CPBs where I manuscript out my blog posts and graduate philosophy essays like my Parker’s Ponderings CPB (where I manuscript the posts you can find here on my Substack) or my “Papers” CPB (pretty self-explanatory).  

So then by asking yourself these two questions, comprised of two sets of differentia, you’ll have four possible answers and thus will be able to determine which CPB is best for you.

(1a) + (2a) = General Treasury CPB

This is the broadest scope CPB you could keep. You indiscriminately collect quotes you like all into one spot. You read it back over probably just because you enjoy the quotes and want to reflect on them. As soon as you start giving some more reasons for why you’re collecting these particular quotes, you start moving into a more specific type of CPB. It’s all good though. I have one of these and I use it for quotes I can quite categorize.

(1a) + (2b) = General Manuscript CPB

In this specie of CPB, you collect quotes for a purpose, you’re manuscripting something, probably for publication (even if that’s just on Instagram or Facebook or something) but maybe you’re doing it just for yourself to help you think more clearly. Manuscript CPBs are a collection of quotes and your thoughts about the quotes. You will string the quotes together in a coherent way, interspersing your own thoughts and ideas, exegesis, comments, hermetical asides, etc. My Parker’s Ponderings CPB fits in this general manuscript specie. The only theme of the CPB is “Substack pieces” that’s pretty general since the theme of this Substack is pretty general, it’s my ponderings.

(1b) + (2a) = Topic-specific Treasury CPB

Topic-specific treasury CPBs are a collection of quotes about a specific topic you want to study or master. I have several of these including my philosophy of mind CPB. I want to be an expert philosopher of mind, I want to know noology inside out, to be a real good noologist (lol). So, I created a CPB on phil mind to collect all the quotes and arguments I should be well versed in if I want to be an expert philosopher of mind.

(1b) + (2b)  = Topic-specific Manuscript CPB

Topic-specific manuscript books are just like their treasury counterparts except in this specie you add your own thoughts to the mix. You manuscript out essays or thoughts, journal articles, pieces, scripts, etc. all on the same topic in one notebook. My Simulation Hypothesis CPB is a topic-specific manuscript CPB because I’m actively collecting quotes, summarizing papers, abstracting out ideas, and writing my own arguments on the simulation hypothesis all in the same notebook. I do my own exegesis of the quotes I collect in this one. I analyze the arguments I’ve gathered. I manuscript out my thoughts for podcast episodes where the simulation hypothesis may come up, You get the picture.

So there you go. That’s more than you ever wanted to know about commonplace books. If you have thoughts on the history or on my analysis of the four species of CPBs, please let me hear them!

Again, check out my CPB playlist on my ParkNotes YouTube channel here: ParkNotes CPB playlist

And if you’re going to stock up on CPB supplies, please use the links in my Amazon Storefront to help support my work: Parker's Amazon Storefront