Currently Reading
Getting back into Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I find it relaxing, like watching snooker at the Crucible on TV on a Saturday afternoon. But it's better than snooker:
[quote=Proust]But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.[/quote]
[quote=Proust]But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.[/quote]
Comments (3457)
I stopped reading philosophy or anything serious since I already read contracts or legislation at least 8 hours a day. I go bonkers without an escape into Scifi or Fantasy.
Look forward to philosophically useless updates by me in this thread! :B
I'm having some difficulties understanding Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and I happened across this book while searching for an explanation of the way Nietzsche uses being and becoming.
Extremely clear and nicely argued.
There are still some of the 'great philosophers' of which I know so very little, but I'm still focused on the one's that I know a bit more about.
Erin Manning - Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance
Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin--Ostler
Studies in Ancient Society--Finley, Ed.
The Life and Riotous Times of H.L. Mencken--Manchester
The Wall: Rome's Greatest Frontier--Moffat
Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics and the Passions--DeBrabander
Harlan Ellison, Deathbird Stories - so far, A
Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism - so far A-
Christian Wolmar, The Great Railroad Revolution (finished: B+) about American Railroads, from the beginning to 2000.
Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy - so far, B+ / A-
Victor Navasky, Naming Names - so far, C- for boring; put it down.
Gerard Colby, The DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain - so far B+ (page by page I am enraged)
Regardless, preliminary advice would be this: start with chapter 3 on the Image of Thought.
.
I'm reading 'The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution & Revenge' by Paul Preston.
Both available for a reasonable price on the Play Books app on my mobile. I like my relatively new mobile. It can do nifty stuff my old one couldn't.
Gilles Deleuze - Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life
Last thing I read was The Sandman. Seems like I can only read picture books these days.
Agamben or books on Agamben:
Giorgio Agamben - Homo Sacer
Giorgio Agamben - State of Exception
Giorgio Agamben - The Kingdom and the Glory
Giorgio Agamben - The Sacrament of Language
Giorgio Agamben - The Signature of All Things
Giorgio Agmaben - Stanzas
Giorgio Agmaben - Pilate and Jesus
Giorgio Agamben - The Church and the Kingdom
Giorgio Agamben - The Highest Poverty
Giorgio Agamben - Opus Dei
Giorgio Agamben - Stasis
William Watkin - Agamben and Indifference
Kevin Attell - Giorgio Agamben
On Francois Laruelle:
Katerina Kolozova - The Cut of the Real
Alexander Galloway - Laurelle
John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith (eds.) - Laruelle and Non-Philosophy
John Mullarkey - Post-Continental Philosophy
Phenomenology, Movement, Sensation, and the Body:
Alphonso Lingis - Foreign Bodies
Carrie Noland - Agency and Embodiment
Renaud Barbaras - Desire and Distance
Michel Henry - Material Phenomenology
Maxine Sheets-Johnston - The Primacy of Movement
David Morris - The Sense of Space
Tom Sparrow - Plastic Bodies
On Merleau-Ponty:
Renaud Barbaras - The Being of the Phenomenon
Jessica Wiskus - The Rhythm of Thought
Veronique Foti - Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty
On Deleuze and related themes:
Gilles Deleuze - Pure Immanence
Francois Zourabichvili - Deleuze
Erin Manning - Relationscapes
Erin Manning - Always More than One
Pascal Chabot - The Philosophy of Simondon
Politics and Ethics of Subjectivity:
Adriana Cavarero - Relating Narratives
Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
Judith Butler - Giving an Account of Oneself
Denise Riley - The Words of Selves
Denise Riley - Impersonal Passion
Mari Ruti - The Singularity of Being
Alphonso Lingis - The First Person Singular
Other:
Martin Hagglund - Dying for Time
Dennis King Keenan - The Question of Sacrifice
Peter Gratton - The State of Sovereignty
Eugene Thacker - In The Dust of This Planet
Eugene Thacker - Starry Speculative Corpse
Vicki Kirby - Telling Flesh
-
Currently Reading: Brian Massiumi - Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
47 books, 14 by women (better than last year, but room for improvement), and lots learned.
Also, I managed to do a write up on almost everything here but Lingis's Foreign Bodies.
Goals for next year: more science, and more politics.
Happy New Year all :)
Impressive effort SX! I would love to be able to read that much! How do you find the time for such voluminous reading? It makes me think you may be a professional academic, or one of those lucky ones with independent means, but perhaps you are just suitably obsessed ;) ...
Happy New Year to you and all 8-).
Jeffrey Bell - Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference
@John Thanks! Its just a matter of making time - it can be done, it you love it enough :) (sorry for the late reply!).
Hey, no probs :) happy reading!
Who are the other two? And who is being threatened with being bumped in fourth place?
Regarding Dennett, I agree that Consciousness Explained is very bad in most of its positive explanatory aspirations. Peter Hacker eviscerates him an appendix of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. But it also contains quite a few good insights. Among my favorite "intuition pumps" from him is his discussion of the distinction (or rather pseudo-distinction) between the Orwellian and Stalinesque models of consciousness content elaboration. Another gem from Dennett is his critique of Harris' Free Will.
Dennett was Gilbert Ryle's student at Oxford. There are several mentor/pupil pairs in the history of 20th century analytic philosophy such that, reading works from the pupil, I am left to wonder how it is possible for the core insights from his/her mentor to have been watered down or misconstrued so much. Those are the pairs that puzzle me most:
Gilbert Ryle -- Daniel Dennett
John Austin -- John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars -- Paul Churchand
Peter Strawson -- Galen Strawson (father/son, in this case)
Hilary Putnam -- Jerry Fodor
John Protevi - Political Physics: Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic
Helen Palmer - Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense
Donald Landes - Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression
There seemed to be such hype surrounding Dennett when I read that book that I felt I must not understand it and that I was missing something. I felt vindicated when I later discovered that many felt it as unpersuasive as I did.
If you liked The Very Hungry Caterpillar you'll love it's sequel, The Very Busy Bee.
Bought it today and finished it today. Very good read. Clear story on how actually the Soviet Union went down. What is good that it comes from somebody who did see the collapse of the Soviet Union from halls of power in Kremlin, yet isn't apologetic and compares the events to other instances when autocratic rules have crumbled.
One interesting issue (among many)
- Just how dangerous the collapse of the Soviet Union was. The threat of Civil war like in Yugoslavia was real. According to Gaidar, just how dangerous this path would be was something that the leaders of the new states understood when four states had nuclear weapons. The ICBMs might be controlled by Moscow, but the tactical nukes and bomber dropped nuclear bombs/missiles could be used by those who had them. Let's remember that Ukraine and Kazakhstan had far more nuclear weapons than countries like the UK, France or Israel. This made all the new leaders to embrace a peaceful solution. Hence boundary disputes weren't put on the table. (And there was already the example of Nagorno-Karabach, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaidzan). In fact, now we can see that once this threat was erased (by Ukraine and Kazakhstan giving up their nukes), indeed war has broken out. And Putin can talk that the state of Kazakhstan is "artificial". Gaidar, who died in 2009, naturally didn't see this.
The Ecology of Freedom - Murray Bookchin
Libra - Don DeLillo
I have Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani and Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism by Tran Duc Thao on my immediate list but I'm trying to convince myself to not keep starting books when I'm in the middle of others (already not working as you can see).
You can't ever know if you're getting a "perfectly good introduction" to the thought of some guy unless you actually read that guy for yourself. I'd rather think for myself and make up my own mind than have someone else do it for me in tortured "academese."
I don't understand the claim of snobbery. Academics, the writers of all this glut of secondary literature, are among the most snobbish people you could ever meet.
I don't understand this debate at all. It seems obvious to me that both primary and secondary literature are essential. Indeed, the only thing that truly demarcates "primary literature", so called, from secondary literature, is that it mainly consists in works that have become classics, for better or worse. Almost all primary literature has begun as secondary literature. Few philosophers have endeavored to reinvent the wheel or have abstained from commentating on contemporaries or predecessors. Hence, while Sturgeon's law applies to so called secondary literature, it doesn't apply to primary literature since in that case most of the crap already has been sifted out. If, however, one is able to be selective in one's selection of secondary literature sources, then this criterion becomes irrelevant. Aristotle makes up part of the secondary literature on Plato, and likewise for Kant and Hume, Heidegger and Husserl, Wittgenstein and Frege, etc.
On edit: I am currently reading Sebastian Rödl's Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect for the third time. Is it secondary literature on Kant, or is it an original work? It is both. The distinction is pointless. On account of its specific topic, if it weren't informed by Kant (and by Aristotle), then it would be misinformed. If it weren't original then it would be redundant and pointless -- but it is neither.
In then end all of this just seems purely subjective. You like primary sources, great. I like secondary textbooks more as an introduction to ideas. As a matter of fact I usually don't like reading primary sources.
Amen.
And that creates the problem of your not being able to talk about what you've read because no one should be interested in your views as a secondary source.
I sense a false dichotomy here: either one thinks for oneself or one slavishly attempts to interpret original thinkers without doubting anything that they said (rather in the the way Justice Scalia meant to interpret the U.S. Constitution.) Why it is not possible for a piece of secondary literature to express what its author meant as, in part, explanation/appropriation of the text commented upon and, in part, criticism and elaboration on it? Much of the secondary literature traditions in philosophy take the form of protracted dialogues, it seem to me. The only amount of reverence to the original text that is required is the amount necessary not to get it completely wrong (and that's already a lot, hence the need for exegesis).
Good question but I feel it should be directed at all the bad writers of secondary literature.
Very powerful book, take a look people!
A book that would have been better titled, What is a conservative? Not nearly as full of 'oughtification' as the title suggests, it is a very sincere, humble, and honourable explanation of where conservative principles come from. Roger Scruton builds conservatism from the ground up by starting out of with simple facts of human nature and the human condition, and somehow, remarkably, ends with a well-rounded and coherent view of the proper function of government and the nature of civil society. He does this by admitting that there is in fact a degree of truth in each of the rivals of conservatism (titling each chapter, 'The Truth In' Nationalism, Socialism, Capitalism, Liberalism, Multiculturalism, Environmentalism, and Internationalism), then drawing these truths out and employing them as principles of the conservative philosophy itself. But in doing this he also at the same time sets out to expose the falsehoods of each of them by showing the limits of their truth, how in their fullest forms they go too far thereby losing their truth along the way and hence end up creating an unjust society and government (for example, the answer to the problems of socialism is not 'more socialism'). He argues that we must show restraint and be 'conservative' (see what I did there?) when employing each of the political tendencies of human nature, lest we lose each truth and replace it with it's falsehood.
Emanuele Coccia - Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image
I get the sense that Dennett is more of a New Atheist evangelist/apologist than a legitimate philosopher.
I do like his thoughts on free-will. But, I think Alfred Mele is better.
I'm also reading:
Ten Philosophical Mistakes- Adler
Montaigne's Essays
Selected readings by Cicero
Working and Thinking on the Waterfront: A Journal, June 1958 to May 1959 - Eric Hoffer
I've been reading bits and pieces of these books over the last few months...- so, I'm not sure if I'd call it "close reading".
Fear and Trembling - Kierkegaard
A History of Western Philosophy - Russell
Reason and Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato - John Holbo
The True Believer - Eric Hoffer
The Righteous Mind - Haidt
by Brad S. Gregory https://amzn.com/0674088050
It's extremely different going through it the second time (first was about 5 years ago and I misinterpreted it almost completely). The biggest difference is knowing the terminology, Kant himself never gives good or even any explanation for a lot of the terms he uses.
I disagree with the view that Kant is a bad writer. When you know the terms a lot of the CPR flows quite well. So far it's actually been very enjoyable much more than the secondary literature on Nietzsche and Deleuze that I've been reading lately.
Bernstein lectures on Kant have been nice entertainment whilst driving.
Vicki Kirby - Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large
Syntactic Structures - Noam Chomsky
Word and Object - W. V. O. Quine
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax - Noam Chomsky
The Atoms of Language - Mark Baker
Categorial Grammar: Logical Syntax, Semantics, and Processing - Glyn Morrill
Jeffrey A. Bell - Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?: A Critical Introduction and Guide
Eric Alliez - The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?
Prep for a course I'm doing on WIP.
I keep reading a bit from one book and then jump to the next. Anyone else do that? I should stick to one and finish it.
[quote=Paul]
But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;
[/quote]
So there's a creative misreading of Paul as presenting a third option, between (as symbols) the Jews and the Greeks.
There's also some anarchism, etc. in this:
[quote= Paul]
Christ is the end of the law.
[/quote]
And so on.
:D Not really no - that means Christ is the TELOS (goal, but often translated as end) of the law. Not the abnegation of it, but the fulfilment of it. Christ can never be opposed to the law.
I've just finished this wonderful article! Finally something I can agree with politically!
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
Actually I just read about that ambiguity. I think goal and end are both appropriate for my purposes, since I see the Law in its evolving manifestations as rungs on the ladder. But the ladder is thrown away. Of course this (for me) is "creative misreading." Or rather it doesn't matter what Paul meant. As I see it this Christ idea or personality is as radical as it gets, transcending any tradition that contingently lights it up in one's mind.
I like some aspects of conservatism. But I just want to clarify again what I see as a separation between religion at its height and politics.
The law of custom, imposed by force, will always be with us. And, yes, that creates the space of individual freedom. But I'm thinking something more along these lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomianism
That is incoherent to me. Whether they follow the law of Moses is precisely the verification for whether they are saved. Someone who no longer lives in sin, does not live by breaking the Law.
It's OK if you disagree. This kind of disagreement is thousands of years old by now. Paul happened to be a Jew, but (as I understand it) he took mystery cults for the other half of his blended Christianity. The divine man who dies and is resurrected is ancient, as I understand it.
Just found this quote:
"Pre-messianically, our destinies are divided. Now to the Christian, the Jew is the incomprehensibly obdurate man who declines to see what has happened; and to the Jew, the Christian is the incomprehensibly daring man who affirms in an unredeemed world that its redemption has been accomplished. This is a gulf which no human power can bridge."
Buber
I sort of want to read all of Lewis' stuff, if only to see how one so sensible could have gone so mad.
Henry Somers-Hall - Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition
Building up to enter again the breach that is D&R, something I've been doing for a while now - I'll get alot more out of it this time, I hope.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I sometimes wish I had the willpower to read stuff this that I know I will vehemently disagree with. I can't bring myself to, when there's just so much more 'constructive' (philosophy-building, rather than philosophy-'tearing down') things I feel I might be able to do.
I don't know why I bought these to be honest. It's not like college offers me much time to read anything anyway. At least the latter two books are somewhat related to my degree.
Even now I want to join the reading group but can't get enough time away from verilog.
I found the engineering informed my philosophy stuff more than the other way round.
Classes on machine learning, computer vision techniques etc.
John Stuart Mill said that if he found a book effort to read, then he would also read a book he enjoyed at the same time, and go back and forth.
I've found that as well. Object-oriented programming in Java complemented my excursions into analytic metaphysics.
Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (pretty much finished first reading of this)
Foucault, Madness and Civilization
So far, so interesting.
The misreading of Spinoza makes me sad. He's and acosmist ( "God is real. The finite is an illusion- and so never God") not a pantheist ("The finite is God").
I'm not so sure. You are closer than you might think. Sometimes what you say about God not being a finite entity is approaching his insight. The problem is you, despite realising that God is not really a question of a miracle worker, still consider God in finite terms.
For you God is still effectively a casual force, a force or presence which enables the world, which makes the world and it meaning rather than not. In the way that matters (i.e. the presence of the meaningful world), God is still of the world. For you it is like the world of the finite forms we encountered is and illusion, but it is the world which is really God-- we become wise by recognising our existence is given by the infinite, rather than merely being finite.
Spinoza sort of speaks from the infinite point of view. In terms of God (the infinite), the finite is an illusion. The world is not real at all, meaning it is entirely separate and so not caused by the infinite (not even a transcendent one, not even in meaning) of God. Our world is only ever finite and so cannot be of God. To say our existence is given by God is a contradiction. It would be to turn God into a finite actor.
Anyway, this is probably getting too far off topic, so I should probably leave it here.
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet - Dialogues II
Is Nature Ever Evil?: Religion, Science and Value by Willem B. Drees
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion by Brian Davies
Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed by Cornelis de Waal
and a few others
Narajuna's the tree of wisdom (until he started to get obnoxious around half way through)
And currently Pathological lying, accusations and swindling.
Science
The Ticklish Subject
Rising Up & Rising Down
Possibly my favorite novel.
Strange synchronicities; I've just started reading it again this week: and loving it so far.
May or may not be my last Deleuze reading for a while, unless I decide to pursue a Logic of Sense reading project, which is not altogether unlikely.
Deleuze reading:
Gilles Deleuze - What Is Philosophy?
Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition* (reread)
Gilles Deleuze - Bergsonism
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet - Dialogues II
Jeffrey A. Bell - The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructualism
Jeffrey A. Bell - Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference*
Jeffrey A. Bell - Deleuze and Guattari's 'What Is Philosophy': A Critical Introduction and Guide
John Protevi - Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic
Helen Palmer - Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense
Sean Bowden - The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense
James Williams - Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide
Henry Somers-Hall - Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Eric Alliez - Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?
Daniel Smith - Essays on Deleuze (currently reading)
Science-y reading
Robert Rosen - Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life* (reread)
Robert Rosen - Essays on Life Itself
Gregory Bateson - Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
Manuel De Landa - Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason
Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (reread)
Anthropology
Andre Leroi-Gourhan - Gesture and Speech*
Marcel Mauss - The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Marcel Mauss - A General Theory of Magic
Misc.
Brian Massumi - Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
Donald Landes - Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression*
Paul Bains - The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations
James Williams - A Process Philosophy of Signs
Emanuele Coccia - Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image
Anthony Wilden - System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange*
Arkady Plotnitsky - In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious
Vicki Kirby - Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large
Eugence Thacker - Cosmic Pessimism
Asterisks indicate my favourite ones. Lots of Deleuze, as per usual, but I'm actually attending seminars on the stuff this year, so not unexpected. A bit dismayed by the lack of female authors - again - this year, can only hope for more next year. Could have used a bit more pilitics too. Didn't read as many as last year (32 as opposed to 40 something) but I'm putting that down to having read some pretty hefty ones this year (Leroi-Gourhan, Wilden, Plotnitsky, Rosen). Next year's plans include reading on gesture, sensation, metaphor, technics, the analog, and more psychoanalysis. Also, Marx's Capital. Happy holidays all, and good reading!
_______
https://www.amazon.com/Negative-Math-Mathematical-Rules-Positively/dp/0691133913/ref=cm_rdp_product
"A student in class asks the math teacher: "Shouldn't minus times minus make minus?" Teachers soon convince most students that it does not. Yet the innocent question brings with it a germ of mathematical creativity. What happens if we encourage that thought, odd and ungrounded though it may seem?
Few books in the field of mathematics encourage such creative thinking. Fewer still are engagingly written and fun to read. This book succeeds on both counts. Alberto Martinez shows us how many of the mathematical concepts that we take for granted were once considered contrived, imaginary, absurd, or just plain wrong. Even today, he writes, not all parts of math correspond to things, relations, or operations that we can actually observe or carry out in everyday life.
Negative Math ponders such issues by exploring controversies in the history of numbers, especially the so-called negative and "impossible" numbers. It uses history, puzzles, and lively debates to demonstrate how it is still possible to devise new artificial systems of mathematical rules. In fact, the book contends, departures from traditional rules can even be the basis for new applications. For example, by using an algebra in which minus times minus makes minus, mathematicians can describe curves or trajectories that are not represented by traditional coordinate geometry.
Clear and accessible, Negative Math expects from its readers only a passing acquaintance with basic high school algebra. It will prove pleasurable reading not only for those who enjoy popular math, but also for historians, philosophers, and educators."
If you have an interest in Bergson, you may want to have a look at The Physicist & Philosopher, Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, by Jimena Canales. I got my copy at the library but subsequently purchased it so that I have it as a permanent resource in my library. A fascinating combination of history, science, and philosophy. Since reading this book and reading subsequent reviews and critiques, my views have changed substantially.
Noah Roderick - The Being of Analogy
Kaja Silverman - Flesh of my Flesh
A man is persecuted by pernicious forces beyond his control. Not sure what will happen in the end. Presumably the bureaucrats will execute him.
The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien
Currently -
Rebellious Prophet - Donald Lowrie
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethics, Spirit by Joshua Foa Dienstag (reread)
The Guide For The Perplexed by Moses Maimonides
Operette Morali by Giacomo Leopardi
Socialism After Hayek by Theodore Burczak
History and Utopia by Cioran (reread)
Nihil Unbound by Ray Brassier (reread)
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett
Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai
The Fall Into Time by Cioran
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien (reread)
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi
Melancholy by Laszlo Foldenyi
Anathemas and Admirations by Cioran
Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen (reread)
The White Racial Frame by Joe R. Feagin
The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics by John O'Neill
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (currently reading)
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (currently reading)
One Thousand and One Nights (currently reading)
You may be confusing this work with your upcoming biography, "HANLOVER: Uncensored Confessions of a Lounge Lizard".
In all seriousness (and I realize this is where I lose you), The Trial is sublime, particularly the second to last chapter with the priest, and the one with Block and the lawyer. Read it. Edify yourself. Stay away from your sister.
Both books focus on the horse as a 'living machine' which provided energy for all sorts of functions. Horses walking on treadmills, for instance, powered ferries across rivers, lakes and harbors; they powered equipment like sawmills (10 horses walking in a circle around a central capstan), or pumps, for instance. Horses pulled all sorts of machinery that swept streets, cut hay, and plowed the land.
A classic "industry & horse" combo was the fire wagon: A team of horses pulled a wagon on which was mounted a smoking steam engine that powered a water pump to put out the fire.
There's also quite a bit about horse diseases, (glanders, for instance) the development of veterinary science, costs of using horses, the significant value that could be extracted from a fresh dead horse, and so on. One thing is extremely clear: In the 19th century, almost everyone viewed the horse as a machine. If the horse couldn't work, it was dead meat.
Horses, were themselves, an industry. The largest horse market, in Chicago, could handle 30,000 horses.
I actually creeped myself out with that one. That's a keeper.
Ah, interesting.
Having finished [I]British Labour Leaders[/I], I have since begun reading [I]The Conservatives: A History[/I], and I'm currently on the chapter titled "Peel's Party".
Quoting Agustino
Certainly one of my favourites by Dostoyevsky, and one of my favourites in general, too. Hard to choose between [i]Brothers Karamazov[/I] and [i]Crime and Punishment[/I].
I have his complete works stored on my phone - and it only cost me something like a pound!
Quoting Hanover
:D
It's amazing how many massive workhorses there were around the land less than two hundred years ago, and now they're almost extinct, just a few scattered around for show. I guess they require a lot of work to keep, for no use, and eat piles of food. Stand beside one, they are incredible animals, so big and strong, but very gentle. If the horse is a machine, it's the most gentle machine I've ever seen, but it's still got a mind of its own, so watch out! And don't mistreat it.
Good for a brush up on Philosophy of Science, and more.
You read Brothers Karamazov on your phone screen? Impressive.
Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters - Jonathan Ladd
What makes a Hollywood baby more than its bathwater? Roll up, roll up...
Benjamin Noys - The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (rereading)
George Ellis, How Can Physics Underlie the Mind: Top-Down Causation in the Human Context, Springer-Verlag, 2016
Andrea Kern, Sources of Knowledge: On the Concept of a Rational Capacity for Knowledge, HUP, 2017
Yeah, I found it very interesting looking at movies through his theoretical lens. Also, helped me understand some things about my own writing in general.
Quoting mcdoodle
Not yet, but thinking about it.
The Second Treatise of Government by John Locke
Alessandro Ferrara - The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgement
Bonnie Honig - Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy
Paul Patton - Deleuze and the Political
Hannah Arendt - The Life of the Mind
Link: http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/batterman-ox-hndbk-phil-phys.pdf
http://community.mis.temple.edu/mis3504digitaldesignsections12/files/2015/01/Gender-Knot-Sample.pdf
Frankfurt is one of my favorite philosophers as of recent. He presents a compelling case for treating love and more importantly self-love as the highest good.
Underworld - Don Delillo
Mistress of Mistresses - E. R. Eddison
Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirrlees
That Glimpse of Truth (Short Story Collection) - David Miller (Ed)
Both great - if you like short stories - the second in particular.
It was a difficult read, but rewarding towards the end. It captured the ambiguity and uncertainty of human relationships really well.
It felt somewhat Existentialist to me. But it was written in 1926, thus pre-dating Existentialism.
Analyticity - Cory Juhl & Eric Loomis
“To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.”
“The new America...is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.”
Informative. Depressing.
What the good Ms. Rand said was that charity wasn't a moral virtue, not that it was immoral. That is, you are under no obligation to give, and you're not considered good if you do give, but you are not actually immoral if you give. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html
See what you did here? You started a conversation about Ayn Rand, just like she wanted you to.
Meh, she can't complain, she's dead.
Pass the herbicide.
Yes, nice that's its freely available online. It's based on two lectures that you can also watch on YouTube.
Science, Yes; Scientism, No
Scientistic Philosophy, No; Scientific Philosophy, Yes
And also of interest: Six Signs of Scientism
Dynamics of Faith - Paul Tillich
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing - Kierkegaard
oh god..
Raymond Geuss - Public Goods, Private Goods
Guy gets it right every time. Just too bad people aren't as rational as conservatives think.
The Guns of Avalon – Roger Zelazny
The Journey to the East -- Herman Hesse
Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons -- Mark Siderits
The book begins in 1662, and I'm currently about three quarters of the way through, at the year 1937, with Neville Chamberlain as leader: a chapter titled "The Appeasment Party". It goes up to David Cameron.
Colby Dickinson - Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation
The Sign of the Unicorn – Roger Zelazny
The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis – C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
Raymond Geuss - Politics and the Imagination
Raymond Geuss - Outside Ethics
Nice. I notice that it's available for free on the Google Play Store.
Always a compelling feature.
Søren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
Richard Polt - Heidegger: An Introduction
Robin Le Poidevin - Arguing for Atheism
Emmanuel Levinas - Basic Philosophical Writings
You should just read the whole Parerga and Paralipomena.
Recently: Kant and Spinozism Beth Lord
Was it a wild Geuss chase? >:O
Take a Geuss :P
I'm so sad though, I left a bag in a taxi with Politics and the Imagination in it and it was such a good book :(
A wild Geuss was taken...
Quoting StreetlightX
Sympathy...
:)
Don't worry the cab driver's happy now! :P
Wendy Brown - Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
Wendy Brown - Politics out of History
I've also been reading snippets of Nietzsche, Russell, and G. E. Moore here and there.
Currently:
The Bhagavad Gita
Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis (re-reading)
The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton (re-reading)
Exploring Philosophy - compiled by Steven M. Cahn (Brooklyn stoop find!)
Dynamics of Faith - Paul Tillich
The Gay Science - Nietzsche
https://www.amazon.com/Kierkegaard-Nietzsche-Acceptance-Philosophy-Religion/dp/0312173474
EDIT: Got it, thank you, you know who you are! (Y)
Raymond Geuss - Politics and the Imagination (new copy :D )
I read Viper's Tangle years ago. It's a great book. Mauriac was friends with several French Existentialists, including Gabriel Marcel.
Mauriac wrote to Marcel in 1929.
I'm currently reading The Broken Eye, by Brent Weeks. :)
Ivan Ascher - Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction
Believe it or not it actually did kinda fall into my lap.
I bought it used, so I haven't tasted the pages.
Wonderful book, even if, ultimately, I disagree with it's thrust! The reading of Davidson alongside Heidegger in particular is a tour de force.
--
Judith Butler - Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
Loic Wacquant - Punishing the Poor: the Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
There we go.
Nikolas Rose - The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century
The Silmarillion by Tolkien
Some light, local reading while I wait for my Rose book to arrive : )
Dissemination (Derrida)
Interrogating the Real (Zizek)
Just finished the Sartre, actually. He's very open and likable. Finished first part of Derrida. Really liked the thoughts on Hegel's prefaces (which exiled themselves famously to a space outside philosophy proper). Derrida's prose is thick, of course, but I really like his tone. It's the same tone of his other texts I've look it. Cold but curious. He's also a thinker of form, or of the "content" in form. Zizek is great as usual (one of my favorite personalities), but the book (for me) lost steam after a very powerful beginning. Still, loved that beginning. He does tend to repeat himself, I've noticed. Oh well, maybe a personality is often permutations on a few key insights/revelations.
Quoting darthbarracuda
>:O
I'm currently reading these books, all at once :-O (a few I've finished already though):
Behold The Spirit by Alan Watts
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil
The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra (reread)
The Republic by Plato (reread)
The Real Estate Game by William J. Poorvu
This paper by Thomas Metzinger (not that I agree with his views, but it was interesting to read)
Mostly philosophy, except that business book by Poorvu.
A few pages into the essay and he re-states what Nietzsche had already made clear - that what makes a life worth living is whether or not you would live it over again. The amor fati of a hypothetical eternal recurrence. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's ahistorical wheel-reinvention.
Could you give me a link to those? Thanks!
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/231
http://heavysideindustries.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/HARMAN_IAmAlsooftheOpinionThatMaterialismMustBeDestroyed.pdf
I've also read The Ego Tunnel.
As everyone knows I'm not sympathetic to the eliminative materialist stance, nor for that matter to those who are diametrically opposed to them: the (Cartesian) substance dualists. Like Richard Swinburne.
But I think Metzinger, despite his tendencies towards eliminative materialism has quite a few interesting points. For example, his idea that the self is more like a process / activity rather than a static / passive substance is good. His idea that this "phenomenal self-model" is transparent, namely that it is not perceived like an activity/process is also interesting - this also brings up the possibility of the phenomenal self model becoming opaque, and hence visible. I'd say he is quite close to the religious tradition of Buddhism, and is more like someone such as Sam Harris from the atheists. In other words, his "eliminative materialism" isn't as eliminative as he sometimes makes it sound.
Personally, I side more with philosophers like Plato/Aristotle or St. Augustine/Aquinas and think that the soul (or self) is the form of the body, in the technical sense of the term. Both form and matter are needed to constitute the substance that is us.
He's right, though. Suffering is a very important, if not the most important, relevant constraint on inquiry. It's time we start taking it more seriously, in science, phenomenology, and ethics. In this sense, religion has a serious head start.
Evelyn Fox Keller - Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
Evelyn Fox Keller - The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Culture
Catherine Malabou - Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality
Catherine Malabou - Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophy
Maurice Blanchot - The Step Not Beyond
https://isidore.co/calibre/get/pdf/Scholastic%20Metaphysics_%20A%20Contemporary%20Introduction%20-%20Feser%2C%20Edward_5458.pdf
Happened to stumble upon this one, been wanting to read it for a while.
you might like this.
Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle.
Always try to read three books simultaneously, one fiction/short stories, one philosophical/non-fiction and one book of poetry. But I haven't been able to find a book of poetry that has held my attention recently.
Ever read Ariel?
I recently picked up The Concept of Time. [Heidegger] This is the short lecture. I think there's a longer text with the same name. The last two thirds are lean and lovely prose (translation by William McNeill). It's understated, suggestive.
I also have Existential Psychoanalysis. This is just a couple of chapters from Being and Nothingness, but Sartre is really on fire in the chapter "Existential Psychoanalysis."
[quote= Sartre]
[The] impossible synthesis of assimilation and an assimilated which maintains its integrity has deep-rooted connections with basic sexual drives. The idea of "carnal possession" offers us the irritating but seductive figure of a body perpetually possessed and perpetually new, on which possession leaves no trace. This is deeply symbolized in the quality of "smooth" or "polished." What is smooth can be taken and felt but remains no less impenetrable, does not give way in the least beneath the appropriative caress -- it is like water. This is the reason why erotic depictions insist on the smooth whiteness of a woman's body. Smooth --it is what reforms itself under the caress, as water reforms itself in its passage over the stone which has pierced it....It is at this point that we encounter the similarity to scientific research: the known object, like the stone in the stomach of the ostrich, is entirely within me, assimilated, transformed into my self, and is entirely me; but at the same time it is impenetrable, untransformable, entirely smooth, with the indifferent nudity of a body that is beloved and caressed in vain.
...
Destruction realizes appropriation perhaps more keenly than creation does, for the object destroyed is no longer there to show itself impenetrable. Is has the impenetrability and the sufficiency of the in-itself that has been, but at the same time it has the invisibility and translucency of the nothingness which I am, since it no longer exists.
[/quote]
Too expensive for one book, especially since I'm only interested in one specific part of it.
Eva Jablonka & Marion Lamb - Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
It's a great story - interesting, thoughtful, and moving. It addresses gender in a way that is disorienting, enlightening, and philosophically challenging. The book is the first part of a trilogy. I've also read "Ancillary Sword," which is as good or better than the first. I have "Ancillary Mercy" which I haven't read yet.
It arrived today :)
I've never read anything by Lovecraft. Apparently, he has a lot of fans scrambled around the internets.
Besides, if we did a comparative of post-quality, then post-modernism it is given that streetlight is a portal to the mysterious realms of awesomeness.
Also - portal to mysterious realms of awesomeness will do just fine too :D
Didn't have Gulag Archipelago on Kindle. This is pretty good though. Also got a sample of Street's Oyama ontogeny of info recommend.
Although, your book will be my next. (Y)
Should I be worried by the fact that I can't put this one down?
Lila Gatlin - Information Theory and the Living System
Dorion Sagan & Eric Schneider - Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life
The Hero with a Thousand faces (thought it was a little starry eyed)
Currently Divine Comedy (tons of allusions to classical literature, and all poetic af, quiet good).
I've read most of them already (and haven't reread anyone besides Nietzsche and Kant, the best ones), besides stuff that came out in like the last hundred and fifty years or so, but few actually significant people have in my view.
Few actually significant people have done what? Read philosophy you mean, or?
Quoting Wosret
For some reason, I remember Aristotle used to be your favorite. I've never read a lot of Kant, he produced so many works. CPR, Prolegomena, and the Critique of Practical Reason are all I've read.
Do you genuinely misunderstand that, or trying to get me back on some grammatical error? It won't be hard to find one, but I really wasn't sure if you meant that other thing didn't make sense to me, but this is grammatically fine, it seems.
I said that I read most of them, besides within the last century, but few significant people have (come out in the last century or so).
Aristotle is still like third, he's super awesome too, but I just hadn't come to appreciate and fully absorb the other two yet. I used to think that Plato was a total ass too, but I've gotten more appreciation for him. I might even as well for moderns if I bothered with them.
I don't bother about grammatical errors lol, why so paranoid? :P I just misunderstood.
Quoting Wosret
Ok got you now. I would agree, mostly it's just Heidegger/Wittgenstein within the last century, though some people also give greater importance to folk like Russell.
Quoting Wosret
Strange, I always liked Plato, simply because he is fun to read generally. A very cool way to read philosophy, the dialogues that is.
Quoting Wosret
Yeah, I quite like A and K myself, not sure about Nietzsche though. I used to really like him when I first read him, but ever since then, I don't find his ideas as revolutionary as I first found them. Birth of Tragedy is probably my favourite of his works, don't much like BGE, TSZ, or Genealogy that much (nor Human all too human, or Twilight of the Idols for that matter :P ). Birth of Tragedy is good for the "discovery" of the Dyonisian element and the role it plays.
I'm paranoid because I have trust issues.
I've read some of Witgenstein, Russel, Dewey, Levinas, De Beauvoir, Whitehead, Popper, Derrida... hmmm, um, maybe a few more, but those are all I can think of. From what I know of Heidegger, I would never read that asshat.
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by Vincent B. Leitch
Schelling's Idealism And Philosophy Of Nature by Joseph L. Esposito
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant
John McDowell by Tim Thornton
The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology by Hans Jonas
The Wholeness of Nature : Goethe's Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature by Henri Bortoft
[I]John Polkinghorne[/I]
Although, I [i]was[/I] warned:
Enjoying studying stats?
What's the book?
Gulag Archipelago is autobiographical, of course, and very good. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is awesome. You might enjoy Cancer Ward, also, which is semi-autobiographical and set towards the end of the Stalinist era.
This is a fantastic introduction to John McDowell's thought. Maximilian de Gaynesford also wrote such an introduction, which is quite good though not as accurate as Thornton's one.
Cheers, Pierre. (Y)
The Invisible Committee - To Our Friends
for the fourth time? Fifth time? Aww never mind, I should have it memorized by now.
A strangely perfect follow-up to my Invisible Committee reads. Perhaps every city in the world needs a book like this.
Peter Hoffman - Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
And I just started How the Laws of Physics Lie by Nancy Cartwright.
This book is intense.
In what way?
IDK, just feel that I have to be at a high level of mental exertion to understand what I'm reading most of the time, otherwise my eyes glaze over and I just stare and 'read' the book.
It is about analytic philosophy and Wittgenstein's place in it after all.
Daniela Voss - Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas
At first, i thought talk of higher dimensions was metaphysical nonsense but after reading this (and watching the odd YouTube video about geometry) I realize that, at the very least, imagining the omniverse in ten dimensions could be a useful tool in defining our universe's position in the cosmos.
Have a look see and message me your thoughts:
Imagining 10 dimensions: the movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg85IH3vghA
Perfect Shapes In Higher Dimensions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4TqVAbfz4
Melancholy by Laszlo F. Foldenyi (reread)
Paradise Lost by Milton
SPQR by Mary Beard
Ancient Greece by Thomas Martin
The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar
Selected Works by Cicero
The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge
The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce
The Once and Future Liberalism by Mark Ilia
I also finally finished the full essays of Montaigne, having started in 2013.
Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, by Raimond Gaita.
Quite excellent! Despite being a devout Christian, he was nevertheless highly skeptical of many forms of superstition, best demonstrated in his most famous essay, An Apology For Raymond Sebond (although given his many digressions however, it's discussed elsewhere as well).
Indeed, which is why he clearly showed that any 'difference' between genders is largely a product of custom and education which, I think, had an influence on Rousseau. He also has that forceful talent with a hint of humour (although I have certainly not read everything of his, just reminiscing what I did many years back now) that gives me that same joyful feeling that Voltaire does. I will try and remember the title of the essay, I am at work now but it is somewhere at home.
Some of them are good, but some of them are so boring :-d ... I often get lost in his ruminations. No wonder it took you so long to plough through everything.
Most of it is good - my favorite was "On prognostications". It was short, to the point, and impartial. It would actually make a good topic for a thread.
Finding it a bit heavy to be honest, I'm sticking with it though as I feel there's some great lessons in there.
I mostly read books on psychology. Currently going through work of Sigmund Freud.
Also - Stephen Grosz - The Examined Life
I'm not well read in philosophy, so was wondering if anyone could recommend me anything on 'the philosophy of mind', and if possible at least partially related to psychology. I know there are Encyclopedias that capture the main ideas of philosophy of mind, but I was looking for something more specific, and maybe a bit more practical?
The Divine Invasion - Philip K. Dick
Political Theory
Hannah Arendt - Between Past and Future: Eight Excercises In Political Thought***
Wendy Brown - States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
Wendy Brown - Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics
Wendy Brown - Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
Wendy Brown - Politics out of History
Wendy Brown - Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
Alessandro Ferrara - The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgement
Raymond Geuss - Philosophy and Real Politics (Reread)
Raymond Geuss - Politics and the Imagination (Reread)***
Raymond Geuss - Outside Ethics
Raymond Geuss - Public Goods, Private Goods
Bonnie Honig - Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy
Bonnie Honig - Public Things: Democracy In Disrepair
Bonnie Honig - Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (reread)
Paul Patton - Deleuze and the Political
Linda Zerilli - A Democratic Theory of Judgement
Linda Zerilli - Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom***
Sociology/Political Science
Ivan Ascher - Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction
Melinda Cooper - Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era***
Melinda Cooper - Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism***
Christopher DeWolf - Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong
Nikolas Rose - The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century
The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection
The Invisible Committee - To Our Friends***
Loic Wacquant - Punishing the Poor: the Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
Life/Evolution
Lila Gatlin - Information Theory and the Living System
Peter Hoffman - Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
Evelyn Fox Keller - Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines
Evelyn Fox Keller - The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Culture
Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
Eva Jablonka & Marion Lamb - Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life***
Dorion Sagan & Eric Schneider - Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life
Sound/Analogy
Edward Campbell - Music After Deleuze
Aden Evens - Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience***
Daniel Heller-Roazen - The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World
Noah Roderick - The Being of Analogy
Kaja Silverman - Flesh of my Flesh
Eleni Ikoniadou - The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic
'Theory'
Giorgio Agamben - The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics
Giorgio Agamben - The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days
Maurice Blanchot - The Step Not Beyond
Judith Butler - Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
Colby Dickinson - Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation
Benjamin Noys - The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
Scott Wilson - The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment
Catherine Malabou - Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality***
Catherine Malabou - Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophyi]
Catherine Mills - The Philosophy of Agamben
Misc.
Hannah Arendt - The Life of the Mind
George Williams and Daniel Reynolds - A Charter of Rights For Australia
Peter Brain and Ian Manning - Credit Code Red: How Financial Deregulation and World Instability are Exposing Australia to Economic Catastrophe
Luciano Floridi - Information: A Very Short Introduction
--
Really happy with this year's reading. Been meaning to revisit both politics and sciences this year, and I think I achieved that. Also super happy with my male/female ratio - this is the possibly the first year I've read as many female authors as I have male ones, which I've been trying to do without success for a few years now. Next year I need to branch out along ethic lines, though I'm not as confident I'll achieve that. Aesthetics, though, is the topic I really want to knock over next year. Have a great year to come everyone!
-
Also, started today:
Hermann Weyl - Symmetry
Adolf Portmann - Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals
-The most recent edit of my brother's forthcoming sci-fi novel
The Existential Drama of Gabriel Marcel edited by Francis Lescoe
Awakenings by Gabriel Marcel
Have you read Berdyaev yet? I really think you'd find him interesting.
He's on my short list, I promise! Right now I'm working on a project involving Gabriel Marcel.
(I'm listening to this today)
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
Oh I also read Moby-Dick by Melville last year, and I thought that worth mentioning. Absolutely breathtaking.
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Philosophy?
Jakob von Uexküll - A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning
Miguel Sicart - Play Matters
Byung-Chul Han - Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese
A low period at work, so I'm tearing though some shorter works.
Also rereading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Haven't read it since 2011
Just finished it actually.
Very persuasive, eloquent, and factual. Couldn't ask for a better book on UBI.
Ernest Cline - Ready Player One (first fiction book in... months)
This is some almost-black-comedy/surrealist/horror 1984 shit. Really different; barely even sci-fi.
2018 February
Walsh Denis M Mechanism, Emergence, and Miscibility: The Autonomy of Evo-Devo
(in Functions: selection and mechanisms, Synthese Library, Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science vol. 363)
2018-02-03 (currently reading)
Moreno Alvaro (with Xabier Barandiaran) Adaptivity: From Metabolism to Behavior (2008)
2018-02-03 (currently reading)
2018 January
Bechtel William (with Adele Abrahamsen) Mental Mechanisms, Autonomous Systems, and Moral Agency
2018-01-29
Lennox James G Darwin was a Teleologist (1993)
2018-01-28
A theory of biological relativity: no privileged level of causation
2018-01-27
Collins Arthur W The Nature of Mental Things (1986)
2018-01-26 (Second reading of chapter 6: Action and Teleology)
Noble Denis Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework
2018-01-24
Bechtel William Explicating Top-Down Causation Using Networks and Dynamics (2016)
2018-01-24
Bateson Patrick The Nest’s Tale: A reply to Richard Dawkins
2018-01-23
Glenberg Arthur M (with Justin Hayes) Contribution of Embodiment to Solving the Riddle of Infantile Amnesia (2016)
2018-01-22
Sterelny Kim The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (2012)
2018-01-20 (first two chapters)
Hacker PMS Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt
Chapter 6 in The Passions: A Study of Human Nature Wiley-Blackwell (2017)
2018-01-19 (unfinished reading)
Sterelny Kim Dawkins Vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest (2001)
2018-01-16
David Cole's review of The Evolved Apprentice
2018-01-16
Costall Alan From Direct Perception to the Primacy of Action: A Closer Look at James Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Psychology
(Chapter 3 in Theories of Infant Development, Gavin Bremner & Alan Slater eds, 2004)
2018-01-12
A Piecewise Aggregation of (Some) Philosophers' and Biologists' Perspectives (review of Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings by Isabella Sarto-Jackson1, Miles MacLeod, Stephan Handschuh, Christoph Frischer, Julia Lang, Martin Schlumpp and Werner Callebaut)
2018-01-11
Wimsatt William C Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings (2007)
2018-01-10 (first 14 pages only)
Estany Anna (with Sergio Martínez) “Scaffolding” and “affordance” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences (2013)
2018-01-09
Wiegman Isaac Angry Rats and Scaredy Cats Lessons from Competing Cognitive Homologies (2016)
2018-01-08
2017 December
SterelnyK Artifacts, Symbols, Thoughts
2017-12-31
CostallA The 'Meme' Meme Revisited
(Chapter 4 in Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology, Thiemo Breyer, Ed. 2015)
2017-12-11
MenaryR Cognitive integration, enculturated cognition and the socially extended mind (2013)
2017-12-31
SmitH Darwin’s Rehabilitation of Teleology Versus Williams’ Replacement of Teleology by Natural Selection (2011)
2017-12-01 (approximative date)
2017 November
KirchhoffMD Extended Cognition & the Causal-Constitutive Fallacy: In Search for a Diachronic and Dynamical Conception of Constitution (2015)
2017-11-23
PankseppJ (with Biven) The Archaeology of Mind
2017-11-28 (unfinished reading)
DennettD A Difference That Makes a Difference _Edge.org_
2017-11-17 (A conversation with Daniel Dennett)
GiuntiM (Simone Pinna) Toward a dynamical theory of human computation
2017-11-17 (unfinished reading)
PankseppJ (with peer commentaries in B&BS) Toward a general psychobiological theory of emotions
2017-11-13 (unfinished reading)
StoffregenTA Affordances Are Enough: Reply to Chemero et al.
2017-11-09 (First section only)
HackerPMS The Conceptual Framework for the Investigation of Emotions
(in Emotions and Understanding Wittgensteinian Perspectives, Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist and Michael McEachrane eds (2009)
2017-11-07
HackerPMS (with BennettM) Criminal Law as It Pertains to Patients Suffering from Psychiatric Diseases 2011
2017-11-09
HardcastleVG (with C. Matthew Stewart) What Do Brain Data Really Show? (2002)
2017-11-21
CostallA Socializing Affordances (1995)
2017-11-13
WellsAJ Cognitive Science and the Turing Machine: an Ecological Perspective
in Alan Turing_ Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker-Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg (2004)
2017-11-20
WellsAJ Gibson’s Affordances and Turing’s Theory of Computation
2017-11-19 (partially read)
WilsonRA Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences (2004)
2017-11-20 (Second reasing of some sections)
BarrettL Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds (2011)
2017-11-25
BechtelW Explanation: Mechanism, Modularity, and Situated Cognition
2017-11-22
RollsET (with peer commentaries in B&BS) Précis of The brain and emotion
2017-11-13 (unfinished reading)
SmitH Inclusive Fitness Theory and the Evolution of Mind
and Language (2016)
2017-11-22
SandelMJ Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do (2010)
2017-11-07 (chapter 9)
2017 October
CostallA From Darwin to Watson (and Cognitivism) and Back Again: The Principle of Animal-Environment Mutuality (2004)
2017-10-12
BarrettLF The Future of Psychology: Connecting Mind to Brain (2010)
2017-10-03
SmitH Popper and Wittgenstein on the Metaphysics
of Experience (2015)
2017-10-15
RollsET Emotion and decision making explained (2013)
2017-10-19 (read some sections only)
SmitH The Social Evolution of Human Nature: From Biology to Language (2014)
2017-10-26
ScrutonR My Brain and I (2014)
2017-10-14
PankseppJ How to Undress the Affective Mind An Interview with Jaak Panksepp
2017-10-19
LoveAC Hierarchy, causation and explanation: ubiquity, locality and pluralism
2017-10-05 (must reread)
LanceM (with WhiteWH) Stereoscopic Vision Persons, Freedom, and Two Spaces of Material Inference
2017-10-12
HackerPMS (with BennettM) Chapter 7 on emotions, in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
2017-09-28 (second reading)
BoullierDG Le danger du "débat" lancé par Bronner et Gehin sur les sociologies (2017)
2017-10-11
2017 September
PankseppJ Exchange with BarrettLF and IzardCE:
1- BarrettLF Are Emotions Natural Kinds (2006)
2017-09-25
2a- PankseppJ Neurologizing the Psychology of Affecs (2007)
2017-09-29
2b- IzardCE Basic Emotions, Natural Kinds, Emotion Schemas, and a New Paradigm (2007)
2017-09-26 (unfinished reading)
3- BarrettLF et al. Of Mice and Men: A Response to Panksepp and Izard (2007)
2017-09-28
4- PankseppJ Cognitive Conceptualism - Where Have All the Affects Gone (2008)
2017-09-29
5- BarrettLF & LindquistKA Corrections to Panksepp (2008)
2017-09-29
IsmaelJ Interview by Andres Lomena Cantos about How Physics Makes Us Free
2017-09-10
IsmaelJ Freedom and Determinism, chapter 5 in How Physics Makes Us Free
2017-09-10
IsmaelJ From Physical Time to Human Time, chapter 6 in How Physics Makes Us Free
2017-09-12
IsmaelJ Decision and the Open Future, chapter 8 in Adrian Bardon (ed.) The Future of the Philosophy of Time - Routledge (2011)
2017-09-14
BarrettLF (With Kristen A Lindquist) A functional architecture of the human brain: emerging insights from the science of emotion (2012)
2017-09-30
BlackmanR Why Compatibilists Need Alternative Possibilities (2015)
2017-09-04
AlbertDZ Time and Chance (2008)
Chapter 6: The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention
2017-09-17
KhooJ Backtracking counterfactuals, revisited
2017-09-19
MenziesP The Consequence Argument Disarmed: An Interventionist Perspective
in Beebee, Hitchcock, Price (eds) Making a difference: Essays on the philosophy of causation - OUP (2017)
2017-09-10
PankseppJ (workshop with Stephen Asma, Glennon Curran, Rami Gabriel & Thomas Greif) The Philosophical Implications of Affective Neuroscience (2010)
2017-09-20
RestallG A cut-free sequent system for two-dimensional modal logic, and why it matters (2010)
2017-09-17
2017 August
ShafferJ Causal Contextualism
2017-08-28 Chapter 2 in BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy
SinnottArmstrongW Free Contrastivism
Chapter 7 in BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy
2017-08-31
SmallW Practical Knowledge and the Structure of Action
Chapter in Abel & Conant eds. Rethinking Epistemology Volume 2 (2012)
2017-08-14
HitchcockC Contrastive Explanation
2017-08-25 Chapter 1 in BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy
HornsbyJ A Disjunctive Conception of Acting for Reasons
Chapter 10 in Macpherson and Haddock ed. Disjunctivism: Action, Perception, Knowledge
2017-08-04 (second reading)
HornsbyJ Knowledge How in Philosophy of Action (2017)
2017-08-03
BlauuwM (ed) Contrastivism in Philosophy - Routledge (2013)
2017-08-31 Introduction
FrostK Action as the exercise of a two-way power
2017-08-18 Second reading
2017 July
ClarkeR Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will: The New Dispositionalism - clarke2009
2017-07-14
SmallW Agency and Practical Abilities
2017-07-27
SøvikAO (partial reading) Free Will, Causality and the Self
2017-07-22
SmithM Rational Capacities, or: How to Distinguish Recklessness, Weakness, and Compulsion
Chapter 1 in Stroud & Tappolet eds. Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality OUP (2003)
2017-07-06
TuckerC Agent Causation and the Alleged Impossibility of Rational Free Action
2017-07-20
VihvelinK Free Will Demystified: A Dispositional Account
2017-07-11
WallerBN A Metacompatibilist Account of Free Will, Making Compatibilists and Incompatibilists More Compatible
2017-07-20
StewardH Action as Downward Causation
2017-07-21
KannistoT Freedom as a Kind of Causality
2017-07-18
MarcusE (second reading) Events and States
Chapter 5 in Rational Causation HUP (2012)
2017-07-12
LeviDonS The Trouble with Harry
2017-07-08
2017 June
RankinWK Ifs as Labels on Cans
2017-06-13
Carl Ginet's review of Rankin's Choice and Chance
2017-06-12
SchmidtJH Newcomb's Paradox Realized with Backward Causation
2017-06-10
SpohnW Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box
2017-06-06
RottschaeferWA The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency
Chapter 7: The neurophysiological bases of moral capacities: Does neurophysiology have room for moral agents?
2017-06-01
SainsburyRM Paradoxes CUP (Section on Newcomb's Probelm)
2017-06-08
AyersMR Reviews of The Refutation of Determinism by
Elizabeth Telfer (review of TROD)
2017-06-12
John W Yolton (review of TROD)
2017-06-12
K W Rankin (review of TROD)
2017-06-12
BerowskyB
Curd's review of Freedom From Necessity: The Metaphysical Basis of Responsibility
2017-06-17
John Martin Fischer's of Freedom From Necessity
2017-06-17
Widerker and Katzoff's review of Freedom From Necessity
2017-06-18
Mark Ravizza's review of Freedom From Necessity
2017-06-19
MayrE (Erasmus) Understanding Human Agency OUP (2011)
2017-06-22 to 2017-07-18
Stewart Goetz's review of Understanding Human Agency
2017-05-23
CraigWL Divine Foreknowledge and Newcomb's Paradox
(Only re-read the beginning on 2017-06-08 but found references therein to interesting one-boxing papers by GrandyRE and GalloisA)
2017-06-08
FaraM Masked Abilities and Compatibilism (2008)
2017-06-21
SpohnW Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box
2017-06-06
SobelJH Critical Notice John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will
2017-06-03
SobelJH Puzzles for the Will, chaper 2 -- Predicted Choices
2017-06-04 (About Newcomb's problem)
MenziesP (with Huw Price) Causation as a Secondary Quality (1993)
2017-06-02 (unfinished reading)
NoonanHW Two-Boxing is Irrational
2017-06-05
RobertsonLH The infected self: Revisiting the metaphor of the mind virus (2017)
2017-06-16
GrandyRE What the Well-Wisher didn't Know
2017-06-10
GalloisA How Not to Make a Newcomb Choice
2017-06-09
BurgessS The Newcomb Problem: an Unqualified Rresolution (2004)
2017-06-05
AltshulerR Character, Will, and Agency
2017-06-02
BishopJ Is Agent-Causation a Conceptual Primitive
2017-06-18
2017 May
VargasM Precis of Building Better Beings
2017-05-16
Tamler Sommers' review of Building Better Beings
2017-05-16 (To be revised; the NDR of his book BBB seems to be missing the first part)
Desert, responsibility, and justification: a reply to Doris, McGeer, and Robinson
2017-05-17 (Incomplete reading)
MumfordS (with AnjumRL) Freedom and Control: On the Modality of Free Will
2017-05-04
(with AnjumRL) Getting Causes from Powers (2011)
2017-05-15 (second reading, first chapter)
Powers, Non-Consent and Freedom
2017-05-07
ThalosM The gulf between practical and theoretical reason
2017-05-25 (Incomplete reading)
(Also read two reviews of her book: Without Hierarchy, 2017-05-24)
ListC Non-Reductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle
2017-05-28
Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise
2017-05-30
What's wrong with the consequence argument
2017-05-31
DorisJM Doing without (arguing about) desert
2017-05-16 (Comment about Vargas' Building Better Beings)
McGeerV Building a better theory of responsibility
(Comment on Vargas' Building Better Beings)
2017-05-16
MerricksT Against the Doctrine of Microphysical Supervenience
2017-05-15
MooreD Supervenient Emergentism and Mereological Emergentism
2017-05-13
MeleAR Weakness of Will
in 'Donald Davidson', Kirk Ludwig ed. (2003)
2017-05-24
BishopRC The Hidden Premise in the Causal Argument for Physicalism
2017-05-10
BalaguerM A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will
2017-05-18
LavinD Action as a form of temporal unity: on Anscombe’s Intention
2017-05-21
RigatoMJ Reductionism, Agency and Free Will
2017-05-08
RigatoMJ The Agent as Her Self
2017-05-09
RobinsonM Revisionism, libertarianism, and naturalistic plausibility
2017-05-16 (Comment on Vargas' Building Better Beings)
SpeakD Review of Four Wiews on Free-Will in NDPR
2017-05-18
2017 April
DeWallF Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
with Robert Wright, Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher and Peter Singer, EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (2006)
2017-04-07
Andrew McAninch's review of Primates and Philosophers
2017-04-06
Zed Adams' review of Primates and Philosophers
2017-04-06
Wade L. Robison's review of Primates and Philosophers
2017-04-06
AllaisL Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and his Realism
Chapter 3: Things in Themselves Without Noumena
2017-04-22
BainJ Emergence in Effective Field Theories
2017-04-08
CrowtherK Decoupling emergence and reduction in physics (2013)
2017-04-10
GlymourC Android Epistemology for Babies: Reflection on Words, Thoughts and Theories (2000)
2017-04-27
KlaymanJ (with Young-Won Ha) Confirmation, Disconfirmation, and Information in Hypothesis Testing (1987)
2017-04-29
StanovichKE (with Richard F. West and Maggie E. Toplak) Intelligence and Rationality (Chapter 39 in the Cambridge Hanbook of Intelligence) (2011)
2017-04-28
HaackS Just Say "No" to Logical Negativism
chapter 12 in Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and its Place in Culture
2017-04-26
2017 March
WeinbergS Reductionism Redux
Chapter 10 in Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries
2017-03-24
GroffRP Agents, Powers and Events: Humeanism and the Free Will Debate
Chapter 6 in Ontology Revisited Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (2012)
2017-03-15
GroffRP Sublating the free will problematic: powers, agency and causal determination (2016)
2017-03-16
GroffRP Causal Mechanisms and the Philosophy of Causation (2016)
2017-03-19
BauerN A Peculiar Intuition: Kant's Conceptualist Account of Perception (2012)
2017-03-09
BauerN Kant's Subjective Deduction
2017-03-10
BitbolM (with Pierre Kerszberg and Jean Petitot eds) Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics (2009)
Introduction
2017-03-26 (or earlier)
BitbolM Decoherence and the Constitution of Objectivity
in Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics (2009)
2017-03-26 (or earlier)
DeutshD Constructor theory (2013)
2017-03-16 (incomplete reading)
MayrErnst Analysis or Reductionism
Chapter 10 in What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline (2004)
2017-03-24
MacbethD Responses to Brassier Redding and Wolfsdorf (2017)
(response to comments on her book Realizing Reason)
2017-03-01
RödlS Roedl Law as the Reality of the Free Will
2017-03-09
BonioloG Chapter 9 - Laws of Nature: The Kantian Approach (2009)
in Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics
2017-03-26 (or earlier)
HarréR Chapter 6: The Transcendental Domain of Physics (2009)
in Constituting Objectivity Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics
2017-03-26 (or earlier)
KauarkLeiteP Chapter 10: The Transcendental Role of the Principle of Anticipations of Perception in Quantum Mechanics (2009)
in Constituting Objectivity Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics
2017-03-26 (or earlier)
2017 February
BitbolM Quantum Mechanics as Generalised Theory of Probabilities (2014)
2017-02-22
EarleyJE Three Concepts of Chemical Closure and their Epistemological Significance (2010)
2017-02-23
EllisG How Can Physics Underlie the Mind: Top-Down Causation in the Human
Context (2014)
2017-02-11 (First chapter: Complexity and Emergence)
FeserE From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature (2016)
2017-02-21
HarréR (with Steen Brock) Nature’s affordances and formation length:
The ontology of quantum physical experiments (2016)
2017-02-21
PihlströmS Kant and Pragmatism
2017-02-24 (skipped third section)
Current:
Elizabeth Grosz - Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (rereading)
Elizabeth Grosz - Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art
Selecting only three would be tough but I'll limit myself to the five items that I judged to be outstanding. As you may guess, I've been quite impressed with Alan Costall who I only discovered recently thanks to Louise Barrett having referenced him in her book Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds.
---
Bitbol Michel, Decoherence and the Constitution of Objectivity
in Constituting Objectivity: Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics (2009)
Bauer Nathan, A Peculiar Intuition: Kant's Conceptualist Account of Perception (2012)
Costall Alan, From Darwin to Watson (and Cognitivism) and Back Again: The Principle of Animal-Environment Mutuality (2004)
Costall Alan, The 'Meme' Meme Revisited
(Chapter 4 in Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology, Thiemo Breyer, Ed. 2015)
Costall Alan, From Direct Perception to the Primacy of Action: A Closer Look at James Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Psychology
(Chapter 3 in Theories of Infant Development, Gavin Bremner & Alan Slater eds, 2004)
Prologemena To Any Future Metaphysics - Kant
The End Of Our Time - Berdyaev
Awww, poor you, you just spent some hours reading a text that may not be relevant anymore in light of non-Euclidean geometry ;)
I read in several places that it was a good intro to the Critique of Pure Reason, and since I have a lot of other stuff to read, I figured it would be a good crash course, and then I'll get to the Critique in the future. No?
My comment was more tongue-in-cheek with reference to this thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2871/what-would-kant-have-made-of-non-euclidan-geomety/p1
Having read both, I don't particularly think the Prolegomena is better than the Critique to start with, though many have thought that. I think the Critique is quite thorough if you go slowly - Kant explains how he uses his terms throughout. I personally found the Prolegomena more confusing than not, and personally, I found the Critique harder, not easier to understand afterwards, since I had some judgements based on the Prolegomena that ended up being erroneous in light of the Critique.
Fair enough, noted. The intro to my copy outlines exactly where to go to get the gist of the Critique, so I'll follow that. I just don't have time for the Critique right now, my interests are too broad.
Hmm, I see. Then you're more likely going to enjoy literature atm I think, since the Critique (and the Prolegomena pretty much) go step by step, discussing subject after subject in depth.
Prolegomena goes straight to addressing how is mathematics possible, how is science possible and then how is metaphysics possible. That's it's structure, pretty much.
The Critique explains this whole journey in a lot more detail and shows how it actually happens.
I'm interested in all of that, but I don't have time for it right now. I have enough discipline to get through the Prolegomena. But that's about it :P
History and Utopia by Cioran (rereading)
Oh, how I yearn for her philosophy of education to become manifest.
I much enjoyed Haack's paper Just Say 'No' to Logical Negativism. I share her profound dissatisfaction with Popper's falsificationism. She seems to have already expressed some of her critical arguments against falsificationism in Evidence and Inquiry (I merely browsed it). A minor criticism that I may have is that she doesn't have a clear view of the possibility of a disjuctivist epistemology as a fallibilist alternative to falsificationism. She seems not to distinguish fallible epistemic grounds (or defeasible criteria, as they're also called), from fallible epistemic abilities. To be fair, almost everyone working in epistemology makes this unfortunate conflation.
Thanks for drawing my attention to Graeber. If you've enjoyed Diamond's anthropological work (I've only read Guns, Germs and Steel, and maybe a couple chapters from The Third Chimpanzee), maybe you'll also find interesting Sterelny's The Evolved Apprentice, which I mentioned above. (I'm currently midway into the third chapter). It reaches deeper into the past than does Diamond's Guns but it articulates a conceptually overlapping framework for understanding the origins of culture.
It sounds good! Bah. I have so much to read.
Elizabeth Grosz - The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism
Turns out, holidays are not as great for reading time as I thought. Brought 4 books with me and only got through one. Too busy eating and playing in beaches. It's a hard life.
&
The Trial, Kafka
Starting Writing and Difference, Derrida, translation by Alan Bass
A Short History of Atheism by Gavin Hyman (very good, recommended).
Ethical Intuitionism by Michael Huemer
The Birth and Death of Meaning by Ernest Becker (re-read).
Currently reading:
The Body in Pain - The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
Dune by Frank Herbert (re-read).
God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion
Anxious to begin reading:
The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump
Emmanuel Levinas - The Genealogy of Ethics by John Llewelyn
The Winds of Winter by George R. R. Martin (come on, man, finish the book!)
Seibo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Krasznahorkai is arguably one of the most important living writers.
Have been intrigued by Amery for a while now. He writes gently and without an air of pomposity, which I thoroughly appreciate. From the introduction:
"The essays of On Suicide explore the subject in a rambling, frankly subjective, and openly hesitant effort to provide illumination, their aim being "not to make a bold description of the act," as Amery writes, "but rather to strive for a gentle and cautious approach to it."
[...]
Amery's style of argument has been described by Lothar Baier as a "doubting generosity" that seeks to avoid the attitude of one who is convinced he must be right.
[...]
These characteristics [of Mann and Bernhard] mark Amery's style and method: the 'gentle posture,' the language of doubt and skepticism without relativism, the inclusion of emotion in thinking, the urge to pursue problems outside of their social existence, and the attempt to be as honest as possible."
Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality
I've read some of Amery's book on the holocaust, and it was, as far as books on the holocaust go, really good stuff. Plan to go back and finish it at some point.
An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent by John Hick
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion vol.1
The Trouble With Being Born by Cioran (rereading)
Third time trying to get through this pre-Tolkien pseudo-fantasy/fairy-tale epic. It's actually crazy philosophical. Crazy ontological questions posed with no apparent answers in sight. Published in 1895.
I've finally come to the doorstep of the famous Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind essay in this book. I remember giving it a go a few years ago - in a reading group of the old PF if I recall! - and found it almost entirely incomprehensible. I'm actually a couple of pages in and it's actually readable this time around :gasp:
Until (if?) I get it back -
Daniela Voss - Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas
The Freudian in me says your subconscious may have done that to you. I bet you don't pay too much heed to Freud. The Freudian in me says your subconscious does though. The Freudian in me still hasn't explained why I pay any attention to the Freudian in me. Mysterious.
[hide="Reveal"]Ya mum.[/hide]
Drawn and Quartered by Cioran (rereading)
pretty great so far...
Proto-modern-fantasy at it's finest.
Matija Jela?a - The Problem of Representation in Gilles Deleuze and Wilfrid Sellars [link]
Read both of these recently, both unpublished PhD theses, both fantastic, and I'm insanely jealous of Brender's dissertation which is more or less the kind of thing I wish I'd written. Also just started:
Bob Clark - Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and World
Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914;
Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (Kunstler); Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse and the hard future ahead (Greer);
O'Donnell's Ruin of the Roman Empire, a New History; The Romanovs: 1613-1918.
"When I certify someone insane, I am not equivocating when I write that he is of unsound mind, may be dangerous to himself and others, and requires care and attention in a mental hospital. However, at the same time, I am also aware that, in my opinion, there are other people who are regarded as sane, whose minds are as radically unsound, who may be equally or more dangerous to themselves and others and whom society does not regard as psychotic and fit persons to be in a madhouse. I am aware that the man who is said to be deluded may be in his delusion telling me the truth, and this in no equivocal or metaphorical sense, but quite literally, and that the cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed. Ezekiel, in Jaspers's opinion, was a schizophrenic."
Right now for me:
Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror - John Ashbery (really really good)
& just starting: Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states James C Scott
Anne Sauvagnargues - Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon
Thanks for the recommendation, .
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality (replacement copy for the last one I lost in the middle of reading!)
Took a class from him in college. I remember once, hanging around his office talking, I mentioned I had just started reading Deleuze's book on Foucault and he said immediatley -- you know, sort of involuntarily -- "That's a beautiful book!" Then he looked embarrassed. I think he wanted to be careful not to push me in any particular direction, you know?
The Trial by Kafka
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu
Still reading:
The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith
On Suicide by Jean-Luc Amery
and lots of Lovecraft's supernatural horror stories. Everything else has been put on hold.
Done. :cool:
I'm there, and on the philosophical front I need a break from Zizek, who is a bit addictive but also tiring in his contrariness after a while. It gets predictable that he's going to unpredictably turn everything upside down/inside out so it means the opposite of what it's supposed to roughly every three paragraphs.
A commentary of the three philosophers by a severely under-recognized philosopher.
Color Out of Space is pretty much the best horror story ever written. I always wondered if it would not be the earliest prototype of a zombie story.
Seb Franklin - Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
Love the only two books of his that were translated to English: The Real and Its Double and Joyful Cruelty
If you have to pick one, which would you recommend?
:up:
I finally got around to reading Capital Vol. 1 for the first time late last year and was impressed by a lot of misconceptions which I think surround it. Beyond the opening few chapters, it's far more focused on description and analysis than theory, and a lot of the concerns he's raising deal with irrefutably awful stuff, unless one's pro de facto child slavery. It's certainly not a 1000+ page theoretical edifice a la Kant, which is what I think scares people off.
The strongest essay I remember is on compound growth and differential resource consumption - convincingly arguing that overpopulation is a massively exaggerated problem when tied with an analysis of differences in consumption and consumerism. @Baden's made this point with similar alacrity before - that a high and increasing number of consumers is the root assumption of the overpopulation scare. The world can stand more, a lot more, people with their needs and sensible wants met but it can't stand the economic arrangement that enables the number of suburban McMansion SUV yatch parties to be sustained or grow.
I followed with Harvey's 17 Contradictions of Capital, which while attempting to provide a contemporary entry point to Marxist theory unfortunately doesn't jettison the theoretical jargon of alienation and value theory, so it's still unfortunately mostly another good contribution to Marxist scholarship. The major rhetorical contribution it makes is that it does 'dialectical analysis' from the ground up and without much reference to Hegel. Making the Marxist notion of contradiction something intuitive - as a conflict of interests or prescribed actions inherent in a doctrine or social arrangement - which nevertheless does all the theoretical work it's supposed to is pretty excellent.
The most memorable insights are the maxim 'capital doesn't resolve its contradictions, it moves them around geographically'. It comes with a discussion of how conditions in sweatshops in Asia and Africa are still much the same as Marx describes in the factories of England in his day. That he does this without leaning on 'third-worldism' as a political paradigm is refreshing.
After that, I finally manned up and decided to tackle Manufacturing Consent. Besides the methodological criticism that the authors are using training data as test data, it's still a very well documented exhibition of how the media, the government and influential/monied groups (some of them media organisations) construct the meaningful context and acceptable bounds of political discussion. Considering mainstream skepticism of the media and its relationship to governments in the US, Europe, Russia and Australia, it reads as a little outdated. I'd like if someone could tell me where to look to find discussion of how 'skepticism management' fits into this as a companion piece - one needs only to look at the memetic character of 'fake news' to see that the game's changed a bit since the book was published.
I feel like the only solution would be a different form of status symbol. It seems, unfortunately, like a need for legible social hierarchy is built deeply into us, and conspicuous consumption is the most legible game in town.
But then you probably can't just make a new system of status symbols out of whole cloth because any official, public system would immediately generate a shadow-system where buying into the official system would, at a certain level, be considered low-status.
Feel like the saddest part of the human condition is that, no matter where you're at socially, you're not really there. You're smeared somewhere between the level you're trying to differentiate yourself from, and another higher level, the existence of which is potentially humiliating, if people you care about ascend to it and you remain. So there's an endless restlessness where you're never on absolutely firm social ground. And that gets externalized in yachts and all that. I don't even think most of the yachtiest people care that much about yachts. The yachts are more like a firm stare at another.
I think that's also part of the deal with stuff like what's revealed in the panama papers. Its partially about protecting your wealth, but also at a certain level, its like - how much wealth do you need? I think its more that the only way people can feel secure that they're elite is to be part of exclusionary second-world. The highest status symbol is a kind of secret handshake and access (to whatever)
It's surprising that Harvey includes the Labor Theory of Value given that (if I recall correctly), he's acknowledged it's not widely accepted anymore.
Marx has his own value theory, it starts with the distinction of use value and exchange value, that road leads up to the different historico-logical money forms that culminates in money as the general equivalent, then some of its uses. There's a thread developed in tandem (in contradiction if you prefer) in Vol 1 concerning labour and production, where the 'value' (not price) of a commodity halves (or at least decreases, depending on reading) if the socially necessary labour time for the commodity halves.
Coming from this is the idea of 'surplus value' coming from labourers producing things worth more than it takes to pay them to make those things, which Marx gets at through the distinction between labour time (how long it takes to make a thing) and labour power (the capacity to work).
I don't see how anyone could come through Capital without registering the distinction between value and price.
Giorgio Agamben - The Fire and the Tale
Yeah the distinction between value and price is made evident early on in Capital.
I never could square myself with it though. Value's clearly something quantitative as it tracks socially necessary labour time, but it doesn't have a particularly simple relationship with price. There are situations where the price can be much lower than the one suggested through socially necessary labour time (like what results from a production subsidy), but there are also situations where it can be much higher (like an import tariff). Supply and demand fluctuations can produce the same effects. So it's not like one is a simple function of the other in reality.
The only way I can see it as empirically relevant is as a baseline expectation or a model of how things would work in the absence of such externalities. So it does reasonably well when you blur out the specifics; the account Marx gives prefigures differences in productive efficiency and production cost facilitating price undercutting, and the induced tendency to replace workers with fixed capital while repressing wages. Those two things, together with the assumption that the expenditure of labour power is the sole site of surplus value creation, suggest the falling rate of profit argument. But people who believe in that are pretty niche. Crises of Neoliberalism is the paradigmatic account (last time I was involved in academic Marxist circles anyway) of contemporary capitalist crisis, which goes against the falling rate of profit argument. But there are those like Andrew Kliman (The Failure of Capitalist Production) and his research circle which still go for it. The central hub here is the discussion of the transformation problem.
I think the trick with reading Capital usefully is to keep track of the context Marx is assuming for his models; which hold (in some sense) 'in the aggregate' and absent the 'counterveiling tendencies' in his account of capital. So I'm still very fond of the focus on production, the logical structure of money, and treating the commodity and wage labour as the essential features of capitalism. But seeing how those things actually work requires studying of real political contexts and distribution networks, contra 'orthodox Marxism' and those who still hate 'reformism' and have Naxalite wet dreams.
Yes, I recall one fairly valid criticism of Marx's concept of Value was that a commodity with a higher socially necessary labor time should correlate to higher prices, but this is often not the case as you point out. But to Marx's credit, his general method throughout Capital is to work from an abstract ideal of Capitalism, outside of external forces, in order to demonstrate that Capitalism, as posited by the Bourgeois economist, in its abstract-logical workings, contains internal contradictions, manifesting themselves into substantive conflicts. But I think this also limits his arguments in some areas as well.
Nevertheless, Marx offers one of the most penetrating critiques of Capitalism of any economist, and I think his definition and understanding of the process of Capitalism is essentially valid. And when we look at the world today, in which productivity has been increasing for decades, stock value has risen dramatically, company profits or soaring as are executive pay, and yet real wages have stagnated, it's hard not to acknowledge the exploitative nature of the beast and accept that Marx was strongly on to something.
So is Crises of Neoliberalism worth picking up then? I remember when it first came out, but it's been sitting in my Amazon cart for many years.
I think we said essentially the same thing. I'd want to stress that the 'abstract ideal' is fundamentally a process model of capital, and what makes it still relevant today is that it still captures the essential features of what it's aimed at. It had some predictive validity too, even if the rate of profit behaviour isn't exactly as pictured. Maybe time will bear it out though.
Another weakness in Marxist theory (not of Marx) is that it's got almost no emphasis on econometrics - if you give a well read Marxist an economic time series they'll probably have absolutely no idea on how to make predictive inferences for it except in very broad qualitative terms. I think this is mostly an institutional feature of Marxism in the academy though; it's the anthropologists, sociologists, historians and political scientists that study Marxist theory, rather than econometricians or systems theorists (despite the latter's historical indebtedness to Marx).
Quoting Maw
I don't remember much of it if I'm honest - I gave it a skim read because I felt familiar enough with the account by proxy at the time. But it is well respected.
Quoting ?????????????
Exactly. Marx uses the distinction a lot, and clearly knew that changes in value don't have to correspond to changes in price. Nevertheless, some features of Marx's account require a mathematical correspondence between them - like the initial analysis of cotton looms suggesting direct proportion between value and price - and later on that surplus value, fixed and variable capital are conformable and enter into a ratio. There is a lot of wiggle room in how you quantify these things, which leads Kliman and his programme to affirm the falling rate of profit and Levy and Dumenil to reject it.
I remember reading that article some time ago. Gave it a re-skim. I have two comments on it.
The transformation problem applies in much the same way to money prices and direct prices. What you observe is the money price, and only the money price. Similar theoretical guarantees are required to translate direct price dynamics into money price dynamics. Are they a strictly increasing or decreasing function? No, again it's a complicated relationship. After productive equilibrium is reached, the money price is still characterised as oscillating around the direct price induced by the present socially necessary labour time as expressed in direct price. The means of that expression is left blank - and that absence is the transformation problem rephrased.
Unless I've really missed something.
I think the article misses the mark in terms of monetary theory too.
[quote=Critique of Crisis Theory]When we talk about the prices of all commodities, we are by definition leaving one commodity out—the one commodity in the capitalist economy that does not have a price. And what commodity by definition has no price? The money commodity. Since the money commodity serves as the standard of price, it itself cannot have a price. Only if we imagine that money is not a commodity can we talk about the prices of all commodities. Let N equal the total quantity of commodities. The total sum of commodity prices will always leave one commodity out. We can add up the prices only of N – 1 commodities.[/quote]
This is completely artificial, currency exchange as the exchange of money commodities is a thing, you can't just say people are actually exchanging the raw general equivalent as values aren't exchanged, money prices as an expression of their direct prices in the exchange are.
Have you seen that scene in Rick and Morty where Rick sets the value of the Intergalactic Currency to 0 and immediately this makes the galactic economy crash? It's worth 1 of itself, but also 2 of itself and so on... Nevertheless goods would still exchange at relative values and there's an equivalent form which can root a general equivalent again - just set it back to 1, call it a Galabuck, use all the same infrastructure and you're done. The impossibility of this in the real world is precisely why the network of money commodity exchange can't be externalised from the 'real' economy of commodities; which has real manifestations like inflation from the California gold rush or (appropriately distributed as in the theory) quantitative easing.
Opus Dei (Last chapter)
Remnants of Auschwitz (Last chapter)
State of Exception (Chapter 2 and 3)
Homo Sacer (Section II and most of Section I)
Stanzas (Section I and III)
The Signature of all Things (Chapter 3)
Infancy and History (Whole book)
Potentialities (Whole book)
What Is Philosophy? (Whole book)
The Coming Community (bits and pieces)
Profanations (bits and pieces)
It's been exhilarating.
Also: Quoting Maw :clap:
Alexander Galloway - The Interface Effect
Dude, my friends make fun of me for reading the most tedious of books, but you surely take the cake.
The Interface Effect sounds interesting though.
https://griffithreview.com/articles/andrew-bolts-disappointment/
- a reflection on people's reaction to the book which aims to show the extent of Aboriginal innovation in Australia before white settlement. Also, I've been sniping with my family over just this question recently so I decided I need to get educated! Something a little outside my normal reading habits, but its very good so far and I'm learning lots.
lol I'm just imagining your father pounding the table with his fist, his eyebrows furrowed, and his face red with anger, and yelling, "Dammit, Streetlight, you honestly think the Australian aboriginals somehow bypassed a nomadic adaptation for living, despite nearly all humanity across societies and continents experienced it as the initial social structure, instead experiencing some sort of localized Neolithic revolution ex nihilo?"
Little Dorrit
Otherwise, David Couzens Hoy's The Time of Our Lives is a great overview of different 'continental' approaches to time which I really like.
Elizabeth Grosz's two books, The Nick of Time and Time Travels, might be somewhat closer to what you've looking for, but they're more 'how to think about time and politics', and again, not anything like that Thompson essay (also, they're both essay collections themselves).
Henri Lefevbe's Rhythmanalysis might be even closer (Lefebvre being a Marxist sociologist), but it's a short book that deals more with rhythm than it does with 'time' as such.
Errr, otherwise, there's Poalo Virno's Déjà Vu and the End of History which I haven't read, but looks very much like something that matches what you're after.
Sciency-wise there's Lee Smolin's Time Reborn and Ilya Prigogine's The End of Certainty, which are superb (no politics at all!).
My last reccomendation might seem strange but is one of my favorite books I've ever read and has influenced me massively when thinking about time - Martin Hagglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, which strictly speaking is a (very clear!) reading of Derrida on time, but which I think is absolutely super as a stand-alone book on time in general.
But yeah, this is all a very random scattering of things off the top of my head. Time is always something I've approached 'sideways on', so these recc's may not be the best/most relevant, but yeah.
Giorgio Agamben - The Use of Bodies (The ninth and final book of the Homo Sacer series!)
Paolo Virno - When The Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature
Paolo Virno - Essay on Negation: For a Linguistic Anthropology
After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux (re-read, never finished previously)
The Basic Kafka by Kafka
The Trouble With Being Born & Drawn and Quartered by Cioran
[I]Capital V2[/i] by Marx
Brian Rotman - Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics
This is is one of the best books I've read in a while. It contains sentences like: "The ancient ruins of the Imperial Age lie scattered across the center of modern Rome like whale bones that have washed up on a rocky shore and been picked clean by the birds and rodents that make their nests and burrows amid the debris."
Whale bones. Plus its author is a hero of the Mongolians. Awesome.
Brian Rotman - Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero
Brian Rotman - Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting
Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
On a bit of a Rotman/Spinoza kick.
This has been on my radar for some time. Can you let me know what you think?
Essays by various authors on the Australian context specifically, covering everything from healthcare to education to public engineering projects. I've been looking for a book like this for about a year now, and this is perfect.
Quoting StreetlightX
Good reading skills must help too. I too set aside some reading time, usually more than one hour per day, but there is no way I could get through an average-sized book in a week, especially a philosophy book.
(I read mostly fiction though. Currently finishing Javier Marías's A Heart So White in English translation. It is a fairly slim book, as novels go, but it still took me a couple of weeks.)
Giorgio Agamben - What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays
Fernando Zalamea - Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics
Fernando Zalamea - Peirce's Logic of Continuity: A Conceptual and Mathematical Approach
Maybe it is bullshit. But it so successfully circumvents other peoples' bullshit that it gets my attention.
Pensieri by Giacomo Leopardi.
Albert Lautman - Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Real?
The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq
Philosophy of Math
Albert Lautman - Mathematics, Ideas, and the Physical Real
Fernando Zalamea - Peirce's Logic of Continuity: A Conceptual and Mathematical Approach
Fernando Zalamea - Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics
Mary Tiles - The Philosophy of Set Theory - An Historical Introduction to Cantor's Paradise
Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
Brina Rotman - Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting
Brian Rotman - Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero
Brian Rotman - Ad Infinitum... The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay In Corporeal Semiotics
Bob Clark - Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and World
Animals and Aesthetics
Elizabeth Grosz - Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art
Elizabeth Grosz - Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power
Raymond Ruyer - Neofinalism
Jakob von Uexküll - A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning
Richard Prum - The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - And Us
Adolf Portmann - Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - On Growth and Form
Andreas Wagner - Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates
Deleuze, the Digital, and Aesthetics
Aden Evens - Logic of the Digital
Claire Colebrook - Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital
Alexander Gallloway - The Interface Effect
Seb Franklin - Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts
Anne Sauvagnargues - Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon
Anne Sauvagnargues - Deleuze and Art
Daniella Voss - Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas
Elizabeth Grosz - The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism
Agamben and Virno
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Real?
Giorgio Agamben - What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - Taste
Giorgio Agamben - The Use of Bodies
Giorgio Agamben - The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath
Giorgio Agamben - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore
Giorgio Agamben - The Fire and the Tale
Giorgio Agamben - The Adventure
Giorgio Agamben - Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture
Paolo Virno - Essay on Linguistic Negation: For a Linguistic Anthropology
Paolo Virno - When the Word Becomes Flesh
Paolo Virno - A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life
Other
Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality
Wilfrid Sellars - Naturalism and Ontology
Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy
Damien Cahill & Phillip Toner - Wrong Way: How Privatisation and Economic Reform Backfired
Etienne Balibar - Spinoza and Politics
Moria Gatens & Genevive Lloyd - Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present
Daniel Dor - The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu
Miguel Sicart - Play Matters
Byung-Chul Han - Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese
Byung-Chul Han - The Agony of Eros
---
This was a super interesting year, where I kinda oscillated between the super abstract (math) and the super concrete (aesthetics), so as to get a better feel for the relation between the two. Not a great deal of politics or sociology this year, which is always a bit of a failing, so maybe this is something I can remedy next year. I think the path forward is going to consist in a bit more math - especially Wittgenstein - and after, possibly a project on gesture and language. In any case, happy reading for the New Year everyone! And of course:
Currently Reading: Jose Benardete - Infinity: An Essay on Metaphysics. This is a book I've heard credited for helping to revive analytic metaphysics, and also as having affinities with Deleuzian metaphysics, so I'm pretty hyped for it.
The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood
The Heights of Despair by Cioran (reread)
Tears & Saints by Cioran (reread)
A Short History of Decay by Cioran (reread)
All Gall Is Divided by Cioran (reread)
The Temptation to Exist by Cioran (reread)
History and Utopia by Cioran (reread)
The Fall into Time by Cioran (reread)
The New Gods by Cioran (reread)
The Demiurge by Cioran (reread)
The Trouble With Being Born by Cioran(reread)
Drawn & Quartered by Cioran (reread)
Anathemas and Admirations by Cioran (reread)
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
Seibo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (reread)
Dark Money by Jane Mayer
A Hero Born by Jin Yong
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump by Corey Robin
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai (and then watched the 7+ hr movie lol)
Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
The Trial by Kafka
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu
Capital volume 1 by Karl Marx (reread)
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Capital volume 2 by Karl Marx
Just got this, starting this after I finish Dillion's short book
It's good. It packages contemporary Marxist critique in a clear and accessible way, with an emphasis on education and mental health. A short, depressing, and punchy read.
That's my jam
Santayana is next, I read his Last Puritan as a child, so time to go deeper.
How do you like Krasznahorkai?
Well I read three of his books within a few months and watched the Bela Tarr film Satantango which was over 7 hours long so I guess you can say I adore his work.
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics
Whadya think?
Halfway through this. Definite thumbs up too. The section on education is particularly spot on and gels with my experience (only I never expressed my frustrations as consistently eloquently and effectively as he does his).
I'm not sure what I think yet. I'm at canto iv. He seems to have a lot of good insight about spiritual progress. but then he'll suddenly declare himself equal to Homer, or use his poem to shit on some other enemy from his personal life. And he constantly flatters Virgil, obsequiously, while still casting judgment on Flatterers. So I don't know.
Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative—Walter A. Davis
Rabbit, Run—John Updike
The Conquest of Bread—Peter Kropotkin
Infinite Jest—David Foster Wallace
One of the best things humanity ever made imo
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson
Tho I see aspects of myself in every circle of hell so far, the ones I've most related to are the sullen:
'Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;
in the glory of his shining our hearts poured
a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun;
sullen we lie forever in this ditch.'
This litany they gargle in their throats
as if they sang, but lacked the words and pitch.
I think its interesting that the sullen are introduced just after the wrathful, lying beneath the surface of the water that the wrathful endlessly roil. And that they're in the same canto as the hoarders and the wasters, whose punishments mirror one another. Reminds me of the old idea of depression as aggression turned inward. Sort of like the wrathful are anger-spendthrifts, and the sullen are anger-misers.
Then the mad lad goes and writes what I would say is the greatest epic poem ever written. Literally called his shot, what a baller.
Dune by Frank Herbert
Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Horney
Giovanni Maddalena - The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution
Noson Yanofsky - The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us
Mostly finished my little 'math phase' for now, so hopefully I can pick up the pace a bit on reading. That said I picked up the Yanofsky book after reading this lovely article on the math and the multiverse that anyone interested in one or both ought to read: http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/chaos-makes-the-multiverse-unnecessary
I may or may not be chillin' on a rooftop in Fez at Sunset getting through my reading right now.
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
-Utopia Tomas Moro (in Spanish)
-Walden Henry David Thoreau (in English)
I’m finding both books fascinating and that many of the ideas they transmit are really contemporary. I will be definitely reading more about them.
P.D. Hi everyone, this is my first comment in this forum.
The Bible
Abraham's line is initiated into priesthood by Melchizedek with bread and wine: the same kind of meal that transformed Enkidu from wildman to civilized. Bread and wine points back to something beyond human memory: the point that we realized that we aren't just animals.
I'm supplementing my reading with lectures from the Yale Open Course on the OT and the professor seems to think that might be it - that or, maybe it was written down, but read aloud, and the repetition would help the key points stick for the illiterate audience.
I think there's something to what you said. I found the end of deuteronomy beautiful, and part of that was the delayed release. (also appreciate, being done with it, the repetition. a lot of stuff about e.g the role of levites stuck that wouldnt have if they didnt say it eighteen times.)
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.
Ethics by Spinoza.
I listened to all the Dale Martin lectures on the New Testament and I really learned a lot.
Seriously, main three I’m focused on atm:
- Aion by Carl Jung (a bit of a slog)
- Mythology of The Celtic People by Charles Squire
- On the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche
Also, less attention on:
- Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard
- Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche (second reading)
- Odysseus by Homer
- a few others that don’t immediately spring to mind!
:up: :up:
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson (just finished, and the ending has a glorious put down of libertarian economist Tyler Cowen's response to her)
White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina
Dawn Lyon - What is Rhythmanalysis?
Yi Chen - Practising Rhythmanalysis
(anyone have recommendations around this?)
You are correct, there is not much around this topic. I found this set of podcasts though:
http://generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk/rhythmanalysis/seminar/
"The seminar series comprised six sessions exploring various approaches to time and rhythm as those found in the work of key critical theorists, such as Gilles Deleuze, Henri Lefebvre, Rudolf Laban, Roland Barthes, Henri Meschonnic, Emile Benveniste, Gaston Bachelard and others."
Sara Ellenbogen - Wittgenstein's Account of Truth
Peter Winch - The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy
Oh, this reminds me! Eleni Ikoniadou, who presents the sixth seminar in your link, also has an OK book on rhythm, The Rhythmic Event, which takes a look at alot of sound art through the lens of rhythm, and is pretty useful and well written.
So good 2.
- Logical Investigations, Husserl
- Naming and Necessity, Kripke
- Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel
Up to now, Husserl is good (but vague as usual), Kripke is a puzzle because early doors seems to have overextended the term ‘truth’ ... but I imagine a little more reading will clear this up. Hegel? Still making my way through the preface and intro.
Maybe the last of my Wittgenstein adjacent books for a while, depending.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay - The Federalist
David P. Barash - Approaches to Peace - A Reader in Peace Studies
Karl Marx - Capital Vol. 1
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey (Christian Jihadists attacked the Roman Temples at Palmyra 1700 years ago, pretty much like their Moslem successors did a few years back)
I Am Charlotte Simmons, A Novel by Tom Wolfe (too long, but pretty good)
Oops. One more Witty related thing.
Too many books started and not finished.
However last week caught a Goethe at Lake Garda. The name of a speed ferry. Not quite how Goethe was blown to Malcesine. And the storm he created whilst drawing the castle there, well...
Quite the 007 drama with a twist. *
I read his 'ItalianJourney' and a few of his stories many years ago. Quite the inspiration. For many.
To refresh my memory on philosophical influence, I read:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/goethe/#H6
Extract:
' Finally, Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) claim that things which cannot be put into propositional form might nevertheless be shown bears a family resemblance to Goethe’s formulation of the daimonisch. But where Wittgenstein removes the proverbial ladder on which he ascends to his intuitions about the relation between logic and the world, thereby reducing what cannot be bound by the rules of logic as nonsensical, Goethe believed he could communicate what were admittedly ineffable Urphänomene in a non-propositional way, through the feelings evoked by drama.
There is, moreover, a distinct similarity in Goethe’s and Wittgenstein’s views on the proper task of philosophy. Its aim, for both, can never be accomplished, once and for all, by means of ‘the right argument’. Argumentation, explanation, and demonstration only go so far in their attempt to unravel the mysteries of the world. “Philosophy simply puts everything before us; it fails to deduce anything,” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 126).
Philosophy’s role in our life should guide us to be reflective people, ever ready to critique inherited dogmas, and always ready to revise our hypotheses in light of new observations. Goethe, through his ceaseless energy, limitless fascination with the world as it was presented to him, and his perpetual willingness to test his convictions against new evidence, carries a timeless appeal to philosophers, not because he demonstrated or explained what it meant to live philosophically, but because, through the example of the course of his life, he showed it.'
Given Goethe's influence and his 'timeless appeal', it is surprising that he is not given more attention.
I now better understand the appeal of Wittgenstein if he follows Goethe in agreeing the role of philosophy in our lives.
* Malcesine castle now a major tourist attraction where people can read a bit about Goethe.
Or get married...
Hah. You just can't help yourself :wink:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/4326/death-of-mary-midgley
Have downloaded a free kindle version of Mary Midgley's 'The Myths We Live By'.
Might even read it...
Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
(Particularly funny chapters: "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.")
K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher - Mark Fisher
Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time
Rovelli is the physicist humans need right now.
I'll have this book soon. Will make a thread of it once I've finished reading.
I love that he just gets to work on the issues, I read "Brief Lessons" a couple of months ago and it wasted absolutely no time.
Theses on Feuerbach by Marx
The Limits of Capital by David Harvey
Yes, I love MARX
M - Marx
A - Always
R - Right
X - xoxo
Piotrek ?wi?tkowski - Deleuze and Desire: Analysis of "The Logic of Sense"
Gilles Deleuze - The Logic of Sense
Prep for a seminar on the LoS next week :D
Eleanor Kaufman - Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being
Jane R. Goodall - The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia
Slavoj Zizek - Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences
Hadn't heard of that one. Any good?
It's good once you realise that it's like a 40 page essay on Deleuze and then the rest is cultural critique where Deleuze barely figures. The Deleuze stuff is - expectedly for Zizek - incredibly unorthodox (its almost written in a way to make orthodox Deleuzians mad), and worth reading precisely for that.
Cheers I'll take a look at a sample anyhow or I may be able to get the pdf somewhere.
It was really helpful. It is broken into two parts - the authorized story and the realm where Baggot thinks physics has gone off the tracks. The part I liked best was the first. His explanations of the Standard Model, the Higgs field and boson, symmetry breaking, and the evidence for the Big Bang and Dark Matter answered questions that have bothered me for a long time.
His writing is clear and simple but not too simple. He shows enthusiasm for science without any Gee Whiz.
Now reading:
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm
Patchen Markell - Bound By Recognition
Started this yesterday and I'm 2/3s through. It is fantastic.
• Incontinence of the Void, Slavoj Žižek
• Strange Economics, eds. David F. Schultz et al
• Realm of Lesser Evil, Jean-Claude Michea
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
• Less Than Human, David Livingston Smith
• This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski
'bout time you showed up. :up: :cool:
Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas - Peter Beattie
Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom - Rob Larson
No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left - John Medhurst
Korea: Where the American Century Began - Michael Pembroke
Energy: A Human History - Richard Rhodes
A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow - Joshua Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto - Stewart Brand
Philosophy and Climate Science - Eric Winsberg (more technical than I thought)
Nonsense on Stilts 2nd Edition - Massimo Pigliucci
Gilles Deleuze - Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (includes Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs)
--
:cheer: 'sup!
Some really interesting looking stuff here.
Well - long time no dialectic! Your lists, man, are still as monstrously inspiring as I remember ... :wink:
'sup, B. :smirk:
• Something Deeply Hidden, Sean Carroll
• The Weil Conjecture, Karen Olsson
• The Nocturnal Brain, Guy Leschziner
• Witcraft, Jonathan Rée
*
re-reading:
• Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
• When Einstein Walked with Gödel, Jim Holt
*
Out of the blue a 'birthday gift' (prank?) has just arrived without signature or return address, which, for now, I've consigned to one my "stacks" until further notice ...
• philosophers: Their Lives And Works, eds. M. Walisiewicz, et al
Yeah, some days ... Strange but still trying to get comfortable here. How've you been, Maw? Encouraged by what you've been reading. :up:
:chin: .. Oh no. :death:
"General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications" Ludwig von Bertalanffy - just started
end of history & the last man - francis fukuyama
reality is not what it seems - carlo rovelli
the europeans - henry james
Apparently Fukuyama studied under Derrida at Yale. The guy who engineered modern neoconservatism, helped get us embroiled in Iraq - he was gonna be a cont-lit guy. Later, Derrida strikes him down in Spectres of Marx. this is weird. Kissinger era realism went though a continental bottleneck and got us post 911 us policy
Man And His Symbols - Edited by C.G. Jung
The Destiny Of Man - Nikolai Berdyaev
On deck:
The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath - H.P. Lovecraft (my favorite novel title of all time...maybe I shouldn't read it and just continue to enjoy the title.)
Now reading Zeit der Zauberer - Das große Jahrzehnt der Philosophie 1919-1929 - W.Eilenberger
The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown
Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism by Charles Mills
A bit of momentary reprieve in hell this week. These days, however, I'm just too fatigued to put my (out)rage at this ascendent(?) 'anti-political zeitgeist' into words. But I'm sure we'll chew on our share of effin' fat cat gristle one of these days, comrade. :wink:
Thanks, btw, for mentioning the Charles Mills' book - looks like my jam; I'll wait, though, for your 4-1-1 if & when you'd be so kind. Likewise, if you haven't noticed from my earlier current reads (above), Realm of Lesser Evil, check it out. I might say something more about it when my first read's done.
And to anyone else not mentioned.
Impressive lists. Impressive amounts of reading.
Sorry to intrude, and it is off topic, but I thought it worth posting here.
How many takes does it take to get the most out of a book. And is it better if you have someone else reading along with you - or at the end of a reading ?
I would like to hear views on how best to read a book for understanding.
In particular, the taking of notes and writing down thoughts; what you have read and its effects.
Also, how best to discuss a book with others; especially in an online forum.
Because this sharing might be life-changing for some...
There is a current thread here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6716/mortimer-adler-how-to-read-a-book
Problematizes the concept and practice of work especially in the context of its most recent neoliberal incarnation. Very good so far.
Please excuse my ignorance but what is a 4-1-1 ?
Hadn't read that discussion yet. Thanks for the heads up. :up:
You're welcome :sparkle:
Hope to hear more thoughts...
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog & The Master and Margarita
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
John Medhurst, No Less than Mystic (that rare thing, a Leftist anti-Bolshevik history of the revolution)
Abraham Ascher, Russia: a Short History
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia
Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991
China Mieville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
And a little light economics:
Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to my Daughter
Joseph Choonara, Reader's Guide to Marx's Capital
Karl Marx, Capital (decades since I read it)
Possible plot for a new Adam Curtis documentary?
:victory: & :heart:
I churn through books at a fairly high rate, and rarely return to books in their entirity. What I tend to find myself returning to are parts of books, relavent to whatever I'm interested in at the time. In this sense I treat books more like resources that I can go back to when there's something in one that I'm after.
I also tend to read clusters of books with similar themes or authors, so I can cross-relate readings as I go. Helps to build a more robust picture of whatever it is that you're reading on. Like, I plan to do a bunch of Spinoza study soon, and have a whole series of Spinoza related books lined up.
Occasionally I'll start a thread here in order to pursue a theme that I want to articulate better. I think the absolute best way to demonstrate understanding to yourself is to put arguments or points of view in your own words. Trying to respond to criticisms also helps to really show yourself that you grasp a point of view. The most fun is in connecting different topics that you wouldn't have considered 'connectible' had you not discussed it.
Anyways, a rag tag collection of thoughts to respond to your query.
For sure :victory:
Somewhat similar to StreetlightX, I will gravitate towards a topic (e.g. ethics, politics, economics, pessimism), but usually not for too long because of my terrible ADHD, so I typically bounce around topics.
[quote=StreetlightX]I churn through books at a fairly high rate, and rarely return to books in their entirity. What I tend to find myself returning to are parts of books, relavent to whatever I'm interested in at the time. In this sense I treat books more like resources that I can go back to when there's something in one that I'm after.[/quote]
Ditto.
Thanks for this. I look forward to any new thread you start.
I like the 'most fun' bit - showing the value of discussion in helping to grasp difficult topics or a philosopher. And making connections. Unfortunately, not everyone can hold a library of related books as reference. Or even get them from a library. I rely so much on the internet and 'freebies' to get that bigger picture.
[ Also, if a group discussion is to take place e.g. on Spinoza, it would be good to have advance notice of useful texts or resources. Perhaps there is already such a list in the ' Resources' section of the forum ?]
I'm a bit bouncy too and that's without ADHD. Perhaps I just get impatient and bored :wink:
Ditto. Well, that was easy !
You are both well read and have widely read. Adler had something to say about the differences in levels of understanding. In the discussion I linked to I disagreed with him...but perhaps I was wrong.
We live in extraordinary times. We find our universities awash in strange and mysterious theories, theories that threaten our very sense of reality. This film will tell the story of how, in the 1980s, a mystical jewish philosopher and a japanese-american pragmatist created two diverging paths of political thought, paths which we are still travelling to this day.
I really liked the Fukuyama, btw. Only about 1/3 of it has anything to do with the caricature that has been so often criticized. The other two thirds are those criticisms. It's really not the naive, triumphal book it's made out to be. I don't ultimately agree with him, I guess, but it's the most cogent political worldpicture I've groked (though I haven't groked many.) It's refreshingly direct, and it's insane that it was written in 92 (he predicts that there will be a wave of authoritarian movements and a backslide of democracy sometime in the next generation. He sees it as likely temporary, but he predicts it will be severe and will see new, unheard of authoritarian-hybrids. He also predicts that immigration will become one of the biggest issues for 'posthistorical states') I'm planning to reread Negri & Hardt's Empire next to compare and contrast.
(also - hoping that at some point you'll drop some man-on-the-street accounts of what modern Russia's like. )
submission - michel houellebecq
Late to the game on this one, and I'm bummed I let my preconceptions get in the way of actually reading it. It's really good in pure literary terms & its also a pageturner & its also extremely nuanced.
Funny. I grabbed that from the library a week or two ago. Yes, well-written and I initially liked it but then I felt the author stopped believing himself and it all became a bit forced and naively implausible for me. He's better when he's talking about micro-personal stuff than trying to deal with politics imo. Oh, and the main protagonist is a wanker. Hard to stay with him. So, I dumped it.
You've persuaded me to read it now. Like many, I've been ignorantly dismissing it for years.
Me too. Probably been listening to too much Zizek.
Probably the most acute diagnostic of politics in the West that I know. Punchy and readable too - highly reccomended.
Jodi Dean - Crowds and Party
Hah, that's an interesting choice. Nowadays the book is probably more name-checked than actually read, but I thought it was a well-written novella in the antiutopia genre (not to mention prophetic - it was written hot on the trail of the Bolshevik revolution, almost 30 years before 1984).
Quoting jamalrob
Apropo of nothing, I slightly know his father, a Russian poet, and I met the future author when he was still in school. Haven't read the book though.
I liked it a lot. It's remarkable that he saw what was happening as early as 1920. Remarkable either because he prophesied some of the features of the regime and the society that would characterize Stalinism, or just because those features were clearly evident soon after the revolution--which is remarkable to me as someone weaned on the Trotskyist version of events in which the revolution was fine and dandy before Stalin took power.
Quoting SophistiCat
Cool. I haven't read it either to be honest. I'll get to it.
• Aporetics, Nicholas Rescher
• Proof!, Amir Alexander
• Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, Patricia Churchland
• Hiking With Nietzsche, John Kaag
• Sex and The Failed Absolute, Slavoj Žižek
• Theories of Forgetting, Lance Olsen
• Lobe, Paul Baden
*
re-reading:
• A World Without Why, Raymond Geuss
@180 Proof I'm over halfway through Black Rights/White Wrongs and I highly recommend it. A powerful corrective course for liberalism as typically articulated and defended by white men illiterate to the complexities and inequalities of race and racism produced in society. Charles Mills believes we can keep liberalism (which he defines, by way of John Gray, as Individualist, Egalitarian and Universalist) and strengthen it by acknowledging race experience and the history of racism, and integrating the moral and political philosophies found within it into liberalism (in conjunction with Feminism and Marxism/classism). Pairs very well with the New York Times' 1619 Project, particularly Nikole Hannah-Jones gushingly fantastic essay here.
Quoting Maw
:cheer:
Creation ex nihilo - Gary Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl
Moses the Egyptian - Jan Assmann (an unfortunate last name).
same
For a contrarian take on liberalism, I've just read Jean-Claude Mishea's angry but brilliant (anti-liberal?) critique Realm of Lesser Evil. I need to read it again; if you haven't already, I think you'll find it worth a read.
Quoting Maw
These look great! At some point I want to read Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, and these look like they'd make for good companion reading. @Maw, you gotta tell me how you like the Brown book.
With Naming and Necessity and Reference and Existence on the way...
Oh, that's mah book. Cheers again for reading :up: . Hope there's something in there for you. @csalisbury said he liked some of it. But he was drunk at the time, so...
Yep.
I don't question the gentleman's respectability. I expect it's a family name, having been gained by the prior occupation or reputation perhaps of his ancestors. Much like someone named Smith was a blacksmith or silversmith and maybe someone now named Carpenter had a great great grandfather who was just that.
So Jan Assman had a great great grandfather who enjoyed the backside and was apparently well known for it. It's not something I blame him for, and I do admit to a certain admiration for his celebrating that facet of his personality. His now accomplished descendant, who apparently is quite the Egyptologist, in a whimsically ironic twist, provides evidence of his own ancient civilization through his name. The original patriarch Assman apparently enjoyed staring at, fondling, and perhaps even invading the ass. Good for him I say. Good for him.
"I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats."
:wink:
Dilthey's Selected Works, Volume III
by Byung-Chul Han
--
Michel Feher - Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age
Herbert Marcuse - "One Dimensional Man"
Umberto Eco - "Kant and the Platypus"
Sextus Empiricus - "Against the Logicians"
re-reading:
• When Colorblindness Isn't The Answer, Anthony B. Pinn
• Collected Essays & Memoirs, Albert Murray
[quote=Albert Murray]We invented the blues; Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need.[/quote]
:cool:
The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, Bott Spillius et al., eds.
Yes. Thanks again for mentioning Geguss.
NB: Any history of a religion (and its scriptures) is very much like seeing how a magic trick is done. Most don't want to know, of course; they just want the magic - the make believe - without knowing how they're being tricked.
Continuing on from the Old Testament, alongside a whole lot of secondary literature, and Yale lectures from their open courses. In my exprience, the more I learn about how the bible got made, the more I appreciate what a remarkable document it is. Are both the Old and New Testaments strange, shaggy stitchings together of heteregeneous texts, compilations created in order to serve as mythic propaganda in the interest of power? Yeah, almost certainly. It's no coincidence that a king of an embattled Judah, 'discovered' the deuteronomic laws in a library at the same time many scholars believe the bulk of the old testament was composed. And It's no coincidence the geography of the pentateuch looks a lot the geography of Judah vis-a-vis Egypt at that time. So forth. If you think that the 'magic trick' is 'this is all factual and revealed' then even a small dose of history will dispel the illusion. And it's a lot of fun to learn that history. But does the bible have any power after you understand its sordid, seamy history?
Zizek
"Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh: when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades – the dried skin, sagging breasts… (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrements…) Far from enacting a return to the Real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the escape from the Real, the Real announcing itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance which is the Real, and the decaying body which is reality – we take recourse to the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance."
I just read Engels on early Christianity. Great stuff! It focuses on The Book of Revelation (for reasons explained in the text).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/
Quoting csalisbury
Once I'd learned (enough of) how the 'magic trick' was/is done - after 10 years of parochial school 'bible study, church history & altarboy service' - I seemed to slip effortlessly, almost helplessly, out of the Catechism's mind-forg'd manacles like a newborn out of the womb again, but this time, fallen wide-eyed instead of wailing onto the pellucidly hard cold ground of my facticity. :joke: Teen apostate, then very soon a 'born again' anti-magical thinker & knowing skeptic. Still, decades on, for me the fascination of 'The Illusion' remains. Thus, e.g. Barton's book, etc.
Quoting csalisbury
Great quote! :clap: :cool:
When visiting your girlfriend's family for the first time, imagine yourself fucking their mother, and then their grandmother, this will allow you to establish an approximate upper bound on the relationship length...
Edit:
Upon noticing a perceived flaw in your girlfriend's appearance, meditate upon it, if attachment remains after the meditative exercise, do the same thing as an exercise to try and prevent orgasm - if you can still cum, eternity awaits...
Edit2, De Sade's Principle:
Imagine the body decomposing, the shit in their bowels, the smell of their breath in the morning, decrepit and codependent... Enlightenment is turning the real into viagra.
Makes sense. My religious upbringing was of the desultory 'I guess this year we're going to try going to mass for a couple months' sort and my spiritual volte-face had more to do with making my mean Dad sad than giving up something wholly enveloping. My 'return' to religion is less a return, then a 'wow, I didn't even get it before' & even then I've been treating the bible more as a text-sandbox to flesh out some ideas on spirituality/literature/history than a place I plan on moving into permanently. Pardon the provocation, I guess I've got a mild crush, and I got heated up seeing her ex badmouth her in public. Seemed like the best defense was "you're just saying that cause you still like her!'
made me lol. De Sade by way of modern relationship therapy.
Not following this ...
Maurizio Lazzarato - The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
Maurizio Lazzarato - Governing by Debt
A slight theme.
I've been reading this one on and off for a while. Tell me what you think of it plx!
Finished it a few days back and really enjoyed it. Quite pithy, which I always appreciate. The chapters on the dissolution of the social and the political, replaced by an expanding private sphere was compelling. They are variants on themes I've heard before. I found the last chapter particularity intriguing with Brown's analysis that Capitalism dissolves moral values that would otherwise act as a conscience barrier restraining aggressive acts. With this nihilism in place it then opens a lacuna for nihilism, power as politics, viz., the Alt-Right, to rush in, which explains our contemporary political climate.
However, thinking about the final chapter more in depth, and in a historical context, the political violence in the USA has in fact decreased in the past 40 years. And it's not as if political history isn't abound with moral sublimation between colonialism, slavery, torture, genocide, etc., I'd have to think about it more, but I would say that a conscience isn't a given - which I think Wendy Brown somewhat presupposes here - something that is then subsequently eroded, by neoliberalism. Rather, a conscience is something to be developed, and neoliberalism works to ensure that it doesn't. There are more layers here than explain the political climate, rather than just neoliberal hegemony.
Read this over a couple of days. Was a bit too condensed to be particularly useful, but the emphasis on considering the global (rather than regional) nature and reach of financialization was a good takeaway.
When people say "business is business" they mean that it's a world where contracts are much more important than friendship or even familial relationships. People who fail to recognize that will eventually be screwed over by a former friend and either learn to protect themselves legally or exit that world. So there are natural sentiments that get squashed.
The cultural climate also matters.
A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Gibney
True.
:death: :flower:
And a bunch of grammar/style guides for work.
Such as ?
Do you really need them - I thought you already a talented writer and educator ?
Oh, they're predominantly academic style guides for my editing work (Chicago, MLA, APA, Turabian etc). They're very fine grained and differ on minutiae depending on the field etc. Thanks for the compliment anyhow. :wink:
Ah, OK - so you provide professional editing services for all sorts. Consider me even more impressed.
Had a quick look at Turabian. I note that it is used in journal articles and essays as well as for theses, dissertations and research papers. Apparently offering more readability.
So, let's just say that there might be a few generous intellectuals on or off TPF...
And imagine that they have a burning desire to write an article for TPF.
Why wouldn't they ?
This would be a polished, perfect product; a proud upstanding piece of philosophy :cool:
Then we could all tear it to shreds :naughty: ...er... I mean enjoy and comment :halo:
I think you should write an article on 'How to Write an Article'.
You know ya wanna :wink:
Check out all this attention. @Banno eat your heart out. :wink:
Actually, I've started a blog on various aspects of writing on my site, including how to write academic articles. What I might do here is write an article on argumentation (claims, reasons, warrants, and evidence etc). Anyhow, we're off-topic, so I'll shut up now. Feel free to send a PM about any of this and thanks for the encouragement. :up:
You guys :roll:
Quoting Baden
Excellent :up:
Make it so, number one.
Quoting Baden
Well, not really and please don't.
While I enjoy the lists of current reads, I like it even more when there's a bit of a conversation or review. Like here:
Quoting Maw
Writing a TPF Book Review article would be a bit more challenging but would be easy to find, informative, insightful and inspiring.
How about it...?
Didn't know that. Is there a link to this on TPF ?
No. I try to keep that stuff separate. I've started writing something along the lines suggested though, so I'll keep you posted. :up:
That's a shame. However, I understand the need to keep personal stuff separate. God knows you don't want to be deluged by fan mail :hearts:
Quoting Baden
Look forward to reading it, thanks.
Alright, did that. I put it in the learning centre for now: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7014/effective-argumentation
Thanks for that excellent read. My fuller response there :smile:
And thanks for the push. :wink:
:zip:
A reading room, perhaps
Woah woah woah. I donno if this kind of highly charged erotic language is allowed here.
• Mythmakers & Lawbreakers, ed. Margaret Killjoy
• Peter Watts is An Angry Sentient Tumor, Peter Watts
re-reading
• Poor Economics, Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo
• The Sublime Reader, ed. Robert Clewis
• The Source of Self-Regard, Toni Morrison
• Murray Talks Music, Albert Murray
• The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood
"Essay on Philosophical Method" - R.G. Collingwood, underway
"Analysis of Sensations and Relation of the Physical to the Psychical" - Ernst Mach - starting tomorrow
Wanted to start Popper's 3 volume "Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery" but volume 1 is hung up from a tardy Amazon vendor. :(
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173429/how-propaganda-works
Looks good. On the list.
Right up my street. On mah kindle now. :strong:
• The Color of Money, Mehrsa Baradaran
• Serotonin, Michel Houellebecq
• Flow Down Like Silver, Ki Longfellow
• The Secret Magdelene, Ki Longfellow
• Why Trust Science?, Naomi Oreskes
• The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein**
• Understanding Consciousness, Max Velmans
@Bitter Crank Thanks!**
Various bits by Judith Shklar, particularly the Liberalism of Fear.
Works of Love, Soren Kierkegaard.
I didn't intend it to be so but they are oddly related.
Heard wonderful things about this
The last chapter, on philosophy as literature, really is world class and worth reading on its own.
Finally get to start Popper's trilogy postscript to the logic of scientific discovery: Volume 1 - Realism and the Aim of Science.
Quoting Pantagruel
I noticed your reference to it here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7179/opposing-perspectives-of-truth
It has good reviews, including your own. Might be tempted...
I always take that as a good sign that I am learning the right things....
How so ?
Yes, I understand that we tend to choose books related to our interests.
I have sometimes lived dangerously :naughty: and gone for the opposite to my usual :gasp:
I was asking @Valentinus why his books were oddly related.
The first book I listed is a fiction, presenting an emperor musing on the best kind of Empire to shape.
The second is a series of essays arguing that we need to place the effort to oppose cruelty and the usurpation of publicly granted powers over the articulation of what is the best polity.
The third book explores the command to love one another in terms of personal responsibility. As a manual, if you will, it is not based upon establishing what is secular versus the sacred but having those distinctions come out of the awareness of what love requires. It doesn't oppose previous arguments from Augustine and the Scholastics but sort of turns them inside out.
So what oddly connects them are their interests in expressing what a community is or not. A desire to know what to do next.
Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
• The Rationality Quotient, Keith Stanovich, et al
:up:
Thanks for further explanation.
Of the 3, the first sounds most like my cuppa tea.
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar.
According to wiki:
The book takes the form of a letter to Hadrian's adoptive grandson and eventual successor "Mark" (Marcus Aurelius). The emperor meditates on military triumphs, love of poetry and music, philosophy, and his passion for his lover Antinous, all in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert's "melancholy of the antique world."
Great reviews on goodreads site. This really appealed to me until I read this from academic Mary Beard:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/19/history
[ my bolds ]
Hmmm. Do you think this simply reflects the annoyance of a serious historian towards a fictionalised account. A misrepresentation; putting words put into Hadrian's his mouth that weren't his. And then any subsequent requotes by readers...fake.
It can't be 'frankly unreadable' if so many have read it !
It is pretty obvious that one is hearing what Yourcenar thinks during the book more than a transcription of what Hadrian thinks. I happen to be interested in what Yourcenar thinks.
I understand why the whole enterprise might piss off an actual historian who has read all the source material. I benefited from reading Mary Beard's SPQR.
I always took the pleasure of historical fiction without mixing it up with the real thing. Other readers' aesthetics may bring different results. I do think Yourcenar is a better story teller than Graves in regards to presenting a Roman character of the kind presented by Beard's work.
still working through november's readings, plus:
• Poppy War: A Novel, R. F. Kuang
• The Measure of Our Lives, Toni Morrison
• Fires, Marguerite Yourcenar
re-reading:
• A Mercy, Toni Morrison
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
• Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
• The Abyss, or Zeno of Bruges, Marguerite Yourcenar
I hadn't planned on reading this, I started just to see what it would be like and now I'm more than halfway though... oops. Still. A nice break from Varoufakis, who is getting a bit drudgy for me. It's so good though...
"What then is the spinal column, if not a megalith raised to the mineralizing trace of the organism’s diaspora into its own bloating sensorium—each level of axial segmentation a monument to further neural self-entanglement— dorsally fulgurating our cephalocaudal axis, an outward memory of inward collapse? Indeed, despite the fact that cephalopods exhibit extravagantly complex nervous organization, the most integrated and encephalized CNSs belong unequivocally to vertebrates, for whom metameric spinal regionalization repeats into compartmentalizing brain. A pulsing paradox, intelligence enters the worldly scene by emigrating into its own chronotope."
Having a read now. Strangely compelling despite (or maybe because of) the convoluted prose. (Being too lazy to find my own books, I'm just going to keep piggybacking on you and probably @180 Proof and @Maw too).
Her take on the philosophical content of literature. It helps that her own prose is positively divine.
It's dense too though, because she's one of the smartest, most knowledgeable people on the planet regarding philosophy, literature, and history.
Well done on getting through that in a day. Dude has some mfuckin' vocabulary going on. :lol:
Funnily enough the last book I tore through at that pace was Joseph Carew's Ontological Catastrophe, a book about Zizek which actually (as the title might give away) overlaps considerably in theme.
Also one day I will get around to reading Steigler.
Re: Steigler, I have the first two volumes of Technics and Time sitting under my bed, I just need to get round to them.
The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
Quoting 180 Proof
I met her several years ago she was very lovely.
Paolo Virno - Deja Vu and the End of History
A couple of Italians to round off the year.
A compilation of his later essays on the subject
Thinking of tackling Ulysses at last. I've read Dubliners and Portrait, but for this one I'd like to find a good annotated edition. Problem is that the text is in the public domain, which means that the ebook market is flooded by cheap crappy editions that often can't even get typesetting right, let alone supporting material. One of Amazon's pricier offerings (among dozens) boasts a "functioning table of contents!" and "annotations" in the form of a short New York Times review (from the same year, and presumably also in the public domain). One proudly lists the title in all caps as "ULYSSES - BY JANE AUSTEN."
Ulysses I found a bit of a mountain to climb. Proust has been on my to do list forever, but I fear it will be even steeper than Ulysses...
• The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought, Mark Johnson
• Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies, Gwendolyn Hallsmith & Bernard Lietaer
re-reading
• Last Poems, Hayden Carruth
• Sitting In, Hayden Carruth
Quoting Maw
Likewise. I'd attended a few readings / lectures she'd given in the late 1980s and met her in 1990 at a private dinner given in her honor by William Kennedy (I crashed that party as Hayden Carruth's last minute wingman (HC was invited, I wasn't)), which, for me, had turned out to be an incredible evening, especially Ms. Morrison, who was by turns easily charming & brilliant, down home funny & regal.
MJ is bae.
Quoting Maw
Looking forward to reading it :D
Yeah, that's why I am looking for a helping hand :) I might just end up plowing through it unassisted, but from what I have heard about this book, I fear I'll miss too much this way.
Quoting Pantagruel
Proust may be a stretch in terms of shear length (of everything, down to individual sentences that can run for pages), but in form and style the books are not a long stretch from the classic 19th century Bildungsroman. It is the subject, which alternates minutely detailed observations of the outside and the inner world, and ruminations on the nature of memory and (at long last) art, that may present a challenge if you are not receptive to it. (It does not help that his self-absorbed alter ego is not all that sympathetic.)
Read it and weep!
Levinas - Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
Ricoeur - Symbolism of Evil
Derrida - "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference
Husserl - Cartesian Meditations & Ideas I
Anonymous - The Cloud of Unknowing
Lacan - "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud"
Want to revisit:
Klossowski - The Baphomet
I'm very stop-and-start with the way I read, but usually I manage to finish most if not all of a given book/essay. Getting really into phenomenology but also trying to find ways to connect it with theology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, etc. Any recommendations for phenomenology would be appreciated.
Wittgenstein(ish) + Math
Jose Bernadete - Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Also got 2/3s of the way through the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, but DNF, so it doesn't count!).
Henry Staten - Wittgenstein and Derrida
Noson Yanofsky - The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us
Stanley Cavell - The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy
Stanley Cavell - Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays
Stanley Cavell - Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Carus Lectures, 1988
Sara Ellenbogen - Wittgenstein's Account of Truth
Peter Winch - The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy
G. E. M. Anscombe - Intention
Hanna Pitkin - Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought
Deleuze (Logic of Sense reading)
John Sellars - Stoicism
Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time
Piotrek Swiatkowski - Deleuze and Desire: Analysis of "The Logic of Sense"
Gilles Deleuze - The Logic of Sense
Andrew Culp - Dark Deleuze
Eleanor Kaufman - Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being
Slavoj Zizek - Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences
Gilles Deleuze/Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (two books in one, technically!)
Political Economy / Debt / Neoliberalism / Political Theory
Michel Feher - Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age
Christian Marazzi - The Violence of Financial Capitalism
David Graeber - Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Maurizio Lazzarato - The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
Maurizio Lazzarato - Governing by Debt
Maurizio Lazzarato - Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity
Wolfgang Streeck - Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
Yanis Varoufakis - The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability
Wendy Brown - In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West
Patchen Markell - Bound by Recognition
Hanna Pitkin - The Concept of Representation
Jodi Dean - The Communist Horizon
Jodi Dean - Crowds and Party
Misc
Natasha Lennard - Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
Jane Goodal - The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia
Matthew Warren - Blackout: How is Energy-Rich Australia Running Out of Electricity
Joseph Carew - Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism
Giorgio Agamben - Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (reread)
Thomas Moynihan - Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History
Giovanni Maddalena - The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution
Paolo Virno - Deja Vu and the End of History
Henry Staten - Nietzsche's Voice
--
Still reading the Virno book, but will probably start the new year catching up on some Judith Butler books, before going back to political economy again. So to prempt:
Judith Butler - Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
Judith Butler - Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone :)
Excellent, very jealous, although I doubt you want to know where I was in 1990 :razz:
I was gainfully slinging drinks (with my homie Dave, who happened to be HC's son), unpublishably scribbling, tramping around (south of the border or across the pond) whenever I was flush and, when I wasn't, killing time with sundry sordid side-hustles :zip: ... just to put off going back to grad school. Anyway. Your turn, Maw - what no good were you up to way back when? :smirk:
Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Non-Fiction by Brian Dillion
The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative by Mark Fisher
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Crime and Punish by Michel Foucault
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson
Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials by Malcom Harris
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century by Alex Gourevitch
Capital In the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson
White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina
The Prince by Machiavelli
Grundrisse by Marx
Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by Marx
Theses on Feuerbach by Marx
The Limits of Capital by David Harvey
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown
Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism by Charles Mills
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West by Wendy Brown
The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel
A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Gibney
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
In the past few weeks I read (in chronological order):
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Atomic Habits by James Clear
A Long Way Gone: memoirs of a boy soldier
This is the most important thing! Makes all the difference.
CR (one after the other, of course...):
Judith Butler - Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Judith Butler - Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Isabell Lorey - State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious
"The Open Universe" by Karl Popper
Ellen Meiskins Wood - The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
Ellen Meiskins Wood - Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism
• Ontological Catastrophe, Joseph Carew
• The Philosophical Thought of Wang Chong, Alexus McLeod
• The Racial Contract, Charles Mills
• The Canon of Supreme Mystery by Yang Hsiung, Michael Nylan
*
re-reading
• Maimonides and Spinoza, Joshua Parens
• The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien - in honor of his son, literary executor & editor Christopher Tolkien 1924-2020
Health Justice Now: Single Payer and What Comes Next by Timothy Faust
Declare - Tim Powers
Journeys Out Of The Body - Robert Monroe
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunry? Suzuki
On deck:
Dark Knight Of The Soul - St. John Of The Cross
The City & the City - China Miéville
Ongoing:
The I Ching
Also, hello everyone! Been away for a number of years, but it's great to see many familiar faces still haunting the forums.
• Dune (1965)
• Dune Messiah (1969)
• Children of Dune (1976)
• God Emperor of Dune (1981)
plus
• The Dune Encyclopedia, William McNelly & others (1984), with forward by Frank Herbert (1983)
I started this a few years ago, and always think of it, and need to go back. Any thoughts?
(The first sentence of the abstract makes a point I've been working towards ever since starting to post on forums.)
Quoting Noble Dust
Foundational text for me.
Quoting 180 Proof
:up: one of my favorites
I wanted to read Bunge himself, but his books are way too pricey.
Whaddya reckon btw?
At a glance it looks like this book is highly rated. You like?
So Popper's Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, volume three of his Postscript. They've been getting progressively more engaging....
edit: added The Portable Karl Marx into the mix. Ever since reading the thread suggesting a group read of Das Kapital I have been keen to really dig into Marx. This edition has an excellent preface/biography/chronology, so important to contextualize someone like Marx, I think.
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: An Introduction to Schizoanalysis
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
And once more into the Deleuzian breach.
• Overground Railroad, Candacy Taylor
*
re-reading
In honor of George Steiner 1929-2020
• The Death of Tragedy (1961)
• In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)
• Heidegger (1978)
• After Babel (1975, 1998)
• Real Presences (1989)
War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The Witch - David Lindsay
The City And The City - China Miéville
NVK - Temple Drake
Was a toss up between this and some other Deleuze-inspired stuff but I need a serious break from that kind of thing just at the moment. It's also one of my new goals to read everything Wood has ever written.
Quoting Pantagruel
He passed away just the other day :sad: I still have two of his books sitting under my bed - one day I'll get round to reading them!
:100:
• The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, John Calder
• The Theology of Samuel Beckett, John Cauler
• Until the End of Time, Brian Greene
• Ineffability and Its Metaphysics, Silvia Jonas
• Yinyang, Robin R. Wang
Heard nothing but universal praise for this. Keen to finally delve in!
Most of Bunge's stuff is ungodly expensive. Definitely something I want in my library versus borrowing though.
Starting Quantum Shift in the Global Brain by Ervin Laszlo
The Protestant Ethic was a surprisingly good read.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide
Brent Adkins - Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus : A Critical Introduction and Guide
Should keep me occupied for the next month or so.
I know! I feel that way too. I would have liked to have spent more time on preparatory reading (Hjelmslev and Jakobson in particular), but I'm reading it concurrently with a course that a local philosophy school is running, so... Ah well. Force of the encounter and all that.
Same, lemme know your thoughts.
The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848 by Jonathan Israel
It's a very solid read. The first half of the book is actually more about the history of various peasant resistance movements against feudal power (the Church and the state in particular), while the second half of the book deals with the witch hunts ("Wtich") and colonialism in the Americas ("Caliban'). The stuff on feudal resistance was really interesting to me, alot of the names were new and it was fascinating to read about entire social uprisings that I had never heard of before. Federici's focus on woman in particular makes for really good reading too - she really brings out just how much of women's oppression was and remains political (i.e. intentional responses to socio-economic considerations) and not just some expression of pre-social bias or whathaveyou.
One thing that bothered me slightly was the under-specification of capitalism. She pitches the book as (among other things) a social history of women during the transition to capitalism in Europe, but she doesn't really say much about what constitutes the transition itself: she talks about the enclosure of land and of 'bodies' (i.e. the destruction of community and the atomization of society) as emblematic of capitalism (and she does this really well), but it's not clear why this counts as specifically a capitalist phenomenon (not saying it isn't, only that Federici doesn't make explicit her assumptions).
But otherwise, it really does good work in placing reproduction at the centre of any critique of capitalism, and showing just how implicated it is in any critique of a 'mode of production'. Also gave me a new appreciation - on the basis of class - for the occult in general. As in, the occult and the magical as a site of resistance to the subsumption under capitalist imperatives to universal commercialization. Alot more historical than philosophical, which wasn't what I expected, but enjoyed nonetheless.
Let me know your thoughts as well, I enjoyed Capital, but have been hearing mostly negative reviews for this.
Really been looking forward to starting this
re-reading:
• The Plague, Albert Camus
• Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
:death: :flower:
Re-reading as well
It's a very cool "Longman Cultural Edition" I found on a recent trip. It has a huge section called "Context" covering the social, political and economic conditions in England at the time of writing.
... making it a "Doomsday Dozen" with 9 more novels (and no effin' vampires, zombies, etc):
• Clay's Ark, Octavia Butler
• The Pesthouse, Jim Crace
• The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
• The White Plague, Frank Herbert
• Wool, Hugh Howey
• The Children of Men, P. D. James
• The Trial, Franz Kafka
• Year Zero, Jeff Long
• Blindness, José Saramago
:death: :flower:
Also re-reading Heraclitus' Fragments. Always good to revisit these mysterious aphorisms.
Still some of the best stuff out there.
Any commentary (even by way of review) on this book I'd appreciate. Meinong was a touchstone for my approach to 'the god question' over the last few decades. Thanks in advance.
I will be posting a full review of the book on my blog at alvincapello.com soon. I will be sure to dm you as soon as that happens.
But for some idea of the ground it covers, Miravalle suggests that Meinongianism provides a neat solution to the main problem areas of philosophy of religion. For instance, he suggests that Meinongianism provides the right interpretation for the Cosmological and Ontological Arguments (I agree with this).
The chapters I have not yet reached concern how Meinongianism can provide solutions to the Problem of Evil and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge.
I also have been profoundly influenced by Meinong. Indeed, I am a full-fledged Meinongian, and it is a fundamental away that I approach philosophical problems.
I found Blindness by José Saramago to be the most terrifying thing I have ever read.
Its perfect logic sticks to everything I wonder about.
I tried reading it a while ago, but... ugh.
Now for the really big project: Capital, Volume I. I have been keen to start this since seeing a thread on the forum suggesting a group reading of this work.
It's so good
It's interesting though. It's easier to understand why corporations have come legally to be people when you can see exactly how actual people are already treated like corporations (who have only partial claim to their own assets, so that your name & ssn is an abstract entity whose assets the actual you relates to as one claimant among others)It also helps you realize exactly how the language of business inherently backgrounds everything else & how that can abstract you from everything else, out of fascination -without needing to introduce 'greed' as primary motivation. You can see getting sucked into it for the same reason people get sucked into RTS games etc (im being a good marxist here)
Also:
Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald (re-reading)
&
Guns, Germs & Steel (finally)
Cool!
• Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
• The Dream Universe, David Lindley
• The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph
• God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian, Theism John-Mark L. Miravalle
re-reading:
• Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter
so probably a good time to start
[i]The Theory of Communicative Action
Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of Functionalist Reason, Volume 2[/i]
Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky -- Good, need to re-read, but Tarkovksy's film adaptation as "Stalker" was far better.
Just started:
The Last Days of New Paris - China Miéville (funny, I read far more fiction from the far left than anything else...it's good shit)
American Gods - Niel Gaiman
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - Wittgentsein (via the recent thread)
...On deck.
Apparently it's a real language breaker...
The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 by Eric Hobsbawm
This looks good. I read one of her series and liked it a lot.
"Hidden in Plain Sight: 6 Why Three Dimensions?", Andrew Thomas
[i]"The Transhumanist Wager"[i] , Zoltan Istvan
"The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory", Brian Greene
"Balancing on Blue - Thru-Hiking the Appalachian Trail", Keith Foskett
RIP John Conway.
• [s]The Transhuman Wager, Zoltan Istvan[/s]
still reading
• The Žižek Dictionary, ed. Rex Butler (plus tics, sniffles, obscene jokes, etc)
• God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian Theism, John-Mark L. Miravalle
• Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty
Quoting Maw
I found these on a Cioran wikiquote page:
"I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away." (All Gall Is Divided)
"If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse." (History and Utopia)
"It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late." (The New Gods)
:up:
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
:cool:
Huxley's Island for a bit of a change
GH Mead's, Mind, Self, and Society
Thanks for your OP (re: this book), jorndoe.
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
Ann Pettifor - The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers
Yes. A couple of times. I wish Wilde had written more books!
I'm reading Powers of Time: Versions of Bergson by David Lapoujade
One quick way: When you highlight text a quote button will appear.
Ah! Thanks!
Starting Capital, volume II. It's the smallest of the three volumes, weighing in at a meagre 600 pages....
edit: finished Mind, Self, and Society - one of the best books I have ever read. I'd highly recommend this for anyone with an interest in social psychology.
On to Weber's Economy and Society now. I'll need to do another big book buy soon.
edit: throwing Sartor Resartus into the mix for good measure
sat - Cormac McCarthy°
fri - Albert Murray
thurs - William Faulkner
wed - Toni Morrison
tues - José Saramago
mon - Samuel Beckett
sun - George Steiner
ANTIFA summer nights:
sun - Spinoza, Epicurus, Nussbaum ...
mon - blues (while (re)writing an essay/story)
tues - Cioran, Rosset, Arendt ...
wed - jazz (while (re)writing an essay/story)
thurs - histories / sciences
fri - blues & jazz (while (re)writing an essay/story)
sat - movies, documentaries or tv shows
Nice. I remember bumping into that in an anthology. Flavor.
:chin: :up:
Mariana Mazzucato - The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
Sicc'd on to these by @Maw I believe.
Do the Work - Steven Pressfield
https://www.versobooks.com/lists/4732-abolish-the-police
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor
A fascinating book, well written, and important for anyone's good health.
Thanks, but I think I'm just going to continue with 18th century stuff for the time being and slowly make my way to fascism and the police (same thing really)
Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber
The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 by Eric Hobsbawm
re-reading:
The Shadow of the Wind
Frantz Fanon - Wretched of the Earth
I've put off Fanon for too long, and this couldn't be a more appropriate time. I'm actually so excited.
Better late than never, comrade! :fire:
Sartor Resartus was a fantastic read, I'd highly recommend for anyone who truly loves the english language.
edit. Also finished Economy and Society, which was a grind. I'll move on to Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, which should rather be a treat.
Also reading. :up:
Read that. Yeah, fascinating. Have my doubts about some of the science in the book but an idea definitely worth pursuing.
It convinced me to become a dedicated nose breather. I had already been doing some breath work in meditation over the last few years but have stepped it up after reading the book, with the immediate goal of no longer snoring, for my wife's sake :grimace:, which is supposedly an attainable goal with the various practices and techniques outlined in the book.
Man, the 5th chapter just... explodes. I wasn't expecting it. Wow.
Ah, cool. I'm just near the end of chapter 4 now. :party:
That and more, I think. I started the hypoxic running today. Weird to run while feeling like you're suffocating but then you kind of get used to it and I can see potential. Good to be reminded that you have a body and not just a head full of thoughts.
I've been practicing that with swimming, taking 5-9 strokes between breaths at a moderate pace. Can feel a slight headache sometimes.
If you get an embolism or something from it, please let me know so that doesn't happen to me. :victory:
The Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek
Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, by Adam Cohen
Contrary to the popular belief that the Supreme Court is a champion of justice for the people, according to Cohen, the Supreme Court has always supported the rich and powerful except for a relatively short period around the 60' known as the 'Warren Court', when it had a liberal majority. Nixon somewhat underhandedly ended that majority and conservatives have been strategically maintaining it ever since. For some reason liberals look at it like a game of chance or something, and conservatives are playing chess.
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Noam Chomsky - Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
Steinbeck is brilliant. :up:
Achille Mbembe - Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe - Necropolitics
and Batman
The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 by David Montgomery
Trying to finish Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel
Sunset Park by Paul Auster
A Handbook for New Stoics by Massimo Pigliucci
Michael James Bennett - Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics: The Image of Nature
Jean Piaget - Structuralism
Recent highlights:
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The characters are grotesques or ciphers: rather than developing, they're only revealed, more or less gradually, and we know that how they respond to circumstances is the only way they ever could. The plot relies on several incredible coincidences. The satirical irony is laid on far too thick, even though we can share his anger and righteousness. Despite his progressive treatment of social issues, and despite his ironic targeting of snobbery, he's still a class-bound snob himself. And the repeated contemptuous descriptions of "the Jew" make for uncomfortable reading (I read somewhere that some of Dickens' Jewish friends complained about this during its serialization, and that he removed the phrase "the Jew" after a certain point in the finished book, but at least in my edition it's there up to the end).
But aside from all that, it's great. The intensity and distinctness of the characters (unchanging as they may be), of the most dramatic scenes, and of his scene-setting descriptions is brilliant. And it's great fun.
War and Peace, Lev Tolstoy
I read it straight after the Dickens and had grouped the two books together in my mind as classic mid-nineteenth century novels, but of course, Tolstoy could hardly be more different. War and Peace feels much closer to my world and my life, and it's more real. The characters develop, change their minds, behave unpredictably. The war bits are much more realistic than I expected, intentionally emphasizing the cowardice and the chaos, the comical errors, the blood and guts, the self-serving lies of the officers, and the basic uselessness of orders and tactics. Tolstoy has some persuasive historico-philosophical arguments and manages to weave them into the plot (except for the final epilogue, which is a repetitive and anti-climactic essay).
Also it's great fun to read. It's full of energy and a passionate love of life and the world--not what you get from Tolstoy's contemporary Dostoevsky.
All Hell Let Loose, Max Hastings
To correct my ignorance of the Second World War--I didn't have a good idea of what happened and when--and especially to see how the Soviet Union fitted in to everything else that was happening, I wanted a one-volume overview, and this turned out to be a pretty good choice. Knowing that Hastings is politically a moderate conservative, hovering around the centre-right, I was surprised at how devastatingly critical he is of the British war effort, not only from a strategic-military point of view but also morally. He shows great sensitivity to the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians in all the countries involved, and doesn't hold back when smashing apart the myths of heroism and sacrifice that have been part of the Allied story ever since 1945 (not that he claims heroism and sacrifice were non-existent). One of the unique features of the book is that almost every paragraph contains quotes from archived letters written by people at all levels of society and the military.
Next:
Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy. I know some people say this is the best novel ever, but I can't help but expect it to be a let-down after W&P.
A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov. I confess I got this partly because I discovered that his ancestors were the Learmonths from Scotland. Maybe I'm homesick or something.
The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro. I read this when it was first published, when I was in my early twenties. It creeped me out, I didn't get it, but I was fascinated. Now that I'm older and it feels like time is running out, it'll make more sense.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56, Anne Applebaum. For me this is going to be a kind of sequel to the WW2 book.
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum. I mentioned to a Russian friend that I was going to read this book and she impatiently said "It wasn't just the Ukrainians who suffered under Stalin! It was us too!" :roll:
War and Peace again, because it was so good.
Interested to hear what you think of this.
Sounds perfect. Parsons has made a few references to Piaget and I've been looking for something. On the list. Thank you! :grin:
Mindfuck - Christopher Wylie
Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Perez
Fucking Trans Women - Mira Bellweather
Capital Vol. 1 - Marx (reread (more mathematicising the value theory))
1984 - George Orwell
Uruk Machines - samzdat
Communisation and the Value Form Theory - End Notes (reread, accompanying Marx stuff)
Ongoing maths/stats stuff:
Reading these together with accompanying papers, the study will take a while.
Causality - Judea Pearl
The Algebra of Open and Interconnected Systems - Brendan Fong
Category Theory for Scientists (using for reference, previously read) - David Spivak
}
Ongoing philosophy:
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern - J. Sakai
I'm nearly done all 3 volumes - I'd love to see a full blown global economics simulator based on Marx's principles.
Starting Structure of Social Action Volume II: Weber, by Parsons
I don't think that's possible without filling in/inventing lots of extra-textual details. Some of his arguments are relatively easy to put into a theorem-proof form though. The latter's what I'm attempting.
Yes, it would have to be an extrapolation. What I'd really like to do is attempt to integrate a lot more social dimensions, flesh out his class-conflict in light of the intervening 150 years of history. It's a major undertaking for sure.
Are you a mathematician?
I think that's what a lot of Marxist literature does, no? Filling in the gaps and using the same categories to analyse other issues. Did you have a particular thing in mind?
Quoting Pantagruel
Yes, statistician. (Mathematicians don't like it if you call statistics mathematics)
lol! Yes, of course.
I've been wanting to leverage neural net modelling capabilities since I started reading cybernetics in the 90s. Now it has become pretty plug and play. NetLogo is the new standard, multi-agent based modelling and it's free. It's just about conceptualizing the model. Capitalism is rife with contradictions, and these seem like logical focal points to me.
Unfortunately, the newest version went off in a totally different direction for whatever reason:
There's also another classic "Dinosaur Book" for operating systems that has fortunately held on to its traditional cover art, most of the time. Fun stuff.
"...Of course languages, lexicons, and individual words—like species—evolve. As one population ‘reproduces’ its language in the next, new words arise, old words have their meanings changed, phonology shifts, grammatical rules may be modified, and so on. As is the case with species, some of this evolution will be quite gradual: successive generations are able to fluently communicate with one another, just as successive generations in a population lineage are (counterfactually and in principle) able to interbreed, have fertile progeny, share a system for recognizing mates, etc. As is the case with species, even when abutting generations enjoy the sort of cohesion that would drive the observer to classify them as speakers of a single language, the soritical ways of linguistic change, given enough time, will lead to a diachronic lack of cohesion so great that no one will say that ancestor and descendent populations speak the same language, even though the languages they use are related by descent."
"...Whether we stick with this sort of terminology or not, we should agree that Quine is correct to think that the notion of analyticity is of little to no use in the study of language. But it certainly doesn’t follow from this that the notion of meaning can’t bear any explanatory load, any more than it follows from the fact—biological species do not have essences; none of the small changes that might lead, when summed over time, to speciation are themselves intrinsically changes that separate one species from another— that the notion of species cannot bear any explanatory weight. The notions of word meaning, concept, and (public) language are no worse off because of Quine’s and allied arguments and observations than is the notion of species because of Darwinian arguments and observations that speciation is a historical process and that it is folly to think that species have anything like essences."
"...Our talk about meaning, like our talk about species, tracks something that is event- like, more process than product. Our talk about meaning, like our talk about species, tends to be cast in terms that are more appropriate to something that is not event-like: thus the attraction of the views that species have some sort of essence, and that a word’s meaning can be identified once and for all with a definition or a Fregean sense or something of the sort. Because of the apparent lack of fit between what our talk about meanings and species tracks and the conceptual box that talk creates, we might at the end of the day decide that rather radical conceptual engineering is called for: we might even recommend dropping talk about species or meanings in favor of talk about populations related by descent or lineages of lexicons linked by various relations of communication. To do so in the biological case is not to suggest that species talk does not track a real phenomenon, or that the claims and generalizations biologists make in speaking about species are empty or unverifiable or false. Ditto, for the linguistic case."
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx
Finished:
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx (reread)
The German Ideology by Karl Mark (just the section on Feuerbach and Historical Materialism)
This looks great! How are you finding it?
CR:
Fred Moten and Stefano Herney - The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Frank B. Wilderson III - Afropessimism
Frank B. Wilderson III (ed.) - Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction
edit: a few tidbits from the first couple of chapters...
"Manners are but minor morals."
"The things we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking."
"A modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected."
"As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society."
Side note, sheer curiosity:
Coming across the old reading group, I wondered - why was TGW banned?
Also noticed Landru Guide Us and Prairie Dog Handler are gone - did they just leave?
They seemed a frequent presence on the old forum.
(More of a lounge question I suppose but prompted by coming across the thread and didn't seem worth starting a new one over.)
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology
David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
David Graeber - Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
:up:
• Adorno and Existence, Peter Gordon
• The Struggle for Recognition, Axel Honneth
• Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson III
*
"Fear is the mind-killer." :mask:
1st trailer for DUNE (they might have gotten it right this time):
https://youtu.be/n9xhJrPXop4
I will not stand idly by as David Lynch and Sting are besmirched
Let me know how you find this. As a book I thought it was an incredible read. I even think he's exactly right to point out that there is a certain class of subject ('slave') which escapes the major emancipatory frameworks of either Marxism or post-colonialism (the slave neither fights for a different relation to the means of production, nor for a claim to land); but I don't understand why this class of subject *must* be black. Like the whole book made me think very hard about the way in which racial issues - black racial issues in particular - cannot simply be assimilated or amalgamated with other claims for emancipation (there is a specificity to racial struggle that is not simply class or land based), but I still don't see why this warrants his afropessimism. Like, what is it about the slave that warrants the slave being 'inherently' black? I feel like there's a step missing in his argument. Still, I really enjoyed it.
I started rereading Dune and it's very enjoyable. I read it as a teen and again sometime around 15 years ago. The remake looks promising, btw.
I've read all the Dune novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, incidental, and though entertaining they don't compare to Frank.
+
Samantha Bankston - Deleuze and Becoming
German Eduardo Primera - The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben: Signatures of Life and Power
For sci-fi? It definitely stands out in that genre.
In the Presence of Schopenhauer, Michel Houellebecq, recently published in English.
• Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger
• I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, Sue Prideaux
Could not finish it. :(
Not your cup of tea?
Yes, it takes some getting used to.
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy by Jurgen Habermas
David Lapoujade - Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
Giorgio Agamben - Creation and Anarchy
• There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire, Michael Gaddis
:up:
• The Awkward Black Man, Walter Mosley
still reading:
• God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian Theism, John-Mark L. Miravalle
• Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty
re-reading:
• Beatlebone, Kevin Barry
• In Tune, Mark Lewison
(in honor of what would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday today)
:up:
Preparing to have my mind blown to pieces.
I've put Chemistry completely on the back burner with respect to philosophy of science so I'm trying to mitigate my ignorance of this.
You can always cut the 800 pages volume in two halves, if that helps.
Male Fantasies V1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History by Klaus Theweleit
Belated birthday present to myself just arrived :grin:
No shit! I just started re-reading this.
How's this one going?
Still wading through Habermas....
Alex Anievas and Kerem Ni?anc?o?lu - How The West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
I have to do 5 more books by the end of the year to meet my Goodreads goal, so I'm throwing in some shorter works (although I like nothing better than to be immersed in a Dickensian epic).
• Isonomia and The Origins of Philosophy, K?jin Karatani :up:
• John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life, Kenneth Womack
re-reading
• Crises of the Republic, Hannah Arendt
• On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder
still reading
• The Fascism This Time, Theo Horesh
etcetera ...
Given the tenor of politics, especially in the states, it is interesting to note the emphasis he places on the idea of civility in rationally founded political and democratic will-formation.....Of course it applies to all rational deliberation really.
my old copy broke at the A side of "On the Mathematically sublime" and was falling apart.
Gonna prolly start rereading that when i get it.
Kinda makes me wonder if people who just like Kant like to give his books away?
Maybe when their heads start hurting?
How are you finding it? It said that it was originally written as the last part of another work, and I felt that it really reads like it. Like a side project, almost. I liked it, but it did feel a little 'light'.
CR -
Perry Anderson - Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
Perry Anderson - Considerations on Western Marxism
Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed
"In this study Cassirer analyzes the non-rational thought processes that go to make up culture. He demonstrates that beneath both language & myth there lies an unconscious "grammar" of experience, whose categories & canons aren't those of logical thought. He shows that this prelogical "logic" is not merely an undeveloped state of rationality, but something basically different, & that this archaic mode of thought still has enormous Power over even our most rigorous thought, in language, poetry & myth. The author analyzes such seemingly diverse (yet related) phenomena as the metaphysics of the Bhagavat Gita, the Melanesian concept of Mana, the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, modern poetry, Ancient Egyptian religion & symbolic logic. He covers a vast range of material that is all too often neglected in studies of human thought."
^That's a good one.
Yeah. I thought so, too.
Writing is decent, nothing great. A shame because his The Darkness That Comes Before has really good writing. I like this though because it's so accessible; good book to get people thinking who normally wouldn't read anything on mind-body philosophy.
:up:
How is the audio-Kant going? I got the Critique of Pure Reason for free too and listened to the intros last night. I found it pretty decent.
the reading of Practical Reason is done in a very strong American accent, which is a little off-putting, although the diction is clear enough. It's tough going, requires a lot of concentration to take it in.
I bet.
Mine is a Kindle, so it is read by a computer-generated voice (Alexa). Oddly enough, I actually prefer this to Audible's human narrators!
Perry Anderson - In The Tracks of Historical Materialism
Moar histore.
Historian writes about the British East India Company, which acted like a State, conquering and (mis)governing parts of India. Wonderful characterisations, fascinating insights into bizarre societies (both western and oriental), a great book but I've had to stop reading it as I can't bear the descriptions of torture and mutilation.
The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
turns out crazy old uncle ted has some interesting ideas
Anything Wolfgang Streeck or Mike Davis or Robert Brenner
Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital
Gindin and Panitch's The Making of Global Capitalism
Ellen Wood's The Origin of Capitalism
So much!
A very smart, but twisted man. I think he should have stuck with the math.
[quote=Wikipedia]In 1967, Kaczynski's dissertation Boundary Functions[42] won the Sumner B. Myers Prize for Michigan's best mathematics dissertation of the year.[11] Allen Shields, his doctoral advisor, called it "the best I have ever directed",[/quote]
I don't know man, civilization moving in and squeezing me, hardly seems like a good reason for bombing it.
The writings are anti-societal. The acts were anti-societal. We can ask, which came first, the writings or the acts, to see if the acts were meant to bring attention to the writings, or if the writings are an attempt to justify the acts. Before the acts, wasn't the man a mathematical genius who got disillusioned with society? It's possible that he later turned that incredible mind of his toward justifying some terrible acts. Fifteen years of violence before his manifesto was published doesn't look good for the idea that the violence was meant to bring attention to his ideas.
Eric Hoffer (whom Kaczynski occasionally references) said that people turn into fanatics in order to justify atrocities that they have committed. The devotion of a fanatic is often an attempt to silence feelings of guilt. Deeper and deeper they go. Hoffer thinks there are three types of people in a social revolution: men of letters, fanatics and men of practical action (appearing in that order temporally). I think Kaczynski might be considered to be both a man of letters and a fanatic.
Regardless, I don't see much use in focusing on his actions. It's his ideas that really matter. Use what you can, and compost the rest.
His work place was a University. His targets were Universities. So he displays elements of classic 'going postal'. And as a letter bomber he gives the expression a whole new dimension.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The question then, do his ideas really have merit, or is it just a case of being an interesting read because it's written by a very intelligent and capable human being, who experienced an extremely messed up life.
• Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton
• The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War, Jonathan Daniel Wells
• Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
re-reading:
• Stories Of Your Life And Other Stories, Ted Chiang
still reading
• There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire, Michael Gaddis
• God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian Theism, John-Mark L. Miravalle
• Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty
Excited for this one :party:
Incidentally, am currently reading Joseph Strayer's On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State.
I got a few books by Ellen Wood (already own/have read Origin of Capitalism, although I might re-read it next year). Also got Robert Brenner's tome, Merchants and Revolution, Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter History, and a few other books.
Looks like I have to buy my fourth bookshelf!
Ellen Meiksins Wood - Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
Quentin Skinner - Liberty Before Liberalism
Raymond Geuss - The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School
Probably the last book I'll start this year so I'll do my annual reading list
Deleuze and Guattari:
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Readers Guide
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus': Introduction to Schizoanalysis
Brent Adkins - Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
Ian Buchanan - Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus': A Reader's Guide
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 2)*
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 1)
David Lapoujade - Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze*
Samantha Bankston - Deleuze and Becoming
Joe Hughes - Philosophy After Deleuze
Joe Hughes - Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation*
Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Literature
Michael James Bennett - Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics: the Image of Nature
BLM inspired:
Frank B. Wilderson III (ed.) - Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction
Frank B. Wilderson III - Afropessimism
Achille Mbembe - Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe - Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe - On the Postcolony
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney - The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks
Paolo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Aime Cesaire - Discourse on Colonialism
History of Capitalism:
Perry Anderson - Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism
Perry Anderson - Lineages of the Absolutist State*
Perry Anderson - Considerations on Western Marxism
Perry Anderson - In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu - How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism*
Ellen Meiksins Wood - Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism*
Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View*
Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States
Silvia Federici - Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
Anthropology:
David Graeber - Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Pierre Clastres - Archaeology of Violence
Pierre Clastres - Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology
Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - Cannibal Metaphysics
Political Economy:
Mariana Mazzucato - The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
Mariana Mazzucato - The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy
Ann Pettifor - The Production on Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers
Jereome Roos - Why Not Default?: The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt*
Misc.:
Jospeh Strayer - On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State
Raymond Geuss - The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School
Quentin Skinner - Liberty Before Liberalism
Reza Negarestani - Intelligence and Spirit*
Catherine Malabou - Morphing Intelligence: From IQ to Brain Measurement
Kojin Karatani - Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Philosophy?* (reread)
German Eduardo Primera - The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben: Signatures of Life and Power
Jean Piaget - Structuralism
Bernard Cache - Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories
Judith Butler - Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
Judith Butler - Precarious Life
Judith Butler - Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly
Isabell Lorey - State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious
Currently Reading:
Ellen Meiksins Wood - Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
Albert O. Hirschman - The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph
Fuck you
I bought Anti-Oedipus while in college 11 years ago and haven't managed to get past a handful of pages. Need to get through it at some point... Your BLM reading list is quite inspiring as is your History of Capitalism, and to that end I would recommend How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney and Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
And since we're doing end-of-year lists I also wrote up the top movies I watched this year in another thread, since I assume people watched more movies this year than in other years.
Listed in approximately the order I read them, except the fiction is lumped together in the middle starting with Sartor Resartus.
The last one was an essay of Ivan Kireevsky, an orthodox philosopher, of the Slavophile movement.
On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy - I. Kireevsky.
By the way, I'm currently reading Phaedrus.