What are you reading?

[Faust]

Oh, you educated French! Give well-done entertainment a chance. You might enjoy it :-)

[Czx]

So, this may seem like quite an inane question but I'm having a year of break before my studies in philosophy and I know many of you here are deep into it so here it is - what direction should one go after the "basics"? By basics I mean having it in school for three years and going through the major works of the schools up to and including existentialism. I'll be revising all of it before I start my studies but I'm looking for any interesting reads that are out of the schooling circle to study on the side. Not any particular movement, just books worth reading and knowing. There is a lot of it so I'm just looking for worthy recommendations, really.

[Mail-Moth]

Oh, you educated French! Give well-done entertainment a chance. You might enjoy it :-)

But I do, as long as it is devoid of any dumbed-down philosophy/spirituality/common sense wisdom.

I love zombie flicks.

[Faust]

So, this may seem like quite an inane question but I'm having a year of break before my studies in philosophy and I know many of you here are deep into it so here it is - what direction should one go after the "basics"? By basics I mean having it in school for three years and going through the major works of the schools up to and including existentialism. I'll be revising all of it before I start my studies but I'm looking for any interesting reads that are out of the schooling circle to study on the side. Not any particular movement, just books worth reading and knowing. There is a lot of it so I'm just looking for worthy recommendations, really.

I suggest switching to literature before it's too late

[Czx]

If you mean it in terms of interest - it's already too late, most of my books are underlined with philosophy and psychology and I love that hahah

And if you mean it in terms of studies - I got accepted this year to Central and Eastern European Culture studies but came to conclusion that is not my thing as they lay too much focus on history and languages (and I'm not interested in learning belarussian and lithuanian languages) so I'm using this year to work and study just using this course so I have a student license (profits, many of them, higher netto paycheck being the highest). I would propably be interested in studies that focus on literature and culture as a whole (as it's the only option here) and actually apply but the requirements are really high and I'm definitely not leaving my hometown. But if I do get accepted there I will choose it over philosophy because of specialization you get too chose there (events organization, could be useful in my work).

[Faust]

I'm from Belarus and I am not interested in learning Belorussian either (there are like, what, two books written in that language?). What a waste of a country. Brrrrrr....

I was just (half)teasing, in light of our all-philosophy-worth-reading-is-in-literature-and-better-written-OR-NOT! debate.

[Czx]

Hahah, I supposed so. It's just my mind always trying to find few depths in what people say and making me reply taking every of this ways into consideration. Brings me some awkward conversations at times hahah

Yeah, I decided that I'm too young to be learning languages out of pure interest (which I have none towards those at the moment, actually) and mind training. I plan to learn Russian, French and German so this will be hard enough. You can also learn Russian and German on this course but well... I got those ruled out because of our web registration to classes which is a "who clicks f5 faster" contest. 20 spots on each language (and a few groups of those, by advancement level) for 120 people. Before I even got to the registration page spots very taken on every possible language apart from Russian B1 and the ones I mentioned. If I could take German and Russian I would propably stay there but well... that's the system, innit. The most evil thing about studies here, fucks up the entire course of 5 year studies for some people. Luckily, I don't care this much about those ones so I can easily use a free year for good purposes. I feel like I need it anyway after the hell last year was.

[Guetteur]

Im also wrapping up Slaughterhouse 5 and enjoying it. I just picked it up to get more familiar with post modern stuff and to prepare for House of Leaves on the way; Im told that one is a doozy. Afterwards Ill try Gravity's Rainbow which also seems to be frustrating with reviewers, but I like a challenging read now and then.

[Rei]

[AKA*NYC]

So, this may seem like quite an inane question but I'm having a year of break before my studies in philosophy and I know many of you here are deep into it so here it is - what direction should one go after the "basics"? By basics I mean having it in school for three years and going through the major works of the schools up to and including existentialism. I'll be revising all of it before I start my studies but I'm looking for any interesting reads that are out of the schooling circle to study on the side. Not any particular movement, just books worth reading and knowing. There is a lot of it so I'm just looking for worthy recommendations, really.

oswald spengler - decline of the west

[trentk]

Czx - I could go on forever, but instead, I'll limit myself to 3 recommendations:

Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude
(and if you need some extra help / want to read sections from one of his unpublished books: Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making)
The idea which Meillassoux's project revolves around is that of the necessity of contingency: “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.”

Gabriel Catren's Outland Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism
Catren is a practicing physicist who is also a philosopher, and his project is to enfold as much of philosophy as possible within the sciences, arts, politics etc.. leaving a synthetic function for philosophy proper:
"A given composition will be called philosophicalonly if it entangles a set of abstract mediating operations provided by the different localmodes of thought in a non-trivial global section, i.e. in a concrete mediator that cannotbe completely localized in the space of abstract procedures. In other words, the phil-osophical system is a delocalized concrete machine capable of connecting and articu-lating the various local abstract machines (be they artistic, political, scientific, etc.) in anon hierarchical way so as to set in place a generalized constructivism, a general
musaic of thought. Paraphrasing Xenakis, we could say that such a ‘symphilosophy’ (F. Sch-legel) should be able to construct the most concrete musaical organon in which the disindoxicating vectors of Bach, Freud, Grothendieck, and Marx, for example, would be the singular components of a polyphonic mediator. Whereas the various local modes of thought are characterized bytheir subjective typologies (the scientist, the artist, the analyst, the militant, etc.), their regulative ideas (the True, the Good, the Beautiful, etc.), the typology of their produc-tions (works, theories, effects, interventions, etc.), their modes of discourse (the university’s discourse, the analytic discourse, etc.), and so on, philosophy’s own task is thatof diagonalizing these different local structures via operations of translation/transduction, synthesis, transposition, crossbreeding, resonance, grafting, connection,
and counterpoint. It is onlythrough this systematic transversality that it will become possible to produce mutantforms of ‘spirit’, inject new plugs into the (immanent) real, generate hybrid corporealsupports, project new infinite tasks, and evaluate, reactivate, and constellate the inher-ited regulative ideas. More importantly, such a philosophical diagonalization allows us to insert the sheaves of scientific, artistic, and political abstract perspectives into aconcrete unfolding ‘vision’ of the real."

Lastly, you could browse this site and explore whatever piques your interest:

http://www.urbanomic.com/publications.php

[Czx]

Thanks guys, appreciated!

[Philipppp]

Lieh Tzû tells us:

No man lives more than a hundred years, and not one in a thousand that long. And even that one spends half his life as a helpless child or a dim-witted dotard; of the time that remains, half is spent in sleep, or wasted during the day. In what is left he is plagued by pain, sickness, sorrow, bitterness, doubts, losses, worry, and fear. In ten years and more there is hardly an hour in which he can feel at peace with himself and the world, without being gnawed by anxiety.

Do we live for the sake of being cowed into submission by the fear of the law and its penalties, now spurred to frenzied action by promise of a reward or fame? Never for a moment do we taste the heavy wine of freedom. We are as truly imprisoned as if we lay at the bottom of a dungeon, heaped with chains. In life all creatures are different, but in death they are all the same. They are just rotten bones. And rotten bones are all alike; who can distinguish them? So let us make the most of these moments of life that are ours. We have no time to be concerned with what comes after death.

[kompressorkev]

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

"On every new thing there already lies the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark. Knowledge of that descent in to the dark, for Browne, is inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection, when, as in a theatre, the last revolutions are ended and the actors appear once more on stage, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece. As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life. To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best men have gone without a trace?...It is astounding, he says, how long these thin-walled clay urns remained intact a yard underground, while the sword and ploughshare passed above them and great buildings, palaces and cloud-high towers crumbled and collapsed. The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog's grass wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman...And since the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature, Brown scrutinizes that which escaped annihilation for any sign of the mysterious capacity for transmigration he has so often observed in caterpillars and moths. The purple piece of silk he refers to, then, in the urn of Patroclus - what does it mean?

[Czx]

That's true. We read a good few of Plato's dialogues in the class but I forgot to pick up the rest of them. Will definitely do that now. Same goes for the Meditations, as if I remember well, we only touched upon them vaguely. Thanks.