Philosophy books?

[lovejuice]

Here and Now spring from perception, but when we perceive, we are already in a state of mind; the perception appears in consciousness already within the context of our concepts, sense of Self and Otherness, etc. The uncanny ruptures the cohesion of this context, but that does indeed bring us back to whether the movement is temporal or atemporal. Do we perceive something, try to fit it within our expectations of reality, and fail, or is the uncanny thing given to us within those expectations, leading to a manifold of perception containing within itself an incongruity?

btw, where did you get all these uncanny stuffs? are they in later parts of the book? i am planning on doing a research on surrealism and thai comics, and i think that might be useful.

[Melville]

btw, where did you get all these uncanny stuffs? are they in later parts of the book? i am planning on doing a research on surrealism and thai comics, and i think that might be useful.

It's inspired by Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics.

EDIT: but my description of the Here and Now in terms of a trace, and the relation of that to the uncanny, is to the best of my knowledge, my own idea. Of course, it's presumably been analyzed as such before, but not by anybody I've read (I think).

[lovejuice]

Observation of Nature (AA.A.a) in PHENOMENOLOGY is freaking tough! I read the chapter over and over along with its accompanied text, and very little gets into my head.

I also have this nagging feeling it's not that good or that central. bias on my part, no doubt.

Btw, Melville, I assume you read the version with Finlay's accompanied text. What do you think of it? There are certains paragraphes I feel like he takes too much liberty with Hegel's. I still can't survive this book without them though.

[lovejuice]

about to finish REASON, guess i agree with Marx afterall. Hegel really needs to be put right back on his feet.

[Melville]

Btw, Melville, I assume you read the version with Finlay's accompanied text. What do you think of it? There are certains paragraphes I feel like he takes too much liberty with Hegel's. I still can't survive this book without them though.

Yeah, the endnotes are a mixed bag. I didn't use them a lot. I found some of the notes just as obscure as the text, some too simplistic. Must be a damn hard job to try to give a full explanation of what Hegel is saying without simply restating it or oversimplifying it.

about to finish REASON, guess i agree with Marx afterall. Hegel really needs to be put right back on his feet.

25 pages further than I ever got. I'll have to review these sections when I start on the later ones.

[endingcredits]

My advice would be to start with Plato. If you want to understand much of what has been written, then you will have to understand Plato. Aside from that, I would recommend picking up some logic if you haven't already done so. If you're a masochist and want to plunge into Hegel, Fichte comes to mind as a bridge to his ideas. Hegel's use of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis was "borrowed" from Fichte. If existentialism interests you, then Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are good place to start, as their ideas paved the way for Heidegger and Sartre.

[lovejuice]

My advice would be to start with Plato.

which book specifically? i've never read any greek, I am ashamed to say. (except Aristotle on Meteologie.)

[endingcredits]

which book specifically? i've never read any greek, I am ashamed to say. (except Aristotle on Meteologie.)

The Apology, The Republic, or Parmenides would be my recommendations. You can read all three in a day's time if you wish, as they are short. Apology and Republic exemplify Early and Middle Platonic thought, respectively. Parmenides mostly deals with the ubiquitous "forms".

EDIT:
The whole library of plato can be found here :
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/

[Qrazy]

The Apology, The Republic, or Parmenides would be my recommendations. You can read all three in a day's time if you wish, as they are short. Apology and Republic exemplify Early and Middle Platonic thought, respectively. Parmenides mostly deals with the ubiquitous "forms".

EDIT:
The whole library of plato can be found here :
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/

The Republic isn't short dude.

The Meno and Phaedo are fairly standard short starting places also.

[endingcredits]

The Republic isn't short dude.

OK... then perhaps two days is more accurate.

[lovejuice]

OK... then perhaps two days is more accurate.

I bow to you, sir.

[lovejuice]

whoa! this zizek guy is brilliant.

[endingcredits]

whoa! this zizek guy is brilliant.

Which book of his are you reading? I read On Belief a few years back and it was pretty stale. Never went back for more.

[lovejuice]

Which book of his are you reading? I read On Belief a few years back and it was pretty stale. Never went back for more.

I'm reading his first the sublime object of ideology. I find it wonderful and topical to what's happening right now in my country. Two years ago I read the metastases of enjoyment, but back then a lot of it go over my head.

[Philosophe_rouge]

Just started Foucault's Madness & Civilization, interesting so far.

[SirNewt]

Not as cerebral but I highly recommend "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig.

PS also the book that inspired that book's title "Zen and the Art of Archery".

[lovejuice]

every year I plan to achieve one heroism to be forever sung by my children. last year was the rubik. this year is phenomenology of spirit!

[lovejuice]

Sein und Zeit is surprisingly easy to chew. Heidegger, if he were alive, would surely be a powerpoint master. The book is well-structured. The introduction neatly outlines the main idea, and every section and sub-section serve well to progress the idea and argument forward.

[B-side]

So I kinda randomly dove into Kierkegaard after hearing about a close friend's battle with ethical structure and her subsequent desire to revert back to Christianity, I'm reading The Sickness Unto Death right now, and doing plenty of complimentary reading. I'm not certain I'll stick with him long since I find the general premise of being in constant despair simply because you lack a relationship with God to be specious at best. Granted, I acknowledge he often speaks from the point of view of his ultra-religious pseudonym whom he acknowledges is better than him in that regard, I still find it a bit hard to swallow, even just as pure literature.

[Melville]

I'm reading The Sickness Unto Death right now, and doing plenty of complimentary reading. I'm not certain I'll stick with him long since I find the general premise of being in constant despair simply because you lack a relationship with God to be specious at best.

Given your lack of connection to religious thoughts, I wouldn't have recommended that for a first foray into Kierkegaard. Books like Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, and Repetition are a lot more interesting on purely structural and literary levels. But I think Sickness Unto Death can be read without dwelling on the religious aspects. The central premise is that despair is a dislocation of the relation of oneself to oneself, and his exploration of that premise has great phenomenological value—that is, it gives valuable descriptions of how things are, our actual experience of states of human existence. He relates those descriptions to God, but you can often (though not always) simply excise such a relation from his descriptions or translate God into something more general. As with many of his other works (Concept of Anxiety springs to mind), he lays a groundwork for later, more fleshed out existential descriptions by Sartre and others, which ditched the religious aspect but kept many of the core concepts.

[B-side]

Given your lack of connection to religious thoughts, I wouldn't have recommended that for a first foray into Kierkegaard. Books like Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, and Repetition are a lot more interesting on purely structural and literary levels. But I think Sickness Unto Death can be read without dwelling on the religious aspects. The central premise is that despair is a dislocation of the relation of oneself to oneself, and his exploration of that premise has great phenomenological value—that is, it gives valuable descriptions of how things are, our actual experience of states of human existence. He relates those descriptions to God, but you can often (though not always) simply excise such a relation from his descriptions or translate God into something more general. As with many of his other works (Concept of Anxiety springs to mind), he lays a groundwork for later, more fleshed out existential descriptions by Sartre and others, which ditched the religious aspect but kept many of the core concepts.

I'll definitely check those out, then. I spent a few hours yesterday researching the concepts you told me to familiarize myself with, like, two years ago.:P I need to do more reading on Plato's Theory of Forms -- as well as in the original text -- since I don't feel like I can speak about it knowingly, if that makes sense.

[B-side]

Hegelianism promised to make absolute knowledge available by virtue of a science of logic. Anyone with the capacity to follow the dialectical progression of the purportedly transparent concepts of Hegel's logic would have access to the mind of God (which for Hegel was equivalent to the logical structure of the universe). Kierkegaard thought this to be the hubristic attempt to build a new tower of Babel, or a scala paradisi — a dialectical ladder by which humans can climb with ease up to heaven. Kierkegaard's strategy was to invert this dialectic by seeking to make everything more difficult. Instead of seeing scientific knowledge as the means of human redemption, he regarded it as the greatest obstacle to redemption. Instead of seeking to give people more knowledge he sought to take away what passed for knowledge. Instead of seeking to make God and Christian faith perfectly intelligible he sought to emphasize the absolute transcendence by God of all human categories. Instead of setting himself up as a religious authority, Kierkegaard used a vast array of textual devices to undermine his authority as an author and to place responsibility for the existential significance to be derived from his texts squarely on the reader.

See, this sounds like a much more interesting Kierkegaard than the one I was exposed to. Then again, these things likely come to one after reading more than a dozen pages of one of his books.

[B-side]

The figure of the aesthete in the first volume of Either-Or is an ironic portrayal of German romanticism, but it also draws on medieval characters as diverse as Don Juan, Ahasverus (the wandering Jew), and Faust. It finds its most sophisticated form in the author of “The Seducer's Diary”, the final section of Either-Or. Johannes the seducer is a reflective aesthete, who gains sensuous delight not so much from the act of seduction but from engineering the possibility of seduction. His real aim is the manipulation of people and situations in ways which generate interesting reflections in his own voyeuristic mind. The aesthetic perspective transforms quotidian dullness into a richly poetic world by whatever means it can. Sometimes the reflective aesthete will inject interest into a book by reading only the last third, or into a conversation by provoking a bore into an apoplectic fit so that he can see a bead of sweat form between the bore's eyes and run down his nose. That is, the aesthete uses artifice, arbitrariness, irony, and wilful imagination to recreate the world in his own image. The prime motivation for the aesthete is the transformation of the boring into the interesting.

Holy shit, this sounds fantastic. And fits so much of the cinema I enjoy.