What philosophy books are you reading?

[ur-monkey]

Chuchichastli wrote:

This is a big favourite of mine. Like the Chronicles, it has paradox at it's heart, and I just love a good paradox!

The Tao Te Ching never ceases to amaze me, and I return to it often. No matter what insights I glean from life due to my own experiences, every time I read it it seems to present me with new depths and new things to think deeply about.

Yeah, man!



Verse 2:

When all the world knows beauty as beauty,
There is ugliness.
When they know good as good,
Then there is evil.

In this way -
Existance and nonexistence produce each other
Difficult and easy complete each other
Long and short contrast each other
High and low attract each other
Pitch and tone harmonise each other
Future and past follow each other.

Therefore, Evolved Individuals
Hold their position without effort,
Practice their philosophy without words,
Are a part of All Things and overlook nothing.
They produce but do not possess,
Act without expectation,
Succeed without taking credit.

Since, indeed, they take no credit
It remains with them.

Yoda, eat your heart out! [/quote]

[Chuchichastli]

Nice!

If I had a criticism about this stuff, though, is that it's easy to pass off all these paradoxes & contradictions as a convenient philosophical cop out. I mean - how can you argue with a viewpoint that claims both a point of view AND its opposite?

Clever bugger, that Lao Tse.

[rusmeister]

Currently reading everything I can get by G.K. Chesterton and will be for the next two years (he was unbelievably prolific!). The man was a master of the eye of the paradox!

His book "The Everlasting Man" turned a younger C.S. Lewis off to atheism. His works are prophetic - it's hard to believe they were written a hundred years ago. He also seriously busts George Bernard Shaw's chops.

[earthbrah]

I started reading Die Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft by Kant about ten years ago, and after around twenty pages about the difference between a priori and a posteriori, I too wanted to just kill myself, or at least blast the book to bits.

The most profound piece of philosophy I've ever read was PD Ouspensky's Tertium Organum. One of the most unsung philosophers of all time, this work of his is astounding for the conclusions it draws, if not for the analogies it uses to draw them.

But currently I'm reading Terrence McKenna's The Invisible Landscape. Haven't gotten to any mindblowing parts yet, but if two of his other books (True Hallucinations and Food of the Gods) are any indication, then I'm in for an awesome ride.

[Linna Heartbooger]

I started reading Die Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft by Kant about ten years ago, and after around twenty pages about the difference between a priori and a posteriori, I too wanted to just kill myself, or at least blast the book to bits.

How dare you mention that name! And awaken all sorts of vile angsts within me!

From what little I know of Kant, I detest him.

Oddly, I seem to remember reading some of his stuff for a class 8 yrs ago; and at the time, he seemed relatively innocuous to me. O what a blind and foolish child I was!

Oh, and welcome to The Close, earthbrah!

[Avatar]

Kant wasn't actively harmful, just incredibly dense. I'm sure I've complained before about his impenatrability. A failing I've often encountered in philosophical writing...poor buggers don't know the simplest rules about sentence length and structure, or how to engage a reader.

--A

[Linna Heartbooger]

Kant wasn't actively harmful, just incredibly dense.

I disagree; from my perspective, his work was actively harmful. His philosophy, sad to say, DID have an impact that reverberated into many people's worldviews and assumptions.

Most of the affected people probably don't even know they have been affected. I'm sure I have been indirectly affected myself.

I'm sure I've complained before about his impenatrability. A failing I've often encountered in philosophical writing...poor buggers don't know the simplest rules about sentence length and structure, or how to engage a reader.

Heh, a shame if most philosophers have this problem. Because philosophy is intended to be useful. (I think.)

[Avatar]

Oh, it's definitely more practical than its given credit for.

--A

[earthbrah]

Avatar wrote:

A failing I've often encountered in philosophical writing...poor buggers don't know the simplest rules about sentence length and structure, or how to engage a reader.

I'd have to generally agree with that statement. At the same time, many people who read philosophy read it because they are interested enough in the material that they are willing to hack through some dense overgrowth of words.

This is another reason why I like Ouspensky. The guy was a journalist, and knew how to write. While incredibly deep and thought provoking, his work is by no means impenetrable.

[Lord Mhoram]

Lina Heartlistener,

Would you elaborate on Kant's harmfulness? I'm not quite sure I'm following what you mean.

[rusmeister]

Kant wasn't actively harmful, just incredibly dense.

I disagree; from my perspective, his work was actively harmful. His philosophy, sad to say, DID have an impact that reverberated into many people's worldviews and assumptions.

Most of the affected people probably don't even know they have been affected. I'm sure I have been indirectly affected myself.

I'm sure I've complained before about his impenatrability. A failing I've often encountered in philosophical writing...poor buggers don't know the simplest rules about sentence length and structure, or how to engage a reader.

Heh, a shame if most philosophers have this problem. Because philosophy is intended to be useful. (I think.)

Reps to this post.
If a philosophy can express truth, then it must have the potential to be harmful. If it contains falsehood, then it is harmful. Most philosophies and religions contain at least some truth. The real question is - which one comes closest to, or hits, the bullseye?

On the usefulness/importance of philosophy:

But there are some people, nevertheless--and I am one of them-- who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.

GK Chesterton, Heretics, ch 1 www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/heretics/ch1.html

[Linna Heartbooger]

Lina Heartlistener,

Would you elaborate on Kant's harmfulness? I'm not quite sure I'm following what you mean.

I wondered if/when someone would ask for the substance behind my claims...

An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual. [According to Kant,] A benefit destroys the moral value of an action.

Now perhaps she was being a little extreme in her assessment of his philosophy. But from a little reading I did (plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#GooWilMorWorDut), I don't think she's too far off.

For example:

In Kant's terms, a good will is a will whose decisions are wholly determined by moral demands or as he often refers to this, by the Moral Law. Human beings view this Law as a constraint on their desires, and hence a will in which the Moral Law is decisive is motivated by the thought of duty.

I think that the belief that "actions performed primarily out of desire for happiness have no moral worth"... is false, numbing, deadly. (So if his writing makes you want to kill yourself, perhaps there are good reasons.)

And one of the worst things (from my POV) is that this preposterous notion of his seems to have successfully infiltrated many Christian denominations! (in spite of its blatant contradiction with the premise of every part of the Bible)

So now we have a bunch of churchgoers thinking that they aren't supposed to be enjoying themselves when they're "serving God." That's like a wife worrying that she isn't supposed to be enjoying herself when having sex with her husband because it might lessen the moral worth of doing her "duty"! What a horrible thought!

(And that's only about half of it. Heh.)

Mind you, I'm trying to get around the "Kant's writing is very dense, and he wants people to read his whole argument from cover-to-cover, not give us sound-bytes" problem by reading others' synopses of (or responses to) him. But do you think these characterizations are accurate?

[Lord Mhoram]

Lina Heartlistener,

Let me be very upfront before I go on: I do not consider Ayn Rand to be a serious philosopher by any means. In a philosophical discussion, I do not consider her to be a reliable citation. Especially not in a discussion of Kant. Her assertion that he was "the most evil man in mankind's history" is so preposterous and beyond the normal realm of philosophical discourse, that I'm forced to dismiss everything else she says about him almost immediately. Especially when some allege that she never actually read Immanuel Kant.

That said, there's no question that Kant is not above reproach. Like any other philosopher, especially one of his enormous stature and influence, his ideas are controversial.

I myself have always taken great inspiration from Kantian ethics. For example:

Given the metaphysics of his transcendental idealism, Kant can say that the categorical imperative reveals a supersensible power of freedom in us such that we must regard ourselves as part of an intelligible world, i.e., a domain determined ultimately not by natural laws but rather by laws of reason. As such a rational being, an agent is an end in itself, i.e., something whose value is not dependent on external material ends, which are contingent and valued only as means to the end of happiness - which is itself only a conditional value.

I view Kantian ethics as he did: an effort to create a "systematic union of different rational beings through common laws" (his words). I think that is a worthy goal.

"actions performed primarily out of desire for happiness have no moral worth"

I'm not sure if this is an accurate characterization. (What source does it come from?) Firstly, the notion of having "no moral worth" is not so much that the action is immoral as amoral; I do not see this as "evil." Secondly, as I understood it, Kant said that moral value is determined by the intention of the agent. A "desire for happiness" could certainly correspond to a good intention and would therefore, according to Kant, be a moral action.

In fact, Kant also says that one can follow a hypothetical imperative, in contrast with the categorical, to arrive at a "material end" (to feel happy).

(So if his writing makes you want to kill yourself, perhaps there are good reasons.)

I meant only that his prose is ridiculously hard to read, nothing more.

[Linna Heartbooger]

Let me be very upfront before I go on: I do not consider Ayn Rand to be a serious philosopher by any means. In a philosophical discussion, I do not consider her to be a reliable citation. Especially not in a discussion of Kant.

Hehe about the Ayn Rand stuff. That's fine; I don't like her either. Had no idea that she was THAT firebrand against him. I find it rather funny.

Well, I guess I was kinda hiding my real reason for disliking Kant. My real reason was that the real effect of his philosophy, over time, was to rip the spirituality and the heart out of much of Western Christianity -- and replace it with a hollow core of "duty" and "morals."

He wanted to dictate how he thought "Christianity" should be carried out - but from the outside. To get the ignorant masses to have good moral principles. And he was wrong. Yet somewhat successful in his plan.

Admittedly, Christians shoot themselves in the foot alot too. (It would have been Christians or leaders of Christian organizations who were reading about and applying Kant's ideas.) But I can still consider that Kant's intentions and work caused terribly harmful effects.

That said, I really don't feel like reading the guy - he's probably rather subtle (and insidious *cough*). I may or may not respond to the rest of your post - but thanks for your defense of your views on the subject.

[rusmeister]

Well, I guess I was kinda hiding my real reason for disliking Kant. My real reason was that the real effect of his philosophy, over time, was to rip the spirituality and the heart out of much of Western Christianity -- and replace it with a hollow core of "duty" and "morals."

He wanted to dictate how he thought "Christianity" should be carried out - but from the outside. To get the ignorant masses to have good moral principles. And he was wrong. Yet somewhat successful in his plan.

Admittedly, Christians shoot themselves in the foot alot too. (It would have been Christians or leaders of Christian organizations who were reading about and applying Kant's ideas.) But I can still consider that Kant's intentions and work caused terribly harmful effects.

Agreed. (No surprise there.)

I'd like to address the reason "Christians shoot themselves in the foot", but that's a separate thread. Suffice to say that it is a natural fruit of the Reformation and the development of the idea generally called 'sola scriptura' (the individual as the authority that interprets Scripture and the Faith). Certainly a unity of faith that denied that individual authority would've stopped Kant cold (he would not have been accepted as authoritative from the get-go). But that would spin off in a whole 'nuther direction.

Obviously, Kant's ideas influenced the founding fathers and the formation of America - it was probably George Washington who most openly rejected his conclusions. For me, his statement in his farewell address - that is generally deliberately excised from public school texts - addressing the divorce of religion and morality is a great truth that has been largely censored - so that Washington be seen only as another secular figure.

Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

www.bartleby.com/43/24.html

Washington's got my vote.

[Vader]

The university I studdied philosophy here in Germany was at that time very much focused on idealistic philosophy of Hegel and his dialectics - for me it was like finding a thread leading from Parmenides of Elea, over Plato and Aristotele to Plotin, Augustinus and Thomas of Aquins to Descartes, Locke and Kant and finally to Hegel. Not regarding these different thinkers as "just" contradicting each other and regarding philosophy as an arbitrary colection of opinions, I learned to see in as a dialectical process that had to unfold itself the way it did.

I adore Kant. The way he solved the antinomy of rationalism and empircism was truly ingenios. Also his Critique of practical reason was groundbreaking. If Kant affected people with his Categorical Imperative, the better.

Of course it's hard to read and understand, but in his defense I'd like to point out that he wrote the books in German and for his kind of philosophy the Germasn language is more suitable in terms of rather clear and explicit terms. The English language has advantages in other areas (literature, for example) but looking through English Kant or Hegel translations I noticed the difference and can understand a lot of problems non native Germans have with the books. (Not that all native speakers of German understand Kant, of course.)

[Avatar]

Mmm, quite a technical language, although it does have its gems, like "zeitgeist."

I speak a little, conversationally anyway...just what I managed to keep from 2 years of it at school. Not enough to read Kant, that's for sure, although germanic languages are (relatively) easy for me since Afrikaans is one of our (11) official languages, and it shares those roots.

--A

[Vader]

Mmm, quite a technical language, although it does have its gems, like "zeitgeist."

I speak a little, conversationally anyway...just what I managed to keep from 2 years of it at school. Not enough to read Kant, that's for sure, although germanic languages are (relatively) easy for me since Afrikaans is one of our (11) official languages, and it shares those roots.

--A

Afrikaans is pretty much Dutch. The Dutch are actually Germans who refused to develop their language furthermore at the end of the Middle Ages. Some would say Dutch isn't language at all but some sort of throat infection :p

Some more German words I saw being used in English:

Weltschmerz
Blitzkrieg
Kindergarten

[Avatar]

Gestalt.

Yes, very similar to Dutch, I can read, understand and get along in both Dutch and Flemish, although they are both grammatically more complicated than Afrikaans, which is perhaps one of the most modern operational languages in the world. (It only became a language in 1928.) Despite it's relative apparent simplicity, it's an extremely versatile language which I have quite an appreciation for.

--A

[Vraith]

Some more German words I saw being used in English:

Weltschmerz
Blitzkrieg
Kindergarten

Weltenschahung, Dachshund (when I hear them said aloud, both make me say: Gesundheit!)
Weiner
Schmertzgehuven...no wait..that was the song and dance by Swedish supergroup BAAB.