One could approach the question from a negative side. The different ways to understand truth as hidden collide with each other. Put this way, our ignorance can be ameliorated to varying degrees by qualifying how different kinds of information can be accepted as points of departure.

In the analogy of the Cave, there are no reports of smart people watering their garden under the true sun. The enlightened one stumbles back to the others with dazzled eyes and a troubled mind.

The distance between Hume and Kant was a disagreement upon how helpless they were in the face of how obscure causality is for the observer. Kant basically agreed with Hume but said it couldn't hurt to keep the hands on wheel rather than abandoning the enterprise to play backgammon.

I could go on but why? I am not proving a truth by making these observations.

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
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.

Nietzsche did not identify the role of the state as you have. Duty to a system of order is separated from individual conscience.
The psychology of the ego in his work is entangled with the idea of eternal recurrence. As an ethical requirement, you are to live your life as something you are willing to repeat over and over.
In regards to playing the arrogant writer, he challenged people to kick his butt in regards to what he put forward.
The best way to accept him is to oppose him. He said that himself.

I am not sure about what you are pointing to in regards to the politics of the reader.
The observation I made does draw from other Marx writings than Capital. I will try to pull together statements that present that.
I am a working person who will do that when I can.
There is something curious about your approach that I won't give up on.

In Marx's Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy (1844), the matter of being alienated by the objective world is examined side by side with theology. It is hard to decide where to jump into this text but the following points to the distinctions made in my remark. Marx claims Hegel is saying:

"Man, who has realized that in law, politics, etc, he leads an alienated life, leads his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, self-confirmation in contradiction with itself and with the knowledge and the nature of the object is therefore true knowledge and true life.

Therefore there can no longer be any question about a compromise on Hegel's part with religion, the state, etc., since this untruth is the untruth of his principle.

If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. Thus I know that the self-consciousness which belongs to the essence of my own self is not confirmed in religion but in the destruction and supersession of religion.

In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of true being through the negation of apparent being. It is the confirmation of apparent being or self-estranged being residing outside man and independent of him and its transformation into the subject.

The act of superseding therefore plays a special role in which negation and preservation (affirmation) are brought together.

Thus, for example, in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, private right superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals family, family superseded equals civil society, civil society superseded equals state and state superseded equals world history. In reality private right, morality, family, civil society, state, etc.,continue to exist, but have become moments and modes of human existence which are meaningless in isolation but which mutually dissolve and engender one another. They are moments of movement." — Marx, edited by John Raines

The loose inflated bladder in this scrum of an essay is how discussions of Nature are involved with accepting one narrative of what is happening over other narratives. Somehow, the discussion of the idea of loving the neighbor as oneself got entangled with seeing the world as a cold blue ball.

When reading the passages of Marx where he is describing a good life for a person, it reminds me a lot of what getting to have a bourgeoisie lifestyle might provide, if such self fulfillment is the desire of the said bourgeois.
This observation combined with Marx's antipathy regarding unions suggests to me that he separated the means to get certain benefits from the idea that what was desired was negated in the process of reaching for it.

A question that arose in that thread, that concerns me is why aren't the majority of Abrahamic religions more left-leaning rather than being conservative in nature? — Wallows

The emphasis upon what happens to an individual soul became equivalent to the idea of property as used in various forms of common law and various theories of natural right.
Hegel based his idea of Rights upon this notion. Marx used Hegel's description to try and reverse the logic of it.
Maybe neither thinker understood what is involved with the idea.

The remarks the Professor makes regarding discipline and order of training in Epictetus are well done.
I wonder how he looks at Marcus Aurelius citing his skills as inheritances of different kinds, encounters and conditions that make a person able to do things.
Or does he consider that discussion as outside of the circle of the "Stoas"?

One thing to note about universals expressed within the Plato writings; There are many different views about what participating in the expression of a form is like. The interest in the matter was not just about validating a set of presuppositions but an investigation of what what was going on.

I recognize that you are working toward some idea of creativity that provides things and services people want because people understand they are good things and services.

My understanding of what Marx is calling the mysterious quality of what is produced does not come from stuff being put on a market but from producers of things being commodities in their own right. The social relationships being referred to in the text of Marx is fashioned to put personal property in the context of who gets to own what. If many people agree to sell the ownership of their products to others on the basis of their effort in time and no other criteria, then the connection between maker and product becomes something different than how we talk about who owns this piece of land or that share of bacon.

You had said that the fetish element was a result of commodities being assigned an exchange value or a price. I don't understand how to see that remark as a relationship in the text of Marx.

I accept that others may read those texts differently, and that perhaps I am missing something essential, but I see the existence of grief, anger, and sorrow as a given in the responses. The appeal to be "rational" is not a negation but a negotiation. Sort of like the deal Apollo cut with the Furies.

Grief is a feeling and an act. I don't look at the teaching as a betrayal of my feeling. But I understand how it can be taken that way.
These are deeply personal things to consider. My interest in the teachings is not to make it other than that.

But I was challenging your use of a future tense of this "species". How would one separate the criticism he has for species and "types" of all kinds from his own expressions?
To not ask this question would suggest he did not hear his own contradictions as he put them forward.
He seems like a pretty smart guy who would dodge that bullet.

Perhaps you could provide an example of what you militate against.
A lot of bad things happen to most people, including their impending demise. For myself, I like the Manual quality of Epictetus: Do this when things go South.

I agree that the use of universals in the mode of seeing creation as "intelligible" existences having relationships with each other is far enough away from the focus of concepts as what humans "do" that the latter is not in a position to opine upon the former.
Conversely, however, the limit works the other way. Both sides will never lose their Home games.
Something is missing from both sides.

Where, in Nietzsche, do you read that going "beyond Man" is the creation of a new species?
He speaks of new philosophers. He expresses contempt for humanism for the sake of humanism.
How one generation would pass that on to another is one of the biggest questions he approaches.
He doesn't help the reader in this regard to find their bearings but his clear contempt for nationalism might be a clue.

Personally I see this as no more than a conflict between wanting to be part of a group and wanting to be different/unique. — I like sushi

The fetish is not the result of a monetary value being attached to material resources. Perhaps it is time in this discussion to refer directly to what Marx says. In Capital 1, Section 4 the element of the fetish is presented as a social relationship being masked by a material one. The most succinct summation being:

"This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them."

Now, Capital is an ambitious argument, tying the different ways that exchange value relates directly to other kinds. But the "materialism" being argued for here is not a substitution for what gets hidden by "individuals" being defined by what they want to buy. Individuals wanting things for themselves is a key element in the "peculiarity" being considered.

That is a good question. My impression is that Plato was not invested in giving a clear answer. All the different discussions of perception and what different parts of souls were up to are unified in their purpose to make it a complex matter to consider but not to buttress a single theory of what it was all about. I think one is on firmer ground to identify what was being opposed by all the different observations.
There are centuries of Platonists arguing about this sort of thing. Jump in wherever you like.

I disagree with the critique because it simply misrepresents what those philosophers said.
So, in that regard, it has little merit.
As a starting point to discuss what is missing from said thinkers, it offers possibilities. But starting with an incorrect perception kills my groove.

Well, your original OP challenged the reader with the idea that "Greek" thinkers (many of whom disagreed with each other strongly) did not understand that parts of living things had their own processes apart from whatever made whole organisms operate. So on that point. my point has been amply made. Many of the "Greeks" talked about it precisely upon this criteria.
As to what Aristotle concludes regarding the "soul" as a perceiver, the work starts as distinguishing dead stuff from alive stuff on the basis that living things have to relate to other beings whereas dead stuff doesn't care what is beyond themselves.

What is a body?

When you get to Aristotle's On the Soul, you will note that each kind of sensation that leads to perception is related to a particular exchange. Touch is felt as touch through whatever allows us to sense tangible things that way. Aristotle calls it the primary sense of mobile life forms.
Hearing is a process where sounds being made are heard by the individual as sounds being made.The ears are involved. But something other than the obvious instrument turns these feelings into information about what is happening.
Sight is something going on with the eyes. How that turns into perception of the visible is recognized as a process of its own.
Each of the senses has its own processes in addition to the world of convergence that allows the perceiver to recognize what is there before them in the moment of being alive with other things.

Bodies can be broken down into parts, and when seen in this way, we can imagine one part of the body moving another part (or parts) of the body. Plato and many of the Greek philosophers did not seem to consider this as a viable option." — Walter B

This is not correct. Read Plato's Parmenides and then read Aristotle's On the Soul. The recognition that different parts were listening to their own drummer is one of the driving forces of Greek thought.
That all these discordant elements would agree to be a part of something else is the issue.

If I understand the concept correctly wouldn’t custom made products decrease, to some degree, Commodity Fetishism? — I like sushi

This is a good question. It does, however, get entangled with the general conditions that Marx saw the formation of individual aesthetics. The problem as drafted by Marx was not that individual desires were substituted for something not-individual but that what an individual wants is shaped by systems of exchange.
So, the bourgeoisie are both the exemplars for getting just what they fancy and people cut off from their true natures who are not listening to what they actually want.
As the idea has played out over the decades since it kicked off, how these factors play a part with each other gets more complicated. Are people able to become less alienated despite all the elements that would encourage them to stay within the lines? Do market conditions ever permit degrees of freedom to create others?
When one gets beyond asking for an easy answer, there are a lot of thorny problems.

Yes, it is seems absurd to argue that my existence is separated from whatever situation that my parents underwent to "have" me.
But that is how it feels for me to be me. I landed on your shore. Or maybe my own.
I don't object to the idea that procreation is not a right per se. But the idea that is something we can point to as a thing bothers me. It makes it sound like we understand more than what I have seen demonstrated.

One way to look at the subject is to consider the difficulties of being a civic servant within any of environments proposed.
What a job to have.

Fair enough.
One way to put it is how Hegel tried to frame how "people" were caught up in some kind of design regarding roles in a process.
The problem there is how to separate that kind of observation from others who would say how the world is.
Sure, my questions are concerned with those questions.
But taking a point of view that sees those things together is exactly what other people are not inclined to do.

My philosophy is only a set of concerns I am pretty sure I should be having.
There is an arbitrary quality to philosophical problems. If a person doesn't invest in them, they have no value.
So, it is odd to argue about a lot of stuff because the only thing thing that would make a certain line of inquiry interesting is if you are interested by it. It seems to me that many arguments about what is true or not are also appeals to interest people in a a problem.
Putting it that way, it might sound like I am proposing something that avoids that confusion.
I haven't gotten that far.

If the reason to remove the topic is because not enough people can form a consensus as to what it is, doesn't that same limit restrict the formulation of any plan to ban it?

I am heartened to see the third one mentioned, the Critique of Judgement brought into view.

The matter of what is peculiarly "continental" seems deeply connected to to whatever getting beyond the Scholastics was about. The history of philosophy is very interesting and I wished I had a better understanding that reading everything would probably help give me. Without that super scholarship, I am left with just the narratives that set up each bit of explanation each is willing to provide.

Explaining the course of philosophy as a product is an odd practice. It always comes off as an excuse not to do something.

I take your point regarding what is being argued versus my reaction to it.
I don't own my progeny. My parents tried to make me be a certain way but I never thought they were responsible for my existence.
More precisely to your point, how does being born have to do with your parents at all?

The concept of the soul is integral to the judeo christian framework. It is the focal point for responsibility and human personhood. — dazed

You may have it precisely wrong.
The decisions both of those traditions (which are not each "one" set of traditions in either case) put so much emphasis upon are not necessary outcomes after accepting a set of conditions but come down to what a person can do in a place and time.

I will start by admitting I have trouble perceiving the "anti-natalism" argument as a thing. I understand zero population growth strategies as a means to control our fate as a species so that we avoid that nasty catastrophe part of the movie where we all die.
But I don't understand the effort to assign having progeny to one personal end or another. As a parent, the process has been a lesson on which end of the stick I inhabit.
I think taking the species point of view as a means of averting disaster has a better chance of being developed than convincing particular people they want stupid things.

I suggested starting with a particular book in light of the OP reaction to reading another. I am not suggesting that random selection of order is worthy in itself.
On the other hand, the guy did not write millions of words. When you get close to reading most of them,
how they become related to each other can follow many different lines of inquiry.

I get the Kantian point of view of seeing the world as a construction of some agency.
The difference of perspective you advocate for is not just about the history of philosophy but involves what being empirical requires.
I think you are correct about the change of language between the past and the present.
But perhaps neither structure is adequate for the needs of the time.

Are there any works out there exclusively on this subject? — Gregory

Exclusivity is a lot to ask for. Zhuangzi talked about different ways to refer to nothing. The distinctions made there are not arguments for what is or is not happening but a guide to how each expression has a situation that is meant to be conveyed.
Our different descriptions set against the background of what we cannot describe.

I don't mean to disparage any of his works. Suggesting one order of reading over another won't matter after you have read them all.

I would suggest not looking at whatever happened for you or not in the education world as a measure of your situation.
That is not to say it does not matter. Every opportunity or its absence matters in some sense.
But you seem quick to blame yourself for the results of judgements beyond your power.
If things get better, it won't be from abasing oneself to unknown factors.
You have a good ear for a lot of words. Go with that.

Well said.