Raymond Ruyer - Neofinalism
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.

I keep trying to read Ethics, Sophistry, and the Alternate Universe on my holidays, but something always gets in the way.

God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion.

Picked up a Skeptic magazine. Interesting read. A lot of pretty well written anti-PoMo articles and good articles on PC issues. I had never run across this magazine before. I suppose the journal is atheistic, so I can't buy into it all, but overall good (even had an anti-Cartesian dualism article that I endured).

Finished The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus
&
The Trial, Kafka

Starting Writing and Difference, Derrida, translation by Alan Bass

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry.

Let me know how this is, it's been siting in my Amazon cart for a while.

Will do!

I've read the first two chapters of that Scarry book (out of four) and they - along with Alphonso Lingis's "Carrion Body, Carrion Utterance" - set me permanently against the use of torture. It's some of the most powerful phenomenology I've ever read.

So far I have to agree, and I'm only through the introduction. Scarry has a powerful talent for writing. I'm excited for this one.

Recently finished:

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!)

The Fall Into Time by E.M. Cioran (Rereading)
Seibo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Krasznahorkai is arguably one of the most important living writers.

On Suicide - A Discourse on Voluntary Death by Jean Amery.

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 - Naturalism and Ontology
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.

The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith

An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent by John Hick

Hegel's

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion vol.1

Dark Money by Jane Mayer
The Trouble With Being Born by Cioran (rereading)

Lilith - George MacDonald

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.

Wilfrid Sellars - Science, Perception, and Reality — StreetlightX

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:

Just ordered The Clock Repair Primer: The Beginner's Handbook by Phillip E. Balcomb. I got my grandfather's old mechanical time clock he used at his store (not to be confused with a grandfather's clock) and have developed this interest in clock repair. Anyone here familiar with that? It seems like an old man sort of thing to do to tinker around with clocks, but I've got this fascination now.

I left my Sellars book at a work function :cry: Just started to reread Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind too :broken:

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.

The answer is obvious!:

A Hero Born by Jin Yong
Drawn and Quartered by Cioran (rereading)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Cynical_Reason


pretty great so far...

A Voyage To Arcturus - David Lindsay

Proto-modern-fantasy at it's finest.

Noah Moss Brender - The Meaning of Life: A Merleau-Pontian Investigation of How Living Bodies Make Sense [link]
Matija Jelača - 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

What have I been reading... The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit; Designing Detroit: Wirt Rowland the rise of Modern American Architecture; Once a Great City: A Detroit Story; Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World; Staying Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.

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.

Work gets busier, no headspace left to read. Still working through Debt by David Graeber.

The Divided Self (An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness) by R. D. Laing.

"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."