The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger. Great blend of philosophy and empirical science.

Jeffrey Bell - The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructuralism
Jeffrey Bell - Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference

@John Thanks! Its just a matter of making time - it can be done, it you love it enough :) (sorry for the late reply!).

Hey, no probs :) happy reading!

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science

Peter Sloterdijk - Globes (Spheres vol. 2). The spheres trilogy is continuing to blow me away. Sloterdijk is rapidly becoming one of my top 3 favorite thinkers. Also listening to Dennet's Consciousness Explained during my morning commute just bc I was curious to see if it was as bad as I'd heard (it is).

Sloterdijk is rapidly becoming one of my top 3 favorite thinkers. — csalisbury

Who are the other two? And who is being threatened with being bumped in fourth place?

Regarding Dennett, I agree that Consciousness Explained is very bad in most of its positive explanatory aspirations. Peter Hacker eviscerates him an appendix of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. But it also contains quite a few good insights. Among my favorite "intuition pumps" from him is his discussion of the distinction (or rather pseudo-distinction) between the Orwellian and Stalinesque models of consciousness content elaboration. Another gem from Dennett is his critique of Harris' Free Will.

Dennett was Gilbert Ryle's student at Oxford. There are several mentor/pupil pairs in the history of 20th century analytic philosophy such that, reading works from the pupil, I am left to wonder how it is possible for the core insights from his/her mentor to have been watered down or misconstrued so much. Those are the pairs that puzzle me most:

Gilbert Ryle -- Daniel Dennett
John Austin -- John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars -- Paul Churchand
Peter Strawson -- Galen Strawson (father/son, in this case)
Hilary Putnam -- Jerry Fodor

Next three...

John Protevi - Political Physics: Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic
Helen Palmer - Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense
Donald Landes - Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

Regarding Dennett, I agree that Consciousness Explained is very bad in most of its positive explanatory aspirations. — Pierre-Normand

There seemed to be such hype surrounding Dennett when I read that book that I felt I must not understand it and that I was missing something. I felt vindicated when I later discovered that many felt it as unpersuasive as I did.

@StreetlightX the closest thing I ever had to a professor-mentor once told me (apropos of Deleuze & Joyce) that you devour the literature because you love it but, after a certain point, keeping up with the sheer volume of literature turns it into somethong you hate (pity my one "mentor" was so depressed.) I haven't read enough secondary literature to weigh his world-weary claim on the basis of personal experience, so I'm curious: has there come a point where the fresh vibrant vital insights come to seem sclerotic and tired?

That has been my experience. I tend to believe now that reading large amounts of secondary literature is actually positively harmful not only to your enjoyment, but to your understanding as well.

@csalisbury Heh, not really, not at this point anyway, because I still feel like I'm learning things that I hadn't known before, and that I'm still pursuing questions whose horizons are still strewn wide. I'm still hungry, basically. It helps that I read thematically too: I take up a theme, read four or five things on it, and move on to another theme, which is usually related anyway. That's why I'm happy to do so much secondary reading: my interest is in problems and their implications, and much of the reading I do is about extending insights into other fields, finding cross-fertilizations with other thinkers, ideas, and so on. I like finding resonances, building bridges, and building 'webs', as it were. I think my reading reflects that.

Just finished Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar. @Michael recommended it, and although very thick in parts (because the pages were made of sturdy cardboard), I really enjoyed it.

Just finished a book on Charlemagne.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Michael recommended it, and although very thick in parts (because the pages were made of sturdy cardboard), I really enjoyed it. — Hanover

If you liked The Very Hungry Caterpillar you'll love it's sequel, The Very Busy Bee.

Read Jegor Gaidar's "Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia".

Bought it today and finished it today. Very good read. Clear story on how actually the Soviet Union went down. What is good that it comes from somebody who did see the collapse of the Soviet Union from halls of power in Kremlin, yet isn't apologetic and compares the events to other instances when autocratic rules have crumbled.

One interesting issue (among many)

- Just how dangerous the collapse of the Soviet Union was. The threat of Civil war like in Yugoslavia was real. According to Gaidar, just how dangerous this path would be was something that the leaders of the new states understood when four states had nuclear weapons. The ICBMs might be controlled by Moscow, but the tactical nukes and bomber dropped nuclear bombs/missiles could be used by those who had them. Let's remember that Ukraine and Kazakhstan had far more nuclear weapons than countries like the UK, France or Israel. This made all the new leaders to embrace a peaceful solution. Hence boundary disputes weren't put on the table. (And there was already the example of Nagorno-Karabach, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaidzan). In fact, now we can see that once this threat was erased (by Ukraine and Kazakhstan giving up their nukes), indeed war has broken out. And Putin can talk that the state of Kazakhstan is "artificial". Gaidar, who died in 2009, naturally didn't see this.

The Dialogic Imagination - Mikhail Bakhtin

The Ecology of Freedom - Murray Bookchin

Libra - Don DeLillo

I have Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani and Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism by Tran Duc Thao on my immediate list but I'm trying to convince myself to not keep starting books when I'm in the middle of others (already not working as you can see).

I completely agree. Reading secondary literature really ought to be considered a grave offense, as well as the writing of it. It's the worst prose imaginable and bores me to tears. It could just be because I'm a grad student and forced to read copious amounts of this tripe, but I have no intention of purchasing very many secondary sources whenever I have enough money to complete my book collection. It will be 95% primary sources.

I get most of my initial information from textbooks and then get the primary literature if I feel the need to. In all honesty all this talk of primary literature being better than the other sources of information just sounds snobbish. I mean if I can get a perfectly good introduction to the thought of some guy instead of having to drudge through countless books then I'll take the former route.

. I mean if I can get a perfectly good introduction to the thought of some guy instead of having to drudge through countless books then I'll take the former route. — darthbarracuda

You can't ever know if you're getting a "perfectly good introduction" to the thought of some guy unless you actually read that guy for yourself. I'd rather think for myself and make up my own mind than have someone else do it for me in tortured "academese."

I don't understand the claim of snobbery. Academics, the writers of all this glut of secondary literature, are among the most snobbish people you could ever meet.

You can't ever know if you're getting a "perfectly good introduction" to the thought of some guy unless you actually read that guy for yourself. I'd rather think for myself and make up my own mind than have someone else do it for me in tortured "academese." — Thorongil

I don't understand this debate at all. It seems obvious to me that both primary and secondary literature are essential. Indeed, the only thing that truly demarcates "primary literature", so called, from secondary literature, is that it mainly consists in works that have become classics, for better or worse. Almost all primary literature has begun as secondary literature. Few philosophers have endeavored to reinvent the wheel or have abstained from commentating on contemporaries or predecessors. Hence, while Sturgeon's law applies to so called secondary literature, it doesn't apply to primary literature since in that case most of the crap already has been sifted out. If, however, one is able to be selective in one's selection of secondary literature sources, then this criterion becomes irrelevant. Aristotle makes up part of the secondary literature on Plato, and likewise for Kant and Hume, Heidegger and Husserl, Wittgenstein and Frege, etc.

On edit: I am currently reading Sebastian Rödl's Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect for the third time. Is it secondary literature on Kant, or is it an original work? It is both. The distinction is pointless. On account of its specific topic, if it weren't informed by Kant (and by Aristotle), then it would be misinformed. If it weren't original then it would be redundant and pointless -- but it is neither.

You can read reviews online before purchasing a textbook. Sometimes the textbooks I buy have primary sources in them as well. But honestly what is it about primary sources that make them always better than a text covering the same thing? Perhaps you get the personalized feel, but at the same rate you also often lose the objectivity as you're reading something by one person.

In then end all of this just seems purely subjective. You like primary sources, great. I like secondary textbooks more as an introduction to ideas. As a matter of fact I usually don't like reading primary sources.

This is partially why I don't usually enjoy reading continental philosophy, because it relies too heavily upon specific interpretations and primary sources. In my view, if you can't summarize a position into a textbook, if you can't convey your ideas without falling back into obscurantism or a kind of "sophisticated" philosophy, then it's probably bullshit or at least needs refinement. Analytic philosophy, in this particular area, is superior because it is much easier to translate philosophy without losing any of the meaning.

In my view, if you can't summarize a position into a textbook, if you can't convey your ideas without falling back into obscurantism or a kind of "sophisticated" philosophy, then it's probably bullshit or at least needs refinement. — darthbarracuda

Amen.

That has been my experience. I tend to believe now that reading large amounts of secondary literature is actually positively harmful not only to your enjoyment, but to your understanding as well. — The Great Whatever

And that creates the problem of your not being able to talk about what you've read because no one should be interested in your views as a secondary source.

I'm not a secondary source; I give my own opinions.

I'm not a secondary source; I give my own opinions. — The Great Whatever

I sense a false dichotomy here: either one thinks for oneself or one slavishly attempts to interpret original thinkers without doubting anything that they said (rather in the the way Justice Scalia meant to interpret the U.S. Constitution.) Why it is not possible for a piece of secondary literature to express what its author meant as, in part, explanation/appropriation of the text commented upon and, in part, criticism and elaboration on it? Much of the secondary literature traditions in philosophy take the form of protracted dialogues, it seem to me. The only amount of reverence to the original text that is required is the amount necessary not to get it completely wrong (and that's already a lot, hence the need for exegesis).

Why it is not possible for a piece of secondary literature to express what its author meant as, in part, explanation/appropriation of the text commented upon and, in part, criticism and elaboration on it? — Pierre-Normand

Good question but I feel it should be directed at all the bad writers of secondary literature.

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of The British World-System, 1830 - 1970 by John Darwin.