• Pathfinders: The Golden Age Of Arabic Science, Jim Al-Khalili
• Ontological Catastrophe, Joseph Carew
• The Philosophical Thought of Wang Chong, Alexus McLeod
• The Racial Contract, Charles Mills
• The Canon of Supreme Mystery by Yang Hsiung, Michael Nylan

*

re-reading

• Maimonides and Spinoza, Joshua Parens
• The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien - in honor of his son, literary executor & editor Christopher Tolkien 1924-2020

The Age of Revolution 1789 - 1848 by Eric Hobsbawm
Health Justice Now: Single Payer and What Comes Next by Timothy Faust

The Witch - David Lindsay
Declare - Tim Powers
Journeys Out Of The Body - Robert Monroe
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunryū Suzuki

On deck:

Dark Knight Of The Soul - St. John Of The Cross
The City & the City - China Miéville

Ongoing:

The I Ching

Jacques Ellul - The Technological Society. One of the most important works of the 20th century, in my humble opinion.

Also, hello everyone! Been away for a number of years, but it's great to see many familiar faces still haunting the forums.

Anticipating Denis Villeneuve's Dune film (Part 1) later this year (on 12/23 in the U.S.) - perhaps setting myself up for disappointment, but still - I'm rereading (for the nth time) only the first four books of Frank Herbert's saga:

• Dune (1965)
• Dune Messiah (1969)
• Children of Dune (1976)
• God Emperor of Dune (1981)

plus

• The Dune Encyclopedia, William McNelly & others (1984), with forward by Frank Herbert (1983)

Jacques Ellul - The Technological Society — Umbra

I started this a few years ago, and always think of it, and need to go back. Any thoughts?

Anyone read or reading Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism, Sebastian Rodl ?

(The first sentence of the abstract makes a point I've been working towards ever since starting to post on forums.)

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunryū Suzuki — Noble Dust

Foundational text for me.

Serotonin by Houellebecq

Dune (1965) — 180 Proof

:up: one of my favorites

"Systemic Thinking - Vol. 1: Aspects of the Philosophy of Mario Bunge"
I wanted to read Bunge himself, but his books are way too pricey.

Ontological Catastrophe, Joseph Carew — 180 Proof

Whaddya reckon btw?

• The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought, Mark Johnson — 180 Proof

At a glance it looks like this book is highly rated. You like?

Shelved the Systemic Thinking book as it is basically a short handbook for experimental design and methodology. Interesting, but just too tedious - I like to read about the experimental results but designing them is a ways off. lol.

So Popper's Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, volume three of his Postscript. They've been getting progressively more engaging....

edit: added The Portable Karl Marx into the mix. Ever since reading the thread suggesting a group read of Das Kapital I have been keen to really dig into Marx. This edition has an excellent preface/biography/chronology, so important to contextualize someone like Marx, I think.

Ian Buchanan - Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: A Readers Guide
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: An Introduction to Schizoanalysis
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

And once more into the Deleuzian breach.

• The Black And The Blue - Matthew Horace
• Overground Railroad,  Candacy Taylor

*

re-reading

In honor of George Steiner 1929-2020

• The Death of Tragedy (1961)
• In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)
• Heidegger (1978)
• After Babel (1975, 1998)
• Real Presences (1989)

Added Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre) into the mix. I have theDeathgate Cycle by Weiss/Hickman on the go too.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (data greatly influence Sanders' and Warren's tax proposals)

War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Recent weird fiction:

The Witch - David Lindsay
The City And The City - China Miéville
NVK - Temple Drake

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber

Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: An Essay on Old Regimes and Modern State

Was a toss up between this and some other Deleuze-inspired stuff but I need a serious break from that kind of thing just at the moment. It's also one of my new goals to read everything Wood has ever written.

Systemic Thinking - Vol. 1: Aspects of the Philosophy of Mario Bunge" — Pantagruel

He passed away just the other day :sad: I still have two of his books sitting under my bed - one day I'll get round to reading them!

It's also one of my new goals to read everything Wood has ever written — StreetlightX

:100:

march readings:

• The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, John Calder
• The Theology of Samuel Beckett, John Cauler
• Until the End of Time, Brian Greene
• Ineffability and Its Metaphysics, Silvia Jonas
• Yinyang, Robin R. Wang

Silvia Federici - Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation

Heard nothing but universal praise for this. Keen to finally delve in!

He passed away just the other day :sad: I still have two of his books sitting under my bed - one day I'll get round to reading them! — StreetlightX

Most of Bunge's stuff is ungodly expensive. Definitely something I want in my library versus borrowing though.

Starting Quantum Shift in the Global Brain by Ervin Laszlo

The Protestant Ethic was a surprisingly good read.

Pierre Clastres - Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide
Brent Adkins - Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus : A Critical Introduction and Guide

Should keep me occupied for the next month or so.

or the next two seasons! thats a list. i feel like thousand plateaus is a boss in an rpg you fight too early and only confront prepared later on.

i feel like thousand plateaus is a boss in an rpg you fight too early and only confront prepared later on. — csalisbury

I know! I feel that way too. I would have liked to have spent more time on preparatory reading (Hjelmslev and Jakobson in particular), but I'm reading it concurrently with a course that a local philosophy school is running, so... Ah well. Force of the encounter and all that.

Quantum Shift in the Global Brain by Ervin Laszlo

Silvia Federici - Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation

Heard nothing but universal praise for this. Keen to finally delve in! — StreetlightX

Same, lemme know your thoughts.

The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848 by Jonathan Israel

Same, lemme know your thoughts. — Maw

It's a very solid read. The first half of the book is actually more about the history of various peasant resistance movements against feudal power (the Church and the state in particular), while the second half of the book deals with the witch hunts ("Wtich") and colonialism in the Americas ("Caliban'). The stuff on feudal resistance was really interesting to me, alot of the names were new and it was fascinating to read about entire social uprisings that I had never heard of before. Federici's focus on woman in particular makes for really good reading too - she really brings out just how much of women's oppression was and remains political (i.e. intentional responses to socio-economic considerations) and not just some expression of pre-social bias or whathaveyou.

One thing that bothered me slightly was the under-specification of capitalism. She pitches the book as (among other things) a social history of women during the transition to capitalism in Europe, but she doesn't really say much about what constitutes the transition itself: she talks about the enclosure of land and of 'bodies' (i.e. the destruction of community and the atomization of society) as emblematic of capitalism (and she does this really well), but it's not clear why this counts as specifically a capitalist phenomenon (not saying it isn't, only that Federici doesn't make explicit her assumptions).

But otherwise, it really does good work in placing reproduction at the centre of any critique of capitalism, and showing just how implicated it is in any critique of a 'mode of production'. Also gave me a new appreciation - on the basis of class - for the occult in general. As in, the occult and the magical as a site of resistance to the subsumption under capitalist imperatives to universal commercialization. Alot more historical than philosophical, which wasn't what I expected, but enjoyed nonetheless.

Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty