Still reading Royal Robbins - The American Climber by David Smart. Royal was a friend BITD.

Scientific Realism: Selected Essays of Mario Bunge
by Mario Bunge

White Nights; Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Synthetic Men of Mars (Barsoom #9)
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Started Deconstructing Postmodernist Nietzscheanism: Deleuze and Foucault by Jan Rehmann several days ago

Llana of Gathol (Barsoom #10)
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Symposium, Nikos Kazantzakis.

Vacaciones en el Cáucaso, María Iordanidu.

Again, don't miss Greek literature! It's pure and beautiful.

The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy

Starting Plotinus the Master and the Apotheosis of Imperial Platonism by William Altman.

It is a polemic which I admit sympathy to before beginning but deals with texts and historical factors I am not familiar with. It seems to be headed toward questioning my understanding of Gnosticism.

Indian Buddhist Philosophy by Amber Carpenter
I recently finished this book. Pretty thick going, as expected. It covers Buddhist philosophy up to approximately the 8th century. It presents different views on many philosophical problems and even introduces a few new ones. Satisfying overall.

Read:

Select Discourses by John Smith. Some good stuff wrt innate ideas and a little bit on things in themselves.

Clavis Universalis by Arthur Collier. An actual idealist, rational instead of empirical (Berkeley). Some good arguments whose form anticipates Kant's antinomies. Besides that, really unconvincing and rather boring.

Reading:

Scepsis Scientifica... An Essay of the Vanity of Dogmatizing by Joseph Glanvill

Tooks a break from Richard Burthogge's Philosophical Writings but will now continue. Close to finishing him. It's a crime he is not much better known. A mix of Locke and Kant, genius even.

After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations, Cline

The best analysis is synthesis, or the embedding of the construct of interest into a theory
~Mario Bunge, "Energy: Between Physics and Metaphysics" — Pantagruel

After your recommendation, I downloaded this book, but I haven't read much of it yet. I started in on the essay you listed, but I got a bit lost. I'll go back and work on it some more. I also downloaded "Causality and Modern Science," which I am currently reading. As I noted, causality is a subject that I've thought and written about a lot. I'm enjoying it so far - clear and well written, or at least well-translated.

:up:

Personally, I'm especially interested in the concept of causality qua instrumentality, and the instantiation of knowledge in the physical form of tools.

Personally, I'm especially interested in the concept of causality qua instrumentality, and the instantiation of knowledge in the physical form of tools. — Pantagruel

My interest is primarily ontological, i.e. by what metaphysical mechanisms does the world operate.

I'll get back to you when I've read more of both books.

Robert Kennedy - The Real Anthony Fauci,

Completely unmissable for all thinking people. For two decades I've been trying to understand what is going on in US society - it's toxic food, poor healthcare and incomprehensible foreign policy - and this book explains most of it. , . .

How We Think
by John Dewey

Dewey never fails to satisfy, like a cool drink of water on a hot day.

That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart. It's a book on Christian universalism, although it is more focused on rebutting infernalism (belief in eternal, punitive Hell as opposed to remedial Hell). Sandwiched in here are some of the most cogent (if not necessarily accessible) explanations of the classical view of freedom and the Good as a transcedental property of being. It's written quite well, although probably too combativly to serve its purpose.

Aside from the philosophical arguments it covers the paucity of scriptural evidence for infernalism, amounting to just Matthew 25:46 and some heavily symbolic language in Revelation. This is set against the fact that language suggestive of universal redemption: "all," "the entire cosmos," "every" etc. shows up in all four Gospels, most of the Epistles, and Revaluation, often in very explicit terms. There is also a good deal of annhilationist language (although significantly less than universalist).

In general, the arguments are made very well. The only one that seems weak is the claim that the blessed in heaven would have to be so radically changed not to mind that their loved ones were in Hell as to have become completely new people (and thus it really wouldn't be "them" getting beatified). This is a fine point to make, but it cuts both ways. A true monster like the BTK killer would have to be so radically changed to be saintly as to also have been entirely stripped of their personality. Perhaps this could be proffered as the explanation of the annhilationist language though—there is plenty to suggest that salvation is not a binary.

Finally, he covers how infernalism was virtually absent from the early church and failed to take root in precisely the places where the texts could be read in their native language.

I was impressed by the prose and reasoning so I got his "You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature." This one is much more scholarly and is dealing more with highly philosophical issues. It includes a really good paper on Nicolas of Cusa, and another on classical aesthetics. I am not super familiar with Orthodox philosophy (he is Orthodox) at any advanced level, but a lot of what he lays out is quite consistent with the Catholic tradition.

Currently reading On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo

Been meaning to pick this book up. I've read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the past when I was younger but honestly I didn't get too much out of that book. So people have recommended me to start reading the other books by Nietzsche then give TSZ another shot.

After I finish up that book and before I continue my Nietzsche study I will be picking up Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study by Luis Navia. Been really wanting to study more of the ancient philosophy of Cynicism and Stoicism.

Welcome to the forum.

Thank you. I am very happy to be here! If you or anyone on this thread have any book recommendations on any subject of philosophy or various subjects that you enjoy I will gladly take any recommendations. I’m very open into understanding and learning any subject matter.

It's a long thread. Read back and you'll find hundreds of recommendations. More come just about every day.

Samurai trilogy

The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.
Hidden by the Leaves by Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazō Nitobe

Post deleted.

Here’s a mediocre 20 minute read that you could be currently reading… — Fire Ologist

Spamming your OP is not allowed. :roll: We talk about books and literary recommendations in this thread.

So people have recommended me to start reading the other books by Nietzsche then give TSZ another shot. — NickGoodfella

In philosophy people seem to talk mostly about Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. And in my opinion a great way of approaching those two is to read The Gay Science (or the Joyous Science in a recent translation), which is brilliant and enjoyable.

The Birth of Tragedy is where he started, so that might be a good place to get stuck in. If you do you will need to check out Aristotle's The Poetics for a better idea of where he was coming from though (it is a short though, so not a huge burden).

a great way of approaching those two is to read The Gay Science — Jamal

Thank you, I've been meaning to pick that one up. I will look into reading that one first.

you will need to check out Aristotle's The Poetics for a better idea of where he was coming from though (it is a short though, so not a huge burden). — I like sushi

Appreciate that I will give that a look today.


Appreciate the help!

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth.

How did you get on with it? It's an extraordinary book, I thought, but hard going in all its self-reflexive cleverness. It's like someone on the spectrum, with a gift for wordplay, has just let rip. — Tom Storm

I'm at page 545 of nearly 800, and still loving it. It's a masterful parody, a technical tour de force, beautifully and transparently written. It's convincing and involving and brilliant.The basic experience is of reading an 18th picaresque novel, not remotely like reading other books labelled as postmodern. If it's self-reflexively clever it's in the same way that, say, Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy are.

On the other hand, it's not an 18th century novel, but a late 20th century one, and that makes it something else, something of an oddity.

It's made me realise that some of what's been called postmodernism is a sort of reactionary reaction to modernism—a traditionalist return to the art of storytelling. It's a masterpiece in my opinion, but would be much easier to digest if I didn't know it was so modern; this fact turns it into something else (the important reference here is the Borges story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in which an author faithfully reproduces Don Quixote but in doing so produces an entirely different thing, since it has been produced in a different time and by a different person).

Despite the similar setting and language it's not at all like Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which is postmodern in subject matter while maintaining the period veneer: Barth isn't willing to mix in conspiracy theories, science fiction, and esoterica—he sticks faithfully to literary tradition, as if in an effort to be comprehensively and performatively anachronistic.

With 200 pages to go I'm getting tired of the convoluted plot, but there's always an adventure, a hilarious mishap, or a fascinating discussion around the next page.

Martin Chuzzlewit
by Charles Dickens