Yes, James is on your wavelength, judging from your previous posts.

Yes, James is on your wavelength, judging from your previous posts. — Paine

I didn’t know anyone was paying attention.

There have been many times when I wondered if I was the only one who retained any kind of institutional memory here.

There have been many times when I wondered if I was the only one who retained any kind of institutional memory here. — Paine

I try to remember where people are coming from, not always successfully. I appreciate that you did.

The State and the Tributary Mode of Production by John Haldon

Initial thoughts on it? Looks kind of interesting.

Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 2: The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge
by Jürgen Habermas

Another Country --German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity
Jan-Werner Muller

Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 2: The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge
by Jürgen Habermas — Pantagruel

Ha! Habermas figures large in the book I'm reading, about German nationalism after WW2.

Habermas looms large in modern philosophy for me.

:up: What do you like about him?

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Wiliam Egginton. NY Times Review (gift link).

I'm a keen student sociology, especially symbolic interactionism. For me, Habermas' communicative rationality seems a logical development of that. Instrumental rationality is a core theme for me. I also like to read him as counterpart and contrast to Rawls' theories of distributive justice. His writing is dense but it is concise, and his knowledge encyclopedic. Also is a monumental work.

I'm a keen student sociology, especially symbolic interactionism. For me, Habermas' communicative rationality seems a logical development of that. Instrumental rationality is a core theme for me. I also like to read him as counterpart and contrast to Rawls' theories of distributive justice. His writing is dense but it is concise, and his knowledge encyclopedic. Also is a monumental work. — Pantagruel

Cool. My interest is in how a community recovers from a catastrophe related to nationalism. Apparently the narrative was that Germany has a tendency to embrace irrational themes, and the ideology of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger fed into this. I think the real root of it goes much deeper than Hegel, though. I think it's in Christianity as well.

Rationality is also a narrative.

Rationality is also a narrative. — Pantagruel

It's a bunch of different narratives, in a way. There's rationality that's basically just fashion, there's rationality that's logical, etc. Do you agree?

Rational thought is simply thought which is logically consistent with its premises. People speak about premises being rational, but that's a harder things to measure. If rationality equals consistency, what can the starting premises of a movement of thought be consistent with? Tradition? Scripture? Science? Everyday experience?

I suppose I should say what I've been reading, which I usually never bother to do. I tend to read non-fiction in the morning and fiction at night, and I often have several books on the go. Currently reading Biosemiotics and Signs of Meaning by Jesper Hoffmeyer. Other books on the go Life's Ratchet by Peter Hoffmann, Beast and Man by Mary Midgeley, The Everpresent Origin by Jean Gebser, Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse and The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy.

Yes, rationality means different things to different collectives. My sociological interests tend to collide with philosophical anthropology, following that premise.

If rationality equals consistency, what can the starting premises of a movement of thought be consistent with? Tradition? Scripture? Science? Everyday experience? — Janus

:up:

I've been reading "The Republic" over the past couple of weeks, and i don't regret it, because it's pretty rediculous.

First of all, they talk about abolishing private property, because of how it divides people. Maybe some would argue this is ahead of its time, as it seems very proto-left-wing...

Second of all, they eventually define justice as minding your own business. I don't really know what to say about this, is being a good slave justice.

Third of all, there's lots silly plans, like training children in warefare by letting them watch the easier and safer battles, and giving them horses so they could escape...A lot of it sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories, like arranging that the best citizens get to reproduce, while the bad ones wallow in confused incontinence...

The Lost Continent
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera.

Dark Academia: How Universities Die
by Peter Fleming

What I find striking is that Thrasymachus just kind of rage-quits, yet his position wasn’t truly defeated; he simply abandoned the conversation. It makes you wonder whether "might makes right" rests on firmer ground than it first appears in the book. And of course, for Plato, someone who takes such a point of view had to appear as driven more by anger than by reason.

The work as whole deals with looking for an answer to whether justice is merely whatever the powerful say it is. The City of Words is a mirror to the one we live in. In many dialogues, Plato pulls the beards of self-righteous elites. They killed him for that.


I take your point about anger but there would have been no further dialogue if Glaucon wanted more than the parlor stunt Socrates started with.

What I find striking is that Thrasymachus just kind of rage-quits, yet his position wasn’t truly defeated; he simply abandoned the conversation. It makes you wonder whether "might makes right" rests on firmer ground than it first appears in the book. And of course, for Plato, someone who takes such a point of view had to appear as driven more by anger than by reason. — Zebeden

The exchange with him is cut short kinda like that, and Socrates keeps talking with Glaucon about "justice", and at the end of that first or second book admits that he did not come to a conclusion about how to define it.

Lots of academics have already point out that Plato had a biased opinion against the sohpists, but in the case of Thrasymachus and Protagoras, no original texts written by them are available, so we have to consult second-hand accounts like Plato and others (many have commented on them briefly in ancient texts) to get an idea of what they actually thought. Hermias, around 600+ years later, comments on how Thrasymachus could rouse groups of people to anger and pity for the weak and downtrodden, which contradicts the "right is might" type of argument he was making in The Republic...but, maybe not since people like Thrasymachus and Nietzsche simply make that argument just to point out how morality and justice are enforced in real life.

All these dialogues that Plato wrote between philosophers were never meant to have the appearance of legitimate recordings of conversation, but are semi-realistic characterizations of the opinions that these philosophers had. I think Plato was using Thrasymachus in the republic as a foil to illustrate some of these other-worldly beliefs about "truth" and "justice" ideas he taught to people...i personally like to read as close to I can to a firsthand account of what philosophers believe, as i tend not to like secondhand interpretations of what other people say. For some of the ancient philosophers, Plato is as close as you can get to a firsthand account...because he lived within 1 or 200 years of when the absolute earliest philosophers existed (thales, heraclitus, parmenides, etc.)

The work as whole deals with looking for an answer to whether justice is merely whatever the powerful say it is. The City of Words is a mirror to the one we live in. In many dialogues, Plato pulls the beards of self-righteous elites. They killed him for that. — Paine

No, The Republic is a lot more than that...it does have to do with the prevailing notions of justice from the time period, which Plato rejects as mob idiocy, but The Republic is largely an imagination-based dialogue about what it would take to create a city based on Plato's moral ideals. I would say at least 40% of the book is this. It's most famous, however, for the cave analogy, which is a vague introduction to his Forms (the forms are outside of the cave).

I'm reaching the end of the part where Plato compares and contrasts various styles of government, and how they can be personified as the actions of hypothetical individuals (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny are the 4 he specifically treats in this fashion). In accordance with his style of characterizing different points of views, he talks about the characteristics that each of those governments would have if they were sons of people who ran the previous government, as his story is that each form of those governments gives rise to the other one. For example, the son of the timocracy ends up losing all his money, then learns to treasure it above all else and develops an oligarchical personality...

Also, there's no evidence that Plato was punished by the state in any way, you are referring to Socrates, who can be verified as a real person based on the accounts of more than one person from his time period who was put to death in a similar manner to the way Plato described it.