What philosopher do you think has been most successful in embracing atheism and avoiding nihilism? If you have some book you can recommend, I would be happy to read it.

My philosophical interests are in epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of life with a minor interest in political philosophy. So, the issue does fit within my areas of interest but I just haven't read much on this particular topic.

What philosopher do you think has been most successful in embracing atheism and avoiding nihilism? If you have some book you can recommend, I would be happy to read it. — Ron Cram

Well, I'm probably not the best person to ask this question, because I'm certainly no Nietzsche expert, and your characterization of him is simply not how I read him. Still, I can't help but give a hopelessly obnoxious answer and suggest Kierkegaard to you. I suppose it depends on how widely or narrowly we are willing to take the term atheism.

My philosophical interests are in epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of life with a minor interest in political philosophy. — Ron Cram

I do have a (more serious) recommendation for you! If you have some time, try reading some Pittsburgh School philosophy (Sellars, Brandom, McDowell). If you have an analytic background, Brandom's book on Hegel might be a good place to start in approaching Continental thinkers.

In no particular order:

Sense and Sensibilia, J.L. Austin
The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle
Reconstruction in Philosophy, John Dewey
The Winds of Doctrine, George Santayana (not entirely philosophical, I know, but a good read)

My favourites are not as erudite as most of those listed here. :wink: I have lived my life gathering (stealing :grin:) interesting ideas as I come across them, and keeping them for myself. <demonic laugh> :grin: Some came from books, some are merely well-known quotations, some arose during face-to-face conversation, and so on. Here are a few books that affected me enough that I still remember their titles. :wink:

Pirsig - Zen and Lila.
Lakoff - Metaphors we live by and Philosophy in the flesh.
Lao Tsu - Tao te ching (Ursula LeGuin translation).
Claxton - Hare brain, tortoise mind.
Alan Watts - Everything he ever wrote or said.

I would also add unspecified (but well-conceived and -written) fantasy novels, where the experience of different worlds/realities (albeit imaginary ones) can often be food for worthwhile thought.

The best thing I ever learned during 32 years as a firmware designer was about perspectives: nearly every different perspective you can discover is worthwhile, to some extent. Sometimes a problem can be solved simply by finding and adopting a different perspective, or by finding several, and using them in combination. Looking at something from every possible angle (or as many as you can manage/find) is the most valuable and useful problem-solving tool I have ever found. [ I mean "problem" in the broadest sense, intending to include the philosophical conundra (?) we encounter in communities like this one.] But I've never read about perspectives (in this sense) in a book....

Sextus Empiricus - "Outlines of Pyrrhonism"
Maurice Merleau-Ponty "Phenomenology of Perception"
Thomas Kuhn - "Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
Karl Popper - "Conjectures and Refutations"
Franz Brentano "Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint"
Michel Foucault - "Discipline and Punish"

-Various - "I Ching" (Wilhelm translation)
-Laozi (Li Er)- "Daodejing"
-Liezi (Lie Yukou)- "Liezi"
-Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou) - "Zhuangzi"
-Sunzi (Sun Wu) - "Art of War"
-Yagyu Munenori - "Hereditary Book on the Art of War"
-Miyamoto Musashi - "Book of Five Rings"

House of Leaves serves not merely as a simple tale or intrigue, but as a profound closure between the layers of metafiction, characterization, and the individual. The cast remain as stolidly indistinguishable as any Pynchonesque or Nabokovian exploit. The entirety of each episodic dreamlogic, the nature of every grim person, face, or entity becoming as a collapsing wind of time made a feature, distortion, and heedless plunge of every indescribable wailing kept by the pages of unformed strength only serves to cycle. Those times, places, and undivided notions of all and unlevelled other are becoming a clash, a verdant perfection, upon which every moment of unseen and uncultivated theses might bloom into raconteurs of paper persons. Danielewski invites us to question, and even fantodingly interrogate, our preconceptions about the origins of storytelling, our own notions of every possible event as a history, and our appreciation for the mythical entourage of every culture. Those diffident evolutions of unthought, of drastic and absolute transmogrifications upon all and every unheard failure of the loss, the land, and the infernal crawl of each livid essence becoming clandestine.

Magical realism is an abundantly profound tool for its application in the various spaces of unseen threads, hints, and collections of defunct passage. Hallways, the grand steps of the House, and the untrodden potentialities of the pages. Every possible conglomeration of might, of unseekable ipseity by the very notions of evolved place, conglomeration, and vague opponency of choice, is brought into chaos. The panic, the entropy, and the melisma of the halls can be interpreted in any modality. Those zenithal sounds, halls, Holloways, and insensate beacons of crude want have become as lavalieres, where words, fascinations, obsessions, and bleak terrorscapes may guide the reader into any thicket of verbvepricosities.

There is, in House of Leaves, a fathomless and boring instinct to the core of every escapism. We may eventually discover the complexities of each diverse formation and ultimate dissolution of the unknown through our own homes, which might reflect to us another façade entirely other than our own. The House, too is surely connected by a mesentery of mythomaniacal outlets, wherein shamen, wise magicasters, paracosmicists, and oneirophrenics have envisioned, and interpreted, it.

The Similars, being a motion picture of the uncanny, features a primal distortion of the countenance. The primal form of every unremarkable feature, the facial transformations, and the fundamental fear of conformity or abstrusity is epipresent. Those inherent conglomerations of miraculous foundation, wherein one countenance may become another, are, however, attributed to the machinations of extraterrestrial entities. The entirety of all possible or fanciful countenances are contained here, as the Mexican bus station becomes a harbor of intrinsic collapse, inherent dissociation, and inherent vice. Those convoluted entities of characters, dull terminal scenery, the paranoia, the grim nuance of the hopeless and the trodden, and the eventual revelation of the unthinkable alien are here in full frampold. Each such placement of fright, each rampart of unthinkable clamor, and each desperate character is vivid in its dissociation.

The Similars explores the horror vacui of conformity and the abberant confusion of a society amidst anonymity. The nature of such dastardly disparities between students, the faculty, and the government become apparent through the tensions at the station. The disease carries a mutation of the countenance into the apparent guise of Ulises, a character possibly named for James Joyce. Throughout the journey, which ensues not in an omnibus, taxi, or city, but within a claustrophobic paracosm, we witness a warping of cultures, of politics, and of humanities.
Ulises, we learn, is the first of the group to have transformed. At another time, he was an ordinary countenance, but, because of the extraterrestrial influence, he cannot recognize the transformation. His eventual dearth brings a moment of revelation.

Both House of Leaves and The Similars display a paranoaic escapade found within the confines of the ostensibly domestic. The frightening transition from melancholic hiraeths of the quotidian into absolute and arrant pandemonium is an unending void, a rictus of horror within the bed, within the very fabrics of the unseen, within the voidances of every crude unreality and misstep. The extraterrestrial beings, in their Cosmicism, wish to make humans identical, and therefore otiose to the deistic viewer. Identity and the home are stripped of their reason, and replaced by catechetic calamity. The cacoethes which drive both the Navidson-Greens and the Mexican cast are driven by an insane perplexity at the order of homes, relationships, and features which reassure the traditional familial unit. Ignacio is no placid boy, and neither is the House a mere hearth for the hunter and entourage. In the House, shifting walls symbolize the dissolution of a marriage, of the nuclear family, and of the self. These themes are echoed throughout The Similars, and that profundity of the House. A House which emerges in similarities and in pareidolia is a fundamental mimicry, for, even as the walls shift and sieve, it is not easily distinguishable from the confines of the wonted home.

The Navidson Record illustrates to us the deepest agonies of a life in which supellectile places, people, and ambitions are caught within concentric nightterrorscapes of the unthinkable and the irrational. Every possible outcome, every impossible failure of nuanced room, vice, and countenance are relegated to the ordinary familial home or to the washroom of a degenerate omnibus station. Every portion of the unknown is as a shattering blow to the tastes of the vagrant, for whoever loses a facade, whoever is lost within a hall, loses their place in the hearth and the home.

The Similars revolves about a xenomorphic presence, or egregore, which, as the House was constructed by and for unknown purposes, so too alter the image of man for unknown reasons. The philosophy of pessimistic nihilism is one which encompasses, and confounds, all aspects of existence. House of Leaves is a book within a book, and so nested into the folds of every recursive narrative. Every frightened tumult, clash of nonsensical amphigory, and the mutation of ostensible literature only recurses the further into semioticism.