Jason Stanley - How Propaganda Works

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173429/how-propaganda-works

Looks good. On the list.

It's actually really, really good. It was originally published in 2014 but it's positively prophetic when read in the light of even just 5 years onward, and it really helps make sense of just so much that seems to be happening in the world. Basic idea is that the alliance between democracy and capitalism was only ever a post-war détente, and that since the 70s the two have been prying further and further apart, to the benefit of capitalism - much due to the mechanism of sovereign debt. It's a pretty impressive piece of scholarship.

Right up my street. On mah kindle now. :strong:

• Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Phillip Mainländer [rough, unpublished, english translation]

• The Color of Money, Mehrsa Baradaran
• Serotonin, Michel Houellebecq
• Flow Down Like Silver, Ki Longfellow
• The Secret Magdelene, Ki Longfellow
• Why Trust Science?, Naomi Oreskes
• The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein**
• Understanding Consciousness, Max Velmans

@Bitter Crank Thanks!**

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
Various bits by Judith Shklar, particularly the Liberalism of Fear.
Works of Love, Soren Kierkegaard.

I didn't intend it to be so but they are oddly related.

• The Color of Money, Mehrsa Baradaran — 180 Proof

Heard wonderful things about this

You've heard right. (A third of the way in it feels like I've read it before though.)

Finished the R.G. Collingwood.

The last chapter, on philosophy as literature, really is world class and worth reading on its own.

Finally get to start Popper's trilogy postscript to the logic of scientific discovery: Volume 1 - Realism and the Aim of Science.

Essay on Philosophical Method" - R.G. Collingwood, underway...[now finished] — Pantagruel

The last chapter, on philosophy as literature, really is world class and worth reading on its own. — Pantagruel

I noticed your reference to it here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7179/opposing-perspectives-of-truth

It has good reviews, including your own. Might be tempted...

It's all good, but everything really converges in the last two chapters, so a very rewarding read.

I didn't intend it to be so but they are oddly related. — Valentinus

I always take that as a good sign that I am learning the right things....

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
Various bits by Judith Shklar, particularly the Liberalism of Fear.
Works of Love, Soren Kierkegaard.

I didn't intend it to be so but they are oddly related. — Valentinus

How so ?

That my intuitions are sound, that I have taken away good information. I have often selected books from a variety of fields and found strong thematic connections. In one sense not surprising as my choice is based on what I have already read.

Yes, I understand that we tend to choose books related to our interests.
I have sometimes lived dangerously :naughty: and gone for the opposite to my usual :gasp:

I was asking @Valentinus why his books were oddly related.

The first book I listed is a fiction, presenting an emperor musing on the best kind of Empire to shape.

The second is a series of essays arguing that we need to place the effort to oppose cruelty and the usurpation of publicly granted powers over the articulation of what is the best polity.

The third book explores the command to love one another in terms of personal responsibility. As a manual, if you will, it is not based upon establishing what is secular versus the sacred but having those distinctions come out of the awareness of what love requires. It doesn't oppose previous arguments from Augustine and the Scholastics but sort of turns them inside out.

So what oddly connects them are their interests in expressing what a community is or not. A desire to know what to do next.

Yanis Varoufakis - The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

• The Demon in the Machine, Paul Davies
• The Rationality Quotient, Keith Stanovich, et al

:up:

The first book I listed is a fiction, presenting an emperor musing on the best kind of Empire to shape. — Valentinus

Thanks for further explanation.
Of the 3, the first sounds most like my cuppa tea.

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar.
According to wiki:
The book takes the form of a letter to Hadrian's adoptive grandson and eventual successor "Mark" (Marcus Aurelius). The emperor meditates on military triumphs, love of poetry and music, philosophy, and his passion for his lover Antinous, all in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert's "melancholy of the antique world."

Great reviews on goodreads site. This really appealed to me until I read this from academic Mary Beard:

..Hadrian is the kind of political leader whose behaviour seems distinctly recognisable, whose ambitions and conflicts we can almost share.
That feeling of familiarity has been boosted by Marguerite Yourcenar's fictional, pseudo-autobiography of the emperor, Memoirs of Hadrian. Published in 1951, and once hugely popular (it now seems to me rambling and frankly unreadable), it took the modern reader inside Hadrian's psyche - presenting the emperor as a troubled and intimate friend, in much the same way as Robert Graves made the emperor Claudius a rather jolly great-uncle.  — Mary Beard

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/19/history
[ my bolds ]

Hmmm. Do you think this simply reflects the annoyance of a serious historian towards a fictionalised account. A misrepresentation; putting words put into Hadrian's his mouth that weren't his. And then any subsequent requotes by readers...fake.

It can't be 'frankly unreadable' if so many have read it !

It is pretty obvious that one is hearing what Yourcenar thinks during the book more than a transcription of what Hadrian thinks. I happen to be interested in what Yourcenar thinks.

I understand why the whole enterprise might piss off an actual historian who has read all the source material. I benefited from reading Mary Beard's SPQR.

I always took the pleasure of historical fiction without mixing it up with the real thing. Other readers' aesthetics may bring different results. I do think Yourcenar is a better story teller than Graves in regards to presenting a Roman character of the kind presented by Beard's work.

december 2019 (last month of the decade)

still working through november's readings, plus:

• Poppy War: A Novel, R. F. Kuang
• The Measure of Our Lives, Toni Morrison
• Fires, Marguerite Yourcenar

re-reading:

• A Mercy, Toni Morrison
• Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
• Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
• The Abyss, or Zeno of Bruges, Marguerite Yourcenar

Thomas Moynihan - Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History

I hadn't planned on reading this, I started just to see what it would be like and now I'm more than halfway though... oops. Still. A nice break from Varoufakis, who is getting a bit drudgy for me. It's so good though...

"What then is the spinal column, if not a megalith raised to the mineralizing trace of the organism’s diaspora into its own bloating sensorium—each level of axial segmentation a monument to further neural self-entanglement— dorsally fulgurating our cephalocaudal axis, an outward memory of inward collapse? Indeed, despite the fact that cephalopods exhibit extravagantly complex nervous organization, the most integrated and encephalized CNSs belong unequivocally to vertebrates, for whom metameric spinal regionalization repeats into compartmentalizing brain. A pulsing paradox, intelligence enters the worldly scene by emigrating into its own chronotope."

Thomas Moynihan - Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History — StreetlightX

Having a read now. Strangely compelling despite (or maybe because of) the convoluted prose. (Being too lazy to find my own books, I'm just going to keep piggybacking on you and probably @180 Proof and @Maw too).

It's pretty fun right? Ended up finishing it on the same day. Definitely has a momentum to it, and the short chapters help.

Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge

Her take on the philosophical content of literature. It helps that her own prose is positively divine.

It's dense too though, because she's one of the smartest, most knowledgeable people on the planet regarding philosophy, literature, and history.

Currently reading: Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Well done on getting through that in a day. Dude has some mfuckin' vocabulary going on. :lol:

Bernard Stiegler - The Re-Enchantment of the World—The Value of spirit against Industrial Populism

To be honest I reckon that kind of language makes me read faster. Like, I'm leafing through Moynihan's PhD thesis right now (also really good), but because it's written in a more careful, academic manner, I'm reading it alot slower (or I should probably say - at my 'normal' pace). I think there's a kind of intellectual fun to be had in writing like that which is exhilarating.

Funnily enough the last book I tore through at that pace was Joseph Carew's Ontological Catastrophe, a book about Zizek which actually (as the title might give away) overlaps considerably in theme.

Also one day I will get around to reading Steigler.

Do you recommend Ontological Catastrophe? If you haven't already read them, btw, add Stiegler's State of Shock & The Neganthropocene to the pile ...