Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty — 180 Proof

Let me know your thoughts as well, I enjoyed Capital, but have been hearing mostly negative reviews for this.

Jurgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society
Really been looking forward to starting this

Taking a brief *pandemic break* from Piketty's latest tome ...

re-reading:

• The Plague, Albert Camus
• Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy

:death: :flower:

The Plague, Albert Camus — 180 Proof

Re-reading as well

Dickens' Hard Times

It's a very cool "Longman Cultural Edition" I found on a recent trip. It has a huge section called "Context" covering the social, political and economic conditions in England at the time of writing.

:cool: :up:

Taking a brief *pandemic break* from Piketty's latest tome ...

re-reading:

• The Plague, Albert Camus
• Wittgenstein's Mistress, David Markson
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy — 180 Proof

... making it a "Doomsday Dozen" with 9 more novels (and no effin' vampires, zombies, etc):

• Clay's Ark, Octavia Butler
• The Pesthouse, Jim Crace
• The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
• The White Plague, Frank Herbert
• Wool, Hugh Howey
• The Children of Men, P. D. James
• The Trial, Franz Kafka
• Year Zero, Jeff Long
• Blindness, José Saramago

:death: :flower:

Working my way through God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian Theism John-Mark L. Miravalle. A very interesting little book which deals with some quite fundamental issues in philosophy of religion.

Also re-reading Heraclitus' Fragments. Always good to revisit these mysterious aphorisms.

Also re-reading Heraclitus' Fragments. Always good to revisit these mysterious aphorisms. — Alvin Capello

Still some of the best stuff out there.

Working my way through God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian Theism John-Mark L. Miravalle. A very interesting little book which deals with some quite fundamental issues in philosophy of religion. — Alvin Capello

Any commentary (even by way of review) on this book I'd appreciate. Meinong was a touchstone for my approach to 'the god question' over the last few decades. Thanks in advance.

I will be posting a full review of the book on my blog at alvincapello.com soon. I will be sure to dm you as soon as that happens.

But for some idea of the ground it covers, Miravalle suggests that Meinongianism provides a neat solution to the main problem areas of philosophy of religion. For instance, he suggests that Meinongianism provides the right interpretation for the Cosmological and Ontological Arguments (I agree with this).

The chapters I have not yet reached concern how Meinongianism can provide solutions to the Problem of Evil and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge.

I also have been profoundly influenced by Meinong. Indeed, I am a full-fledged Meinongian, and it is a fundamental away that I approach philosophical problems.

I found Blindness by José Saramago to be the most terrifying thing I have ever read.
Its perfect logic sticks to everything I wonder about.

:cool: :up:

re: God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian Theism. Amazon provides a sample for perusal. Question: If you're looking for God (never mind your g/God at the moment), then how do you get past language? If you don't/can't, then what's the best you can do beyond a structured concatenation of ideas? And if you do - mirabile - what have you then got? - Seems it cannot be anything with a residence in language.... And a patient host of secondary, tertiary,..., questions.

In short it has seemed to me theology is a poking around in language for that which cannot be there, and western religion psychology on crutches. Both species of the drunkard's search. On the other hand, the little I could read looked interesting, like an interesting game. But when does one get to Paul's state of putting away childish things?

I found Blindness by José Saramago to be the most terrifying thing I have ever read.
Its perfect logic sticks to everything I wonder about. — Valentinus

I tried reading it a while ago, but... ugh.

Just entering The Old Curiosity Shop now.

Roadside Picnic - Arcady and Boris Strugatsky

Finally finished the Critique of Dialectical Reason; not an easy read.

Now for the really big project: Capital, Volume I. I have been keen to start this since seeing a thread on the forum suggesting a group reading of this work.

Now for the really big project: Capital, Volume I. I have been keen to start this since seeing a thread on the forum suggesting a group reading of this work. — Pantagruel

It's so good

:ok:

Read a couple of novels by George Sand. And staying with female writers named George, now reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.

An accounting textbook, god help me.

It's interesting though. It's easier to understand why corporations have come legally to be people when you can see exactly how actual people are already treated like corporations (who have only partial claim to their own assets, so that your name & ssn is an abstract entity whose assets the actual you relates to as one claimant among others)It also helps you realize exactly how the language of business inherently backgrounds everything else & how that can abstract you from everything else, out of fascination -without needing to introduce 'greed' as primary motivation. You can see getting sucked into it for the same reason people get sucked into RTS games etc (im being a good marxist here)

Also:
Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald (re-reading)
&
Guns, Germs & Steel (finally)

Currently, aside from math/logic textbooks, I'm reading a lot of cognitive psychology, especially the Oxford Series in Cognitive Development. I've just finished Jean Mandler's The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought and Susan Gelman's The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought, and am currently reading Susan Carey's The Origin of Concepts. Great stuff! These books demolish the idea, dear to Quine and others (including Piaget and Vigotsky), that children are, in the words of a theoretician, "dumb associatinist mechanisms", easily impressed with outward, perceptual appearances; instead, they are more like, in Gopnik's turn of phrase, little scientists, probing the world to find hidden causes and stable properties. Such books also have the added advantage of containing many anecdotes about the researchers' interaction with children, which are always funny or endearing.

The idea of a corporation comes from Roman law and was part of the re-emergence of cities in Medieval Europe.


Cool!

cool, I'd like to learn more about the history of business, its a blind spot for me.

march-april readings

• Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
• The Dream Universe, David Lindley
• The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph
• God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian, Theism John-Mark L. Miravalle

re-reading:

• Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill
• Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter

Finished Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1
so probably a good time to start
The Theory of Communicative Action
Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of Functionalist Reason, Volume 2

Just finished:

Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky -- Good, need to re-read, but Tarkovksy's film adaptation as "Stalker" was far better.

Just started:

The Last Days of New Paris - China Miéville (funny, I read far more fiction from the far left than anything else...it's good shit)

American Gods - Niel Gaiman
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - Wittgentsein (via the recent thread)

...On deck.

The Golden Fleece - Thomas Frederick Page

Apparently it's a real language breaker...

More of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 by Eric Hobsbawm