Every Cradle Is A Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide by Sarah Perry

Daniel W. Smith - Essays on Deleuze

May or may not be my last Deleuze reading for a while, unless I decide to pursue a Logic of Sense reading project, which is not altogether unlikely.

Should we not move the book discussion to a separate thread? I'd want to join in, but I'm not sure if we should clutter this thread. What do you think @unenlightened or any of the other mods?

Doneski.

As per usual, here's the 2016 list:

Deleuze reading:

Gilles Deleuze - What Is Philosophy?
Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition* (reread)
Gilles Deleuze - Bergsonism
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet - Dialogues II
Jeffrey A. Bell - The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructualism
Jeffrey A. Bell - Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference*
Jeffrey A. Bell - Deleuze and Guattari's 'What Is Philosophy': A Critical Introduction and Guide
John Protevi - Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic
Helen Palmer - Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense
Sean Bowden - The Priority of Events: Deleuze's Logic of Sense
James Williams - Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide
Henry Somers-Hall - Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Eric Alliez - Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?
Daniel Smith - Essays on Deleuze (currently reading)

Science-y reading

Robert Rosen - Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life* (reread)
Robert Rosen - Essays on Life Itself
Gregory Bateson - Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
Manuel De Landa - Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason
Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (reread)

Anthropology

Andre Leroi-Gourhan - Gesture and Speech*
Marcel Mauss - The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Marcel Mauss - A General Theory of Magic

Misc.

Brian Massumi - Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
Donald Landes - Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression*
Paul Bains - The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations
James Williams - A Process Philosophy of Signs
Emanuele Coccia - Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image
Anthony Wilden - System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange*
Arkady Plotnitsky - In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious
Vicki Kirby - Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large
Eugence Thacker - Cosmic Pessimism

Asterisks indicate my favourite ones. Lots of Deleuze, as per usual, but I'm actually attending seminars on the stuff this year, so not unexpected. A bit dismayed by the lack of female authors - again - this year, can only hope for more next year. Could have used a bit more pilitics too. Didn't read as many as last year (32 as opposed to 40 something) but I'm putting that down to having read some pretty hefty ones this year (Leroi-Gourhan, Wilden, Plotnitsky, Rosen). Next year's plans include reading on gesture, sensation, metaphor, technics, the analog, and more psychoanalysis. Also, Marx's Capital. Happy holidays all, and good reading!

I found this book, "Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent" by Albert Martinez intriguing..... I'm still working it out and it can be really enlightening for philosophy of mathematics, not sure why I haven't seen this book widely promoted before.

_______

https://www.amazon.com/Negative-Math-Mathematical-Rules-Positively/dp/0691133913/ref=cm_rdp_product

"A student in class asks the math teacher: "Shouldn't minus times minus make minus?" Teachers soon convince most students that it does not. Yet the innocent question brings with it a germ of mathematical creativity. What happens if we encourage that thought, odd and ungrounded though it may seem?

Few books in the field of mathematics encourage such creative thinking. Fewer still are engagingly written and fun to read. This book succeeds on both counts. Alberto Martinez shows us how many of the mathematical concepts that we take for granted were once considered contrived, imaginary, absurd, or just plain wrong. Even today, he writes, not all parts of math correspond to things, relations, or operations that we can actually observe or carry out in everyday life.

Negative Math ponders such issues by exploring controversies in the history of numbers, especially the so-called negative and "impossible" numbers. It uses history, puzzles, and lively debates to demonstrate how it is still possible to devise new artificial systems of mathematical rules. In fact, the book contends, departures from traditional rules can even be the basis for new applications. For example, by using an algebra in which minus times minus makes minus, mathematicians can describe curves or trajectories that are not represented by traditional coordinate geometry.

Clear and accessible, Negative Math expects from its readers only a passing acquaintance with basic high school algebra. It will prove pleasurable reading not only for those who enjoy popular math, but also for historians, philosophers, and educators."

The Philosophy of Disenchantment by Edgar Saltus. Great prose.

If you have an interest in Bergson, you may want to have a look at The Physicist & Philosopher, Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, by Jimena Canales. I got my copy at the library but subsequently purchased it so that I have it as a permanent resource in my library. A fascinating combination of history, science, and philosophy. Since reading this book and reading subsequent reviews and critiques, my views have changed substantially.

Cheers - I've actually come across that book a couple of times but haven't yet gone out of my way to pick it up. I've got a list as long as my arm of books to read this year, but when I get around to "Bergsoning" again, I'll definitely keep it in mind. Speaking of - currently reading:

Noah Roderick - The Being of Analogy
Kaja Silverman - Flesh of my Flesh

Franz Kafka - The Trial

A man is persecuted by pernicious forces beyond his control. Not sure what will happen in the end. Presumably the bureaucrats will execute him.

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-explain-the-world-without-cause-and-effect

Just finished -
The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien

Currently -

Rebellious Prophet - Donald Lowrie
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

Usually I do my annual reading roundup, but in the last 6 months I haven't been keeping track since I would normally write it down in the currently reading thread of the old forum. From what I can remember, here is what I read in 2016:

Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethics, Spirit by Joshua Foa Dienstag (reread)
The Guide For The Perplexed by Moses Maimonides
Operette Morali by Giacomo Leopardi
Socialism After Hayek by Theodore Burczak
History and Utopia by Cioran (reread)
Nihil Unbound by Ray Brassier (reread)
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett
Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai
The Fall Into Time by Cioran
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien (reread)
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi
Melancholy by Laszlo Foldenyi
Anathemas and Admirations by Cioran
Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen (reread)
The White Racial Frame by Joe R. Feagin
The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics by John O'Neill
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (currently reading)
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (currently reading)
One Thousand and One Nights (currently reading)

SPOILER ALERT: He marries his father and artificially inseminates his sister as a prank.

You may be confusing this work with your upcoming biography, "HANLOVER: Uncensored Confessions of a Lounge Lizard".

In all seriousness (and I realize this is where I lose you), The Trial is sublime, particularly the second to last chapter with the priest, and the one with Block and the lawyer. Read it. Edify yourself. Stay away from your sister.

Currently reading The Horse in the City. Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr. It's the second "horse book" the first one being "Horses at work" by Anne Norton Green. Both books forces on the vital role of the horse in the industrial revolution. Green's book compares the use of oxen, mules, and horses (each having advantages and disadvantages) in agriculture, especially, and the role of the horse in the American Civil War. As the title suggests, McShane and Tarr are much more concerned with urban horse use than agricultural use.

Both books focus on the horse as a 'living machine' which provided energy for all sorts of functions. Horses walking on treadmills, for instance, powered ferries across rivers, lakes and harbors; they powered equipment like sawmills (10 horses walking in a circle around a central capstan), or pumps, for instance. Horses pulled all sorts of machinery that swept streets, cut hay, and plowed the land.

A classic "industry & horse" combo was the fire wagon: A team of horses pulled a wagon on which was mounted a smoking steam engine that powered a water pump to put out the fire.

There's also quite a bit about horse diseases, (glanders, for instance) the development of veterinary science, costs of using horses, the significant value that could be extracted from a fresh dead horse, and so on. One thing is extremely clear: In the 19th century, almost everyone viewed the horse as a machine. If the horse couldn't work, it was dead meat.

Horses, were themselves, an industry. The largest horse market, in Chicago, could handle 30,000 horses.

I will read it. What are you wearing?

I actually creeped myself out with that one. That's a keeper.

John Stuart Mill said that if he found a book [an] effort to read, then he would also read a book he enjoyed at the same time, and go back and forth. — Wosret

Ah, interesting.

Having finished British Labour Leaders, I have since begun reading The Conservatives: A History, and I'm currently on the chapter titled "Peel's Party".

Brothers Karamazov — csalisbury

Possibly my favorite novel. — Agustino

Certainly one of my favourites by Dostoyevsky, and one of my favourites in general, too. Hard to choose between Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.

I have his complete works stored on my phone - and it only cost me something like a pound!

I will read it. What are you wearing?

I actually creeped myself out with that one. That's a keeper. — Hanover

:D

Horses, were themselves, an industry. The largest horse market, in Chicago, could handle 30,000 horses. — Bitter Crank

It's amazing how many massive workhorses there were around the land less than two hundred years ago, and now they're almost extinct, just a few scattered around for show. I guess they require a lot of work to keep, for no use, and eat piles of food. Stand beside one, they are incredible animals, so big and strong, but very gentle. If the horse is a machine, it's the most gentle machine I've ever seen, but it's still got a mind of its own, so watch out! And don't mistreat it.

David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity

Good for a brush up on Philosophy of Science, and more.

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper by E. T. A. Hoffmann

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 by Jonathon Israel

what do you think of it?

Giorgio Agamben - The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics

I've only just started, about 100 pages in. I've read the two previous works in Israel's Enlightenment Trilogy,Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested, and loved them both, so I have no doubt this will be of similar high standard work.

I have his complete works stored on my phone - and it only cost me something like a pound! — Sapientia

You read Brothers Karamazov on your phone screen? Impressive.

Thanks. Been meaning to read them myself.

I took your advice and purchased a used copy of Deinstag's Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. So far, I am impressed by his style and breadth. His analysis of the time-consciousness of humanity, and the subsequent analysis of pessimism's kernel as the rejection of social progress paralleling time-linearity was fascinating. Thanks.

Glad you are enjoying it. If you find those subjects intellectually appealing, you might also enjoy Black Mass and Straw Dogs by John N. Gray