Having said that, you'd best avoid it if you're sold on hermeneutics or post-Kierkegaardian 'existentialism'.

give up the prehistoric wank, read some neuroscience.

That's precisely the sort of thing Badiou is arguing.

I do ocassionally read properly 'scientific' things, but I always just want to jump to the abstract. It behooves me none to know the particulars of a field I'm not likely to operate in.

go gazzaniga go

anyway, try this?

http://books.google.com/books?id=FB5cDa05U8cC&printsec=frontcover&vq=%22Ph ilosophy+and+Neuroscience%22&dq=philosophy+of+neur oscience

un autre

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZS0eo39XOs8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=philo sophy+of+neuroscience&sig=ACfU3U0y1m2pAZecoQ_1j-biknzjIjd4RA&source=gbs_similarbooks_r&cad=2_2#PPP 1,M1

Heliogabalus or the crowned anarchist by Artaud. It might be a litte bit too phallic, but it's nevertheless very interesting. Heliogabalus replaced Nero as my favourite Roman Emperor anyway.

Will give the first a bash, unlikely I'll read something as insipid as the second.

not something i would have suggested but you asked for deep abstraction.

something as popular as gazzaniga's the ethical brain should suffice to blow up everything you knew until today (i.e. "morality comes from god").

it's here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=R0ICFQ16h0YC&dq=the+ethical+brain&pg=PP1& ots=jR1BDdnHNS&sig=g9aSvfR9FbE11PBuM_J4qq73F1k&hl= en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

I hope this is the pejorative 'you'. This is the problem I have with a lot of what you might call 'philosophico-science', that it rather gleefully and smugly pronounces things that a decent sceptic could've forseen several thousand years ago.

i would post in this thread but it would get lost in the general wankery

Science is the Yngwie Malmsteen of knowledge. Incredible, yes, but no one really wants to hear it.

yes it's true-- but look at this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html

that man you see is an utter twat. but still-- the implications of the science are ready to kill the soul--socially that is. oh yeah. i couldn't be happier myself. why people need scientific proof of the obvious i don't know, but there!

The problem with that sort of article is that you get into this epistemic loop that's pretty pointless, as pointless as religions antagonists claim religion to be - assuming that any notions of 'faith' or 'religion' are 'false' constructs, and any belief in those is a consequence of empirical chemistry/ physics, how can the brain trangress beyond its own (empirically defined) limits? This might seem pessimistic, but if it produces endorphins in some people to intuit ('falsely') the existence of God, religion [etc], then does that make the notion 'false', the 'outside' of God 'false', or does it make God true within the empirically defined parameters of the brain? And ultimately, does science propose to make people's lives any different (positively or negatively) or does it propose to merely observe?

See? It's a big loop of pointless cock.

I'll finish reading it next time I go into barnes and noble. I'm not gonna actually buy it.

I finished reading Watchmen recently. Pretty great.

bought William Gibson's Neuromancer and Bukowski's Factotum. can't wait to read them!

I found it at some thrift store for 25 cents! Along with Dante's Inferno, and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

But first I must read Hardball by Christ Matthews for AP Government.

Win. I got my first copy for free when my library was throwing out books.

you know hardball is good, dontcha?

Neuromancer is fucking great. I didn't expect it to be as good as it was, but it was my favorite book for a really long time. Gibson is one of the best describers in literature.

I hadn't heard anything about it until now. All my friends in the same class procrastinate so much that none of them even have it yet. Actually their irresponsibility annoys me sometimes because I have to be the one to make copies of assignments or whatever for all of them.

But it's good you say? I haven't read any non-fiction for a while, so it'll be a nice read.