A Philosophy Thread?
 

Confession: Today I picked up Bertrand Russell's History Of Western Philosophy, and the Oxford Dictionary Of Philosophy. And I have no idea why I felt compelled to do this, hahahahaha......

Some force from within, or from without, directed me to begin Philosphical Investigation. I haven't the first clue about this subject.

As I very slowly delve into studying this seemingly awesome field, may I ask what your experiences are in Philosophy? What excites / conducts your Philosophical reflections / musings?

It has ruined my life.

intro: since i was probably 3 i was one of those little shits that keeps asking his parents "why?" "why?" "why?"-- when i was 11 i started having doubts about religion & smelling the bullshit & tormented my parents with theological questions at the dinner table which they couldn't answer.

education part 1: attended a catholic school, so they gave us a bit of philosophy-light, descartes, blah blah, nothing too heavy, but we read some stuff, the priests couldn't answer my questions either, but one did, he fessed up after cornered that there was no proof of any god and it was all a matter of faith. at last! thanks dude.

followed this by going to college to study science and a prerequisite was a course in philosophy of science, etc, so that was fun. befriended some older people/teachers/etc & i learned a lot discussing stuff with them, from (more) philosophy of science, phenomenology, etc. became interested in philosophy of science as a further pursuit but that got sidetracked when i reached the age of 20 and wanted more adventure.

education part 2: came to 'merica where philosophy wasn't a requirement, they gave you predigested "critical" shit and rote learning of opinions-- however, for grad school i had an advisor who was seriously into philosophy & read plenty of nietzsche, a whiff of adorno, some kant, some platonic dialogues, aristotle, banged my brains against wittgenstein (might as well attempt to read mayan hyerogliphics), took some courses in the philosophy department, and ended up realizing that i know nothing-- yes?

the motivation for philosophy for me has been pretty simple: i have a problem, i want a solution that is not readily available, so i have to think about it-- moral problems for example. once that i was in a tough situation but didn't want to be a sociopath, for example, i thought for a while, "without a deity, is there a basis for morality?" i ended up doing what i wanted in the end, but the question would be a philosophical one, and i got my answer in sociobiology ("there's an evolutionary basis for morality, so morality is in our nature and not a simple imposition from the outside" or some such crap conclusion). im not saying this is correct or works for you or anybody else, im saying this is where i found a role for it-- to solve problems.

there was some spanish philosopher twat (ortega y gasset) who wrote that we think only when we don't know what to do-- i think he was partially correct from my thing above. however, there is the wankathonic side of it which is the pleasure-- to think for the pleasure of it & fuckitall. during my 3rd-world days it was fun to get together with friends, get shitfaced on beer or stoned out of this reality, and speculate about all manner of issues we couldn't know, like "what is the mind" or some other shit. here in 'merica however that doesn't exist as far as i can tell-- de tocqueville wrote that americans don't know how to have a conversation, they only know how to preach, and so far he's been mostly right after almost 200 years (1830 or so?), it's a lot of cock-contests and very little dialogue. you go to other countries however & you see that shit again-- i had a bricklayer friend in israel who liked to read spinoza during lunchtime, and discuss politics in depth. here it's all as i've said a cock-contest but i've learned to adapt. still, i miss that type of conversation.

anyway, i forgot what i was going on about, but the question-- why? 1) to solve problems, 2) for pleasure

those books are nice picks, i hope you enjoy. you sound btw like the kind of person who would like to get shitfaced on 50 beers and discuss if there is such thing as time and if so what is it, ha ha ha-- shit, it's been ages since i've done that. sad.

I studied philosophy at undergraduate level. My university was largely of the analytical school, with a smidge of philosophy of science and non-Western philosophy. I ended up taking more of an interest in the continental tradition, being the awkward cunt that I am, though I've never really got the hang of Heidegger.

Philosophy doesn't really excite me. It's more like an brain emetic for me.

!"£$% - do you still not get Wittgenstein? I find that incredibly odd. I tend to find there's always things that people intuitively have blind-spots for, but Wittgenstein is a really odd blind-spot to have. Unless you mean early Wittgenstein, but I doubt that's the case.

I don't think that much; therefore, I might not be.

Also, watch Lost.

My B.A. degree is in Philosophy. My school was a small jesuit university so most of my early classes were on classical philosophy (pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, some Hellenistic stuff) and medieval philosophy (Augustine, Aquinas, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Anselm, Averroes). Later courses were modern philosophy, existentialism, Foucault, Heidegger, and philosophy of science. I didn't really get much exposure to the more contemporary side of analytical and continental philosophy until after graduating.

Wittgenstein, like many philosophers who deal with language, is fairly convoluted in his writing style. It's rather necessary to be so complex it order to avoid the very confusion he is addressing. I think the whole 'ordinary language' tradition is wrong-headed, in this sense.

I read the Rebuplic last year, it was far less heavy going than I imagined but also a bit drawn out. Still it was interesting to read and quite illuminating.
Glice recommended some Kant to me years ago I bought a Critique of Judgement but have yet to read it.
I've been listening to philosophy podcasts this year and have been enjoying Philosphy Bites and Partially Examined Life greatly, as a result of these I'll at some point soon be checking out Hegel, Hume, Nietzche, Descartes & Aristotle.

i get explanations, summaries and accounts of wittgenstein, i even enjoyed (twice) that derek jarman movie about him; dealing with his prose translated into english is another story.

i own a copy of philosophical investigations, it's sitting on a shelf waiting for the time when i can really strangle myself with it. there's some propositional logic shit in it that completely goes over my head. i did get a bit of that ages ago, truth tables & what not, but his shit reads more like quantum physics equations and i am woefully inadequate to comprehend-- or am i mixing it up with something else? probably. i need the book in front o me and it's 200 miles + 6 years away. *

the tractatus i don't get completely but there are some wonderful would-be aphorisms in it and while i don't own a copy it's available online. check it: http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/ten.html

it's a similar case with hegel-- the whole language of german idealism as a matter of fact, and the reason reading 2 pages of adorno's asthetics is harder for me than reading 2 pages of finnegan's wake-- i don't know the jargon and the meaning it carries, so i get the accounts, summaries, interpretations and cliff notes, but it's a different story when i sit in front of the actual phenomenology of the spirit and try to plow through it. this has caused me problems when reading nietzsche, who criticizes that tradition, but i've had help and/or dictionaries to cope.

so for now i have plato's dialogues and aristotle's extant works next to my bed, and i read them when i get a chance or find something that interests me. my plato translation seems to be a bad one, christian-oriented (the word "God" appears frequently in the Apologia), even though it's in the Bollingen series, which was/should have been more serious. it pisses me off when people "update" ancient texts like that.

anyway, i have other stuff waiting to be read like that wittgenstein volume: spinoza's ethics (not sure i'll ever get to it), habermas's theory of communicative action, and other random stuff.

meanwhile, the online tractatus i just found is proving very enthralling. abstruse most of the time, and requiring of some auxiliary texts, but still, awesome. gotta go butt my head against it....

-----

* now that i think of it, this might have been kripke, not poor ludwig w. but anyway, i didn't understand him at the time, possibly due to fatigue and suicidal impulses.

With the phenomenology, you might be best off starting with the section on phrenology - that is to say, start off at the point where he's furthest away from making anything like decent sense. Hegel is all about the construction of his arguments, not the content thereof. Once you've got how he constructs his arguments (which you'll get easier from a secondary texts), the actual content is 'immaterial'. I've read the phenomenology, but its actual importance in terms of content is far less unless you're writing academically on him.

Wittgenstein is probably similar - but I really can't fathom how his language games idea isn't intuitive. It seems so fundamental to the orientation of understanding the 20th-century that I can't actually address whether I actually do understand it.

One of the most important things to understanding philosophy, to me, is that it's really not important to take in the actual content. I've read more Adorno than I'd care to admit, but his importance isn't in the content but his general consistency - he basically has the same thought-pattern over and over again. Adorno is probably the best example of someone who has an idea aged 21 and seems to carry it until his death. There's minimal point reading Spinoza unless you care about the details - ultimately, Spinoza's ethics says a few things, and the proofs along the way are immaterial, unless you plan to refute him (in which case you'll have to take apart each proof in turn, which is essentially masochism).

I say this: I've always found the Greeks agonising. I just can't get anywhere near them. But I probably don't need to. I should return to this sober.

Philosophy is nothing but the inane prattle of pseudo-intellectual loners read by pseudo-intellectual, poseur losers.

What should I read instead? I've never seen it put so clearly before, you've enlightened me.

Also, I'm going to have to ask directly: whose sockpuppet are you? I can't figure it out for the life of me.

Broaden your mind and check the dozens of other sections in book shops other than the Philosophy section.

who would put so much effort (2400 posts) into an angry nonfunny persona? I feel bad about the amount of time I've wastefully spent on this message board over the years, but seriously if I had constructed an alter ego as lumpen as KIS then used ti to post 2400 times I would end up hating myself.

I have three Nigella Lawson cookbooks and a book on medieval cartography, will this do?

you got that wrong, simpleton. the readers may be all kinds of people (a book cannot control who picks it up), but the prattle is far from inane when it's a real philosopher-- and if a philosopher is not an intellectual ("pseudo-intellectuals" you say), then there are no intellectuals. if you disagree, i invite you to present the case of the non-pseudo-intellectual-- who would that be?

about them philosophers being loners-- that is a generalization from individual cases, and utterly misinformed-- like saying that all rock musicians die at 26. i know you're ignorant, but your display spells "jackass" with fireworks in the sky.

finally-- if you're looking for inanity, and i mean inanity of the most abject kind, just look at the mirror, and when you spot a large turd with eyes and mouth that looks just like you, then you've found it.

dont bother feeding the troll man. he's not interested in responding. just trolling.

like i say again and again - we should get chabib to ban him. im sure about 20 people would agree and we might get 1 or 2 that disagree. he doesnt contribute, just trolls. its so boring.

glice-- im planning on starting with kant to get to hegel-- i've read people like the schlegel bros. and schelling, and some accounts of fichte which have more or less prepared me for the hardcore german idealism, but my readings of kant are limited... i know it might be horrible prose but i'll give it a shot regardless.

i'm not sure i get what you mean about the construction of the arguments vs the content.

by content, do you mean the text line by line? i've found that to be the greatest of pleasures with people like nietzsche above everyone else, and roland barthes, or some of marx, and aristotle's nicomachean ethics, and the schlegels and other german romantics, and camus, and marcus aurelius, and even some of plato, and other people i can't recall at the moment (i just woke up and haven't had breakfast).

i am aware however that sometimes important ideas are presented in turgid prose, so in that case i take a look at the interpreters and commentators, but i think sometimes this is just a surface. what i've read of adorno's asthetics was indecipherable simply because he wrote in a language that was alien to me, and what appeared to be a simple word was in fact a specialized term loaded with hegelian thought. i did not know what the words meant. so i sat with my advisor over coffees & peppered him with questions until i deciphered the thing, which was actually not bad once understood.

about spinoza, i don't believe a word he says, but i'm curious about his frikkin proofs and how the book is structured. but like i said, just curiosity, like visiting the pyramids without believing that the pharaoh is in the afterlife with his dead slaves.

about the greeks: some stuff is fun, some is utter caca, but they did lay the tracks, so to speak, and began to pose a lot of questions we haven't finished answering yet, so i always find them necessary, because even the most recent stuff will be answering to them (eg. derrida vs plato). so it's like doing push-ups i guess.

alright i need some caffeine and eggs...

im not feeding anything, i'm just taking pleasure in insulting the little turd and i don't need chabib's help to do that... think of him as a punching bag for a morning workout.

ok IM HUNGRY. adios.

yeah man no worries i do that to. as i've told him on many occasions. but its hard to keep up the barrage of new insults, i end up repeating myself. i'm going to end up doing a best of compilation soon.

Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Barthes, Bataille, Camus, Lyotard, Sartre [etc] - all very writerly writers. Aristotle and Plato come from a very classic tradition where philosophy wasn't a distinct subject, hence you have dialogues, plays and so on rather than strict philosophy alone. Marx was a great polemicist. Writing style makes a huge difference. I'd recommend that everyone read Kierkegaard, regardless of whether they're interested in philosophy. I'd recommend very, very few people to read Hegel. It isn't a compelling writing style (although that style, like Spinoza's, is crucial to his project) and you will get as much, if not more, from reading a secondary text on him. Kant I sort of wobble on - I love him, but he's incredibly dense. Hegel is much more frustrating because he's sort of dense but somehow simple. One of my lecturers used to say, with the grandest air of malice, that no-one in the history of philosophy has ever truly read Hegel, including Hegel himself. I don't quite think that's true, but honestly, it's a complete waste of time unless you want to write a paper on Hegel.

I see all you've learned from reading philosophy is to insult someone in a painfully puerile way. Considering philosophers are normally barraged with insults, ridicule and derision, it's no surprise their ripostes to hecklers has rubbed off on you.

attacking people with a mentally deficient line of thinking doesn't succeed in doing anything other than demonstrating what a fucking moron you are. i wonder who it is you are interested in demonstrating this for tho.

i learned to insult people in the street, where everyone else learns it, you fucking tool-- of course it is puerile (the behavior dates back to childhood, yes?), but if it's painful, i think it's only painful to you. i mean it took you the whole day to come up with "ripostes to hecklers"? i bet you were crying under your bed until 15 minutes ago when your mommy pulled you out and told you to act like a big boy now.

anyway, the only purpose of your existence is to help me warm up the keyboard fingers in the morning, and this being the early evening in my time zone, you can now fuck off.

As Steve Martin said, calculus and physics are all numbers and stuff that you forget immediately afterward. Philosophy, you remember just enough to fuck you up for the rest of your life.

I had problems in my phi class. I kept reading 'causal' as 'casual' and just couldn't understand why they were talking about all these casual relationships (and not any serious ones).

Keeping It Simple posts a banal, oafish opinion and !@#$%! responds with insults.

At least it's consistent.

So, what shall we talk about then? ;)

(Oh dear, what happened to this thread today?)

Anyway, I'm enjoying parts of this discussion, thank you very much, and parts of my 2 new aforementioned books. Interesting that imho, philosophy is rather like chess, an Art and a Science, with debates and hard facts.....

I was introduced to philosophy via Plato and Aristotle, it's a bit difficult for me to imagine approaching it any other way. I also had the opportunity of studying them in a seminar class that allowed me to really challenge those philosophers in very open terms. They're really the most immediately relevant philosophers, I believe, for those who are new to the ideas and provide the concepts and questions that inform the relevance of later philosophers. Think about 'the good life' first and worry about induction later.

fixed!

but seriously, if it displeases you, why call more attention to it? i only insult the little shit for my own amusement, not to "take the trollbait". as you may have noticed, i've made posts totally unrelated to my username and/or that red angry face i display.

let's try to avoid this:


and instead continue with the more enjoyable stuff:


so mang, is this your first foray at all or do you have any prior knowledge of the subject at all? what's motivating you? pure curiosity? something else? i'm curious about this.


i agree with a good chunk of your post, as you can see from something i wrote in a previous page, but i can imagine a different approach to philosophy: start with a PROBLEM. something that does not have an empirical solution and requires thought and speculation. attack the problem with your own devices, and then research who and how has addressed said problem before. take from your own post the question of "the good life", and you could go back to the existentialists, for example, or deep ecology, or marcuse, other more immediate ideas, before reaching back to the greeks. of course, since all of philosophy postulates or implies its own history, you do eventually end up back on plato and aristotle, except that you arrive at them from a different avenue, i.e., your own "vital" problem, the questions that you need to answer now, and a research into possible solutions.

part of the reason i think people find a hard time reading plato today is because they are not shown how it may be relevant to their own lives-- though i find aristotle more relevant anyway-- but that's besides the point. the point is that it is not just possible but also viable to approach philosophy from a "here and now" situation rather than by the accumulation of historical knowledge which may or may not apply, eventually, to one's life.

and i'm repeating myself like a broken record at this point.

Must you be such a humorless cunt? I'm not ni'k. I don't care why you respond to KIS. I just thought it was funny that both of your usernames fit the exchange. I suppose a defensive overreaction also fits the character of an expletive, though.

i honestly believe that your humor is lost on most people---i can't speak for everyone. but anyway, there were other parts of my post and you just focus on that one. must you be such a whining cunt? circular argument ensues, with finger-pointing ad infinitum "you started it" "no you started it". best skipped, don't you think?

anyway, 2 am here, so im folding the laptop for the night-- looking forward to reopening this in the morning; with some luck, might find something interesting.

No, you're a humorless, hypersensitive cunt. The more you whine at this perception of yours that I was complaining, the more you are a humorless, hypersensitive cunt. No circle, just a spiral staircase that you descend alone.

Hopefully, in the morning, you'll have some detachment to see that my comment was more of an insult at KIS than you.

Well I think that is rather implied. What philosophy does not begin with a question? Philosophy, it seems to me, holds questions in a higher regard than answers. While this might frustrate less patient attentions, therein lies the love of wisdom.

Plato is exceptionally easy for me to read so I don't know why anyone would have a hard time. The questions dealt with, such as pinpointing the definitions of courage, justice, piety, or friendship, are eternal questions. I especially suggest beginning with the early Socratic dialogues as these famously aren't resolved by the end of the dialogues. Thus, the reader is forced to further reflect upon the reading. It fosters the internal dialectic, which I think Kierkegaard refers to but that is beside the point.

!@#$%! clearly suffers from a delusion of superiority. A hyper-inflated sense of his own intelligence, wit, charm and appearance. Very much like the philosphers he's wont to read.

How do you know philosphers are like that?
Who do you consider to be a true non-pseudo intellectual?

pbradley and symbol man - stop bitchin ffs. you're fighting over the little troll cunt. which is what it wants. thats why as ive said again and again we need to take it outside and beat it over the head with a shovel (ban).

"more of a" ... FINE. let's not derail the thread with discussions about the merits of your joke or my hypersensitivities or how we perceive one another. i'm selfishly interested in this thread, and it's not worth crapping all over it. we can bicker elsewhere (or not). but i'll continue kicking the punching bag if you don't mind (he shows up, i can't help myself).


simpleton, while i do have claims to be not-as-stupid as you, i have never claimed publicly or believed privately to posses any kind of "charm"-- i prefer to punch people in the face-- it's a more direct way of communication. besides, "charming" is a brand of ass paper here in america-- and while you might be the one who aspires to be charming (you list it as a virtue i lack), we just see you as a sorry asswipe.


i'd happily do that if it was physically possible but i must content myself with calling him a sorry asswipe. the limitations of the internet and what not.

anyway, i gotta stop this & post back on topic.

here are no conclusions to be drawn from philosophy, just whether or not one agrees with a particular philosopher.

ok, post-breakfast-sandwich:


i think you meant questions in higher regard than answers, i get it though. of course philosophy begins with questions. my point was that philosophy could begin not with reading the texts of its founders, but with a questioning of one's own circumstances-- which will eventually lead to the great-gramps.


Yeah, part of the reason why it's very easy is because there are no references to previous philosophers that are necessary for its comprehension. Take Aristotle's Poetics (I know you said Plato, but still, I'm making the jump)-- he builds on the idea of what is tragedy purely on his own experience and that of people around him, and so it's a very accessible text, whereas reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory requires a solid grounding on Hegel. So yes, Plato is a great place to start, but it's not the only one. It could start from anywhere that you can pose a question-- even a kid watching The Matrix and wondering what is real.

One of the problems of starting with Plato would be that you're confined to the questions that he asks-- e.g. what is courage, piety, friendship, etc.-- while you in your own circumstance could be looking at what is your place in the environment or what to do in the face of impending nuclear annihilation, or what are the politics of late-capitalist societies, or what should we do about genetic engineering, which are modern questions Plato had no access to. In that sense then, an introduction to philosophy based on the classics could prove too academic for someone interested in vital, pressing questions that are not included in those texts (not to say there are no vital pressing questions there-- just that we have some new ones).

In that sense, I prefer the "here and now" approach to the historical one, at least at the introductory level. Not saying that there is no place for a chronological approach, but that there is more than one entrance to the thing, and that's something Skuj might be interested in.

Speaking of which, there's this little magazine that migh interest him-- very down to earth, very accessible, kinda like New Scientist:

http://www.philosophynow.org/

I got some copies as a present some years ago, and maybe I should get a subscription...

There's some wonderful posts here amongst the silliness, and I'm slowly digesting them. (And my new books.) Thanks.


Um, I had a gift certificate to a major book store, after 2hrs of wandering about the Art and History sections, I was a) stumped and b) out of time, so on the way out something made me stop at Philosophy. The Russell book seemed interesting, so I looked him up in the Philosophy distionary, and I just said "fuck it" and bought both.

Well, ok....that's not "it" completely.....in University there was a Philosophy class that I was in (as a mandatory Arts elective), and the teacher + subject always fascinated me. Plato et al wrote such incredibly thoughtful works literally thousands of years ago, and that fact always blew me away. Now I really genuinely do want to delve into this. And the good posts in this thread really are impressive....I have so much to learn from you learned people, hahaha.....

And, I'm having a mid-life crisis, plus a lot of stress in my life right now.

You are sorry you asked, I know.