Name

2y

Aristotle’s Nicomachean is a mind numbing read

MrMudManMood

2y

Thread is extremely interesting but got me kind of overwhelmed:

1) Where do you start?

2) How do you come across different people and texts to read? There's so much in here that I've never seen mentioned anywhere else

Name

2y

What’s a good critique of existentialism?

Name

2y

Aristotle’s Nicomachean is a mind numbing read

Name

1y

Need someone to pick it up and tell me if I am tripping

Choking

1y

read excerpts from it but nico ethics and politics were my fav stuff reading from him compared to the other excerpts i read from him

Name

2y

What’s a good critique of existentialism?

X7JQ9L2MF4A8Z

1y

the rejection of an eternal meaning and allowing the individual to create one’s own meaning is a bit of a nihilist gigacope imho, it allows people to undermine moral principles and ethics based on whether or not it aligns with the arbitrarily decided meaning(s) that one may have constructed for oneself

also, (this is more of a personal gripe for me) it lacks the beauty and solidity that can be found in spiritual systems

X7JQ9L2MF4A8Z

1y

the rejection of an eternal meaning and allowing the individual to create one’s own meaning is a bit of a nihilist gigacope imho, it allows people to undermine moral principles and ethics based on whether or not it aligns with the arbitrarily decided meaning(s) that one may have constructed for oneself

also, (this is more of a personal gripe for me) it lacks the beauty and solidity that can be found in spiritual systems

Very Based

2y

· edited

Pre-Socratic thought is something I am not well versed in, because in my mind the real jewel of Western philosophical thought begins with Plato and then Aristotle. But I have read some Pre-Socratic thought on Atomic theory which is really interesting... That the Greeks, Leucippus, and his student Democritus, and the more famous of the three Epicurus, formulated the Idea of Atoms 2500 years before particle physics came along is pretty astounding.

So the philosophers I find most interesting I would say are these:

Western:

Plato (The most influential philosopher who ever lived. As far as I know all of Western philosophy springs from his dialogues and the platonic theory of forms. Yes he got a lot wrong (totalitarianism) but he set the foundation for all of it)

Aristotle (the rediscovery of Aristotle by Islamic Culture is what is thought to have led to the renaissance, and lifted Europe out of the “Dark Ages”.) Historians will doubt that the dark ages really existed in the sense of the word ‘dark’, but Aristotle can be considered just as significant as Plato for this reason.

Wittgenstein “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent" I don’t think his statement should be taken at face value, but there is plenty that we can extract from it, about the limits of language, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” and about how to communicate with one another effectively (language games/patterns of intention). His only work, incomprehensible in many ways if you don’t have a background in formal logic, published while he was alive: “tractatus logico-philosophicus”.

Camus is perhaps my favorite Western philosopher because for me he is the only one to give a truly lucid answer on how to live a "meaningful" life in an inherently meaningless existence. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Nietzsche is perhaps the most misunderstood philosopher to my knowledge. Nietzsche's philosophical doctrine was notoriously b******ized by the Nazi Party and many others, who misinterpreted his ideas of Eugenics, Das Ubermensch (Thus Spake Zarathustra), and the parable of eternal recurrence, a brilliant (but not literal) thought experiment to examine one’s own life.

“Hope is the greatest of all evils for it prolongs the torments of man”

Kant's transcendental phenomenology changed the way I view all reality and consciousness. Kant's idea of the phenomenon and noumenon (Ding an sich) ruptured my mind and then opened it to a new horizon of experience. It is safe to say that Kant along with Descartes are the two most influential Western philosophers of the last 1000 years. Just like antiquity starts with Plato, modern philosophy begins with Descartes, Locke and then Hume and Kant. And the enlightenment with Isaac Newton, leading to the French Revolution. Newton is the impetus for the enlightenment, and all philosophers as well as scientists follow in his shadow.

John Stuart Mill (I think his contribution to utilitarianism and consequentialism is extremely important, but ultimately, later utilitarians, like Karl Popper, Peter Singer, and especially deontologists, like Kant, who was a precursor to Mill, poke holes in many of his theories.) I think negative utilitarianism ultimately is the better of the two, and I don’t believe it leads to antinatalism .

Schopenhauer (love how he writes with clarity and lyricism, love his pessimism) One of my absolute favorites. One should read the World as Will and Representation. You must be familiar with Kant before diving into Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer believed in The Will. Schopenhauer's philosophy holds that all nature and matter, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will. It is through the will, the in-itself of all existence, that humans find all their suffering. Desire for more is what causes this suffering. He argues that only aesthetic pleasure creates momentary escape from the will. Schopenhauer's concept of desire has strong parallels in Buddhist thought.

A quote from Schopenhauer:

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

E.M. Cioran, A nihilist, even more pessimistic than Schopenhauer, but also extremely lyrical and hilarious to read, if only because of how insanely depressing he is. His books to check out are “The Trouble With Being Born” and “On The Heights of Despair”

Excerpt from "The Trouble With Being Born"

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, the source of every sickness, every disaster”

Philip Mainlander is the only pessimist to my knowledge who actually took his philosophy to its logical conclusion and killed himself. I would caution yourself reading him, if you can even find an English translation of Die Philosophie Der Erlosung (The Philosophy of Redemption) Though Mainlander was a huge atheist, he believed in a sort of salvation or redemption that could only come from nonexistence, hence why he committed suicide, shortly after finishing his manuscript. In his conception, the final singularity and destiny for all of humanity, all reality, and all matter within it, was absolute nothingness. When the universe dies so does the chaos within it. Peter Wessel Zeppfe is very similar, I would recommend the short Essay (The Last Messiah) but read it with caution as well.

As for the French…

Deleuze was a hack.
Guatarri was a hack.

Baudrillard is interesting however… his most important work is “simulacra and simulation”

George Bataille (his writings on the relationship between s***and death, limit experiences, transfiguration through torture and suffering, the inseparable similarity between ultimate ecstasy and ultimate despair, human and animal sacrifice, are all really interesting.) Check out his book (Erotism)

The Stoics

Marcus Aurelius/Seneca/Epictetus (Stoicism, along with skepticism), is the closest sister philosophy to Eastern thought, and unlike most Western Philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl who argue inaccessible, inscrutable theories that almost no one can understand, this philosophy can actually be accessed by anyone, Eastern or Western, as a tool for finding meaning and reducing suffering..

Eastern Philosophy:

As for Eastern Philosophy, which at this point I am more interested in than Western, it is hard to point to specific philosophers, because most Eastern philosophy comes from ancient texts. Western Philosophy emphasizes individualism, whereas Eastern philosophy emphasizes Collectivism, which may be what accounts for this lack of. When we think of Western philosophy, we think of certain individuals and their contributions to the canon, but when we think of Eastern, yes there are many individuals who come to mind, but it all blends into a collectivist philosophy as a whole with its many subsets. The Baghavad Ghita is great, (an ancient Sanskrit text of Hindu thought) and it is very similar to Buddhist writing. The philosophy of Adveita-Vedenta for example, Non-Duality, which is written about in the Upanishads. A = not, Veita = two. Advaita = not two. The basic idea is that all living things see the world through a subject-object duality. “Us” (consciousness) being the subject, perceiving the external world as the object or objects. When you look at a tree you are a subject perceiving an object. Nonduality believes that this distinction is illusory… spurious… and that in the true nature of “phenomenological” reality, all distinctions between subject and object, even object and object, collapse into a single unity. In Eastern philosophy you hear platitudes (though not entirely incorrect platitudes) thrown around like the “oneness of life”, or “one with everything”. That a person is everything, and therefore nothing. Non-dual = Not two = One. Above all else, the self is an illusion.

As for contemporary philosophers, this is tough because philosophy is sort of at a crossroads between particle and astro -physics, so some of these philosophers work jointly across both domains.

David Chalmers (the nature of consciousness)

Donald Hoffman (reality is not what is purports to be, it is an illusion in our minds, and most importantly an invention of biological evolution. Consciousness is a product of fitness. Objective reality does not exist in a form of spacetime)

Nima Arkani-Hamed (the man who theorized that spacetime is doomed)

Nick Land (right wing Accelerationist, edgy meth head in the 90s, neo-reactionary alt-right conservative in the 2020s)

Mark Fisher (left wing accelerationist, anti capitalist, fed up with modern culture and committed suicide)

Thomas Ligotti (the true nihilistic, pessimistic heir to Philip Mainlander, and the darkest philosopher of them all.)

David Benetar (antinatalist, check out: Better to Have Never Been) He presents the asymmetry argument of negative utilitarianism.

Joseph Campbell (mythology)
Ray Brassier (nihilist)
Peter Singer (utilitarian)
Sam Harris (determinist)
Danniel Dennet (indeterminist)
Hilary Lawson (anti-realist)

Very Based

2y

· edited

Pre-Socratic thought is something I am not well versed in, because in my mind the real jewel of Western philosophical thought begins with Plato and then Aristotle. But I have read some Pre-Socratic thought on Atomic theory which is really interesting... That the Greeks, Leucippus, and his student Democritus, and the more famous of the three Epicurus, formulated the Idea of Atoms 2500 years before particle physics came along is pretty astounding.

So the philosophers I find most interesting I would say are these:

Western:

Plato (The most influential philosopher who ever lived. As far as I know all of Western philosophy springs from his dialogues and the platonic theory of forms. Yes he got a lot wrong (totalitarianism) but he set the foundation for all of it)

Aristotle (the rediscovery of Aristotle by Islamic Culture is what is thought to have led to the renaissance, and lifted Europe out of the “Dark Ages”.) Historians will doubt that the dark ages really existed in the sense of the word ‘dark’, but Aristotle can be considered just as significant as Plato for this reason.

Wittgenstein “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent" I don’t think his statement should be taken at face value, but there is plenty that we can extract from it, about the limits of language, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” and about how to communicate with one another effectively (language games/patterns of intention). His only work, incomprehensible in many ways if you don’t have a background in formal logic, published while he was alive: “tractatus logico-philosophicus”.

Camus is perhaps my favorite Western philosopher because for me he is the only one to give a truly lucid answer on how to live a "meaningful" life in an inherently meaningless existence. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Nietzsche is perhaps the most misunderstood philosopher to my knowledge. Nietzsche's philosophical doctrine was notoriously b******ized by the Nazi Party and many others, who misinterpreted his ideas of Eugenics, Das Ubermensch (Thus Spake Zarathustra), and the parable of eternal recurrence, a brilliant (but not literal) thought experiment to examine one’s own life.

“Hope is the greatest of all evils for it prolongs the torments of man”

Kant's transcendental phenomenology changed the way I view all reality and consciousness. Kant's idea of the phenomenon and noumenon (Ding an sich) ruptured my mind and then opened it to a new horizon of experience. It is safe to say that Kant along with Descartes are the two most influential Western philosophers of the last 1000 years. Just like antiquity starts with Plato, modern philosophy begins with Descartes, Locke and then Hume and Kant. And the enlightenment with Isaac Newton, leading to the French Revolution. Newton is the impetus for the enlightenment, and all philosophers as well as scientists follow in his shadow.

John Stuart Mill (I think his contribution to utilitarianism and consequentialism is extremely important, but ultimately, later utilitarians, like Karl Popper, Peter Singer, and especially deontologists, like Kant, who was a precursor to Mill, poke holes in many of his theories.) I think negative utilitarianism ultimately is the better of the two, and I don’t believe it leads to antinatalism .

Schopenhauer (love how he writes with clarity and lyricism, love his pessimism) One of my absolute favorites. One should read the World as Will and Representation. You must be familiar with Kant before diving into Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer believed in The Will. Schopenhauer's philosophy holds that all nature and matter, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will. It is through the will, the in-itself of all existence, that humans find all their suffering. Desire for more is what causes this suffering. He argues that only aesthetic pleasure creates momentary escape from the will. Schopenhauer's concept of desire has strong parallels in Buddhist thought.

A quote from Schopenhauer:

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

E.M. Cioran, A nihilist, even more pessimistic than Schopenhauer, but also extremely lyrical and hilarious to read, if only because of how insanely depressing he is. His books to check out are “The Trouble With Being Born” and “On The Heights of Despair”

Excerpt from "The Trouble With Being Born"

“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.
We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. …” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, the source of every sickness, every disaster”

Philip Mainlander is the only pessimist to my knowledge who actually took his philosophy to its logical conclusion and killed himself. I would caution yourself reading him, if you can even find an English translation of Die Philosophie Der Erlosung (The Philosophy of Redemption) Though Mainlander was a huge atheist, he believed in a sort of salvation or redemption that could only come from nonexistence, hence why he committed suicide, shortly after finishing his manuscript. In his conception, the final singularity and destiny for all of humanity, all reality, and all matter within it, was absolute nothingness. When the universe dies so does the chaos within it. Peter Wessel Zeppfe is very similar, I would recommend the short Essay (The Last Messiah) but read it with caution as well.

As for the French…

Deleuze was a hack.
Guatarri was a hack.

Baudrillard is interesting however… his most important work is “simulacra and simulation”

George Bataille (his writings on the relationship between s***and death, limit experiences, transfiguration through torture and suffering, the inseparable similarity between ultimate ecstasy and ultimate despair, human and animal sacrifice, are all really interesting.) Check out his book (Erotism)

The Stoics

Marcus Aurelius/Seneca/Epictetus (Stoicism, along with skepticism), is the closest sister philosophy to Eastern thought, and unlike most Western Philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl who argue inaccessible, inscrutable theories that almost no one can understand, this philosophy can actually be accessed by anyone, Eastern or Western, as a tool for finding meaning and reducing suffering..

Eastern Philosophy:

As for Eastern Philosophy, which at this point I am more interested in than Western, it is hard to point to specific philosophers, because most Eastern philosophy comes from ancient texts. Western Philosophy emphasizes individualism, whereas Eastern philosophy emphasizes Collectivism, which may be what accounts for this lack of. When we think of Western philosophy, we think of certain individuals and their contributions to the canon, but when we think of Eastern, yes there are many individuals who come to mind, but it all blends into a collectivist philosophy as a whole with its many subsets. The Baghavad Ghita is great, (an ancient Sanskrit text of Hindu thought) and it is very similar to Buddhist writing. The philosophy of Adveita-Vedenta for example, Non-Duality, which is written about in the Upanishads. A = not, Veita = two. Advaita = not two. The basic idea is that all living things see the world through a subject-object duality. “Us” (consciousness) being the subject, perceiving the external world as the object or objects. When you look at a tree you are a subject perceiving an object. Nonduality believes that this distinction is illusory… spurious… and that in the true nature of “phenomenological” reality, all distinctions between subject and object, even object and object, collapse into a single unity. In Eastern philosophy you hear platitudes (though not entirely incorrect platitudes) thrown around like the “oneness of life”, or “one with everything”. That a person is everything, and therefore nothing. Non-dual = Not two = One. Above all else, the self is an illusion.

As for contemporary philosophers, this is tough because philosophy is sort of at a crossroads between particle and astro -physics, so some of these philosophers work jointly across both domains.

David Chalmers (the nature of consciousness)

Donald Hoffman (reality is not what is purports to be, it is an illusion in our minds, and most importantly an invention of biological evolution. Consciousness is a product of fitness. Objective reality does not exist in a form of spacetime)

Nima Arkani-Hamed (the man who theorized that spacetime is doomed)

Nick Land (right wing Accelerationist, edgy meth head in the 90s, neo-reactionary alt-right conservative in the 2020s)

Mark Fisher (left wing accelerationist, anti capitalist, fed up with modern culture and committed suicide)

Thomas Ligotti (the true nihilistic, pessimistic heir to Philip Mainlander, and the darkest philosopher of them all.)

David Benetar (antinatalist, check out: Better to Have Never Been) He presents the asymmetry argument of negative utilitarianism.

Joseph Campbell (mythology)
Ray Brassier (nihilist)
Peter Singer (utilitarian)
Sam Harris (determinist)
Danniel Dennet (indeterminist)
Hilary Lawson (anti-realist)

slimreapercantrap

1y

Interesting for you to toss Delueze, Guattari, and Foucault to the curb like that. I'm guessing Lacan doesn't float ur boat either. why?

As far as Eastern philosophy goes, if you are ready to move past the basics and become fully based, check out the Zhuangzi. I strongly advise you get an annotated version or look up an a***ysis of each chapter as you go along. There are a lot of things that get lost in translation when you read it in English without any supplementary material.

Very Based

2y

he wasn't a terrible writer he just wrote in obscure niche German neologisms for a small group of other German philosophers of the time (1700s) with extremely abstract ideas, which is why it's so inaccessible today.

Hegel on the other hand.....

Skinn Foley

2y

The way I personally made peace with this is just accepting that we are what we are

There's probably never going to be an answer to "how", let alone "why", this all happened the way it did, but just an understanding that it did happen. Tryna explain the unexplainable is way out of anyone's league and, if held responsibly, that is why religion is useful and good for many people. The burden of human consciousness can be intense

Very Based

1y

@edumist

to add on to this, I find it's really better to learn about Kant through secondary sources, different lectures, a***ysis of the Critique, University journals/papers, anything you can get your hands on to help unravel deontology, and of course learn about Plato. And maybe even read Schopenhauer, who will reference Kant throughout The World As Will and Representation (a much more fun, lyrical piece). And then maybe..... work your way through the Critique, but be prepared to dedicate more time than you should be dedicating to such a formidable and at times incomprehensible book. I think Kant is so significant that it may be worth the time.

(And no, I haven't finished it either lol)

Marble

1y

You say “it allows people to undermine moral principles and ethics”

But what moral principles and ethics and who says those moral principles and ethics are the right ones? Are there set moral principles and ethics and aren’t those also arbitrarily chosen? Feel like every culture and person has different moral principles, even one person has different ones depending on the time you ask them. I don’t even know exactly what existentialism stands for, but I think it’s weird that you may not undermine some ‘moral principles’.

Not that I think that ‘oh nothing in the world means anything, so I can do anything I want’ is that valid either tho.

CutiePieHole

2y

My favorite philsopher.

Very Based

1y

I'm somewhat familiar with Zhuangzi, and will delve deeper, thanks for the tip about the annotated version. I will delete what I wrote about Foucault. He had plenty of interesting ideas. Deleuze and Guattari I'm going to leave that in my post for now, if those are philosophers you find insightful, I'd love to hear why and possibly (but not probably) you can change my mind.

(this is a meme from 4chan btw, not targeting you of course)