My undergrad was in STEM which due to cultural osmosis is a type of education that smuggles in a lot of unstated analytic philosophy assumptions, so to me the analytic point of view is much more intuitive even though I haven’t read more than snippets from its founding texts yet.
I only started to read continental philosophy in the past 5 years or so. Prior to that the passage you read would’ve been gibberish to me and probably also I’d have been inclined to actively argue in favor of the analytic point of view. Which I still feel has a great and sturdy rigor that the continental side lacks and I still admire, however it’s a bit of a demoralizing philosophical dead end that closes off discussion and has absolutely nothing to say about existentialist questions (as Wittgenstein openly asserted, as if this was a good property of a philosophical system!!).
So that’s why when my interest in philosophy revived recently, it was caused by the to-me-fresh tradition of continental philosophy. It proved worthwhile to try suspending my sense of rigor and appreciating the value of what they have to say regardless of whether it’s really “correct”
The lack of rigor is something that scares me, and I don’t even have any experience with analytic philosophy. Its tough to even feel aware of just how without rigor are some of the things I’m really on board with. I think that comes with the territory, the project. This wasn’t meant to be a body of knowledge with fully sealed gaps, maybe. It can do other things because of that. Not to say it’s better or anything.
If you’re starting to be actively scared about the question of rigor, I wonder if you’d enjoy the exact reverse path I traveled? Try reading Wittgenstein or Russell for instance, or at least capsule summaries of them. Their project as I understand it is basically to see what happens if you treat rigor as the absolute #1 consideration in philosophy, and take that to its natural conclusion.
(Warning: the aesthetic difference would probably be bracing though, and I imagine reading them in a charitable manner would a require big effort of “temporarily suspending” important values of other kinds.)
I wonder the same! I think you were right about the fun of it being the potential friction too. Still, I’m not sure how I’ll come by any analytic philosophy anytime soon. Life is too short.
In Chinese official ideology, they are keep trying to treat themselves as a pure higher civilisation or selectively admit few part influences from outside, only believe that every nations around is barbarian and worship them . They’re avoiding the fact about so many western culture strongly grown in Central Asia and then Hun, Mongolian, Manchurian and etc changed their language and entire life in their whole history.
Lots of western scholar are accept this statement because of unfamiliarity about Central Asian and guilty about Eurocentrism. Luckily, after USSR down, so many studies about mid Asia was finally published by Russian and Modern Turkic in these 20 years, we could understand what really happened in history and treats them as a whole part link to Europe and Middle East.
I’m recently reading a book called Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara: An Introduction with Selected Translations, about the early ages of Buddhism, as reviewer said:
This wonderful book provides tantalizing glimpses of a forgotten Buddhist civilization, one that flourished at the geographical crossroads of Indian, Persian, Hellenistic, and Central Asian cultures around the time of Christ…The book not only introduces us to ancient Gandhara but also enriches our understanding of the complex currents of ideas that formed the diverse Buddhist traditions of India, Central Asia, and China.
Back to poem, even the Classic Chinese translated to modern text, it’s still not the truly the meaning of their age, we’re hardly to confirm the pronunciation of them, and the influence of other languages in these poem. So the value of English translation should also definitely not be limited to the original text.
attempting to read Heat 2 led me to pick up Middlemarch, which I am now a third of the way through and enjoying more than I’ve enjoyed a 19th century novel in a decade. my unlikable pretentiousness only grows
A friend sent that to me a little while ago for a laugh, but I also took it a bit seriously because I think it’s kind of clever, like reading something that requires so much work for you to construct would, if you believed in that responsibility with the seriousness of any struggle for improving your health, that it would help you to discover a way to sort or scan through brain noise, if changing your behavior would be of any help at all.
Then while reading Ricoeur, who says as part of his ultimate thesis that time is human conception related to the production of narrative order, with all that the idea of “ordering” implies about spatial organization, he does end up talking about how stories are actualized by readers and that some books basically set all the work of actualizing the world of their stories upon the shoulders of readers, with his example being Ulysses.
“Finally it is the reader who completes the work inasmuch as (if we follow Roman Ingarden in The Literary Work of Art, and Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading) the written work is a sketch for reading. Indeed it consists of holes, lacunae, zones of indetermination, which, as in Joyce’s Ulysses, challenge the reader’s capacity to configure what the author seems to take malign delight in defiguring. In such an extreme case, it is the reader, almost abandoned by the work, who carries the burden of emplotment [a verb that basically means the structuring of events].”
Just thought this was cool, how it may validate reading Finnegan’s Wake as a method for battling with intrusive thoughts because of the labor it takes to actualize the time and space of that story.
her narrator is really making it work for me in a way that Tolstoy ceased to after I was about 22, she’s so seemingly helpless to resist interjecting and caveating and apologizing for her characters, it’s very endearing and often funny
a nice thing about ebook repositories online is that it’s easier to accidentally find stuff and then check it out on a whim which is why i’m reading a book called 100 Things Phish Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. i have never heard phish before and have no opinions about them. i checked out some of their songs on youtube and feel like they can best be summed up with the word “amiable”. but it’s somehow pretty fun to read a book which is written from the inside of a subculture you’ll never join or understand and which has the typical music writing elusiveness as to what anything actually sounds like
the mixture of pedantry and perfect vagueness… mwah!!
whole pages go by which are functionally meaningless to me. you read them expecting to be returned back to some concrete reference point eventually and it just never happens, like reading raymond roussel or the voynich manuscript. or maybe like a phish jam?? i’ll never know. i guess i would recommend this book to other people who are happy not knowing anything about phish.
A friend who recently had a baby passed onto me a book that is basically a guide to being a decent partner to your pregnant S.O. and while there is some genuinely good info in it, boy oh boy am I not the target demographic for this particular book (manchildren who never really bothered being considerate of anyone but themselves).
The author basically admits in the opening “I was a selfish asshole until one day I figured I shouldn’t be” and the tone of the book kind of assumes the reader is the same. So the whole thing is teeth-gratingly insulting/condescending even if it’s coming from a place of genuinely wanting to be helpful.
At week 19 in the book, it recommends taking over more of the household chores. Like, it just straight up assumes you’ve been leaving all the work to your wife.
Anyway I think I hate the author of this thing but I suppose I’ll continue to skim through it for the occasional nugget of wisdom that manages to rise through all the instructions for clearing a bar that is one inch off the floor.
i won’t give any clarifying details about Phish because i’m tickled by the musings in this post but as someone who spent some years in upstate NY this is very funny to me (upstate NY is jam band central. oops I’ve said too much already)
There are many reasons to marry a pediatrician but probably the biggest is never having to read a single book or article or anything about pregnancy or childbirth or child rearing. I continue my life of indolence and blissful ignorance
The month after the publication of Inoue’s Naichi zakkyoron (On Mixed Residence in the Interior), Taguchi’s Jōyaku kaiseiron (On the Revision of the Treaties) was published. In this collection of lectures, to which an introduction by the famous journalist and Christian, Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), was added, Taguchi referred to ‘those who most vigorously oppose’ mixed residence, namely Shiga Shigetaka, Miyake Setsurei, Tani Tateki, Hayashi Hōmei and Inoue Kakugorō, and advanced a strange counter-argument, saying ‘all these gentlemen are foreigners’.
This claim was based on the origin of their family names, which Taguchi looked up in the Shinsen shōjiroku.
…
“Taguchi sent a copy of his work to Inoue Tetsujirō, who had just arrived home from abroad, with a letter noting that the family name Inoue is that of the descendants of Chinese immigrants.”
“This provoked boisterous laughter and applause from his audience. ”
I got a copy of Against Interpretation to read and made it a couple essays in (just the first two) and I feel like I’ve found the well water for a certain kind of essay writing that I think is annoyingly ambitious and still not fun to read. I should probably read a bit more but I think I’m putting it down for the moment.
Finding The Two Towers to be a lot less engaging than The Fellowship of the Ring. I am nearly half-way through, and the scene with Gandalf arriving to the already conquered Isengard and finding Mari and Pippin there was honestly very fun, but I keep thinking about where this book is going to land in a tier list of the Hobbit and LotR.
I am curious to hear what people think about this book, or this book in relation to the others. And I am already curious to rewatch the movies and notice differences, so how this book differs from the film is also interesting to think about. I was surprised by how quick Wormtongue is handled in the book, it is almost hard to notice that he’s a slimy gaslighting type before Gandalf zaps him.
This is making me think of a concept for a YouTube video: “Top 10 MOST EGREGIOUS Padding OF ALL TIME” and it lists, like, the Bible, The Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, etc.
Death by Landscape is real fuckin good! Sort of makes me wish I kept up with contemporary lit more so I could have already read the stuff she writes about, but I guess that’s OK. Novels are boring
