Category: Philosophy

Categories
Book review Philosophy

Siddhartha, An Indian Tale (1922). Herman Hesse

Siddhartha is the fictitious biography of a man who shares a name, and temporal-spatial proximity, with the Buddha, and who echoes many notes of the Buddha’s development. This spiritual journey into the self unfolds in rolling lyrical language, develops psychological insights in vivid imagery, and reconciles the cacophonous conflict between the worldly and the spiritual in a symphony of joy. Siddhartha is most memorable for its portrait of its protagonist: who combines amiability with an openness to endless change, and becomes a role-model for spiritual seekers everywhere.

Categories
Book review Philosophy

Waiting for Godot (1953) & Endgame (1957). Samuel Beckett.

*Waiting for Godot* and *Endgame* are pure. Pure existential angst. Their plots are constructed, with extravagant meticulousness, out of nothing. Their characters discuss, painstakingly, nothing. Meaninglessness saturates these short plays’ atmosphere: leaving the reader airless, suffocating. These plays are twin peaks of artistic achievement – and are deeply disturbing.

Categories
Advice on Writing Book review Philosophy

Poetics (335 BCE). Aristotle.

*Poetics* is a bite-sized treatise combining commentary on the evolution of literary genres with still-relevant advice to writers on how to develop characters, construct a good plot, and evoke appropriate emotions in the reader.

Categories
Book Excerpts & Overview History Philosophy

Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction to: Poststructuralism

“Existing meanings are not ours to command. When we use a language, we inherit & reproduce, usually unintentionally, the language’s cultural legacy & moral attitudes… This is the way in which language as it exists necessarily imposes limits on thought.”

Categories
Book review Philosophy Psychology

The Stranger. Albert Camus (1942)

The Stranger manages to disorient us, and dislocate our own comfortable ideas about what it means to live a human life. It’s not a comfortable book – but, like the best existentialist literature, it’s a book that may enable us to search our own souls, and see in ourselves a brother or a sister to criminals and to saints. It’s a book that may empower us to face the essential meaninglessness of life: in order to create meaning for ourselves.

Categories
Book review History Philosophy Psychology

Very Short Introduction to The Meaning of Life. Terry Eagleton (2007)

Terry Eagleton’s Very Short Introduction to the Meaning of Life is a delectable, digestible introduction to landmark schools of thought whose debates on big questions have shaped European cultural history; and, via that route, global political history.

Categories
Book review Cognitive Science Philosophy Science

Making Sense (2020)

Making Sense (2020) is an accessible introduction to key topics & trends In current science, presented in the ancient epistemological format of the expert dialogue

Categories
Philosophy Politics Science What I read

Notes on Christopher Caudwell’s *Studies In A Dying Culture*

These analytical essays illuminate aspects of contemporary capitalist culture: including literature, liberty, and psychology. Underpinning these essays is the insight that a commodified approach to art and life erodes fundamental human relations, and impoverishes our souls. Caudwell argues — not for regressing into an imagined “glorious past” — but for us to fight together for a future of universal human dignity.

Categories
Book review Cognitive Science Philosophy Politics Science

The Republic: Examining Plato’s Best-Known Dialogue: Part 2/2

Part Two of Two:
* Summary of Main Ideas
* The Structure of the Dialogue: What’s the Unifying Theme of this Sprawling Behemoth?
* Interrogating The Republic: A Cognitive Scientist critiques the Dialogue’s main ideas

Categories
Book review Philosophy

The Republic: Examining Plato’s Best-Known Dialogue: Part 1/2

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436105

Part One of Two:
* Reading Plato as Light Literature
* Note on Gender Pronouns
* Socrates the Character
* Are the *Dialogues* Really Dialogues?
* Socrates’s Dialectic Style: Characteristics, and Pros&Cons
* Reasoning from the Ideal