/lit/ - Literature

>>1155470

Notice that I said "credible."

>>1129603

I teach philosophy, and here's some advice for you.

1) Think about why you're interested in philosophy and what you find appealing. This should help you achieve some kind of focus (however temporary).
2) Don't be afraid of allowing your focus to change, but try to get something out of everything you focus on. Philosophy, as a previous poster said, is a discourse, and so ultimately (however far removed it may seem) everything relates to everything else.
3) That being said, I actually would strongly advise against forcing yourself to start with Plato or Descartes (unless you really have no idea of what interests you). The chronological approach that's often prescribed sounds nice, but it's ultimately untenable. Instead, follow your interests and just go both ways on the timeline (i.e., read what influenced what you're reading and what it influenced).

I suggest that you look into Bruno Schulz's short story collections (Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium pod klepsydrą). I've been reading them lately, and they're very good.

Cowboy Bebop was pretty cool.

>>745713

I'm reasonably certain that you do not understand Hobbes. Go read Leviathan again. The WHOLE thing, not just the first section. Then read Liberty, Rationality, and Agency in Hobbes's Leviathan by David Van Mill, The Rhetoric of Leviathan by David Johnston, Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat by James R. Martel, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes by Quentin Skinner.

Hobbes is not Nietzsche. And probably Nietzsche is not what you think Nietzsche is, either.

In other words...

>ITT: Trolls, teenagers who think Nietzsche is a nihilist and fantasize that they are ubermenschen, and conservatives

>>721099

I strongly suggest that you read Stephen Asma's Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha. It's about Theravada.

For no particular reason, I thought I'd share a few poems that are favorites of mine. You're welcome to do the same.

"Water" by Robert Lowell

It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.

Zoyd needed cash and also some advice about a quick change of appearance, and both were available from the landscape contractor Zoyd did some lawn and tree work for, Millard Hobbs, a former actor who’d begun as a company logo and ended up as a majority owner of what’d been a modest enough lawn-care service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named The Marquis de Sod. Originally Millard had only been hired to be in a couple of locally produced late-night TV commercials in which, holding a giant bullwhip, he appeared in knee socks, buckle shoes, cutoff trousers, blouse, and platinum wig, all borrowed from his wife, Blodwen. “Crabgrass won’t be’ave?” he inquired in a species of French accent. “Haw, haw! No problem! Zhust call – The Marquis de Sod… ‘E’ll whip your lawn into shepp!”