/lit/ - Literature

>>22949185
>>22949198
Maybe I'm missing something, but none of this reads as a positive argument for teleology.

I see the geneaology: where telos comes from, why we abandoned it, why we're more willing to interact with eastern than western spiritual practices. I also see arguments for why the concept of telos is useful. But neither of those is an argument for its truth.

I took a quick look at "The Phenomenology of the Human Person," and my understanding of its central argument is that humans essentially and naturally become agents of truth. I could buy this. But this doesn't show that our purpose is to be agents of truth, which would be required to establish a teleology.

I think the root of the problem is similar to Hume's is-ought distinction. For human beings to have telos, there must be some outside purpose-giver. But biology, psychology, phenomenology, or any other empirical science can only establish that humans have certain tendencies, not that their purpose is to have those tendencies. For that, we'd need to rely on some pre-existing framework. But that only begs the question, since we can ask why we ought to adopt the framework grounding telos. (Homoiosis theoi, for example, is just an appeal to God, which only works when your interlocutor is also religious.)

For what it's worth, I actually like the ideas in virtue ethics (with the exception of the "golden mean" model, which seems both too narrow and too flexible to be useful in practice). My own inclination is to make a egoist-pragmatic argument:
>i should do things which are good for me, which feel good, and which help me achieve my ends
>cultivating virtue is good for me
>it feels good to cultivate virtue
>virtue will help me achieve my other ends
>therefore, i should cultivate virtue
This gets me past the question of "telos" pretty quickly, but admittedly it's deflationary and not especially high-minded.

Thanks for the detailed response btw. Made for some good reading even though I'm not fully on board with the project.

>>22864449
I think he looks cool

Where is the best place to download books these days?

>>22791253
>litRPG mentioned
my god i thought i hallucinated this genre
it's the most dystopian thing i've ever read

What has meditation done for you? Do you get any powers?

>>22755800
What's the problem?
Other than turdworlders not getting it.
If you are that concerned about pearls before swine, why cast them?

I want to dive into a big book next, but I'm torn between The Three Musketeers and Atlas Shrugged. I imagine the former to be a comfy adventure and the latter a 1k+ pages long autistic rambling of a bitter old woman which sounds kinda based desu. What do you recommend me /lit/?

>>22413933
>>22414000
What do you mean by "left wing framing"? What do they do?
I don't trust leftismists and I don't trust liberals either but I am willing to have an open mind if you explain.

What should I read if I feel like God hates me? I know, weird question, but I feel like something is off with this life of mine.

>inb4 the Bible

Yeah but what books and what should I meditate on?

Do we have autobiographies of lesser Founding Fathers? I know we have those of Franklin, Jefferson, and even Adams (but he actually wanted to keep this private for his descendants), but what of the others? What about those who fought against them, do they have autobiographies? I find that autobiographies are often better than biographies.

My reading speed for a fiction book is 25 pages per hour.

Is this good for a beginner? What is the most common average?

>>22072615
What protestant denomination do you go to that isn't liberal or zogged or feminized?
>Presbyterians
gay liberals (plus I don't agree with Calvinism)
>Methodists
gay liberals
>Episcopalians/Anglicans
even gayer liberals
>Baptists
cuckservative zogbots

>>22068176
>Pic related. They put the heading "instructions for Christian housholds" (which obviously wasn't there in the original text) above "submit to one another out of reverence", thus implying that wifely submission to the husband is nothing special and the husband must also submit to the wife.
Why are modern evangelicals so cucked on these things?
I am not even talking about left wing progressive protestants who put rainbow flags in their churches.
I am talking about the "conservative" evangelicals. They are very cucked but just in a different way from the progressives. They are afraid to say that men hold a hierarchically superior role. They even have woman Sunday school teachers. In some ways they are enslaved to the political correctness that they complain about and they don't even know it. They also of course are obsessed with Israel to the point of idolatry. It is sickening.

How do I stop being so horny? And don't tell me to get a gf because I'll fuck my gf and be horny again before i'm even physically capable of going a second time

>>21832801
The problem you're facing is the typical pitfall of most people with ADHD (or are just scatterbrained thanks to modern tech). The constant pursuit of novelty is what does them in. They can't bring themselves to practice for more than a few days on the keyboard they just bought, or with the brush kit, etc. The reason for this is that their minds prefer novelty over excellence.
Many people like this find that they change hobbies or interests almost as often as they change clothes. Once they enounter the first hint of difficulty on their path to becoming the next beethoven or picasso, they jump to the next thing they see on youtube or whatever constant stream of info they're plugged into.
Reducing the amount of media you consume should be your first priority for avoiding this trap.
Even though I am by no means excellent at anything, my suggestion to you would be that you focus on just one (1) thing you want to study in depth. Set up a schedule for when you plan to do the thing and strictly adhere to it. Also, experiment what works best for your learning environment and try to build an SOP so that your time doing the activity will be optimally spent.
Hope this helps, anon. Good luck.

Is there any literature exploring the ideas of a world after a post apocalyptic event where civilization has somewhat recovered? I don't mean people trying to survive a wasteland or a dystopia, but where humanity is starting to flourish again after a devastating event.

>>21486564
Full title for LLPSI? Asking for a fren.

>>21392612
I prefer poetry. My favorite poet is Keats.

Some common points being made in this thread (points which have also been made several times in several threads related to the concept of autodidactism we've had here before) is that most autodidacts don't have:
>a.) an external structure that can provide them with feedback in order to "correct" any interpretations they have, or otherwise expose them to any viewpoints that are regarded as "correct" inside of professional circles; this structure would also help confirm that the student is not conflating "familiarity with the text" with "actual understanding of the concepts being discussed within the text,"
>b.) an external structure that will insure they are "on the right track" with their reading in order to gain a systematic understanding of the subject they are studying, and are not flitting from subtopic to subtopic aimlessly,
>c.) the willpower, concentration, and self-discipline needed to direct their own education and stay diligent and consistent while doing so.
>d.) any resources necessary for the study that the average person on the street might not otherwise have access to.
All of these points are usually covered by the university; the university provides professors to teach the students, grade ("correct") any assignments, and to whom the student can as questions and receive personalized answers; the university provides a list of classes/courses needed to gain a degree within the student's chosen field; being enrolled in a university (and, most of the time, having to pay large sums of money to it) serves as an incentive for the student to be diligent in their study, and the university holds the student accountable if they are not; and, especially for things like medical degrees, the university provides access to specialized resources the student might require in order to complete their study. So, can we agree that, in essence, these are the four things a self-teacher is disadvantaged in when it comes to autodidactism? Anything else I'm missing, anons?

>>20823200
These claims are usually made by retards who don't understand the difference between "fantasy literature" and "literature with fantastic elements" (and if these people do actually understand the difference, they choose to ignore it because they want to lend the fantasy genre more merit by claiming that [insert famous author]'s works were actually fantasy). Surprisingly and dishearteningly, the most vocal of these people are established fantasy authors themselves, most egregiously Terry Pratchett and Patrick Rothfuss.
To clear things up, when they say 'Fantasy literature,' most of the time what they're talking about would more accurately be called 'modern commercial fantasy literature.' Like I said, there is a vast difference between 'modern commercial fantasy literature' and 'literature containing fantastical elements' (Shakespeare's plays and Borges' short stories fall into the latter category, as does the work of a good portion of canonical and 'literary' writers). Michael Moorcock talks about this distinction in 'Wizardry and Wild Romance,' and explains how 'literature with fantastic elements' is a very rich tradition and goes back all the way to the Epic of Gilgamesh and Iliad and the Odyssey, but 'modern commercial fantasy literature' has its roots in the often elaborate, sentimental, melodramatic chivalric romances that were popular in the 14–16th centuries (ironically, the same romances that Cervantes parodies and ridicules in Don Quixote).

>>20822225
One mindset change might be preferable because, while you want to be superior, you don't want to become an asshole and alienate people that you should befriend. Instead of thinking "how can I be superior," think "how can I become the absolute best version of myself that I can." This puts the focus more on you and encourages you to improve for your own sake instead of improving to be compared to others, and you still get to feel slightly superior to others when you meet a person and very clearly see that this is not them at their peak potential.

>>20738184
They are slow readers, let them be

>>20693846
Your first reason has some merit, insofar as having a standard language/dialect facilitates communication, but this can be done without denigrating the vernacular tongues; consider the German cantons of Switzerland, where all natives speak both Standard German and their local dialects. As for your second reason, I wholly disagree. If languages deteriorated over time, then after hundreds of thousands of years of human speech, our idioms would have declined to such a point that we were incapable of expressing complex thoughts, yet that is obviously not the case. There's no link between grammatical complexity and civilizational complexity; the Navajos are capable of expressing complex ideas in very few words, and their language's grammar is almost impossible for outsiders to learn due to its complexity, but before European colonization of the Americas, the Navajos were technologically and politically primitive. On the other hand, the Chinese language has had almost no grammatical complexity for thousands of years, yet in that time, China has almost always been one of the world's leading powers, and they've had a sophisticated literary tradition as well.

How do you actually improve reading speed? I'm getting a lot more proficient now that i've been reading every day, but I'm surprised to find little advice available to increase speed beyond "read more." I'm also not talking about "speed reading" which I think is mostly a scam. I want to sit and enjoy novels but just increase how many novels I have time to enjoy. I'm not looking to learn how to read a novel by staring at the page for a second or whatever the fuck.
I'm thinking of starting a practice of using this site (https://www.spreeder.com/app.php?intro=1)) to read the same novel every day for 20 min or so at a pace beyond my comfort zone. What do you think? Any techniques you've had success with?
thanks frens