/lit/ - Literature

i'm about to dive into this dirty jew's ethics

is there anything i should've read beforehand?

spinoza general

just read the Ethics. It's pretty linear. just make sure you've read some Descartes first (i.e. the Meditations). Spinoza makes much more sense when you see him as taking what lies at the ground of Descartes to its logical end.

>>3790531
I think Spinoza's fascinating and indispensable, but I don't find him to be all that useful of a model for political theory of practice. I need some negation.

Why settle for less?

Spinoza's Ethics is pretty great.
>cool structure
>talks about emotions like "lines, planes, and bodies"
>Challenges philosophy to discover what the body can do

It also made deleuze who deleuze was, for better or worse

A conversation could hardly be called a sports conversation without at least one spinoza reference

lol, k bruh

Has anyone read Spinoza's ethics?

I want to into Pantheism.

>yfw you realize modes can modify modes

>>3340417
>>3340417

“Not,” “non,” is the concept of negation, and it’s one we use all the time without issue. "Day" is not "night," so we can describe day as a type of "non-night," just as we can describe "death" as a type of "non-life." Likewise, when I see two dogs in front of me, I recognize that one is NOT the other, so negation comes into play there as well.
Similarly, the concept of "thing" isn't logically problematic - it's just the MOST general concept that can be formed, since it applies to everything, so trying to figure out just what it means to be a "thing" creates puzzlement; as has been said by others, what it means to be a "thing" is just what it means "to be." This is why we can’t give a more complete description of “existence” than less-than-helpful tautologies like “to exist is to be a thing.” We describe things by way of the more general categories they belong to: a dog is a type of mammal, quartz is a type of mineral. But you can't describe what it means "to be," "to exist," in any more general terms, since "being," "existence," is already the most general term there is!

The real problem comes when we try to combine the concept of negation with the concept "being," "thing," "existence." Because anything we can form a concept of must fit under the category of "being" - since it's the most general category there is, and applies to every “thing” - we cannot form a concept of "not+being," any more than we can form a concept of "square+circle." "Nothing" is not a concept, but our attempt to form an anti-concept; and I say it's an "attempt" because it cannot be successful.

Continued...

>You have 10 seconds to tell my why you ain't full on pantheist

Also: "In 2006, Prominent atheist Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion described pantheism as "sexed-up atheism."

And: Which specific works of Zeno's deal with pantheism?

>>2138142

This, and also this.

Spinoza, check that Writ of Herem. Fuck the Jewish Orthadox Police.