/lit/ - Literature

>>23371467
that's good to know! Have friends who are pursuing law and medicine and are ESL and it makes me physically cringe how they need to rote memorize everything to pass. Took one healthcare adjacent course this last semester and the nursing student in my study group literally jaw dropped when I showed her how you can just decode medical terminology from it's Greek roots. Cannot even imagine going into professional work without having a solid basis in Latin and Greek

>>21413935
I think its generally useful to take two things into account when looking at the work of any philosopher

1. look at the work and its arguments and structure as a piece of truth, given by arguments. This is almost like a scientific approach to the text. which arguments are consistent and brilliant and which ones one sided and blind? what is left out? what is assumed? can we swap out or take over parts of arguments and leave out others or are they necessarily intertwined? Using this approach you'll find that Schoppenhauer and Nietzsche made some brilliant critiques and arguments of some philosophical assumptions while being profoundly uncritical of others in a way that have nothing to do with the rest of their system. Nothing in Nietzsche's or Schoppenhauer's arguments naturally leads to their views on women. In fact in many cases its even antithetical to it, and in this mode of thinking, should simply be discarded as trash.

2. look at the work as written by a specific thinker with specific experiences, intuitions and temperament. What sort of person in what sort of position in society produced this? what were they dealing or struggling with and how did this lead to their philosophical insights? in this mode, if you find a completely wrong argument, it is not simply to be discarded, but should be questioned. if this specific part of the writers temperament produced this obvious error, we should be suspicious of other places where this temperament is applied in similar ways. Why is Nietzsche, a man that was physically weak and unwell for most of his life, so obsessed with health and power? is he hypocritical or must we refine our interpretation of health and strength as intimately tied with the overcoming of suffering? if his views on women so obviously reflect a resentment stemming from his love life, how should we treat his views on resentment? perhaps we might start to suspect that it is not just the oppressed that create resentment, but that its something intimately tied to those in power as well

The two approaches should inform each other i think. The first approach is used to find the particularities of the text that start to inform you of the temperament of the writer, and vice versa, the temperament and resulting blind spots of the author can start to raise suspicions of logical arguments you previously considered sound.

>>17196584
Always been fascinated by how powerful and otherworldly he feels when described in myth, both in the bacchae and in the metamorphoses.
he has this unknowable, mysterious and all dominating quality to him that the other Greek gods rarely have.
Zeus comes the closest being the raw, ungraspable embodiment of fate and power that he is, but even there Zeus feels distinctly more human in his thinking and doing than Dionysus