/lit/ - Literature

nice bib

>>11419729
yes you should, even though the Ethics isn't much fun to read

>>11419738
Is it logically consistent? Are his axioms sound?

>>11419729
>a Jew having anything worthwhile to say
save yourself the time and read something more substantial, like Culture of Critique

>>11419729
Yes and No. I dont think that someone should really into the spinoza when one go to the philosophy in general. note that it is not saying he is worthless or something. It just feels like revolution 9 in all philosophy history.

>>11419753
>Axiom
>sound

WHAT

>>11419753
just go for it man, it's not very long. You will probably want to seek out some secondary material, it's sort of infamous for it's particular style and radical redefinition of philosophical terms. If you have the right level of autism though you can power through it, it's a complete system.
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/spinoza1665.pdf

>>11419759
*snap*

>>11419729
Read Deleuze's courses on him. He spoonfeeds like crazy, telling you the history of each concept like you've never heard of philosophy before. Don't go for his books on Spinoza directly though since they're not introductions.

>>11419831
Deleuze is fucking trash as far as "anal" interpreting other philosophers.

>>11419856
Your opinion is trash. The courses on Spinoza are pretty tame as far as his buggery model goes.

>>11419729
Leibniz>Spinoza

>>11419729
Of course you should read him you imbecile. Study him for a couple of weeks and if you're intelligent you'll know whether or not to read him further.

>>11419856
>deleuze is trash

into the vortex with you

>>11419738
Care to source this fine image friend?

>>11421631
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered". Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing:

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.
This calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):

Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought...

>>11424066
>alan sokal
stopped reading there

>>11424066
You can say that Deleuze's ontology is wrong, but if you're at all familiar with his work that quote is rather easy to understand. Like many contemporary philosophers pointed out, it's a bit biased towards how the human psyche develops, that is to say how neural networks and all their connected elements (from biochemistry to body parts) develop and connect to one another and perhaps Deleuze is projecting this onto Being since humans are a part of the world and the universal mechanisms must be similar therefore.

>>11419759
/thread

>>11424225
*snap*

>>11419729

I was assigned him about 15 years ago and didn't read him at the time, though I got the gist of what he was all about. Just today, I've brought my old copy to work where I plan to be reading it over the next few months on breaks. I expect this to go smoothly exactly because it's short bulleted information which can actually be consumed on a short break, much like the Federalist Papers were.

I even graphed out the structure on break today. Like 259 props IIRC, various fewer definitions, axioms, asides etc. In terms of volume and types of statements, the work is literally comparable to Euclid, which makes like 400+ props and has like 100+ attendant axioms, asides etc.

Now to meat and potatoes. What exactly are things like "essence", "substance" "self-caused" and so on? These are the first few stumbling blocks. Also history of the ideas.

Is there a possibility for an actual reading group here? I'd actually bring it home to participate in same. It's not that big and the ideas aren't that strange.

>>11424252
*snap* Look I have a working camera also Rabbi!

>>11424088

And not because you're right, but only because you're embarassed. They're still mad over this, KEK. Eat shit pomo apologist.

>>11424331

>>11424324
*snap*

>>11424362
Go to bed JIDF, you've put in enough time defending (((Spinoza))) today on 4chan!

>>11424319
>What exactly are things like "essence", "substance" "self-caused" and so on?

http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-spinoza.html?m=1

It's ok to take some things Deleuze says with a grain of salt, at least in the courses he points out himself where he is interpreting loosely (aka creatively), but for some concepts (such as actual infinites or essences) he's spot on and very clear in his explanations. Sadly he doesn't write the same way he teaches.

>>11424373
*snap*

>>11424381
You should really get that twitching snapping finger problem checked out anon.

>>11424406
*snap*

>>11419729
yes you should
>>11419759
His essays are literally a critique of jewish religion and the synagogue

>>11424066
Flawless victory. Could you please post more excerpts?

>>11425333
He should post the one from Guattari that's almost trivial if you know the already rather simple meaning of the Heideggerian concept of existence (ek-sistence, to be situated outwardly so to speak). Not saying Guattari and the others weren't dicks for using non-explained terminology just because it was well known at the time in their small group, but it also shows how clueless Sokal and Bricmont were.

>>11425402
>Sokal and Bricmont were clueless
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity :^)

>>11424066
>Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
>I will attempt to demonstrate that these people do not know what they are talking about by showing that I do not know what they are talking about

>>11425433
See >>11425434

Not saying there weren't (or aren't) plenty of pseuds in the humanities, just that they weren't very good at pointing them out. Even Lacan's weird phallus is the square root of -1 made more sense than S&B granted, it's just that arguments from analogy are pretty bad (as Deleuze himself said), but you can justify them as pedagogical I suppose.

People like to say that French philosophers are pseuds, meanwhile there's no shortage of pseudery in science as well.

If science got the same treatment as continental philosophers, multiverse and string theorists would be laughed out of academia, and yet they aren't.

>>11419784

For secondary material I recommend:

Spinoza: Practical Philosophy - Gilles Deleuze
Spinoza - Roger Scruton (for the The Great Philosophers series published by Routledge)

There's also a writer by the name of FuckTheory who is probably one of the most outspoken proponents of Spinoza online today. He has a Tumblr and he's currently working on elucidating every single one of the Propositions in Ethics one at a time.

Ethics is still a pretty tough read until you can wrap your head around the idea of modes, substance, affect, etc., but those materials have helped me as I continue to slog my way through.

>>11425971
>There's also a writer by the name of FuckTheory
>He has a tumblr

>>11425987

>There's a thinker named Plato
>He transcribes his thought into written material