/lit/ - Literature

>>11599974
KANT IS NEXT

All german ones

the first five are hegel, to be sure

kant
fichte
haile selassie
the wingdings man
SHODAN's poetic / philosophical applet

husserl
hegel
heidegger
lacan
baudrillard

>>11599974
judith butler

>>11600000
AAAAAAAARGH FAGGOT GOT THE QUINTS

>>11600000
Husserl harder than hegel ?
No Kant but Baudillard ?

I hate you

>>11600010
theyre not in order. kant isnt difficult

>>11600000
>lacan
Get real.
The guy is a hack. He throws an autistic fit every time he tries to speak.
The material isn't anything groundbreaking. Just rehashed psychoanalytic garbage.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=URsYj-TVFjc

>>11600019
regardless of what you think of it or heard jbp say, its notoriously difficult

>>11599974
>>11599978
>>11599980
>>11599997
>>11600000
Why are germans so autistic?

>>11600019
SHHHHHH
You shouldn't criticize him here
Get out before someone notice you

>>11600037
autism is codeword for super high iq

>>11600052
based and redpilled

Philsophers that challenged me in descending order
Peirce(harder than Hegel only because his work is a sprawling mess)
Hegel(wtf)
Kant
Heidegger
Whitehead
Deleuze (a pleasure)

>>11600069
>Peirce(harder than Hegel only because his work is a sprawling mess)
Explain more, explain more specifically

>>11600069
Fuck it's the peircefag again. Can you stop shilling him in literally every thread?.

>>11600094
He didn't write books, you have to read a series of research papers and lectures written over his lifetime and connect the dots. Figuring out what to read is a challenge. Also, he wasn't a good writer.
Hegel is definitely more difficult going from the material alone.
>>11600098
Lmao no

Hegel
Heidegger
Sartre
Deleuze
Lacan
Derrida
Baudrillard
Badiou
McTaggart
Graham Priest

Maybe this isn't a perfect list - I include some names not because I think their philosophy is essentially difficult, but because they are either terrible writers or incoherent thinkers or both.

>>11600098
Peircefag/processontologyfag is /lit/'s latest and possibly greatest treasure. He has the perfect combination of traits necessary for a gimmickposter. First of all, he is not joking nor self-aware at all. He is completely 100% serious and will have real life autistic meltdowns when challenged, and sometimes simply when he sees posters with opinions that don't match his own. Second, he is completely insane and filled with burning zeal for the thing he gimmickposts about. Third, he's fucking stupid, and his gimmick is shallow and retarded. He's not even a good expositor of process philosophy of Peirce's philosophy. He has a very poor handle on it. Last of all, he's not a tripfag, so he does not need to rely on the Manlytears crutch of 'aren't you annoyed that I'm so annoying and smug about it?'

In short, he is the ideal gimmickposter. He has high stamina, high insanity, low content, almost no prospects for development or emergent complexity, and the sheer stubbornness to remain a fixture of /lit/ for months if not years to come. He is second only to that Muslim who makes threads about Rene Guenon.

>>11600158
Hey, I am fairly self aware.

Kant isn't hard

>>11600133
Hmhh isn't McTaggart just accessible anglo Hegel?

>>11600000
>baudrillard is hard to read
lmfao.

>>11600029
For an autistic person, yes, it is "extremely difficult".
For a genius, it comes naturally; ergo Lacan was not a genius.

>>11600052
Wrong.
Autism is a code word for "idiot savant".

>>11600289
damn I love this quote
>>11600296
>tfw autistic and can relate

>>11600201
Give him a go if you think he's accessible.

>>11600158
>he is not joking nor self-aware at all
Idk what to say about that...

>>11600037
It's the same country which gave us a Goethe though

>>11600133
>Satre (fart) is hard to read.

>>11600016

>kant isnt difficult

Found one of the guys who always admit to never reading anything but wiki-entries in the confessional threads.

To this day there are profound disagreements among very intelligent people in the scholarship on his work. In over two centuries there have been incessant points of contention. If you thought he was easy, you quite simply did not read him, leaned too heavily on secondary literature, or read him superficially.

>>11600652
The first chapter of Being and Nothingness rivals anything by Hegel or Heidegger.

>>11600716
Did you read it in its original language or translated?

>>11600734
Translated.

>>11600683
From what I know many of the disputes are about contradictions in his work, I've never heard of anyone researching cryptic phrases in Kant's philosophy, as they do with Hegel for example.

>>11600683
>To this day there are profound disagreements among very intelligent people in the scholarship on his work. In over two centuries there have been incessant points of contention
That doesn't mean he is difficult. The sentence "I went to the bank" is not a difficult sentence just because you don't know whether I am referring to a place to deposit money or the side of a river.

>>11599974
My diary desu

There is only one answer:

Eduoard Musbodijk

All other answers are incorrect

>>11600806
>t. Edouard Musbodijk

>>11600763
>>11600773
You guys are retarded but for fucking real.

He wrote a seven hundred page Critique of Pure Reason then admitted two years later how dry and abstruse it is only to expand it again

>>11600737
In its original French it isn't nearly as complicated as Hegel or Heidegger, I've read Hegel and Heidegger in English, Sartre in French. English is my first language.

>>11600683
Kant's expression is simple and clear enough even if there may be disputes for the definitions of some of the more abstract terms. The problem is that he is overly dry and verbose.

>>11600806
>No results

>>11599974
philosophy isnt hard to read if you start with the greeks

starting with 20th century is like watching series since s05e08 though

>>11600819
I think you're the retard who is incapable of arguing for his claims. I have never heard of anyone saying Kant is expressing ideas that are just too hard to get, or that he's doing it in a way that is in one form another too abstract.
Kant approaches his themes very slowly and concretely.

Again, all the issues I'm aware of are not in the form of "What the fuck did he mean by this?" but rather "I know what he means by this, but this can't be considering the rest of what he's said."

>>11600301
You see, this is why many autists are not half bad and are generally allied with geniuses. Despite being a an affront to their very person, they see the logic of the post and agree with it.
There are others who would throw a temper tantrum like Lacan, but autistic persons such as this man, are alright.

>>11599974
I'm a brainlet who can't even understand Plato. I remember opening up The Phenomenology of Spirit just to see what it was like and I spent half an hour on the first two or three pages. How do people learn philosophy?

>>11600763

Even if I grant that that is what the disputes are about (doubtful - there is significant debate on the relation between the categories and the forms of judgment and the schematism that aren't grounded in contradictions, for example), that only renders his work more difficult, given it's monolithic character.

>>11600773

I don't even know what to respond to this. So when you read philosophy, you'll outright make an interpretation vague enough to allow for radical ambiguity, and then use this radical ambiguity to conclude it's not hard? I don't get your analogy at all.

>The sentence "I went to the bank" is not a difficult sentence just because you don't know whether I am referring to a place to deposit money or the side of a river.

What you're essentially saying is that it's easy if you don't understand what it means.

>>11600835

Just to clarify: I'm >>11600683 and >>11600845, not >>11600819

>>11600845
The relations between categories, the Urteilskraft and schematism are laid out perfectly within a few pages, this is a perfect example of Kant saying very simple stuff that everyone can grasp but which cause disruptions within the rest of the theory.
No one would say they don't understand his schematism, it is more the case that Kant introduced that chapter after TEN YEARS of thinking about how to bridge intuition and categories, it's just likely that Kant didn't give a very coherent account of what the schemata are supposed to be.

But no one thinks what Kant is saying is difficult to grasp, dummy.

heidegger
plotinus
ibn khaldun
judith butler
ralph cudworth
Vasubandhu
deleuze
damascius
jizang
kukai

>>11600845
>So when you read philosophy, you'll outright make an interpretation vague enough to allow for radical ambiguity, and then use this radical ambiguity to conclude it's not hard?
No.
>What you're essentially saying is that it's easy if you don't understand what it means
No, I'm saying "I went to the bank" is not a difficult sentence despite an irresoluble dispute about its proper interpretation being possible. Or are you actually saying that "I went to the bank" is a difficult sentence to read?

>>11600838
I can give you two answers, as someone who just spent several months reading most of the formative texts of German idealism and romanticism, and a bucket full of secondary texts.

The first way is that study it until you have an historically grounded understanding of its genesis, its ancestors and antecedents, and its dialogue with its contemporaries and both its immediate and later reception. The second way is that you do the same thing, but really half-assedly, and rely on simplifications by other half-assers who have become authoritative.

With the first method, you start reading Hegel after you have at least some understanding of Kant, Kant's own milieu, Fichte, Schelling, and a few others. Then 1/3 of the work is done for you, 1/3 is also done for you, but in embryo, and needs to be worked up by thinkin' about it hard for a while, and an additional 1/3 requires consulting other interpretations and reading additional texts.

With the second method, you read Paul Paulson's FAMOUS FIVE-STAR READING OF HEGEL from 1981, the one everybody reads in your department because the two professors who teach Hegel there were both students of Paulsons and part of the "new Paulson school" that became dominant briefly in the 80s and 90s, and then you go around repeating Paulson to people forever.

The second method is what most philosophy students do.

>>11600890
What is absolute knowing?

>>11600838
You can't jump straight into The Phenomenology. It's like just jumping into a book written in foreign language you don't know a word of. Philosophy is learned like anything else.

>>11600859

Hegel called the schematism the most brilliant chapter. Schopenhauer called it audacious nonsense that no one has understood. The sheer amount of secondary literature on Kant does suggest that he is difficult to grasp. A guy like Strawson went so far as to outright dismiss most of his work while others find it is all essential.

Your conception of "difficulty" not applying to cases where a monolithic and hyper-interconnected work contains contradictions that need to be resolved in order for the work to be coherent, but rather being about when something is "cryptic" is frankly a ridiculous use of the term difficulty.

>>11600871

My claim is Kant is difficult. Your claim is that he is not. You say that the sentences are not difficult. You also say that proper interpretation may be irresoluble. It seems like you are trying to put some ridiculous wedge in between reading a sentence and interpretation, claiming that since the former is not difficult, you can't call either difficult.

>>11600900
Really depends whether you read Hegel from the high onto-theological or "critical" perspective, or metaphysical vs. nonmetaphysical. Ontological readings are split on whether Hegel is radicalising Kant or disobeying Kant in legislating for experience from the viewpoint of the "conceptual" (theoretical), but the nonmetaphysical reading is basically this:
>Rather than understand absolute knowing as the achievement of some ultimate God’s-eye view of everything, the philosophical analogue to the connection with God sought in religion, post-Kantian revisionists see it as the accession to a mode of self-critical thought that has finally abandoned all non-questionable mythical givens, and which will only countenance reason-giving argument as justification.

Frankly, I don't know myself. I find the nonmetaphysical reading mostly unconvincing because it's so often based on a gut-feeling argument that Hegel wouldn't disavow the givenness of the manifold, the thing-in-itself, but this doesn't hold up at all considering that Fichte and Schelling flirted with exactly that at a theoretical level, and many Fruhromantik thinkers flirted with it at least in an aesthetic way. The textual evidence is hard for me to comment on as someone who has only read the Phenomenology and a few other things (Philosophy of History etc., easy shit), and bits and pieces of the Encyclopaedia. But of the three pro-metaphysical authors I've read (Taylor, Houlgate, Beiser), I find the metaphysical authors, especially Houlgate, seem to poke holes in the anti-metaphysicals I've read (Pipin, Pinkard, a bit of Brandom). I find the latter to be dangerously provincially anglo-analytic and to have a real whiff of presentism and poor historical sense about them when they start twisting Hegel into a pragmatist project for a post-liberal ethics. Some of the things I skimmed from Houlgate were particularly withering (or seemed that way) of selective readings and even misreadings from others, but I can't say until I actually read the Logic. Another thing I'm very curious about is Hegel's philosophy of nature.

An interesting case for comparison: Fichte was certainly perceived as a radical metaphysical idealist who had entirely eliminated the givenness of the manifold by at least many immediate contemporaries, but even Beiser interprets him as only (sort of) rhetorically denying the thing in itself and then having to sheepishly admit its presence in somewhat diminished form later. So is Beiser giving the true reading of Fichte as a somewhat orthodox "non-metaphysical" Kantian? Or is it just so unimaginable to us that he was so "weird," that we want to save him from it to make history itself tidier and more comprehensible?

Kind of interesting:
http://crisiscritique.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/adrian.pdf

>>11600966
You're saying that a certain mini-chapter within a mini-chapter can't be read with a decisive interpretation that Kant is difficult.
You chose the schematism chapter instead of for the deduction or the 2nd argument of it?

I'm claiming Kant is neither saying anything outlandish or difficult to grasp and neither is his writing too difficult to understand once you adapt to his odd syntax.

Hegel and Heidegger I would be ready to call difficult to grasp, which explains the massive discrepancies between different forms of interpretation.

There are no left Kantians and right Kantians, or ones that consider him to be a realist and ones that consider him to be an idealist, what Kant says is extremely clear.
The issues lie within his argumentative framework, if one truly follows from the other and if maybe accepting one premise in the chapter of the Trancendental Aesthetics might contradict stuff that happens in the Analytic.

Kant isn't hard.

>>11600991
>There are no left Kantians and right Kantians, or ones that consider him to be a realist and ones that consider him to be an idealist,

There are massive divergences in Kant interpretation and has been since the publication of the first critique. Actually, since before its publication, because Hamann read the proofs and already had his brutal metacritique ready to publish before the book came out.

The immediate reception of Kant was complete bewilderment and misunderstanding, mostly on the assumption that he was a Berkeleyan idealist. That's precisely why he added so many refutations of Berkeleyan idealism in the second edition of the critique.. Hell, the fact that there is a second edition is an indication that Kant is not "extremely clear." Kant wrote to a friend (can't remember which) in the immediate wake of the first edition's publication that he himself acknowledges he is a terribly "obscure" writer. It was very unusual style even for the time. He takes existing jargon and existing concepts from half a dozen philosophical systems and schools and reworks them, half the time because simply because he needs them as a component of his own jargon system, and the other half of the time because he was to recast or even preemptively prevent another person's own recasting (see: his disagreements with Herder and the naming of the third critique of "Urteilskraft" and focus on teleology rather than "Geschmack") of an existing term.

It took Kant ages to convince people that he was a "formal" idealist, because no one could figure his practically sui generis style of writing out. Even today the big question is whether his formalism is a sly move, because his system and everything he says seem (to some) to suggest that the thing in itself should be eliminated, that the last step of the whole system is a subjective idealism. That was the immediate fear in the 1780s and 1790s of many as well.

Kant is easy to get the gist of because we've been "thinking Kantian" for 200 years and he really did inaugurate a paradigm or episteme shift, whether creatively or by synthesising existing elements and setting the agenda for succeeding generations. He isn't innately easy at all to read. Hume is easy to read.

>>11600966
>It seems like you are trying to put some ridiculous wedge in between reading a sentence and interpretation, claiming that since the former is not difficult, you can't call either difficult.
Let me try to make my position with regard to Kant as clear for you as possible: Reading Kant is not difficult. Coming to a resoluble interpretation of Kant's writing is impossible. Each of the supported interpretations of his philosophy that has been proposed is in itself both not difficult to read and not difficult to understand. At no point in the reading and in the interpreting of Kant's philosophy do you come to a point that can only be bridged with an especially acute intelligence or critical discernment. There is a lot of territory to cover, and over that territory there are multiple cartographies of the territory that in themselves take a long time to digest, but none of it could really be called difficult; just long.

>>11600069
Where do I start with the linguistic work of Pierce?

Many people, even good readers, would get a headache before they've finished the contents pages of the Critique of Pure Reason. There is nothing easy about that book.

>>11601188
NO! STOP SUMMONING THE PEIRCEFAG!

>>11600806
Is he related to Gregory Berrycone?

>>11600986
good answer. ironically i find zizek's understanding of absolute knowing the most compelling, ironic because his hegel is materialist. anti-metaphysical readings of hegel are always just so much less compelling than the metaphysical, i really do think the phenomenology is an initiatory text, or can (should) be read as one. im tired of everything getting twisted into hermenuetical schemas

>>11600986
thanks for the link it's great

>>11600116
>Figuring out what to read is a challenge.
You find it in The Essential Peirce vol 1 & 2 and in the bibliographies of secondary literature, The Cambridge Companion to Peirce helps making sense of his system of thought.
>>11601188
Peirce on Signs.
>>11600158
>>11601506
These.

>>11601042
If we have been thinkng Kantian for 200 years and we are immersed in his body of thought, then you have argued in favor of my argument that Kant shouldn't be difficult to understand.
Surely formal teachings of English grammar would have been difficult to a peasant of the 12th century, not difficult now.

I agree that he is way easier to approach than Hume but I believe that after an initial adaptation there isn't anything difficult or too out there in Kant's writings.

>>11600158
Smarter than you

This is a good thread to gawk at all the brainlets.

>>11601188
It's spelled Peirce
>>11601716
>Secondary literature
They always cite the collected papers which are a pain.

new to philosophy here
started reading the stirner meme but was turned off after the first couple chapters as I struggled a lot with the way language is used in philosophy books.

It seemed to me, words that are familiar to me were used in completely different situations. I could reread a page many times but still not be able to connect the dots

Any help? What should I read before einzige?

>>11602291
>>11600432
>>11600167
>Peircefag replies three times to the same post

>>11600986
>>11601042
You seem remarkably intelligent and well-read compared to many posters on this board. Thanks for contributing.

>>11602327
Read the sticky and start with the Greeks

NUMBER 15
PHENOMENOLOGY FOOT LETTUCE

>>11602388
>88
heil

>>11600000
Lacan isn't that difficult. The seminars are actually quite enjoyable to read if you can persevere through the sheer amount of stuff you're reading. The ecrits on the other hand...

>>11599974
my diary desu, it hasn't been released yet, so pretty hard to read

Kant is fucking retarded hack? how can he write so badly?

>>11600000
Husserl isn't difficult to read in the slightest and one of the clearest philosophers. There are reasons why turbo autists like Hilbert and Gödel considered him the greatest.
Baudrillard becomes a very light read when you understand he is doing literary shitposting half the time.

>>11599974
in French

Lacan
Heidegger
Husserl
Hegel
Whitehead
Deleuze

The most boring is probably Auguste Comte

Phil Anselmo is very obscurantist. It's hard to understand if one can even understand what Phil thinks if one is not Phil himself.

>>11605538

I mean it's not that you CAN'T, it's that he masterfully concatenates the casual with the arcane such that you are always tempted to take him at face value but always weary to do so.

>>11602388
One in the middle was not me. I got btfo, I know. I really am self aware and that guy was wrong about how earnestly I do my thing. The things about low content, low effort, stupid posts, insanity, were all on the money.
Also hating is bad please stop.

>>11600052

>>11605106
>That image

>>11600806
Shilling this hard

>>11604509
>Kant
>Hack
Spotted the pleb

>>11604450
You have to go back to your containment board

>>11600000
>baudrillard
Really? His writing style is a bit dense but you could probably get by without reading anything that came before him and not miss much. Compared to someone that expects you to have read everyone that came before them.

>>11605651
I was just joking around you fuck. I am a guy who argued with you in a different thread, that's the only reason I know who you are. I was only making fun of your philosophy because I hate it and disagree with it, not because I actually think you're a retard. Don't take it to heart.

>>11600158
>He is second only to that Muslim who makes threads about Rene Guenon.
I make Guenon threads sometimes. Fuck you.

Hardest to read or to understand?

Wittgenstein writes simply and clearly enough that he's simple to follow but his thought is too elusive to grasp easily. So I'm not sure if he belongs on the list.

>>11599978
Kant is really straightforward if you have a good German edition (correct commas are key!!) once you get what he is up to.

>>11600806
Nice bait.

PARFIT

>>11607971
parfait*

presocratics where you should start

>>11606751
but I'm right, I don't understand

>>11599974
I found Sloterdijk pretty heavy going, only made it because I could google most of the bits I didn't understand.

>>11599974
Me