/lit/ - Literature

> Why should I waste my time reading Western thinkers when I could skip to the punchline (nihilism) and look for truth and meaning in fideism and mysticism?

It can be fun, but there isn't much value in it. The westerners dug a massive borehole and called it a skyscraper.

your time is worthless already
do something for yourself instead because
you are obviously not suited for thinking

>>15295797
Ah, the classic western mistake. Thinking takes you to the truth like a hammer architects a house.

>>15295797
I can't imagine the mental illness and personality disorders necessary to make this kind of post. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't care what some smelly incel thinks or feels, so fuck off.

You probably don't even realize what a freak you come off as, do you>

>>15295837
holy fuck
you sound indian
never had a chance

>>15295851
Based schizo. Do you space like that to prevent the government from spying on you?

>>15295761
Just become a devout Humean, it pisses everyone off.

The problem you have seems to not be in the ends of philosophy. Your problem seems to stem from the difficulty in finding a beginning.

It's quite possible, and in fact happens all too often, that one reads several books on philosophy, a multitude even, and yet in all that time hasn't spent one moment doing philosophy. It's quite an interesting phenomenon, and I think it is a modern one (modern being within the past 200 or so years).

>>15295837
>mental Illness
>>15295869
Schizo

Your language is a product of net-speak and unoriginal thoughts. Detox from the internet and you will become half the person you think you are.

Retard

>>15296019
These posts are seriously embarrassing for you. I really hope you get the help you need.

>>15295965
I'm not sure entirely what you mean, but I will say this: I had a brief stint as a Catholic. I found the institution repulsive, but I really admired scholasticism/Thomism. I wouldn't call myself super attached to it, but it has greatly influenced how I've decided to live my life.

The Thomistic understanding of sexuality and the consequent strict Christian norms about sex led me down some interesting roads, but mostly importantly it led to me getting married and having a child.

Thomism (and Christianity I suppose) changed the way I thought about sex and what it is. Taking it seriously, viewing it through the lens of the four causes, and synthesizing the act with marriage with conception with raising a child in the context of a family was a very profound experience.

This is the closest I've ever come to "doing philosophy". I'm not sure if this is what you mean, per se

>>15295761
I don't think today's intellectual climate could be characterized as nihilistic or skeptical. In the English speaking world it's practically Victorian, just with stupider values.

>>15296226
You might consider that a beginning, but the principle of philosophy expresses an objective beginning, not a subjective one, a beginning of all things. What you are expressing is more subjective, to your personal situation. The closest we really get to this notion these days is in scientific discovery. And even that is fraught with errors. I was reading something that claimed 50% of scientific studies performed these days are false, just false. A bit worrying I think, and makes me want to question the other 50%, but that's neither here nor there.

>>15295835
A mean trying to build a house who is not suited to used a hammer is going to die outside.

how about this for some philosophy:

a rattlesnake sinks its fangs into the leg of a passing child

>>15296431
clearly the child was the aggressor when he violated the NAP by trespassing on the snake's property and the snake was fully within his rights to use whatever force he deemed necessary to defend his property. can a child possibly know what is and is not the snake's property? well that's the child's problem, for we're all responsible for the implications of our own knowledge or lack thereof.

>>15296469
WRONG THE LESSON IS INDISCRIMINATE VIOLENCE

>>15296483
which would not have occurred had the child stayed off of other agents' property. picture this:

a rattlesnake sits on his property and a child sits on his. nobody passes anybody and nobody gets bit.

ah yes truly this is utopia

>>15296394
Well, the fact that academia is fraught with evil and incompetence doesn't meant that science doesn't work. It just means that science isn't be done, or that it isn't being done well. Blame the particulars of the university system.

>>15296019
i like this guy

>>15295761
actual department of philosophy can be cozy, several idiot profs (critical theory) getting into shit for fucking undergrads, autist department head working on ai and solving world issues with stemfags, native philsophy prof tripping mid lecture, terf feminist bullying fags, resident prot guest lecturer droppin esoteric gems.. it goes on like a sitcom.

you realize most of these philosophy people there are best judged by their faces and behaviour most of them don't have much to say but the good ones know this and are just having fun reading the rantings of really smart people

>>15296629
Sure, science does 'work' in the sense that well done science is relatively reliable. However science does stand on somewhat shaky ground.

Mathematics? Godels Incompleteness Theorem
Physics? Einstein's Relativity vs Quantum Physics
Medical Science? We're in a medical crisis atm
Economics? Just print more money. I'm sure that'll have no consequences
and on it goes

I just wonder if there is a Truth with a capital T, an absolute ground of everything. What do you think?

>>15297078
Well out of the things you mentioned, Godels numbers are the only thing that is unresolvable by correcting incompetence or a simple deficit of knowledge. It is a tricky one though. That setting of an absolute limit on what can be known epistemologically seems to be what encourages epistemological leaps into noeticism etc. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Coming up against absolute barriers to the truth is comforting in a way. What is more frustrating is incomplete knowledge that invites gods of the gaps. But to be faced with a truly uncrossable chasm... it's like a blank canvas and you can do whatever you want with it.

>>15295797
>saying someone is beyond stupid because they don't have the opinion you have

Thats a pretty stupid position to hold. Maybe you should stop thinking anon.

Also
>>15295837
>i dont care
Did you even read your own post lol

>>15295792
thats why the east feels so much more refreshing and fruitful to study

Might be the best thread to ask. A few weeks ago some anon recommended me an anti-consumerism book, and I think the title or something was based on a phrase uttered by Theresa May. Any clue? I forgot to bookmark it

>>15295761
I am switching my major to philosophy. Which lesser known philosophers who will probably be famous in the future should I write about to impress my profs?

>>15298136
>>15298136
you have to write about the philosophers they tell you to write about

>>15295761
2012 was angry millenials, 2018 is gen x and zoom zooms.

>>15295761
the truth is the system itself eventually found out how small minded and animalistic we actually are
by giving us a chance of feeding and clothing ourselves and a chance to procreate, we have completely stopped looking for progress
or rather the progress we seek is just another meaningless product of the system, like a carrot attached to a donkey's ass
as in, we have learn to accept rebellion itself as part of the system
revolutions happen when people go hungry for long enough, it will never happen in capitalism unless the system itself collapses by other factors that are beyond human rebellion

>>15298878
2011/12 resulted in a massive cointel-pro outright creating the SJW of the last decade, proving that class consciousness is legitimately the biggest fear of the 1%.

>>15295965
What do you mean by doing philosophy

>>15295761
Philosophy is just masturbation of the mind and many philosophers have ended philosophy in their own right, everyone didn’t get the message anymore sadly. We don’t need more of it. Stop talking about it

>>15295761
Why ask us? Get a university proxy, hop on ProjectMUSE or jstor and locate the Journal of the History of Philosophy, or any other journal with such a name, and check their recent editorial comments/letter from the editor/etc.. Almost every major journal will either have a retrospective or reflection or some sort of annual debriefing on the state of a given field. It would help if you did this for multiple areas of philosophy because the above and beyond rule of contemporary philosophy is SPECIALIZATION. Even more general outlets for research like Mind and Nous have clear slants nowadays. i'm saying all of this not to dismiss the topic or anyone's opinion here but I think people forget that one of the only clear definitions of "philosophy" we have is intimately bound to its status as a discipline, and like all disciplines the grunt work gets done in the normal outlets of the academy. This is to your benefit though: you can literally find neatly curated consensus about this in a few minutes.

>>15299609
To flesh this out a bit more I highly recommend you check out Kuhn's work on paradigms because I think it is most clearly instantiated in contemporary philosophy. You're using big ticket terms like "nihilism" and "skepticism" which no contemporary philosopher is really going to approach head on, or if they do it will be nearly indistinguishable from the normal specialized jargon of the discourse, journal, etc. That's not to say people don't think about nihilism in contemporary philosophy--obviously there are clear canonical anchors that everyone within a given field will have read, thought through, debated, etc.-- but generally you're not gonna ever get a tome dropped like Kant's critique. At best you'll have a controversial university press book dealing with an overview of a topic that works its way up to taking a stance on the recent work within that field. Take a look at Joshua Foa Diesntag's book on pessimism as an accessible example of the best-case-scenario from what you get nowadays.

>>15300000

>>15298136
Roger Scruton

They'll hate him though

>>15295761
Nothing you wrote in this post has anything to do with philosophy.

>>15300538
forgettable middlebrow trash

>>15295761
analytic philosophy is kinda based tho

>>15298906
What about the American Revolution? There weren't any organic circumstances that lead up to it. You really think colonialists would care about "muh representation" and fucking tea when they are fed and have a roof over their heads?

>>15297638
Yes, especially the dog eating.