/lit/ - Literature

First, start with Plato.
Then go directly to Hegel.
Then go directly to Max Stirner.
Final destination.

>>4159590

I concur

>>4159580
Don't do this:
>>4159590
And you should be fine.

Try Epictetus first.

>>4159580
Step one: start with Plato and Aristotle, Seneca and Cícero.
Step two: read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Cioran, then Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
Step three: Hegel
Step Four: return to step one and. stay. there.
Step Five: enjoy true philosophical enlightenment.

Do you guys think classical mindfuck like Robert Anton Wilson's work will nourish free thought or will it turn you into a conspiracy nut, at least if it's high up the list?

>>4159609
First you need to read the classics and start from there. Leave post-modern shit for last.

Where would you place Voltaire, Kant, Hume and so on?

>>4159629

don't bother

>>4159580

please don't bother. this is a warning. you'll be better off if you remain ignorant to philosophy

>>4159632
Exactly. There is no philosophical enlightenment, only the progressive realization of how fucked you are.

the trilogy
by god

vol 1: lsd
vol 2: dxm
vol 3: dmt

a zany tale of three evolutionary catalysts

>>4159633
>>4159632
I suppose it's ironic to post this in this particular context but I think he has a point:

>Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant what is enlightenment.

Btw. are the terms enlightenment, illumination, epiphany etc. used interchangeably in the english language?

>>4159652
Exactly. Philosophy is just a bunch of limp thinkers not realizing that you can't give people everything in a book because that's cheating. They need to learn and think for themselves.

So the realization is that no one's going to help you.

>>4159629
Kant is a must in certain topics. Ethics and Law subjects por example. The others are just meh. Even Descartes. Don't bother.

>>4159634
I would agree but then I can't remember any advocate of these evolutionary catalysts coming up with praticial solutions or concrete knowledge in general. I mean, most of the you hear only stuff like "we should be all friends" and other statements along these lines.

>>4159656
Or some of them realize, actually. Maybe, probably all of them have. But it's the readers that don't notice.

>>4159590
LOL that's a pretty crazy route to take, but I like the starting with Plato idea.

OP here's my list for you:

1. Read all of Plato's works
2. Read a little Aristotle
3. Read some Stoics
4. Read the Bible
5. Read Augustine's Confessions (why not)
6. Read Descartes
7. Read Hume
8. Read Kant
9. Read Hegel
10. Begin Reading Nietzsche

And the rest is up to you. By this point you'll probably want to read Heidegger or Deleuze.

>>4159656
On the other hand I would go with Frederick Douglass and say “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” and even though you have to eventually think for yourself I believe education might deliver the initial spark to start the fire before it burns on it's own.

>>4159656

> So the realization is that no one's going to help you.

This is utter bulshit. Philosophy doesn't help? You guys are saying that "enlightenment" is the ability to use our own judgement without another's guidance. That's ok, but does it mean that you'll just block any source of outside thought? Don't fool yourself. You can't throw away thousands of years of thought just like that. There's so much to learn. So wouldn't it be better if we just built our judgement before actually start using it?

> They need to learn and think for themselves.


Absolutely but my point is: OP will improve by reading all those authors, because at the end of the day, Philosophy isn't going to "help him" per se. Philosophy will give him the tools (he will learn) and ffffinally he will be able to think for himself (but even that doesn't mean that OP will stop reading altogether now is it?) Then, goal archieved.

Or OP will just start using drugs and heavy alcohol like myself. But oh well. I still go to college everyday for another philosophy class. Gotta love desperation.

Hey, but it sure helps! I mean it!

bump

>plato

Just stop it everyone. Really.

>>4159671
I would also recomend Saint Thomas Aquinas, but not the bible. what do you need the bible for, if you already have both Augusine's and Thomas Aquinas?.

>>4159671
>read the bible

most people will understand most biblical references without actually reading the entire thing

>>4159769
why. it's not the birthplace of philosophy (he can start with others) but there's no way around Plato.

>pick any philosophical book
>have a slight understanding of the times when it was written
>read

>>4159580
Take an hour out of your day to lay down and do absolutely nothing but think.

>>4159632
Can I take TES lore as gospel truth and start worshiping Shor?

>>4159652
>Btw. are the terms enlightenment, illumination, epiphany etc. used interchangeably in the english language?
For the most part, but they convey slightly different ideas.

>>4159769
Plato is the bottleneck. All of philosophy is pre-Platonic or post-Platonic and most of post-Platonic thought is a footnote to it.

What do you guys think about asian philosophy?

>>4159845

*cough* bullshit */cough*

1. plato
2. aristotle
3. descartes
4. hume
5. kant
6. hegel
7. nietzsche
8. marx
9. foucault / deleuze
10. profti

>>4159845

Whitehead was kinda just joking when he said all philosophy is a footnote to Plato

His dialogues are certainly important to read though.

>>4159681
>>4159677
This is what I meant, I just failed to articulate it properly.

Well, "enlightenment" can't be spurred by a book, but I'd recommend reading Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, and then moving onto some of the books in the recommended reading list at the back based on whatever topic(s) interest(s) you.

>>4160243
>Marx
>no wittgenstein
>no heidegger

>>4160243

Don't listen to this man. Continental philosophy is intellectual poison, with the notable exception of Heidegger.

>>4159671

NO
NO
NO

STAY AWAY FROM MARX AND HEGEL OP
THEY ARE THE GREATEST DECEIVERS OF THE AGE
ONLY STUDY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUING AGAINST CONTINENTALS (although phenomenology is legitimate philosophy)

>>4160316
I don't want to derail the thread, but could you suggest a few central points about how and why Marx or Hegel will deceive you? I'm not talking about communism as it was, but the original books.

>>4160332
cf. Stirner

Kant
Schopenhauer
Hume
Voltaire
Plato
Aristotle
Ovid
Descartes
Wittgenstein
Heidegger
Hegel
Nietzsche
Lao Tse
Dschuang Dsi
Watts
Jung
Freud
Ayn Rand
Marx
Brecht
Chomsky
Zizek
Wilson
Joyce

When Mladen Dolar was doing a lecture series at my university, I asked him a similar question. He said: "Here's what you do. Find the cheapest room in Paris you can find, bar the doors, and just read the books. Over and over again. Just read the books."

The books he was referring to were Lacan's seminar.

>>4160316
Can someone summarize hegel's opinions? I was told to read him before stirner

>>4160764
Hegel can't be summed up, and shouldn't be, given every philosopher after him has had to distance themselves from him. But it basically consists of the idea that all human endeavor is a necessary progression toward a rationally perfect end state.

>>4160770
this already sounds like a pile of horseshit tbh

If you really want enlightenment just look into modern astronomy and physics and combine it with eastern philosophy, then just use your common sense. Don't waste your time reading stuff like >>4160390.

A lot of you people seem to think that because someone was influential they were correct in their ideas. That's just untrue. A modern-day physicist has a better view of reality and the world than any philosopher mentioned in this thread.

inb4 philosophers get butthurt. Just fucking deal with it.

>>4160802
>A modern-day physicist has a better view of reality and the world than any philosopher mentioned in this thread.

This is stupid and I hate you.

>>4160808
>Taking the bait

Please don't.

>>4160817
OK.

If you find yourself getting interested in the Enlightenment ideals I would really recommend reading some Hume. Specifically I would suggest 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding' which while not only being a fairly key text in the history of philosophy (Kant riffed on a lot of the ideas contained within) but is also in my own, admittedly biased opinion, the best written book in English language philosophy

>>4160808
it's true you fat fuck

how about you tell us how the other guy's statement is untrue, rather than idly denying it, o wise one.

>tfw you become enlightened for the first time
>tfw you become enlightened for the second time
>holy shit, it keeps going
>my god, it's full of stars
>tfw you realize faith is a shortcut and would have saved all that trouble
>tfw you rationalize your journey and constantly defend your choices, which ultimately rest upon childhood beliefs
>laughingdmtelves.exe
>you are now jiddu krishnamurti

>>4160839
The first guy would have to prove how his statement is true and demonstrate that he's actually familiar with the writers he is dismissing.

My bet: he doesn't know the first thing about physics or philosophy like most of the idiots who write things like that.

>>4160839
I'm tragically underweight.

I object to his trying to separate science and philosophy. There is no reason to love science but hate philosophy, or hate philosophy but hate science. They both have their place in the world, and OP doesn't want to learn about science, he wants to learn about philosophy. A modern--day physicist may have an empirically better view of reality (?? what does that even mean?) but he would not have thought as deeply about it as a philosopher (?what is even a philosopher?) would.

>>4160852
for all of your supposed love of complex thinking, you sure like making generalizations about how scientists don't think as much about life as philosophers. the aim of both science and philosophy may be almost identical, but their methods differ greatly.

and what do you mean what 'empirically better worldview' means? there's a difference between Plato/Socrates spinning a yarn about life after death, and scientists running experiments in order to prove their theories or trying to discern the higgs-boson particle.

>>4160845
yeayeayea, you can't know nothing, unless you're an antediluvian 'wisdom'-peddler who has jacked off in a cave somewhere for decades.

>>4160888
>you sure like making generalizations about how scientists don't think as much about life as philosophers
I actually had a bunch of "maybes" and "probablys" written in there, but decided to take them out seeing as how whoever suggested the OP learn about physics said all modern-day physicists know more about the world than the philosophers mentioned in this thread.

As for your example, the second is "empirical world view"

Read about the preSocratics. Ignore what basic science classes have taught you and come up with arguments as to why it is reasonable to assume these things. Read Lao Tzu and Marcus Aurelius and try to think like them when things get rough. The more absurd something sounds to you at first, the harder you should work to make a system to prove it. Read Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and try to disprove things without proving them. Get a pet cat and read Schopenhauer's Aphorisms and all of Hegel. Take mushrooms one night and listen to Thus Spake Zarathustra on tape. Listen to Kierkegaard on angst the next morning with valium, then go to a puppet show drunk after reading Burke on the Sublime. Interact with the performance like a good audience member and then go home, throw up, and read Candide because it'll be a rough weekend. Re-read Hegel without leaving the house for six months, talk to your cat, and then read Garfield minus Garfield. Get a girlfriend, make her break up with you for reading Either/Or to her, and then read a biography of Seneca and watch his plays. Read Pericles. Work in a factory while reading nothing but the Fable of the Bees, William Blake and Samuel Butler. Read Justine and Juliette by Sade in tandem with the Bible and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Read The Talented Mr Ripley and Thorstein Veblen while posing as a secret agent/kingpin to OKCupid, actively seeking company. Subscribe to a newspaper and read an essay by Hume between each article. Join a Buddhist monastery and try to convert them to Judeo-Christianity using Augustine, Freud and Wilde. Read Baudrillard while browsing /r9k/. Read Heidegger to your toaster. Finally, you must read Kant's one joke while drinking warm beer, laugh across the void, and do all the math in Alice in Wonderland. Then you might pass.

>>4160888
>yeayeayea, you can't know nothing, unless you're an antediluvian 'wisdom'-peddler who has jacked off in a cave somewhere for decades.

keep putting words in my mouth fucker and see what happens

>>4160896
first, you're still making grand generalizations which you can't possibly prove about scientists' states of mind, modern or not.

what do you mean by the second point? yea i know, that why i contrasted those two examples. the empirical approach yields more knowledge about the web of life. or were you correcting my spelling of 'worldview'? both spellings are alright.

>>4160841
I don't think that's what OP meant with enlightment anon.

>>4160802
Science tries to understand the world by trying to be objective and philosophy tries to find the meaning from a somewhat subjective point of view. Where as science might enable us to transform our society, philosophy helps to find out how we want society to look like.

I suppose everyone agrees on the fact that mankind is able to destroy the planet for instance but I suppose most of us would agree we don't want this to happen? Why exactly? Bang! Philosophy. This is an overexerted analogy but the essence holds true to many examples found in ordinary life. From human rights to holidays, to our love life and so on.

Basically, even if you don't understand philosophy as science it still has a complimentative function as a failsafe. For instance take Josef Mengele and consider his scientific advances and then decide if his actions were worth the pain that he caused. Even though science by it's own was able to go there it doesn't mean it should.

>>4160902
I ain't gonna lie.
If you actually would follow through with that stuff and you're a somewhat capable writer this could be one hell of a book. "Expierences on my way torwards the philosophical enlightenment."

is it wrong that i have no interest in philosophy beyond virtue ethics and political philosophy?

>>4160902

How edgy of you

>>4161100
Isn't that all philosophy?

>>4161103
what about stuff like metaphysics?

>>4161100
I'm the exact opposite. I only enjoy metaphysics and could not care less about ethics and political philosophy.

To answer your question, yes, it is. I'd say that your interests are more practical in that they are not simply introspective but can be applied to many worldly situations.

Even though it's a fantasy novel, there are some deep philosophical questions that only the reader can answer in pic related. There were many times I had to put the book down and strain my brain trying to imagine the concepts presented.

>>4161110
I think metaphysics are important for ethics, especially in relation to religion. The christan moral system is ultimately just based on metaphysics. I'm not saying christianty is very philosophical in the original meaning of the word but considering it's supernatural elements philosophy too has to deal with the unkown to be able to debunk it. Having said that, I would think an argument about heaven and hell is rather metaphysical even though it's outcome has very real consequences for everyday life.

A few years back the pope offcially got rid of the limbo dogma, but if the catholic church is really god's voice on earth, what does this imply? What happend to the guys who already went to limbo? Do they get an apology, or do they get upgraded to heaven? Does it mean you could go to hell if another pope decides someday unprotected sex is a deadly? What would be the consequences for your actions?

>>4160902
Is this meta-commentary on the absurdity of /lit/'s patterns of recommending philosophy?

>>4159580
Hey, I like this picture. Where does it come from ?

>>4161227
I had it in my image folder.
Don't know where it's from.

>>4160902
I'll do this in my next life, in this one I'm devoting it all to reading Joyce's works.