/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18858365]

Do you develop your own point of view when reading philosophy/politics, or just regurgitate/embrace the last thing you read? I feel as though I'm in the latter.

[Anonymous No.18858369]

>>18858365
>develop your own point of view
yes of course. regurgitating what you read is the exact opposite of philosophy. why even fucking bother?

[Anonymous No.18858370]

>>18858369
That's the ideal yes, the latter case is bad but I realise it's where I am

[Anonymous No.18858372]

>>18858370
well, if you're self aware, then you can work to correct it

[Anonymous No.18858389]

>>18858365
To be honest I just read because I find the way words are put together funny, I always read to have a laugh and a good time. Don't even think about what I'm reading really, I can remember what I read but I don't think. I develop my own philosophical views while on the bus, don't have a clue if it comes from books or not.

[Anonymous No.18858400]

>>18858389
honestly, that's the most true philosopher thing I've ever heard.

[Anonymous No.18858405]

>>18858365
Your own point comes later after you decode what you read

[Anonymous No.18858425]

>>18858365
i think a lot of people read one or two books and immediately just adopt it as their ultimate influence, mainly because they probably only read one or two books a year. its still better than getting your bullshit from twitter tho

[Anonymous No.18858456]

>>18858365
The vast majority of the books I read just end up pissing me off because I can't grab the author by his collar and force him to acknowledge he is wrong

[Anonymous No.18858460]

>>18858456
you must be an extremely intelligent individual

[Anonymous No.18858468]

ya read ya gawdon wood

[Anonymous No.18858476]

>>18858460
Nope, not even, there are just so many garbage books in existence with authors who could barely string together three ideas without completely botching the relations they seem to think exist there. It's at its worst when their prose is extremely smug and self-satisfied, despite being devoid of genuine intellectuality. This is why I think the old custom of university duels (with corporeal risk) served a great purpose.

[Anonymous No.18858482]

>>18858365
I read every philosophical text with a critical mindset. From the outset, I treat the words that I read as things open to criticism, not as holy tomes. I remember the first time I read the Socratic Dialogues, I found myself disagreeing a lot with what was written there, and especially with Socrates' servile acceptance of incarceration, which has led me to find out that Plato had been using his (supposed) teacher as a sock puppet for his own ideas, and it was all fanfiction. I formed my philosophical views based on a mix of my own experiences, my own ideals, and my criticisms of those texts.

[Anonymous No.18858490]

>>18858482
have you tried actually assuming the mindset that you initially disagree with

[Anonymous No.18858502]

>>18858490
That's how I can criticise them so surely. I realised through this process that I had core values that I can't compromise for any ideology.

[Anonymous No.18858513]

>>18858482
That's what everyone says when they read the dialogues (yes, everyone). You need to go back and read with commentaries, or look up some secondary literature. This is why Plato hated the written word, because it could not be properly defended, and that people could dismiss it without properly (rationally) engaging with it. I can basically guarantee that if I drilled you on some of the major points given by Plato you wouldn't be able to defend yourself in your rejection of them, except by vague denials which aren't rationally substantiated (they are essentially based on some sort of gut feeling that Plato is wrong, which is typical of people who haven't yet been able to properly understand the terms of the argument - they think that Plato is arguing for something or against something which he isn't). There are people who think that the "relativity of beauty" is an argument against the Good as given by Plato, when it's not, and Plato explicitly deals with this idea in depth in Republic (and how relativity of beauty and beauty itself are distinguished).

[Anonymous No.18858518]

I develop my own ideas. But it is refreshing to find political/philosophical works that enunciate ideas I haven't completely formed and that I emphatically agree with.

[Anonymous No.18858520]

That’s a great question, and one with which I struggle a lot. I believe knowledge is foundationalistic with fundamentally true axioms on the basis. In that sense, so long as you can’t integrate a piece of knowledge to the overal edifice of knowledge you already have, what you have knowledge of is not the knowledge itself (as in, the conceptual abstraction), but the linguistic expression of that knowledge.

You may know maxim X, and you may also know that maxim X leads to maxim Y, but unless they’re integrated into your overall edifice of knowledge, those are fundamentally shapeless abstractions to you; they aren’t even “relations of ideas”, just relations of words. It’s the philosophy of a parrot.

I don’t believe philosophy can be meaningfully “learned”, as it is a totalizing view of the world and as such profoundly intimate. You can be a Kantian in the sense that you DIALOGUE with Kant: you seek to understand Kant’s worldview, the premises he’s coming from, the edifice of knowledge he’s built, and then you compare it to your own, and conclude that your own has contradictions that Kant’s satisfyingly solved, and thus you become persuaded by Kant’s worldview and integrate it into your own. But you’re not as much as learning (= passively receiving) from Kant as using what Kant has produced as a means to further your own philosophy.

That’s the only way I believe philosophy can be fundamentally done. All else is, at best, the history of philosophy.

[Anonymous No.18858523]

>>18858513
Bold of you to assume that I denounce the entirety of Plato's corpus.

[Anonymous No.18858529]

I find it hard to read because I am afraid of the latter.

[Anonymous No.18858533]

>>18858513
All you're really saying here is that Plato's conclusions are largely unfalsifiable. Which is true, but that doesn't make them correct.
Childhood is finding Socrates' execution unjust and not understanding why he let himself be incarcerated. Adulthood is realizing that Socrates was a subversive ideologue recruiting children who killed himself to be a martyr. Plato is obviously a genius and deserves credit for formalizing philosophical thought, but he's essentially on the level of a preacher for Socratic metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.18858538]

>>18858523
He didn't

[Anonymous No.18858552]

>>18858513
Greek metaphysics are largely rationally unsubstantiated, that's not a good basis to set up Plato's philosophy as something untouchable.

[Anonymous No.18858574]

>>18858365
the latter as well, its the only use for philosophy
>>18858389
sorta same, I read mainly to sate my curiosity. A lot of my thought and philosophical development comes from when I rant to myself or something

[Anonymous No.18858600]

>>18858533
>ideologue recruiting children who killed himself to be a martyr
whom* pseud

[Anonymous No.18858646]

>>18858533
In metaphysics, valid conclusions are necessarily unfalsifiable. Metaphysics is not empirical science, necessarily, and if it were then Plato would no longer even be relevant as a philosopher. The fact that there are metaphysical truths, and that these are necessarily unfalsifiable by their virtue of necessarily being true, is actually far more a justification of metaphysics than it is a rebuke.
>Adulthood is realizing that Socrates was a subversive ideologue recruiting children who killed himself to be a martyr.
No, this is called becoming infected by modern thought and projecting it onto the motives of old philosophers. The main reason Socrates was killed was because of his cosmological teachings, which were heretical if you contrast, eg, Timaeus to the general reality of polytheism in ancient Greece. Not to mention he was, justifiably, opposed to democracy and in favor of what he termed "aristocracy", although with his own ideal modifications.
>>18858552
That's simply wrong. There are certain dialogues which are more or less unsubstantiated, like Timaeus and Critias for example, but the essentials of his philosophy are heavily substantiated. It has stood the test of time far better than Aristotle (who was very gradually torn apart by succeeding philosophers). None of the criticisms waged by more modern skepticism are generally able to even apply to the essentials of Plato.

[Anonymous No.18858667]

>>18858646
>necessarily unfalsifiable by their virtue of necessarily being true
Not that anon but this is not even what "unfalsifiable" means. Just because something can't be proven to be false doesn't mean it's true. Metaphysics occupy an intellectual space where no claims can be said to be truly false or truly factual. It's a playground of hypotheticals. The reason for this is because our technique has not developed to a point where we can plumb the depths of the cosmos' ultimate nature, but we have been able to plumb SOME depths, and it allowed us to objectively evaluate the metaphysical philosophies of the past. For example, through our discovery of the atom, we knew that the atomists were right. And the more we learn about the nature of humanity and the universe, the more of that insulated intellectual playground will be open to objective scrutiny.

[Anonymous No.18858699]

>>18858667
>ust because something can't be proven to be false doesn't mean it's true.
If something is proven necessarily true then it is necessarily unfalsifiable.
>Metaphysics occupy an intellectual space where no claims can be said to be truly false or truly factual.
>It's a playground of hypotheticals.
No, this is modern thought deluding you into thinking that metaphysics is idle speculation. Modern "metaphysics" is, I'll give you that, but only because it is assumed a priori that metaphysics is a mere playground. Plato would not even call it philosophy (knowledge of what is), he would call it knowledge of opinion, which is on the level of playwrights and admirers.
> For example, through our discovery of the atom, we knew that the atomists were right.
No, the atomists were proven wrong, not even modern physicists adhere to atomist theories. Atomists asserted that the fundamental unit of nature was the atom which was fundamental and indivisible, which is both wrong (given the current understanding of quantum mechanics) and provably wrong given the necessary conditions of space (even Kant admitted this much when he refuted the possibility of simple [indivisible] physical substance.) The atomist theory, by the way, was not metaphysics-proper. It's more like a speculative physical theory, with the one caveat that it can be deductively refuted unlike other physical theories, which is the only sense in which it can be called metaphysical.

[Anonymous No.18858739]

>>18858389
>Don't even think about what I'm reading really, I can remember what I read but I don't think. I develop my own philosophical views while on the bus, don't have a clue if it comes from books or not.

[Anonymous No.18859127]

>>18858460
For you