/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6857506]

please help me /lit/ I am literally about to commit suicide. I'm trying to read the philosophical canon in chronological order and whenever I think I've got some platonic concept down I get btfo by someone on here and it completely destroys my self esteem. How can I continue reading philosophy if I keep misconstruing things I read? I want to read but I keep failing

[Anonymous No.6857511]

>>6857506
>yfw the only purpose of reading that junk is to discuss it with others and you're actually doing it right

[Anonymous No.6857524]

Get TIGHT Get TIGHT Get TIGHT Get TIGHT get PHILOSOPHICAL

P L A T O
L
A
T
O R I G E N
N
I S O C R A T E S
C ... ... . A
!______P
++++++E

ARISTOTLE != LEIBNIZ
......................|
......................|
...................../.\
.............FIRE...WATER

QUERY:
? THE MONAD
? THE REAL
? UNREAL (TOURNAMENT?)

[Anonymous No.6857530]

Read secondary sources

[Anonymous No.6857531]

>>6857506
begin with liebnitz

[Anonymous No.6857546]

>>6857530
but then I may as well just read books about their works instead of their works themselves. I want to be able to reach understanding by myself but I kant. Don't even wanna think about what'll happen when I reach Aristotle

[Anonymous No.6857749]

>>6857546
You don't have to take what the scholars say as dogma, but you can't expect to truly understand the philosophical canon without a helping hand. Use the Stanford Plato encyclopedia for help tbh

[Anonymous No.6857767]

OP, once you read Derrida until you understand deconstruction, you will genuinely understand what is happening here. The play of signifiers is only going to intensify every time you try to pin it down.

[Anonymous No.6857773]

>>6857506

If you are serious. It's time to put down those kinds of books and start doing other things anon. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't care about you, they are feeding their own vanity.

[Anonymous No.6857778]

start with assirians

[Anonymous No.6857806]

>>6857506
I started with the germans and havent run into any trouble tbh

[Anonymous No.6857808]

https://www.scribd.com/doc/31325989/Philosophia-Perennis-by-Brother-Francis-Maluf-M-I-C-M

Written by a Catholic. It is pro-Catholic, Aristotelian/Thomist. The reason that I recommend it to you is because it's written in a very pedagogical spirit, it's easy to absorb. Even if you disagree with it fundamentally you should learn something.

[Anonymous No.6857814]

>>6857808
I will post an excerpt:

Now, when we talk about modern philosophy, we must subdivide it into continental
(the philosophy of France, Germany, Italy, etc.) and British or Anglo-Saxon
philosophy. Most specifically, English philosophy is a rebellious philosophy. Here is
the testimony of an English philosopher, writing in the English language: "We may
even claim in general, that England, though rich in thinkers of the highest order,
has never had but a single school of philosophy, or rather it has never had any, for
its philosophy is a perpetual protest against scholasticism."* There is an English-
speaking atmosphere for thought. A typical English-speaking philosopher is a rebel
of the highest degree.

Continental intellectualism is a rebellion against the supernatural. Sometimes it
even rebels against the natural. English philosophy despises the intellectual. Every
term presupposing intellectualism has a negative sense in the English-speaking
world. The word "abstract" is a good example. The first time most of us will hear
"abstract" used in a positive sense will be when we study good philosophy. Usually
people say, "It’s abstract," meaning no good or useless. We do it even with the
word "intellect." "Faith is in the intellect" is, to many, some kind of elitist view of
religion. They would say something like, "No, Faith is in the heart." Even when we
say someone is an intellectual, it is usually done tongue in cheek.

[Anonymous No.6857819]

>>6857814
Now, let us begin our study of this period with the notion of "abstract." Without
abstract ideas there is no such thing as thinking or reasoning. In logic, we learn
that there can be no inference without universal propositions. Usually, we state it
this way: "From two particular propositions, nothing follows." We cannot expound
upon this in detail in this chapter, but if we make two propositions and neither of
them is universal, we cannot yet reason, we can only talk about individuals. It is
impossible to form a universal proposition without universal ideas. And without
abstractions, it is impossible to have universal ideas. No abstraction, no universals;
no universals, no universal propositions; no universal propositions, no inference;
no inference, no philosophy.

One of the great problems of philosophy, and the first one the scholastic
philosophers had to grapple with, was the reality of the universals. What do we
mean by universals? In the phrase, "the dog, Fido," Fido is an individual and dog is
a universal. "This watch" is an individual, but "watch" is a universal. The word
"courage" is a universal. The word "sand" is a universal. Let us pause for a
moment now, at this first dawn of spiritual activity in man; because, when we speak
of the soul of man being spiritual, (thus immortal) this is precisely what we mean.
The first indication of the spiritual in us is the fact that we can abstract ideas. This
faculty, abstraction, can be easily illustrated in the following way:

How many grains of sand exist on this earth? Nobody knows the number, but there
is a number. Every grain of sand is numbered. God numbers everything. While it is
not the most interesting occupation of the Divine Mind, there is a definite number of
all existing realities, and He knows it. There are certainly billions upon billions of
grains of sand on all of the beaches all over the world. ow let us suppose that we
could not abstract, because there were no universals. If sand were the only thing
we had to know, we would have quite a job. Every individual particle of sand would
have to be somehow in our mind. We could not apply what we know about one
grain to another. We could not begin to speculate about a grain of sand that "might
be." We would be strictly limited to empirical evidence. If someone asked us, "What
happens when you drop sand from the top of a roof?" we would have to test every
grain of sand in existence to answer the question.

[Anonymous No.6857820]

>>6857819
As it is, though, all these billions of little entities are in our minds by way of one
concept. For his spiritual integrity, man can talk about sand recalling only an idea in
his mind — something only a rational creature can do. From the moment we give it
a name we are referring to a nature, and we can speak of it with other people. The
book of Genesis, the most ancient book there is, furnishes us with a good example.
In it we read about Abraham walking by the seashore and God saying to him, "I will
multiply thy seed as the sand by the seashore" (Gen. 22:17). Right away, there is a
community of mind between each one of us and Abraham. We know very well that
what sand meant to him is exactly what it means to us. By use of this faculty, we
can cross over all the centuries that separate us. It could be that every grain of
sand that existed in the time of Abraham has since dissolved and turned into
something else, but with the reality of universals and the human capacity to
abstract, that does not matter. Nobody ever reads that story and finds it unfamiliar.
Immediately there is a rapport.

The problem of ideas — of universals — is the first scandal of the thinkers. Three
schools of error arose around it. We can do little more than name them in this
present chapter.

All philosophy is always haunted by the personalities of Plato and Aristotle. It was
Plato who discovered the importance of ideas. (When we say "ideas" we mean
"universals".) The fact that there are ideas in the mind presupposes that spiritual
activity we call abstraction. Plato exaggerated the reality of ideas. He said, in
essense, "the idea of sand is much more important than these little grains here and
there, because these can be destroyed and will disappear, but that idea is always
there." He thought the same thing about man. Frank and Joe are just individuals,
but man — the universal, man — is the most important thing. In the Summa
Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas names one of his treatises De Homine — "About
Man." Who is that man? Is it Frank? Is it Joe? The answer is yes. Though Frank
and Joe may not have even been alive when he was writing, St. Thomas included
them. He was talking about a nature: anybody who ever had that nature, or will
ever have it.

Any discussion of universals must include Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle’s point of
disagreement with Plato is the dividing line for separating good philosophy from
bad philosophy. To Plato, the only real things are the permanent, eternal ideas.
Plato was like the Christopher Columbus of the realm of ideas. The whole world
after him has a realization of the power of ideas it would never have had if that man
had not lived.

[Anonymous No.6857822]

>>6857820
ristotle, his student, kept seeing the holes in his system and finally separated
from Plato. He then set out to start right from the beginning and establish some
foundations for truth. There is a pathetic passage from Aristotle’s writings in which
he says, paraphrased: "It’s very painful for me to be contradicting a man whom I so
much love and admire. But our dedication to the truth should transcend our loyalty
to any human person." He then proceeded to criticize his master. And the first thing
he said was, "The things that really are, are the individual substances." The
important thing is not man in general, but this man and that man; not the idea of
sparrows, but the sparrow that I see flying over there. Ideas are real, but their
reality comes from the individual substances. After Aristotle affirmed that truth, no
seeker of wisdom (no man who rejoices in the truth) will ever deny it. It was the first
maxim, the first principle for the great thinkers of the ages of Faith. Every one of
them accepted it. Aristotle comes much closer than any other pagan to our
wisdom, which is incarnational, which looks to the concrete and does not fly too
quickly to the ideas.

But what about the reality of ideas or universals? There was one school of thinkers
which said that the universals are nothing but words. They exist only in language.
These we call nominalists. The most distinguished person who expressed that type
of thought was a person contemporary with St. Anselm (d. 1109). His name is
Roscelin. He had a disciple a little later by the name of William of Ockham. These
two scholastics taught an error, because to say there is no reality to the universal
except in words is the most subversive thing you can say about the validity of
thought. If one were a genuine nominalist, then no science and no philosophy
could have any value. Nominalism* is the end of philosophy, the end of science,
and the end of morality. Our ethical principles have to be in terms of universals, or
there is simply no ethics. If we reject universals, in the end we reject all principles
of morality. We end up with the situation ethics that is very much with us today.

Then came another school which knew that nominalism could not be defended, so
they held that universals are ideas, mere concepts in the mind. We call them the
conceptualists. The most prominent name in this school is a man by the name of
Abelard. Of course, conceptualism was also subversive. If all our science is about
ideas, and if ideas are only in the mind, well, then they are not about reality. We
can see an influence of conceptualism in a great deal of modern philosophy.

[Anonymous No.6857829]

>>6857822
Then arose a school that we call exaggerated realism.* Now, the word "realism,"
when we use it in this context, is not the same as the word "realism" as we use it
today. Whereas realism as used today, denotes, practicality, the Medieval realist
was someone who accepted the reality of ideas over individual substances.
Realism is a throwback to Plato at the expense of Aristotle. We do not say that
there is no truth in realism as it existed in Plato or in the Middle Ages. There is truth
there, but it needs to be extracted from error and put in a proper context. It took the
genius of St. Thomas to do this. He gave us the distinctions we need to safely
navigate ourselves between nominalism on one hand and idealism on the other,
giving us what is called "moderate realism."* The very first step towards
Philosophia Perennis is to discover the precise degree of truth that is found in the
universal ideas. Ideas have a place, but their reality comes from their
correspondence to real, individual, subsisting things. The correct solution of the
problem of universals became a common foundation for the different branches of
philosophy. There remained points of difference between different schools within
the scholastic tradition, but these differences remained within the area of a
common method and many accepted principles. Within this tradition, a harmony
prevailed between the truths that could be known by reason and the truths that
have come to us by revelation — between philosophy and theology. Natural truth
and supernatural truths were distinguished but not separated, as we find in the
Summa of St. Thomas. That synthesis could have become a common heritage for
humanity, at least in the Christian world. It was cultivated and protected by the
Church as part of its commission to bring to men that wisdom which leads them to
salvation.

But then there was the great rebellion against the Church and the apostasy from
the Faith. The rebellion and the apostasy produced their predictable effect in the
development of philosophic thought. As a result, there is a great variety of schools
in modern philosophy, all sharing some basic errors. What could be said, in
general, about modern philosophers is the following:

1. Almost all of them ignored the patient and humble work of the logicians ( as in
their solving the technical problem of universals) and preferred to start
philosophizing at the peaks.
2. They were not seekers after wisdom, and from all available evidence, their
philosophic efforts did not lead them or their disciples to the way of salvation.
3. Wittingly or unwittingly, they returned to the different sophistries of pagan
antiquity.
4. All community of effort disappeared. Philosophy became egocentric. Truth on the
whole became subjective.

[Anonymous No.6857853]

Another excerpt (short):

Sophistry led to the school of the Skeptics, the people who say that we cannot be
sure of anything: we cannot even trust our senses. A modern skeptic could be
teaching skepticism in the lecture hall and still behave fairly normally on the street.
But that is not good philosophy to a Greek. If we were to have a real Greek Skeptic
in our midst, we would have to watch him so that he would not get killed by the
cars in the street. Somebody would always have to be with him, pushing him out of
harm’s way. He just could not trust his own senses or his own judgment.

The Enfant Terrible in that school is a man by the name of Gorgias (c.480 B.C.). It
has been said of the Greeks that even when they were wrong they could be
interestingly so. They phrased error in such a fascinating way that it became
unforgettable. This was certainly true of Gorgias. He wrote three books. Those
three books express the three great denials that are found in all sophistry. The first
book was written to prove that there is no truth. The second was to prove that even
if there were truth, no one could know it. And then the third book was to prove that,
even if there were truth and somebody knew it, he could never tell it to anyone
else. When one has uttered these three denials, there need be no fourth. These
denials are a counterpart — a negative — of the three major realities: there is truth,
it is knowable, and it is communicable. The whole life and thought of Socrates was
a contradiction of the three denials of Gorgias: He affirmed that there is truth, that it
can be known, and when it is known, it can be communicated. (The fact that the
student is reading this book proves that he agrees with Socrates and not with
Gorgias.)

[Anonymous No.6857892]

>>6857546
>but I kant

[Anonymous No.6857895]

philosophy is not the same as reading books

[Anonymous No.6857983]

>>6857506
Its all concepts anyway. dont worry about it.
Why grab on to them? simply observe them all in a playfull manner- explore it.
Also, take a break man, what the fuck.