/lit/ - Literature

>>4798253
>>4798261

are you a student?

you have an odd collection, too.

>>4798131

i kinda imagine this to be the type of collection one might find in a used bookstore in covington, KY--complete with a surprisingly diverse selection of michael crighton.

>>4786654

are you a phil. major at an ivy-tier university?

how is kuhn's "road since structure"? i'm a big fan of kuhn, but have only read "structure" and then the iakatos/popper "criticism and the growth of knowledge," which was the seminar on "structure." is "road since" worth reading?

>>4750046

why?

about 10k

>>4728438

what's your question? whether i think there are worthwhile enterprises outside of the academy? obviously--or i wouldn't be leaving it.

i couldn't care less what krugman has to say; his brand of public appeal is up there with fareed zakaria and malcom gladwell as practitioners of a unique strain of starbucks intellectualism. when i say "corpsed," it's to borrow from beckett's Endgame--which i take to be formally analogous to the conditions in academia today; somewhere between lear's "nothing comes from nothing" and beckett's "I can't go on/i'll go on" there is 95% of today's graduate student population. lifeless, unoriginal, self-referential and self-aggrandizing, committed to academia because "everything else out there sucks"--such are the conditions of the majority of graduate students pursuing degrees in the humanities/social sciences. of course, there are really exceptional minds here and there, but they are few, far in between, and ultimately too marginally insignificant to warrant one's loyalty to the profession.

>>4728470

bachelor's degree--then get experience doing something else. approach academia if 1) you are truly devoted to/passionate about the topic you intend to study (and you have a clear sense of what that project is); or 2) you have exhausted the other more "practical" alternatives at your disposal and cannot see yourself anywhere else but in the academy. the latter is the decidedly weaker reason, but its a reason nonetheless. otherwise, stay out of school and intervene directly in the world.

i've attended princeton, NYU, and stanford, with a visiting fellowship semester at cornell.

graduate student right now: PhD in political science/JD with a focus on constitutional law.

but--academia is a corpsed universe, and when I've completed my degrees, i intend to leave the university behind entirely.

>>4673742

lol

this was the perfect response to OP's stupidity

>>4665755
>caravaggio

i think that he had an extraordinary sense of the "moment," e.g. he had an eye for that one point in time somewhere between the view of the dramatic climax and its completion. kierkegaard was obviously quite taken by this problem as well: for him, the sacrifice of isaac was an examplar of the moment of the "leap" of faith. this is how i take caravaggio: what he captures is that last breathe before the leap, the last moment in which a "before" has yet to fully have become an "after."

>>4665692

rolling off this, vico, hamann and herder will also all be important to understanding modernity's treatment/development of "progress" as a teleological category; isaiah berlin's work on them, too, will prove instructive (three critics of the enlightenment). if you like berlin's stuff, then also check out "against the current"--it is a great collection of historical essays that, though not responding to science in particular, begin to map out the large-scale historical trajectories that made feasible conceptions of causality, etc. that obviously deeply inform and structure the terms of scientific discourse

>>4664858

it's get's fairly abstract, and it is far more theoretical than what i suggested in this list (>>4664235), but a very interesting notion of how "progress" itself developed can be found in reinhart koselleck: futures past

another interesting volume in this historiography of progress is lynn hunt's "measuring time, making history"

understanding what "progress" constitutes thus necessarily entails a sort-of historical trajectory of what "history" is suppsoed to constitute in relation to epistemology; to this end, max weber's vocation lectures--especially "science as a vocation"--habermas' entire project of rationalization in modernity, and adorno/horkheimer's critique of enlightenment thought (dialectic of enlightenment) are all seminal in these discussions. dilthey's work on history might also be relevant, but i would put him a distinct secondary tier in relation to the aforementioned.

>>4661812
mind you, this is all very theoretical/skeptical and is only one way to treat the philosophy of science, so don't take this particular grouping as exhaustive. still, here are some interesting/seminal texts
wittgenstein: lectures on the foundation of mathematics; philosophical investigations; on certainty

frege: on the foundation of arithematic

michael dummet on wittgenstein or frege

thomas kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

clifford geertz: "thick description" "common sense as a cultural system"

karl popper: conjectures and refutations; the logic of scientific discovery; objective knowledge

paul feyerabend: against method

herbert gintis: the bounds of reason

michael polanyi: the tacit dimension

imre lakatos: proofs and refutations

lakatos and musgrave: criticism and the growth of knowledge

mary leng: mathematics and reality

>>4661150

what? i don't agree with locke, you stupid fucking philistine; i am saying that you you don't even know the first thing you are talking about, and it painfully shines through your posts.

tell me what you take to be locke's theory of property. how does he construct it, and how does he relate it to natural rights, government by consent, and limited government?

i'm not looking for your opinions, even--i just want to see whether or not you know enough about the actual texts such that you have an opinion worth listening to at all.

>>4661113
>http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/democracy-and-the-intellectuals/#will-of-the-people

i already fucking hate you. you cite a pathetic, factually incorrect blog for evidence? take this claim, for example:

"Locke is playing games with definitions: rights, he says, are a form of property, and injustice means to violate a right. “Where there is no property,” it follows that no one has any rights, which makes it impossible to violate any rights, so “there is no injustice.” Sure, your grandmother was just kidnapped, cooked and eaten by a howling cannibal biker gang, but seeing as she didn’t legally own the right not to be turned into grandmother stew, Locke doesn’t understand why you persist in calling it an “injustice.” "

already everything is wrong here. locke doesn't think there aren't any rights where there is no property: we have FUNDAMENTAL natural rights consistent with our autonomy; we are the property of god, and therefore have property in ourselves and must respect the property of others. either way, the portrayal of locke as equating rights MERELY to property is entirely false, especially given locke's robust idea of "property" being our "lives liberties and estates"--not just the material possessions we own, but the essential characteristics of our own liberty.

jesus christ go actually educate yourself. you are an embarassment right now--having no thoughts of your own, copying down links to websites that are palpably misinformed.

>>4658221
>>4658323

explain more

i really enjoy machiavelli more for any number of reasons, but i'm curious what you like about leviathan in particular?

>>4658635

>joker like locke

elaborate

>>4658796

it goes back to what he assumes about unencumbered man: that he is prone to his passions (primarily fear, in relation to his primary drive of self-preservation), that he is prone to violence, etc.

but hobbes is particularly mindful to avoid stating the state of nature is unjust: hobbes defines justice as keeping to one's covenants, which can only come about after the establishment of the sovereign. hence, no law, no justice, no good/evil in the state of nature for hobbes. obviously much different for locke/rousseau.

>>4660988

eh, that's honestly just to troll. i don't have a brother; it's just my collection. it's difficult to take this board seriously, so my thought process often is: who cares? but i've tried to alter that frame of mind, refrain from doing such things anymore, etc.

i dunno, i'm getting better. the point still stands, though: these threads are particularly cancerous to this board.

>>4660949

you ought to care: your collection is pathetic, and discloses aspects of your identity that anyone with half a brain would find...regrettable.

what do you hope to accomplish by posting your collection? /lit is composed of two dominant groups: those who seek intellectual validation (you) and those who, having none themselves, obnoxiously post shitty little jabs here and there.

these threads, i've found, are a privileged site where these two groups come together and comingle. review this thread: is there any worthwhile conversation? of course not.

these threads are always fucking stupid.

you all have shitty collections for one reason or another: either too much or too little fantasy, too few cracked spines, to many stacked together, too aesthetic or not aesthetic enough, etc etc.

the point being: either develop some kind of standard by which to actually judge one another, or accept the inevitable cacophony of asshole posts all linked by the telling fact that they aren't reading the books they are taking and posting pictures of.

>>4633415
>>4633420
>>4633424
>>4633429

i know where every one of my books are at any given time; i'm not sure how one would manage a large collection without some basic storing mechanism

it's funny--though understandable--that to the casual viewer my organization might seem random--while of course it is intuitive and familiar to me, responding to my natural inclinations and genre groupings

>>4565965

if it is wrong to treat it as a middle road, what do you propose instead?

>>4560857

are you suggesting that the criterion for the question hinges on how you define god?

the definition should be inconsequential; the point being: what would move you to adopt a different worldview?

>>4560114

Am i asking the wrong question? what would be a better one?

bump

>>4555999
>>4556000

999-000 back to back?

evidence of a miracle for you naysayers? there is a surely a god in this thread.