philosophy study, anyone?

pandacular

pandacular

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I've been posting a good deal about philosophy lately. Perhaps because I just reorganized my bookshelves and now all my philosophy books are next to my bonsai ones. I'd love to start a thread to chat with other students of philosophy--whatever that means to you!

I generally take a pretty broad view of philosophy, especially with regards to classical texts, which tend to blur the line between religion and philosophy, including the Bhagavad Gita, the I Ching, the New Testament.

In college, philosophy was one of my majors. I focused a great deal on Greek philosophy, basically everything up to Aristotle (though barely, I can't get thru that mud puddle with a paddle) as well as formal logic, with a particular interest in exotic and non-classical logics.

These days, I've spent most of my philosophy reading time with texts of Eastern antiquity, like the two mentioned before, as well as revisiting Catholic philosophy, now that I'm able to view it thru the lens of Plato and Aristotle rather than that of the Church... she and I never really got along, but that's a story for my other tree house thread.
 
paging @Gabler due to his bomb Heraclitus quote. is Heraclitus your favorite pre-Socratic?
 
I like beautiful sentences and powerful oneliners. I also like diving deep into things, but philosophy, to me at least, is one of those truly bottomless pits. A black hole that makes you reshape the world in your brain with "what ifs", leads you to paths that a lot of people have walked, and then changed nothing.
Nah, I prefer doing mushrooms and then sleeping in. It sets a depth gauge; after 6 hours, the bottom is reached and the next day I wake up and shake it all off. And for some reason, I always end up with better ideas afterwards than I had going in.


I do like Greek and Roman history though. The History of Rome by Mike Duncan is a great podcast to listen to during a daily commute.
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
I like beautiful sentences and powerful oneliners. I also like diving deep into things, but philosophy, to me at least, is one of those truly bottomless pits. A black hole that makes you reshape the world in your brain with "what ifs", leads you to paths that a lot of people have walked, and then changed nothing.
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The bottomless pit-ness is something really great about it! As the Teacher says, "I only know that I don't know nothing". I think it's a bit extreme to say that philosophy has changed nothing. Without philosophers, there are no physicists, no biologists, no computer scientists. The role of the philosopher is to lay the groundwork for future thinkers to specialize into those fields.

I definitely agree that certain fields of philosophy are less fruitful than others (ehem, epistemology) but that still doesn't make it a waste of time.

If you enjoy history, I've often found history of philosophy to be a good entry point into philosophy. I really like the Story of Philosophy by Will Durant.
 
I'm in!
In an effort to escape my fundamentalist childhood, I studied existentialism in college, became fascinated with Kierkegard (so redefined my understanding of Christianity), read a lot of 20th century existentialism too, kinda skipped logical positivism (ho-hum), read most of Wittgenstein and lots of phenomenology, but also read and studied Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Sufism, and have now settled comfortably into Taoism--which supports my bonsai interests.
Currently struggling with G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form which builds on late Wittgenstein but also the foundations of mathematics.
Fascinated by Spinoza as well, but haven't gone very far down that rabbit hole.
 
PerryB said:
Fascinated by Spinoza as well, but haven't gone very far down that rabbit hole.
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me too. I really identify with Spinoza's definition of God. And he was one of the first scholars to say an important thing out loud that no one else would: the idea of Jesus as God the Human is a starting point for folks for whom the more abstract ideas of God are intellectually inaccessible.

Reading Spinoza's writing is an incredible challenge, however. To some extent, it's also suffered the "Seinfeld effect" of not seeming groundbreaking today given just how broadly influential it was. So sad that he passed away so young, after a truly lonely and miserable life.
 
There's an excellent podcast: Philosophize This which has been around for quite some time with 185 episodes so far dealing with almost any philosopher you can name including multiple episodes on many of them.
 
I watched Richard Linklater's Waking Life over the weekend, and wow I really enjoyed that. Perhaps the only good "philosophy movie" I've ever seen, and my word was it good. Easily jumped up to the top of my Lettrboxd. It contains a ton of remarkably memorable monologs that will stick with me for a long time.
 
pandacular said:
I watched Richard Linklater's Waking Life over the weekend, and wow I really enjoyed that. Perhaps the only good "philosophy movie" I've ever seen, and my word was it good. Easily jumped up to the top of my Lettrboxd. It contains a ton of remarkably memorable monologs that will stick with me for a long time.
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this movie is also has some incredible tree art if you're looking closely. the whole thing feels like a mushroom trip, so it might be up @Wires_Guy_wires ' alley!
 
pandacular said:
And he was one of the first scholars to say an important thing out loud that no one else would: the idea of Jesus as God the Human is a starting point for folks for whom the more abstract ideas of God are intellectually inaccessible.
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It seems to me he had it backwards. God as nature is an important starting point for those to whom the idea of a personal God is intellectually inaccessible.
 
As I understand Spinoza (which I don't) it's less God as nature, and more God as material. Of course, nature is a subset of materia. In other words, the conception of God not as a being, but Being itself.

Spinoza, along with studying Vaishnaism, is one finally made me understand my favorite OT phrase of "I am who am".
 
pandacular said:
As I understand Spinoza (which I don't) it's less God as nature, and more God as material. Of course, nature is a subset of materia. In other words, the conception of God not as a being, but Being itself.

Spinoza, along with studying Vaishnaism, is one finally made me understand my favorite OT phrase of "I am who am".
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I think we're probably more or less on the same page there.

By my comment, I meant to highlight the fact that a transcendent, impersonal God is often easier for intellectual types to accept than a man in the sky, but speaking symbolically, the image of a man in the sky makes a more nuanced and complex statement than the image of some kind of nebulous essence underlying the material world. By definition, God is beyond human comprehension, and using intelligible symbols may counterintuitively be a better way to approximate the essence of God than nebulous abstractions.
 
Totally true. I also think that for some--myself including--the image of the rebranded Zeus as god always felt absurd, so I rejected it, but in studying Catholic philosophy, I've found that the more Spinozan God is a lot like something I already believe in. I guess the point I was trying to make about Spinoza is that he acknowledges the differences in representation of aspects of the Trinity as being tools of approximating the idea of this wholly transcendent thing, and they work differently for different people. For his own safety, he likely could've been a little more civil about his thoughts of Jesus the human.

I used to consider myself an atheist, but now I often use the phrase "God is real by definition"...partly because it makes people's head spin.
 
I was very young when I was taught that man is created in the image of God, but as I matured realized that God is created in the image of man. None of us have any knowledge of God. Not the religious and not the atheist. There is only belief and only 3 legitimate beliefs - (i) those who believe in a God; (ii) those who do not believe in a God; and (iii) those who realize they don't know either way and refuse to simply believe either. In this regard, our belief is nothing more than our choice to believe one or the other. And so, we should ask ourselves "why do I choose to believe the things I believe in?" There is no objective truth to be found in discussions about God, only explanations for our subjective choices.
 
I aspire to be the kind of person who can say with honesty that I believe in God. Between Pascal's wager and Kierkegaard's leap of faith, there's no reason not to try.
 
Gabler said:
I aspire to be the kind of person who can say with honesty that I believe in God.
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well that's easy, simply redefine GOD to be something you believe in, rather than GOD = YHWH

and I only say this as half a joke!
 
pandacular said:
well that's easy, simply redefine GOD to be something you believe in, rather than GOD = YHWH

and I only say this as half a joke!
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I definitely believe in certain facets of God, so to a certain extent I've already done what you recommended. What I mean is that insofar as the Bible is the crystallization of at least five thousand years of accumulated wisdom, I want to be able to access that wisdom, but the postmodern world is so far removed from the world in which each book was written that it's difficult to understand it properly.

On the one hand, I find it intellectually dishonest to say, "I don't believe in God." What that really means is something like, "I don't understand God, and I don't want to acknowledge that there is something beyond my capacity for understanding." On the other hand, it seems weird to say you believe in something when you don't understand what it is.
 
It would also help if I had the attention span to sit down and read the Bible cover to cover.
 
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