(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best modern philosophy books

My work is on theories of truth (and other, related topics). There's certainly a lot of literature in this area that's worth reading that isn't presupposing deflationism. In fact, even as a staunch anti-deflationist I don't think it's really fair to claim that much work presupposes deflationism; it's just a popular, well-argued for view.

Some basic sources.

Overall

The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Readings - This volume is the biggest and best collection of articles on the metaphysics of truth available. It's a bit out of date in certain places, but there's no better option.

Chase Wrenn - Truth - This is a nice short introduction to work on the nature of truth. Skip the last chapter if you don't want work on deflationism.

SEP article on truth - Sections 1-4 are on standard theories of truth apart from deflationism.

Substantivism about Truth

To be honest, the best place to look for work on this issue is the deflationists. A lot of those papers are included in the Nature of Truth volume above, although as I noted some update is needed given nearly two decades have passed.

One useful general overview is Gila Sher's recent PhilCompass piece here on substantivism about truth. Sher's own view is whatever, but it'll be helpful in pointing you to other places if nothing else.

Epistemic Constraint

The obvious place to start here is at the beginning, with Dummett's work.

Bernhard Weiss' - Michael Dummett is a good overview.

You should also look at Dummett's primary work. The easiest jump in spots will be his "Truth" and "Realism". Most of his important early papers are available in Truth and Other Enigmas.

You should also look at Hilary Putnam's later work, starting from about Reason, Truth and History. Putnam calls his view "internal realism" but it's basically a more American-pragmatist influenced version of Dummett's anti-realism. Putnam got too caught up in the stupid American use of "realism" as an honorific (and "anti-realism" as a pejorative").

Perhaps the clearest development of epistemic constraint is in Crispin Wright. See his masterful Truth and Objectivity, especially Chapters 1 and 2. Yes, even though Chapter 1 is on deflationism you will find the first half distinguishing types of realism/anti-realism paradigms important for the work in Chapter 2. If you want, you can skip the second half of Chapter 1, but Wright's argument against deflationism is one of the most powerful in the literature.

Truth Pluralism

I'm biased here, but I would also suggest you look at the literature on truth pluralism. A good starting point is the SEP article. The first truth pluralist position is Wright's Truth and Objectivity linked above.

For a clearer and more contemporarily influential view, see Michael Lynch's Truth as One and Many. Lynch's view is not the same as Wright's, despite what some (including Lynch at some points..) will tell you, but it's similar enough and much easier to jump into.

The pluralist movement is important to your questions because it involves a commitment to substantivism at its base, a commitment to epistemic constraint in some domains and a commitment to the view that there's more to truth than mere platitudes like the one you mention about the T-schema (this is most clear in Lynch's book).

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any follow up questions.

<Blind faith is un-Buddhist.

I don't disagree, but I'm an academic. The understanding of Buddhism I have is academic and my arguments are based in issues of history as I understand it.

<I quote scholars and you quote yourself, as if you are an authority. State your name and your credentials then.


This tells me that my arguments alone are insufficient to identify me as an authority to you- really I wouldn't claim to be on this topic. As I said, I study mostly American Buddhism today- no I will not provide my name because I like to preserve some anonymity on the internet. I have a M.A and am doing PhD coursework. The problem that you are having is that you are not taking an academic view of the discussion.

>Your faith is greater than your wisdom

This is an ad-hominem fallacy at its best. I'm not Buddhist at all. I have no faith because I study the topic. I respect the tradition but I certainly don't worship in it. This is a discussion about historical understanding- something that you have garnered from questionable scholars. Here is a brief reading list of real scholars you can take and read to see what actual authorities in the field are saying.

Don Lopez: Elaborations on Emptiness
Don Lopez: The Heart Sutra Explained this is a series of translated commentaries on the Heart Sutra. Though it uses the long version, which is problematic.

J.L Austin: How to Do Things With Words This will tell you a lot about the linguistic empiricists and how words function in religious settings.

If you want to read the theory that I do you might also read
Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality
Also:Whithead's Symbolism: It's meaning and Effect
And
Bruce Lincoln's Authority

For Buddhist histories that are not popularist:

Peter N. Gregory: Tsung-Mi and the Sinification of Buddhism

Gimello's Paths to Liberation
or his Studies in Ch'an and Hua-yen

For modern philosophical takes on Buddhism Nancy Frankenberry's Religion and Radical Empiricism though to understand her you need a wider knowledge base than you probably have. Here, let me suggest something for you to read first:

James: The Varieties of Religious Experience
James: The Will to Believe
James: Pragmatism
Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Rorty: Consequences of Pragmatism

This one is particularly important for you:
Rorty: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

You want to know about the origins of Buddhism? How about Vajrayana?
Snellgrove: Indo-Tibetan Buddhism
Pollock (a great book): The Language of the Gods in the World of Men
For a modern take: Wedemeyer: Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism

Davidson: Indian Esoteric Buddhism
Bhattacharyya: An Introduction to Buddhist Esoterism These last few present conflicting views on the nature of Tantrism, particularly the last one that might fit your "fundamentalist" category.

TO understand American Buddhism better:
Merton: Zen and the Birds of Appetite
Eck: A New Religious America
Tweed (this is one of my favorite books ever) The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844-1912
Neusner (ed) World Religions in America
on individuals: Sterling: Zen Pioneer
Hotz: Holding the Lotus to the Rock Sokei-an was a traditionalist and a near mirror of Thich Nhat Hanh, yet his teachings never took off.
Since you Love Thich Nhat Hanh: Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962-1966 and the companion to that, Merton's journals
Another of Hanh's Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire This is before he was popular and so is much more interesting than some of his later works.

Also Mcmahan: The Making of Buddhist Modernism

>I didn't know continental vs analytical terms are outdated.

Dated perhaps isn't the right term, but just know that they do have certain limits.

As for post-WWII philosophy, there's a lot, but I'm going to let you know that much of it can't be well-understood without a basic understanding of Heidegger, much of whose thought was pre-WWII. His best known work is Being and Time, but it's one of the most challenging texts in the western canon. For an easier introduction to prep you for it, I'd recommend some of his early lecture material, such as The Hermeneutics of Facticity and The History of the Concept of Time. This could just be me, but I've found his lectures to be generally easier than his primary texts. If you want to trace the development of his thought, much of which was post-WWII, the Basic Writings anthology has a number of essays by him. While nothing really eclipsed Being and Time, much of his later thought is still studied. I'd say the most significant work of his later career was his Contributions to Philosophy, which took the form of briefer aphorisms and anecdotes, more similar to Nietzsche in style, but still grounded in much of his own thought and terminology.

If you want to move away from Heidegger, some of the big texts would be Gadamer's Truth and Method (Gadamer was a student of Heidegger's, so the former's thought is very deeply influenced by the latter), Sartre's two texts Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism (note the similarity to Sartre's title with Heidegger's Being and Time, and also note that Heidegger would respond rather critically to Sartre's Existentialism with an essay in the Basic Writings), and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (a key feminist work heavily influenced by Sartre and Heidegger).

Beyond this my knowledge is a bit scattered, as I've only just completed undergrad. I really would recommend David West's text as a decent overview that will guide you in what the key texts are, as well as good secondary sources. I've not brought up Derrida, who was also huge, as well as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor just to name a few. On top of those, there's a ton of pre-WWII stuff that's hugely important for understanding these thinkers, such as the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and the whole field of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung and Lacan). Then there's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the various strands of feminism, and tons more. The more I type, the more I'm just reminding myself how little I know about this area (even though it's the area I'm most interested in).

Let me know if there's anything more you need to know or if you want to know a decent secondary source.

I'm no Nietzsche scholar, but my curiosity was whetted, and I tried to work out an answer from what I could find of secondary works. Hopefully, I'll be corrected if I'm way off.

> Is Nietzsche saying certainty leads to nihilism, or is he saying the certainty can possibly lead to nihilism?

> I'm a bit confused. How can being certain lead to nihilism, surely the certainty makes one sure or confident about 'reality'?

What Nietzsche calls 'passive' nihilism is when "faith in values has been lost but the desire for the absolutes that characterised such faith remains in place."(1) I think this is what Nietzsche has in mind in the first passage you quoted. It's not the 'certainty' that leads, or may lead, to (passive) nihilism. The certainty rather is or represents this passive nihilism, since it's grounded in a will to truth: a need for absolutes in the wake of the death of God.

> Which group of people is he referring to?

I think he's still referring to passive nihilists: not the metaphysicians this time, but the skeptics. They are dismissive of naive realism (they're dismissing sensual experience as sole guide to truth) and positivism, but are really doing the same thing as the metaphysicians: looking for absolutes in the wake of the death of God. These skeptics are right about one thing: their dismissal of the positivists.

I was a bit puzzled about the last sentence of the quote (it's a bit different in my Norwegian translation), but thumbing through another book, I found this quote:

> While admiring their skepticism, Nietzsche thinks they do not follow their ideas far enough, namely to the point of questioning the value of truth as the basis of nobility, such as he anticipates possible (...) (2)

Did this help you at all?

*



(1) Sedgwick, Peter R., Nietzsche: The Key Concepts (2009), entry on 'Nihilism', p. 108, which refers to Will to Power § 22, for the categorisation of 'active' and 'passive' nihilism. It's from 1887 (the same year as a year after Beyond Good and Evil), and I'll quote it here for you:

> Nihilism. It is ambiguous:

> A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.

> B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.

(2)* Acampora, Christa Davis; Keith Ansell Pearson, [Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. A Reader's Guide*](http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsches-Beyond-Good-Evil-Readers/dp/0826473644/) (2011), p. 39.

I think Dylanhelloglue has given you a good start, and I would second the recommendation that you get yourself a copy of Pinkard's translation, if not to read it in place of the Miller then to cross-reference particularly difficult passages.

When Hegel talks about the Absolute, he is talking about, well, everything. The Absolute is something like the universe construed as a whole in its most metaphysically real sense. You could think of the Absolute in Hegel on analogy with substance in Spinoza--the Absolute is the unified metaphysical reality underlying the appearance of difference and distinction. So whereas from our finite point of view thought and being (or subject and object) look distinct, from the point of view of the Absolute thought and being are identical. The sense in which thought and being are identical in the Absolute for Hegel is a bit weird--he doesn't think of identity as the inert equivalence of A=B. Rather, identity in the relevant sense is a property of processes, so that two things are identical if they can be shown to be "moments" or elements of a larger process from which they cannot be abstracted and upon which they depend. The Absolute is something like the largest possible process in which everything else is a dependent moment. Hegel talks about it as a 'self-moving whole.'

Spirit is basically self-consciousness or self-knowledge writ large--something like the collective self-understanding of a historically-situated people. The shape that Spirit takes is the beliefs and way of life of that people, that people's cultural and religious practices, etc. So Hegel thought of democratic Athens as one shape of Spirit incorporating Athenian religious, political, cultural, and philosophical ideas and practices. Basically, a shape of Spirit is what makes a given people or historical epoch distinctive. Democractic Athens was distinctive because it was a shape of Spirit. Western Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries (i.e., the Enlightenment) was a shape of Spirit. Spirit is a kind of self-understanding or self-interpretation--a way of picturing what you are, what you know, and what you do--but it is a supra-individual form of self-understanding. No one person living in democratic Athens was the arbiter of the shape of Spirit represented by democratic Athens--the shape of Spirit represented by democratic Athens was a product of the collective thoughts and deeds of Athenians.

Notion is a bit complicated. The German is Begriff, which is more commonly translated as "concept"--Miller uses Notion to try to draw attention to the fact that what Hegel means by "concept" is not what people usually think of when they think of a concept. For Hegel, a concept in the sense of Begriff is not something in human minds by virtue of which humans sort the objects of their experience into different categories. (Picture it like this: you have a whole bunch of sense data, and you sort that sense data by labeling sense datum A "table" by subsuming that sense datum under your concept of tableness, labeling sense datum B "chair" by subsuming B under your concept of chairness, etc. This is not Hegel's picture at all. Hegel calls concepts in this sense Vorstellungen, which Miller translates as "picture-thoughts.") For Hegel, the concept is something like the essence of a thing, and the more a thing corresponds to its essence the more it becomes "actual" [wirklich] in Hegel's technical sense. Hegel is inspired in a lot of this by Aristotle, so it would probably help to have some familiarity with Aristotle's Metaphysics. This might help. In short, the concept is that by virtue of which a thing is what it is, and the more a thing corresponds to its concept the more it really is, or is actual. So when he talks about the Phenomenology as describing the development of the "concept" of knowledge, he means that the Phenomenology is going to reveal what knowledge truly is, what it means for knowledge to be actual knowledge.

Hope that helps. I'd also add that you should try to pick up a commentary on the Phenomenology to read along with the text itself. The Phenomenology is super, super difficult, so you should take all the help you can get. My two favorite books on the Phenomenology are Michael Forster's Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit and Hyppolite's Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The Forster is an extremely helpful introduction to and broad overview of the aims and concerns of the Phenomenology. (Forster identifies 11 distinct 'tasks' that the Phenomenology tries to accomplish, which he then divides into metaphysical, epistemological, and pedagogical tasks; his book then traces how the Phenomenology goes about accomplishing these tasks.) Forster offers some commentary on specific chapters, but for the most part his book is focused on the whole rather than paying detailed attention to the parts. The Hyppolite is a straight-up chapter-by-chapter commentary. Fred Beiser also has a commentary worth looking at, and I've heard good things about the commentary by Kalkavage.

Apologies for getting carried away with the length of this. (*edited to correct some typos.)

I haven't read them myself but I have it on very good authority that the best two intro texts to Levinas' thought are two books by Adriaan Peperzak: Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and To The Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

A background in phenomenology and continental thought is also very helpful. For phenomenology if you need it Introduction to Phenomenology by Dermot Moran is pretty good. One thing to keep in mind while you read is that Levinas, rather than invent new terms, uses very familiar ones in very distinct ways. He is supposedly trying to radically depart from the general trajectory of western thought, or possibly even articulate something different altogether (partially as a result of his 'phenomenological reduction'). He does often define what he means by things like "religion", "metaphysics" and "ontology", for example, so be sure to flag any 'definitions' when you come across them. If possible it might be good to try to put together a reading group as it is the type of work that everyone will latch onto something different, so brining those points of contact together can be very fruitful.

I've seen Levinas come up on this sub a few times in the past little while so it might be worth it to even see if people around here want to read through with you, though face-to-face conversation might be better (that was a lame 'Levinas joke'!)

I am not knowledgeable to address the whole thing, but regarding how much free thinking was allowed, you should check out The Sleepwalkers from Arthur Koestler, which is about the Copernicus-Galilei era. TL;DR much more than what you probably think.

You seem to be dedicated to see the whole thing as a sort of a machiavellian power game and not much else. This is actually a very entrenched perspestive today, which is sort of hard to challenge without really throwing a library worth of nuance and "one one hand, on the other hand"-ery on you, let me put it this way, power games obviously happened, a lot, if you think the people on top were generally cynical and did not actually believe in all this, what else do you think they believed? I mean, today atheism largely means taking god out of the gaps, as there are only gaps left in a world well explained by science, but how would that actually work back then? What else to believe instead? http://www.amazon.com/Hobbes-Dictionary-A-P-Martinich/dp/063119262X argues that when Thomas Hobbes was accused of atheism, that largely meant back then "belives in god but not divine providence".

Or for example, seeing heaven and hell as a medieval inventions for power-gaming, actually it would be hard to find any religion ever that would not propose that how morally a person lives has an affect on what happens to him in the afterlife, and already the Osiris cults in Ancient Egypt would paint a familiar scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell#Ancient_Egypt

I would argue what is very contradictory about the purely power-gaming model is the implicit assumption that there was a population who actively wanted some kind of an egalitarian society and this was pressed down. The issue is, the active desire of an egalitarian society is what cannot be really demonstrated. It is not a human universal. To large extent it was invented by secularizing various religious ideals, like the dignity of a person or equality in the eyes of god. Do you think an atheist or lightly religious society would never accept inequality or opression? They could simply accept it on an amoralistic basis, that the strong do what they like and the weak suffer what they must. No question that religion, culture, myth holds a society together and helps justifying power relations, but still actual power matters a whole lot more. A good historical example is excommunicated kings. By your logic religion harmed, and not helped in justifiying their power. It often did and sometimes they cared. But very often didn't. It is just enough to fear a ruler, and basically think your life expectations are generally better if you don't rock the boat much, it is not necessary to se him as just and valid. I think you are reading back a brave and dedicated democratic spirit that would be very anachronistic.

Abstract

Emily Thomas is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University; whose work focuses primarily on the history of metaphysics and the metaphysics of space and time. Thomas’ work in these areas has had a great impact, most notably, through her 2018 books Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics and Early Modern Women on Metaphysics.

In this episode, we’ll be discussing Emily Thomas’ forthcoming work on The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair. Born in 1863, May Sinclair was a prolific novelist, as well as a deeply influential poet, translator, critic and philosopher. It Is this last field, philosophy, which perhaps she is least well known for her work. Amongst her many great novels, short stories and poems, May Sinclair published her philosophical treatise in A Defence of Idealism in 1917, and The New Idealism in 1922, which both form the focus of today’s discussion. Sinclair’s unusual take on questions concerning space and time, god, and classic philosophical problems such as Zeno’s paradox, provide us with a refreshing and exciting approach to our understanding of the universe. Combined with her great passion, wit, and her breathtaking writing style, it is no stretch to say that May Sinclair is one of the 20th-centuries most underrated philosophers.

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Personally I like his early work best, especially Les mots et les choses, but that is a fairly difficult work, so it might not be the best start. It is also in a period where he isn't dealing with power and political things yet, so if that's what you're interesting in you should start later; I'd say with Discipline and Punish.

I think Kant is pretty important to have a general grasp of, certainly for his earlier, archaeological period. For his later, genealogical period perhaps the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche might be nice to have read. A decent grasp on structuralism is also important, I think. He rather explicitly does not identify as a structuralist, but there certainly is a close relation. There are even people who simply disagree with him and call him a structuralist.

He gets clearer as he gets older, but for his earlier works you might want to read some secondary literature. This book by Gary Gutting is a pretty good overview of his archaeological period, while this one gives a general overview of his entire work and has been approved by Foucault himself, who went so far as to supply a previously unpublished essay on power as an afterword. I would also highly recommend this article on Foucault by Foucault himself (under the pseudonym of Maurice Florence)

I'm actually not huge on psychoanalysis, and had to do a lot of checking to be able to read through and still probably need to do another reading again now.

I think that it's questionable whether any psychoanalyst was truly anti-Oedipal in D/G's sense, since their "proper" way of being anti-Oedipal was somewhat of an attempt to reconstruct psychoanalysis in its entirety. There has been some more research on this question published fairly recently, such as Deleuze and Guattari: A Psychoanalytic Itinerary, which might be worth the read if only for references. Guattari also discussed his own psychoanalytic practices at length in his work, but I sometimes wonder if Deleuze would have entirely agreed on this... Either way, it's in the collection that's called Molecular Revolution, IIRC. It's fairly interesting. One of the main things that I remember is the introduction of actual practices into psychoanalytic treatment, especially those that break with the normal routine of a person's life based on class structures - poor people learned how to drive, rich people started to garden on their own, etc.

There is a clear reference to the break between Freud and Jung on around page 46 of Anti-Oedipus (depending on the version you have, I suppose). They certainly seem to have a more favorable view of Jung on the break between them. They claim that Jung understood that the "images" of the psychoanalyst that were attributed to them during transference were not merely familial, but involved all sorts of cultural imaginations such as devils and gods and the like. They do think, though, that both associate the expression of the libido with a type of mediation that they don't want to accept, considering their reconstruction of what the libido is and how it functions. They would see that mediation as the introduction of a transcendent into the immanent function of the libido, which re-orients production towards that transcendent and stops it from being creative. It does seem like they have a more positive view of Jung, though, even if they seem to think that he had too much in common with the problems of Freud, and that he seems to have had more influence on their concepts of becoming as they come out in ATP.

Their critique of archetypes is on 128, but it's mainly the same type of critique that they deploy against Freudian Ideals and the type of stuff I was talking about above. It's clear that they want to keep the "surface" level of those images and do away with the idea that they reach any depth of the unconscious, since they have their own critique of those "depths". That's also something that appears in Deleuze's own work, mainly in the Logic of Sense where he explicitly goes through the justifications for the constructions of surfaces and depths and seems to end up rejecting the latter, though obviously not in a simple fashion. They're not the type to throw away the baby with the bathwater - as polemic as they are in Anti-Oedipus, it's clear that they're trying to save psychoanalysis in a sense, instead of just destroying it.

TL;DR: Jung probably didn't go far enough for them, but he made an interesting break with Freud in their eyes. Also, this is a massive gloss and I might have totally misspoken or just have gotten things wrong, so it's better to look up the page numbers. PM me if you'd like to check yourself...

Alain Badiou recently wrote this article on Hegel's master/slave dialectic, but did so asking the question as to it's relation to real slavery. It answers the question quite nicely while also providing an extremely clear reading of Hegel's argument.

Frederick Beiser also wrote a book on Hegel (there are ways to get the PDF version of this if you look in the right places) that is clear and does a good job dispelling the common misreadings of Hegel.

Peter Singer's Very Short Introduction to Hegel (again, available as a PDF in the right places) is also extremely clear and well written.

If you're serious about reading Hegel, pick yourself up a copy of Phenomenology of Spirit and read through it with Gregory Sadler's Lecture series. He goes through paragraph by paragraph explaining the whole text. He's extremely engaging and extremely insightful.

If you can't get enough Hegel and you want to go all in, I'd recommend The Hegel Variations by Fredric Jameson, Hegel: Three Studies by Theodore Adorno, and Less Than Nothing by some Slovenian guy.

Sorry if that's overkill, hope it helps!

I am just getting into "A Thousand Plateaus" and the writings of Deleuze in general, so I can't really help you there. I am curious what texts of Smith you are reading, as from your thinking, they are of interest to me.

--------------

I can, however, help you with this:

"I think I'm just bullshitting about how well I understand them. "

That is just a healthy critical mindset for approaching a difficult text that can be subjected to many interpretations so long as it is not the product of baseless self-doubt, but rather at least a nascent understanding of an alternative to what you are thinking. When you approach the text and begin writing your own, you should address the alternative explicitly regardless of how much it might problematize your position. Thinking through the alternative may provide you with a better understanding of how your interpretation contrasts with it as well as help you revise your thinking where the alternative interpretation demonstrates inconsistency or incompatibility in your thoughts. Then you can decide which interpretation is 1. more favorable based upon evidence in the text and 2. preferable given other notions that are plausible, consistent with empirical data, or strike us as undeniably intuitive, bringing it into reflective equilibrium http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reflective-equilibrium/#MetRefEqu. You can also make it explicit that this is the way I am interpreting an assemblage in your paper, give your reasoning for interpreting it this way from the text with supporting examples, and leave it at that. After all, sometimes there can be novel interpretations not supported by other individuals' readings. The point, however, is to make your thinking always explicit (even to express where interpretive difficulty lies, as it may be the philosopher's fault, and not your own). The philosopher may even be inconsistent in usage, or draw an incorrect entailment. In philosophy (and anything else, for that matter) it is okay to be wrong. Just write with clarity so you and others can know when you are wrong when you are. Being wrong contributes to knowledge too! Most excellent works of philosophy are probably wrong (or at least, very incomplete). :-P

Don't confuse being critical with unwarranted self-doubt. I made that mistake for a long time.

You should delve into secondary texts that seek to interpret the work. There are many on Deleuze due to difficulty:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-deleuze-and-guattari-039-s-a-thousand-plateaus.html

https://www.amazon.com/Deleuze-Guattaris-Thousand-Plateaus-Readers/dp/0826423027

Another great source is the oft referred SEP:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/

With a great list of secondary literature:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/#SecLit

Then you can argue with their interpretations. Or find confirmation from an intersubjective community.

----------------

On your particular definition:

"I interpret assemblages as combinations of expressions (which I interpret as ideas about the world, how it is, how it's supposed to be or could be) and content (which I interpret as the physical realities of stuff in the world, like the realities people need to deal with when they set about doing something). I understand assemblages as uneasy combinations because expressions about the world can be quite different than what the content of the world actually is."

Reading this, and knowing quite little about Deleuze, I would say that your understanding is placing the concept of assemblages very close to that of mental representations. It is likely that there is a more nuanced distinction here based in Deleuze's differing understanding of metaphysics. Mental representations often are consistent with a concept of indirect realism, that the mind's expressions/symbols/thoughts are about the real world, even if they are not identical to the real world.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-representation/

From what I know, I do not think that Deleuze would endorse representationalism, which takes mental experiences as intentions about the real world that exists independently of the thinker.

I'd be delighted if a Deleuzian would pipe in and let me know if my somewhat educated guess is correct.

I'm glad it was useful! I've spent a long time following internet rabbit holes and searching dusty library corners for these folks, so I'm glad to pass it along. There are, regrettably, not very many books collecting all these fascinating figures, but I know of a couple. Copleston's famous history of philosophy includes a volume on them. There's a several volume set which serves as kind of an anthology of writings from a variety of schools in that period (here's the link to the second volume, which contains stuff on nihilism and populism). There's also a good biography in English on Pavel Florensky, which digs a bit into the details of this time (and Florensky is worth taking the time to read--just ask /u/blazingtruth).

A few of the Russians who made it to Paris wrote their own surveys, histories, and reflections, but they are of course quite biased (most of these guys are from the Solovyov strand, though, so you'll get a lot of good stuff on his lineage). On this, see Berdyaev's The Russian Idea, Dream and Reality (which is his autobiography), Lossky's History of Russian Philosophy, and others.

As for Solovyov's stuff, Eerdmans publishing has been putting out some of his material in English over the years (they've also translated Bulgakov's works). I know of only two in print right now (find them here). I've read the book on the Good which is nice because you don't have to commit from start to finish--you can sort of skip around--and it introduces Solovyov's metaphysics and his social thought. The second half of it is more practical application of his philosophy/theology.

As you can see, the field is a bit sparse in terms of secondary engagement. You can find articles here and there if you have access to library databases. For anyone looking for research interests or grad school work, learning Russian could be a ticket to a niche area of reading and thinking (it's one I'm thinking of pursuing in Ph.D. work).

What's referred to in Kant scholarship as 'Kant's 4th critique' may be helpful to you. In short, he devoted a lot of time in his later life to writing about sociology, history and politics, and in these later writings we see many of the themes of What is Enlightenment? developed further.

The texts from this period of Kant's life tend to be compiled into short anthologies. A good one is this collection: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perpetual-Essays-Politics-History-Morals/dp/0915145472/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=kant+perpetual+peace&qid=1557847205&s=gateway&sr=8-2. His essay on The End of All Things is of growing importance for speculative metaphysics, and there are other essays in that collection on his political views.

His most developed work of political philosophy is The Conflict of the Faculties (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conflict-Faculties-Streit-Fakultaten/dp/080327775X/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Kant+the+faculties&qid=1557847269&s=gateway&sr=8-3). In this book he explains what the ideal society would look like, i.e. one where the faculties of law and academia are mediated without conflict, and where academics are allowed free exploration of their crafts without destabilising the functionality of the rest of society.

Hope this helps!

I'm also pretty new to this stuff, but I found the Philosophize This and Partially Examined Life podcasts helpful as very brief simplified starting points, like appetizers, for a lot of philosophical material. Another podcast I can't recommend enough that is heavily focused on the work of Lacan and Hegel is called Why Theory. It's by a couple college professors and every episode is consistently an educational experience for me. One of the professors on that podcast, Todd McGowan, just released a book on Hegel. They also just interviewed Zizek who I know is also heavily influenced by Hegel and his work could also be a good starting point. The reason I am recommending podcasts is because I personally find it really helpful to hear the material in the experts own words before I dive into it on my own. Hope this helps!

In addition to the primary texts willbell recommended, you might be interested in a few secondary sources:

• John Haugeland's Dasein Disclosed is about as clear a statement of an ontology "in the spirit of Heidegger" as you'll find. There's some debate about how much Heidegger is in this and how much Haugeland (or how much Sellars), but there's no doubt that this is extremely interesting in its own right.
  
  
• Denis McManus' Heidegger and the Measure of Truth is an in-depth study of important concepts in Heidegger's phenomenology (present-at-hand/ready-to-hand, constitution, etc.), with great discussions of how that informs other aspects of Heidegger's thought. There's also a great take-down of Dreyfus.
  
  
• If you want to branch out to phenomenology in general and not just Heidegger, I can't recommend Maurice Merleau-Ponty enough. Taylor Carmans' introduction to MM-P is a great guide.

Lots of Rambling. TL;DR toward the bottom.

> If I was doing something wrong wouldn't God make me feel guilty

No. God never makes you do anything.

The thing about the nude body is that it can be naked or not. What I mean is that Adam and Eve were nude, but they didn't realize they were naked until they had let sin in. So I think nudity, as such, is just the human form without clothes on.

But then (I'm trying to think of who it was--Chesterton maybe, or maybe this book, that talks about the propensity for the barbarian to see everything without covering on), we drape the things we value in extravagance.

What does Paul write?

>those parts of the body which we think less honorable we invest with the greater honor

There is--and perhaps their ought to be--a "mystery" preserved about the "less honorable" parts of the human body. That word mystery (Gk. Mysterion), is the Greek of the Latin sacramentum.

Yes, I think we could say that our private parts--that is, our reproductive organs--are a sacrament, that is, a visible sign of an invisible grace.

Through reproduction, we participate in God's creative initiative.

When my priest takes the consecrated hosts around the congregation during communion to the elderly and infirm, he drapes the holy species in the folds of his vestments. As he passes by--or rather, as Jesus passes by, under the appearance of bread--we kneel or genuflect.

It's a very modern thing (a very German thing) to think that you get at the essence of a thing by stripping away ornament. But I think that's exactly backwards. There's a reason tradition has given brides the veil. There's a reason men used to wear hats, and women used to cover their heads to pray. The reason is still there only we've forgotten it.

Chesterton did say that one should never tear a fence down until one knows the reason it was put up.

Now don't get me wrong--I'd prefer to be nude all the time. But whereas I used to be able to be nude in front of whomever, now I think I've internalized all the foregoing. That is, all I've just written (and more) on the subject. So that, as much as I'd like to be nude all the time, I can appreciate the very real (as opposed to pretentious) dignity inherent in wearing clothes.

Let them be loose-fitting. Let them be comfortable. I know Chesterton has very negative things to say about pants (he compared them to the shackles that slaves where), and for my part, I'd be a lot happier in robes.

He does make the point that even in our contemporary culture priests and judges still wear robes as a symbol of dignity and respect.

So what would be the difference, if we prefer to be nude but REALLY, what we prefer is just being comfortable--a bathrobe and pajamas, maybe.

Honestly, modern western clothing is abysmal. It's the least comfortable stuff I can imagine. Even suits are more comfortable than the "business casual" we're stuck with today. And don't get me started on skinny jeans.

But you know what burns me up the most? Belts. And pants that cinch at the waste. Whose idea was that?

If we must where pants, let them buckle above my navel. And if I have to hold them up, let them be suspended rather than belted.

Our clothes are the worst. And I'd rather not wear any of them.

But that doesn't mean I'd rather not wear clothes at all.

I recently heard (in a lecture) that George Washington designed (and possibly made) his own clothes. He said that first impression are so important, it would be foolish to leave your clothing in the hands of another.

And George Costanza famously said he'd like to be draped in velvet if it was socially acceptable.

So while I share your sentiment for nudity, I must say that nudity--apart from being alone or with your wife--may not be the thing we're after.

Finally, Bishop Sheen has pointed out that in the Scriptures nudity and demonic possession when hand in hand. I don't think he limited his citations only to Scripture, either.

I don't think Bishop Sheen thought that being nude was evil. I really don't.

But TL;DR whatever we think of the Adam and Eve story, the truth the story is meant to convey [seems to be] that when we were in a state of original innocence and grace, we could be nude without being naked. But since we are fallen (in some sense) our nudity has become a sign of our nakedness. So that on this side of the dark glass, as long as we still have a propensity to sin, we are naked when we're nude. And (perhaps) to be nude in public, when we still suffer the effects of that original sin, is to incur the guilt of the sin of presumption, even if no other sin is present.

I'm not familiar with Buckland's work, so I can't comment on his particular approach to the topic. However, I tend to agree with the phenomenologists regarding consciousness and our "access" to the external world. Particularly Merleau-Ponty's approach in "The Phenomenology of Perception". The key is that, yes, we can only talk about and come to experience things because of our conscious relationship with those things (i.e. intentionallity), but that implies that there are things to which we have a conscious relationship. It's not that we make a copy or "representation" of a "thing in itself" and that's what we experience. Instead, we experience things as they are. Husserl would say that we need to get back to the thing itself in experience.

I also favor certain readings of Kant that dismiss a "two-world" interpretation ("thing-in-itself" is the real thing and our representations of that thing in empirical reality is a sub-real copy). Graham Bird has a lot to say on this. It takes Kant and his idea of transcendental idealism into a space that respects the empirical reality that we experience while at the same time respecting the transcendental level of critical thought (i.e. we can look at the way that our mental apparatus is setup so that we are able to experience the things that we experience).

Both Merleau-Ponty and Kant have a lot to say on the idea of space. Kant especially.

Here are some resources if you are interested:

[Merleau-Ponty]
(http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Merleau-Ponty-Phenomenology-Perception-GuideBooks/dp/0415343151/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451313516&sr=8-1&keywords=merleau+ponty+routledge+guidebook)

Kant

Because only about 10% of american philosophers identify as continental and the other 90% fundamentally dismiss the discipline. They dismiss the discipline only on the basis of the name, which comes down to analytics judge books by their covers.

Pretty sure this is what analytic(s) think continental philosophy is. The sad truth is they are not far off.

Check out some secondary literature/introductions to those subjects/authors. If you want to delve further they usually have helpful "Further Reading" sections that will give you other points of departure, that will hopefully be better paths to understanding than, just say, picking up Of Grammatology.

There is even a continental theory book in the A Very Short Introduction series, but based on the reviews it doesn't sound like it's what you're looking for.

Books to look at if you have access to a library:

http://www.amazon.com/Michel-Foucault-Beyond-Structuralism-Hermeneutics/dp/0226163121/ref=pd_sim_b_10

http://www.amazon.com/Foucault-2-0-Beyond-Power-Knowledge/dp/1590512340

What types of examples do you need?