The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Skimming Nietzsche as I always do through the insights of post Nietzsche philosophers I'm currently reading.
The Pursuit of Truth by Quine
Nietzsche and Philosophy by Deleuze

El gaucho Martín Fierro; La vuelta de Martín Fierro by José Hernández.

A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich; — AmadeusD

Wonderful little book. Have you also read Cancer Ward? It's equally poignant.

Dormir al sol, Adolfo Bioy Casares.

The Trial
by Franz Kafka

Holding Fast to an Image of the Past: Explorations in the Marxist Tradition by Neil Davidson

Unfortunately not. While reading Ivan i had a rather intense, and close call with cancer. I think I'll give it a while.

Ignorance by Milan Kundera.

Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique.

I've been reading three related books:

Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education (a comparison of monastic Christian education and the pagan education of late antiquity, framed largely in the terms of contemporary secular philosophy).

Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Foucault was himself a big fan of Hadot. This is a look at the role of spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy, with a focus on pagan thought and particularly Stoicism and Socrates.)

Sites of the Ascetic Self : John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation (A study of St. John the Ascetic in largely post-modern terms, building off Foucault's late interest in asceticism, and using some elements of feminist theory and queer theory).

They are all related in that they are studies of ascetic education and philosophy as a practice. I have a lot of ideas about this and maybe I will start a thread on it some day.

The first is definitely the best, at least for my uses, since it is a quite detailed look at actual pedagogy from a period where philosophy was a "way of life" (and were all great philosophers were expected to be saints). But all three do a good job showcasing the much larger role for emotion in epistemic pursuits and the much broader notion of the intellect in ancient thought (whereas Charles Taylor's A Secular Age does a good job showcasing how the intellect and epistemology because distanced from the rest of the human person and their environment).

The last book does show some of the more serious pernicious effects of siloing in philosophy, with claims like "people were generally uninterested in asceticism due to Nietzsche and Weber's critiques until Foucault revived interest by showing how it could be transgressive." I am sure this "lull in interest," would come to a shock to the thousands of Christian and Buddhist monks and nuns living in contemplative orders over this time period, or even to the laity in traditional churches (a large majority outside the Anglophone world), for whom monasticism has continued to be a major influence (particularly in Eastern Christianity).

But it's also a great example of what Charles Taylor points to using Hume and Gibbon, the way the "disinterested scholarly frame" ends up choosing what to "bracket" out of consideration (Latour's late work makes a similar charge). So here, any consideration of the truth of the religious claims of Cassian, or of the metaphysical underpinnings of his practices, gets bracketed out, but the ethical and aesthetic values of the modern secular Western academy (particularly its post-modern side) are definitely very much assumed and "left in."

That said, it's still an interesting book because it makes some solid connections between early Christian thought and contemporary "Continental" thought. One example is the way Cassian's psychology is generally in line with embodied cognition and a sort of enactivism (which is not unusual for his period).

But I've long thought there was actually a strong overlap here that gets ignored. In many cases, "radical new ideas" such as non-overlapping hermetically sealed magisterium or disciplines as discrete language games are actually present in ancient or scholastic thought (in this case in Averroes double truth doctrine and Latin Averroism).

The last book also reminded me of some interesting parallels between the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the early friars and existentialist thought, the Beatniks, and the Hippie movement, with elevations of similar virtues, although there would be obvious differences.

Notably, some of the heretical sects in some of these movements did adopt a sort of "free love" attitude but these tended to be relatively short lived outbursts (especially when compared with intentional communities/communes spanning millennia).