Idk i been reading James King - Holy Bible, for 13years.

Girogio Agamben - What Is Philosophy (Reread)
Michael James Bennett - Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics: The Image of Nature
Jean Piaget - Structuralism

Again no philosophy, and again quite Russia-centric.

Recent highlights:

Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

The characters are grotesques or ciphers: rather than developing, they're only revealed, more or less gradually, and we know that how they respond to circumstances is the only way they ever could. The plot relies on several incredible coincidences. The satirical irony is laid on far too thick, even though we can share his anger and righteousness. Despite his progressive treatment of social issues, and despite his ironic targeting of snobbery, he's still a class-bound snob himself. And the repeated contemptuous descriptions of "the Jew" make for uncomfortable reading (I read somewhere that some of Dickens' Jewish friends complained about this during its serialization, and that he removed the phrase "the Jew" after a certain point in the finished book, but at least in my edition it's there up to the end).

But aside from all that, it's great. The intensity and distinctness of the characters (unchanging as they may be), of the most dramatic scenes, and of his scene-setting descriptions is brilliant. And it's great fun.

War and Peace, Lev Tolstoy

I read it straight after the Dickens and had grouped the two books together in my mind as classic mid-nineteenth century novels, but of course, Tolstoy could hardly be more different. War and Peace feels much closer to my world and my life, and it's more real. The characters develop, change their minds, behave unpredictably. The war bits are much more realistic than I expected, intentionally emphasizing the cowardice and the chaos, the comical errors, the blood and guts, the self-serving lies of the officers, and the basic uselessness of orders and tactics. Tolstoy has some persuasive historico-philosophical arguments and manages to weave them into the plot (except for the final epilogue, which is a repetitive and anti-climactic essay).

Also it's great fun to read. It's full of energy and a passionate love of life and the world--not what you get from Tolstoy's contemporary Dostoevsky.

All Hell Let Loose, Max Hastings

To correct my ignorance of the Second World War--I didn't have a good idea of what happened and when--and especially to see how the Soviet Union fitted in to everything else that was happening, I wanted a one-volume overview, and this turned out to be a pretty good choice. Knowing that Hastings is politically a moderate conservative, hovering around the centre-right, I was surprised at how devastatingly critical he is of the British war effort, not only from a strategic-military point of view but also morally. He shows great sensitivity to the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians in all the countries involved, and doesn't hold back when smashing apart the myths of heroism and sacrifice that have been part of the Allied story ever since 1945 (not that he claims heroism and sacrifice were non-existent). One of the unique features of the book is that almost every paragraph contains quotes from archived letters written by people at all levels of society and the military.

Next:

Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy. I know some people say this is the best novel ever, but I can't help but expect it to be a let-down after W&P.

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov. I confess I got this partly because I discovered that his ancestors were the Learmonths from Scotland. Maybe I'm homesick or something.

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro. I read this when it was first published, when I was in my early twenties. It creeped me out, I didn't get it, but I was fascinated. Now that I'm older and it feels like time is running out, it'll make more sense.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56, Anne Applebaum. For me this is going to be a kind of sequel to the WW2 book.

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum. I mentioned to a Russian friend that I was going to read this book and she impatiently said "It wasn't just the Ukrainians who suffered under Stalin! It was us too!" :roll:

War and Peace again, because it was so good.

Jean Piaget - Structuralism — StreetlightX

Interested to hear what you think of this.

It's a very good introduction to structuralism. Well written, broad (covers lots of topics from math to biology to linguistics), and not too long (just under 150 pages). It's a little dated maybe, but reading Piaget, you get it from the horses' mouth, as it were. It happens to be really good in order to get a sense of the limits of structuralism as well, even while Piaget is a champion for it.

Sounds perfect. Parsons has made a few references to Piaget and I've been looking for something. On the list. Thank you! :grin:

Last few books and essays and stuff:

Mindfuck - Christopher Wylie
Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Perez
Fucking Trans Women - Mira Bellweather
Capital Vol. 1 - Marx (reread (more mathematicising the value theory))
1984 - George Orwell
Uruk Machines - samzdat
Communisation and the Value Form Theory - End Notes (reread, accompanying Marx stuff)

Ongoing maths/stats stuff:

Reading these together with accompanying papers, the study will take a while.

{

Causality - Judea Pearl
The Algebra of Open and Interconnected Systems - Brendan Fong
Category Theory for Scientists (using for reference, previously read) - David Spivak
}

Ongoing philosophy:

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern - J. Sakai

Capital Vol. 1 - Marx (reread (more mathematicising the value theory)) — fdrake

I'm nearly done all 3 volumes - I'd love to see a full blown global economics simulator based on Marx's principles.

Starting Structure of Social Action Volume II: Weber, by Parsons

I'm nearly done all 3 volumes - I'd love to see a full blown global economics simulator based on Marx's principles. — Pantagruel

I don't think that's possible without filling in/inventing lots of extra-textual details. Some of his arguments are relatively easy to put into a theorem-proof form though. The latter's what I'm attempting.

I don't think that's possible without filling in/inventing lots of extra-textual details. Some of his arguments are relatively easy to put into a theorem-proof form though. The latter's what I'm attempting. — fdrake

Yes, it would have to be an extrapolation. What I'd really like to do is attempt to integrate a lot more social dimensions, flesh out his class-conflict in light of the intervening 150 years of history. It's a major undertaking for sure.

Are you a mathematician?

What I'd really like to do is attempt to integrate a lot more social dimensions, flesh out his class-conflict in light of the intervening 150 years of history. — Pantagruel

I think that's what a lot of Marxist literature does, no? Filling in the gaps and using the same categories to analyse other issues. Did you have a particular thing in mind?

Are you a mathematician? — Pantagruel

Yes, statistician. (Mathematicians don't like it if you call statistics mathematics)

I think that's what a lot of Marxist literature does, no? Filling in the gaps and using the same categories to analyse other issues. Did you have a particular thing in mind? — fdrake

lol! Yes, of course.

I've been wanting to leverage neural net modelling capabilities since I started reading cybernetics in the 90s. Now it has become pretty plug and play. NetLogo is the new standard, multi-agent based modelling and it's free. It's just about conceptualizing the model. Capitalism is rife with contradictions, and these seem like logical focal points to me.

The World in Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience by Steven Lehar

That comic reminds me of the covers of the classic Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, aka the "Dragon Book", back when compiler design was still a lively, active field, which accurately described how designing a compiler could feel like:







Unfortunately, the newest version went off in a totally different direction for whatever reason:



There's also another classic "Dinosaur Book" for operating systems that has fortunately held on to its traditional cover art, most of the time. Fun stuff.

"Meanings as Species" by Mark Richard, some provoking bits:

"...Of course languages, lexicons, and individual words—like species—evolve. As one population ‘reproduces’ its language in the next, new words arise, old words have their meanings changed, phonology shifts, grammatical rules may be modified, and so on. As is the case with species, some of this evolution will be quite gradual: successive generations are able to fluently communicate with one another, just as successive generations in a population lineage are (counterfactually and in principle) able to interbreed, have fertile progeny, share a system for recognizing mates, etc. As is the case with species, even when abutting generations enjoy the sort of cohesion that would drive the observer to classify them as speakers of a single language, the soritical ways of linguistic change, given enough time, will lead to a diachronic lack of cohesion so great that no one will say that ancestor and descendent populations speak the same language, even though the languages they use are related by descent."

"...Whether we stick with this sort of terminology or not, we should agree that Quine is correct to think that the notion of analyticity is of little to no use in the study of language. But it certainly doesn’t follow from this that the notion of meaning can’t bear any explanatory load, any more than it follows from the fact—biological species do not have essences; none of the small changes that might lead, when summed over time, to speciation are themselves intrinsically changes that separate one species from another— that the notion of species cannot bear any explanatory weight. The notions of word meaning, concept, and (public) language are no worse off because of Quine’s and allied arguments and observations than is the notion of species because of Darwinian arguments and observations that speciation is a historical process and that it is folly to think that species have anything like essences."

"...Our talk about meaning, like our talk about species, tracks something that is event- like, more process than product. Our talk about meaning, like our talk about species, tends to be cast in terms that are more appropriate to something that is not event-like: thus the attraction of the views that species have some sort of essence, and that a word’s meaning can be identified once and for all with a definition or a Fregean sense or something of the sort. Because of the apparent lack of fit between what our talk about meanings and species tracks and the conceptual box that talk creates, we might at the end of the day decide that rather radical conceptual engineering is called for: we might even recommend dropping talk about species or meanings in favor of talk about populations related by descent or lineages of lexicons linked by various relations of communication. To do so in the biological case is not to suggest that species talk does not track a real phenomenon, or that the claims and generalizations biologists make in speaking about species are empty or unverifiable or false. Ditto, for the linguistic case."

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian (going to read this later)
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx

Finished:
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx (reread)
The German Ideology by Karl Mark (just the section on Feuerbach and Historical Materialism)

"Meanings as Species" by Mark Richard — Saphsin

This looks great! How are you finding it?

CR:

Fred Moten and Stefano Herney - The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Frank B. Wilderson III - Afropessimism
Frank B. Wilderson III (ed.) - Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction

Democracy and Education by John Dewey. I'm shifting into a politics, democracy and legal theory mode for the next few books.

edit: a few tidbits from the first couple of chapters...

"Manners are but minor morals."

"The things we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking."

"A modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected."

"As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society."

The French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle

Starting Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon and noticed an old reading group thread for the same here so will check that out. Also noticed there is a pdf version of an earlier translation as Speech and Phenomena that pops up upon a Google search.

Side note, sheer curiosity:
Coming across the old reading group, I wondered - why was TGW banned?
Also noticed Landru Guide Us and Prairie Dog Handler are gone - did they just leave?
They seemed a frequent presence on the old forum.

(More of a lounge question I suppose but prompted by coming across the thread and didn't seem worth starting a new one over.)

Pierre Clastres - Archaeology of Violence
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology
David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
David Graeber - Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination

:up:

september readings:

• Adorno and Existence, Peter Gordon
• The Struggle for Recognition, Axel Honneth
• Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson III

*

"Fear is the mind-killer." :mask:

1st trailer for DUNE (they might have gotten it right this time):

https://youtu.be/n9xhJrPXop4

How do you do that? I can't reread anything without going totally bored. I only reread legal texts to verify the exact argument or rule.

(they might have gotten it right this time) — 180 Proof

I will not stand idly by as David Lynch and Sting are besmirched

:lol:

Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson III — 180 Proof

Let me know how you find this. As a book I thought it was an incredible read. I even think he's exactly right to point out that there is a certain class of subject ('slave') which escapes the major emancipatory frameworks of either Marxism or post-colonialism (the slave neither fights for a different relation to the means of production, nor for a claim to land); but I don't understand why this class of subject *must* be black. Like the whole book made me think very hard about the way in which racial issues - black racial issues in particular - cannot simply be assimilated or amalgamated with other claims for emancipation (there is a specificity to racial struggle that is not simply class or land based), but I still don't see why this warrants his afropessimism. Like, what is it about the slave that warrants the slave being 'inherently' black? I feel like there's a step missing in his argument. Still, I really enjoyed it.

I've been leery of reading this book for the issues you raise which I'd gleaned from reviews, etc. Orlando Patterson's work on 'historical slavery' - among and between ethnicities, mostly non-blacks (or non-Africans) - has been a profound resource of mine for almost thirty years. Wilderson's examination, I suspect, is more philosophical than historical. I'll let you know how it affects me when I'm done (probably via PM).

:up:

There are sections of technical analytic philosophy that I have to review over, but the parts I was able to grasp are very interesting.

I started rereading Dune and it's very enjoyable. I read it as a teen and again sometime around 15 years ago. The remake looks promising, btw.

I've read all the Dune novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, incidental, and though entertaining they don't compare to Frank.