Anyone read these, any or all of of Pratchett? Thoughts? — Amity

I liked Pratchett. I don't read much fantasy, but I found his style and humor appealing. I was introduced to Pratchett by a college buddy who was a big fan. Later I was gifted a set of audiobooks and I would often fall asleep while listening to them in bed :) (not because they are boring, it's just that audiobooks have this effect on me).

The first book in the series is rather unlike the rest in tone and pacing. At that point, he probably didn't anticipate a big success and a long series, so he went all-out. Later books are more measured. Many of the books have reappearing characters and places, so it probably helps to read those in sequence, but it's not essential.

Story collections by Julio Cortázar. There is a clear influence of Borges in a few "high concept" stories, which I generally don't like much. I actually liked Cortázar better than Borges in such stories - the latter can feel like a dry intellectual exercise, but Cortázar is never dry. The themes and the style vary. One of my favorites is "End of the Game," written from the point of view of a young girl.

Now reading Carlos Fuentes' "The Death of Artemio Cruz"

Just read "How to Start a Worm Bin" by Henry Owen. I ordered 500 red wigglers and I feel I now know enough to start some composting and to build a good supply of fishing bait.

I'll be able to say I raised the worm that caught the fish that fed the family. That's how self-sufficient I'll be.

Reading some parts of The Philosophy of Redemption by Phillip Mainländer.

He has some interesting ideas in his Analytics and Physics, but his Big Idea, shown in the Metaphysics ("God" chose to kill himself rather than continue living) section verges on complete embarrassment. His argumentation is paper thin, and I'm surprised he has a few followers...

I had higher hopes for him, but I suppose I'll take out of it a few bits here and there.

I liked Pratchett. I don't read much fantasy, but I found his style and humor appealing. I was introduced to Pratchett by a college buddy who was a big fan. Later I was gifted a set of audiobooks and I would often fall asleep while listening to them in bed :) (not because they are boring, it's just that audiobooks have this effect on me) — SophistiCat

I wonder how I managed not to read Pratchett for so very long. Currently, listening to his 'Small Gods', a new recording, courtesy of the Libby app and Penguin: https://www.penguin.co.uk/discworld-in-audio

Narrated by Andrew Serkis - amazing changes of voice/dialect/tone. Om's Liverpudlian? accent made me think of John Lennon and wondered if that was deliberate. I'm enjoying the sense of fun, light and darkness. Also, the wisdom - if only I could keep the words in my head...

Like you, I listen at night. Sometimes falling asleep before my setting of 25 mins! That's fine. :smile:

Many of the books have reappearing characters and places, so it probably helps to read those in sequence, but it's not essential. — SophistiCat

Thanks. I usually would prefer to read in sequence but happy to know it's not needed, given my books already purchased. 'Small Gods' appears to be a stand-alone.

***
I didn't really notice Om's Scouse accent until last night when I laughed out loud at the Q&A dialogue between him and Brutha (his believer). Reading it from my book pp42-47 - it just isn't the same.

Brutha's increasing frustration, anger and horror at the small god Om's (as tortoise) lack of recall as to his powers. Om's accent becoming louder and more incredulous as to the suggestion that he as God was the author of the Book of Creation.
'Brutha put his hand over his mouth in horror.
'Thaff blafhngh!'
'What?'
'I said, that's blasphemy!'
'Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I'm a god!'
'I don't believe you!'

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck

This has not aged well. Absolutely horrible at times. — fdrake

That was an important book for me at one time, but yeah. I see books on psychology as having a shelf life of about 20 years.

The amount of adultery the author committed in their life is not surprising given they give a qualified defence of shagging your own psychotherapy patients after an impassioned essay on commitment being life's meaning.

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck — fdrake

The phrase "the road less travelled" is from a poem by Robert Frost - "The Road Not Taken." It is ironic that the Peck used this quote because Frost meant it ironically. It is not meant as a paean to a life of non-conformity but rather a wry comment on how we look back on our lives and try to show how we are masters of our fate.

I see books on psychology as having a shelf life of about 20 years. — wonderer1

William James, Konrad Lorenz, and even Sigmund Freud still have a lot to tell us, just to name a few. The methods and technology for study have changed, but our minds haven't.

It is not meant as a paean to a life of non-conformity but rather a wry comment on how we look back on our lives and try to show how we are masters of our fate. — T Clark

Astute. Very ironic given that much of the book is about self mastery.

The phrase "the road less travelled" is from a poem by Robert Frost - "The Road Not Taken." It is ironic that the Peck used this quote because Frost meant it ironically. It is not meant as a paean to a life of non-conformity but rather a wry comment on how we look back on our lives and try to show how we are masters of our fate. — T Clark

I liked this discussion of the poem:

The poem masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard suggests that the speaker is admitting that “choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had ‘perhaps the better claim.’” In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions.

To me the poem suggests recognition of determinism - that many little things make all the difference in the courses of our lives. I think Peck somewhat recognized determinism. And perhaps, that by writing TRLT, he would to some degree determine the course of other people's lives. However, he also had a woo based belief in free will, and yes, using the metaphor from the poem is pretty ironic.

I did not take the passage as a matter of intention. It was more a reporting of a gap. We do stuff and find out later what it brought about. Maybe.

It is not a football game or a throw of dice against a wall. We do not know what it is.

In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision.

Yes. It's all about the stories we tell rather than what happened. I'm 72. Looking back over the things I've done and that have happened to me, there are no stories to tell. Things just happened. That doesn't mean I'm not responsible for the things I've done, but they don't mean anything.

To me the poem suggests recognition of determinism - that many little things make all the difference in the courses of our lives. — wonderer1

I don't think it's about determinism. As I see it, it's just a sly comment on the human need for stories about ourselves.

a woo based belief in free will — wonderer1

Are you saying that free will doesn't exist - that it's somehow a allusion to mysticism or the supernatural? I don't see it that way. Sometimes it makes sense to act as if ours and others' behaviors are the result of outside influences and sometimes it makes sense to act as if we are in control. Free will vs. determinism is a metaphysical issue. Its not about facts - true or false.

Are you saying that free will doesn't exist - that it's somehow a alllusion to mysticism or the supernatural? — T Clark

Free will doesn't exist in the sense Peck thought it did. That doesn't mean it isn't reasonable to think about what would be a more realistic notion of free will - something along the lines of what Peter Tse is pointing towards with The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation

I don't see it that way. Sometimes it makes sense to act as if ours and others' behaviors are the result of outside influences and sometimes it makes sense to act as if we are in control. — T Clark

Sure it makes practical sense, to go with the simplistic modelling of things that our brains generate, including our models of other people. However, I would think it unfortunate, to not be able to see beyond the simplistic modeling, even if only a bit.

Free will vs. determinism is a metaphysical issue. Its not about facts - true or false. — T Clark

All the more reason to take consideration of free will out of the box of metaphysics.

All the more reason to take consideration of free will out of the box of metaphysics. — wonderer1

You and I understand metaphysics differently. It's not that we haven't found proof that free will exists or doesn't exist, it's that it is not a question that can be answered empirically.

I did not take the passage as a matter of intention. It was more a reporting of a gap. We do stuff and find out later what it brought about. Maybe. — Paine

:up:

You and I understand metaphysics differently. It's not that we haven't found proof that free will exists or doesn't exist, it's that it is not a question that can be answered empirically. — T Clark

This is a topic for a thread. A thread which I have no interest in starting. :razz:

This is a topic for a thread. — wonderer1

It is a question that has been argued many times here on the forum. I've made my arguments so many times, it's hard to work up any enthusiasm to do it again.

It is a question that has been argued many times here on the forum. I've made my arguments so many times, it's hard to work up any enthusiasm to do it again. — T Clark

Same here. :wink:

A Journal of the Plague Year
by Daniel Defoe

Surely someone has read this book here. — Lionino

[Godel, Escher, Bach]

I consider the book an intellectual masterpiece. I've known for a long time that Hofstadter was naive in some of his beliefs about the potential for computation as it was when the book was written. But regardless, Hofstadter provides a lot of valuable tools for thinking about thinking.

Especially valuable (as my 40 year old memory of the book recalls) are Hofstadter's discussion of the importance of being able to flip between reductive and holistic perspectives, and the way he conveys an understanding of emergence.

A few weeks ago, I discussed an article I read by Konrad Lorenz, "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology." It was a discussion of how our human nervous system and mind have evolved as a "negotiation" between Kant's things-as-they-are, the noumena, and our animal need to survive. A link to my post:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/915561

I was so impressed by the article I went looking for more information. Lorenz's "Behind the Mirror" is a detailed expansion of the article. It's completely changed the way I think about human and animal behavior and the mind. I was a psychology major in the early 1970s, when this book was written. My first reaction while reading was how could they not have shown this to us, taught this to us. Ethology, the study of animal behavior, gives us a framework, a context, to understand human neurology and psychology. People say that psychology isn't really a science - it has no solid basis in empirical study. Lorenz's and others work provided that basis decades before the techniques of cognitive science were available. This is from the forward.

[Kant] saw clearly that the forms of apprehension available to us are determined by pre-existing structures of the experiencing subject and not by those of the object apprehended, but he did not see that the structure of our perceiving apparatus had anything to do with reality. In... the Critique of Pure Reason he wrote:

If one were to entertain the slightest doubt that space and time did not relate to the Ding an sich but merely to its relationship to sensuous reality, I cannot see how one can possibly affect to know, a priori and in advance of any empirical knowledge of things, i.e. before they are set before us, how we shall have to visualize them as we do in the case of space and time.

Kant was obviously convinced that an answer to this question in terms of natural science was categorically impossible. In the fact that our forms of ideation and categories of thought are not, as Hume and other empiricists had believed, the products of individual experience, he found clear proof that they are logically inevitable a priori, and thus not 'evolved'.

What a biologist familiar with the facts of evolution would regard as the obvious answer to Kant's question was, at that time, beyond the scope of the greatest of thinkers. The simple answer is that the system of sense organs and nerves that enables living things to survive and orientate themselves in the outer world has evolved phylogenetically through confrontation with an adaptation to that form of reality which we experience as phenomenal space. This system thus exists a priori to the extent that it is present before the individual experiences anything, and must be present if experience is to be possible. But its function is also historically evolved and in this respect not a priori. — Lorenz - Behind the Mirror

Lorenz then goes on to describe specific cognitive capabilities in simple organisms and how they evolve into the much more complex capabilities we have today. I think the most compelling idea in the book is there there is a direct continuity between the "cognition" of the earliest animals and the cognition of complex animals such as us.

I think the most compelling idea in the book is there there is a direct continuity between the "cognition" of the earliest animals and the cognition of complex animals such as us. — T Clark

What is your interpretation of "direct continuity"? I feel there is a "direct continuity" between individual consciousnesses, their socio-cultural encodings, and their subsequent re-encodings (as subsequent individual consciousnesses). Like that?

Boethius' Consolation.

Anyone got notes?

Like that? — Pantagruel

Lorenz describes animals' "cognitive" capabilities, starting from the most basic, e.g. irritability, kinesis, phobic response, topic response. These foundational capacities are the building blocks for more complex mental processes up to our own. The addition of memory is needed to climb above very basic levels and this calls for a nervous system. Obviously, things become a lot more complicated as you move to the more complex organisms. That's the continuity I was talking about.

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Immortality by Milan Kundera. — javi2541997

Excellent. Thanks to Kundera's novel, I started to see love and time in a different manner. Not in the same pessimistic way as I used to do back in the past.

Currently reading: A History of Eternity by Jorge Luis Borges.

Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis
by Marcello Barbieri

Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.

I am enjoying Borges' works. I don't understand why it took me too long to start reading him. Maybe he just popped up in my life at the perfect time. Glad that my parents have books of him on their shelves.

Well, I have to jump in somewhere; let this be the pond!

• Recently finished Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Except not really finished, because I have to go back and take notes on the parts where I think he goes wrong.
  
• Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity.
  
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, trans. R J Blackwell, R. J. Spath, W. D. Thirlkel, intro. by V. J. Bourke. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. From this edition I have learned that the Latin translation of Aristotle's Physics which typically appears in the Latin version of Thomas's commentary, is not the translation that Aquinas used, but a later translation from Renaissance times.
  
• Moved by the dialog mentioned in Count Timothy von Icarus's discussion Semiotics and Information Theory, I began reading John Deely's New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought. But that turned out to be over my head, so I have laid it aside in favor of Thomas Sebeok's Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics, the second edition, 2021.