are you a natural storyteller?
>>9019226
apparently all I do is tell stories and a lot of the same ones come up. which is weird because my dad does that and it pisses me off. fuck.
>>9019226
It seems like every time I tell someone a story, they look disappointed by the end of it, so no. Good thing I gave up on ever writing passable fiction a long time ago.
Literature about sexually frustrated men losing their virginity?
MY
>>9019139
You lost your virginity?
>>9019137
steppenwolf
Why does philosophy keep trying to insert itself into everything? Yes, philosophy requires critical thinking, it's good exercise for your mind, it allows for lots of awesome ideas to arise, etc.
What it doesn't do is find the Higgs Boson. It doesn't find the cure for cancer, it doesn't find the best way to build a bridge, etc.
Philosophy should stop trying to insert itself and take credit for what science is doing, or imply that it's finding as many answers today as science is. If pointing that out is being "unappreciative" of philosophy, then fine, I'm unappreciative.
It's a variety of methods by which humans believe they gain understanding, including the field of theology, which relies on relevational truths (as opposed to empirical ones). However, as many have noted, relevational truths don't offer us a number of things that empirical models do (like validation, consistency, or explanatory and predictive models). To say that we should study all of the fields encompassed by philosophy, including ones that have piss poor track records, strikes me as the opposite of wise.
If that interests you, then even though you don't need my blessing you have it. By all means spend time studying and cogitating on the various epistemologies, ethical systems, and modes of analysis. If you find something ground breaking that will change the world, let us know. But the rest of us are fairly happy letting philosophers handle that while we navigate through a world that appears to be governed by empirical and naturalistic principles.
At the end of the day, Philosophy is, too often, word play untethered to the findings of relevant scientific investigations and uninformed by our understandings of linguistics and general semantics and, therefore, useless in the pursuit of an understanding of reality, unlike STEM. You know I'm right.
really makes u think
That's a philosophical question.
>>/his/
Why find the higgs boson? What purpose is there in curing cancer?
Is complete faith necessary for salvation? Or are veneration and reverence for the idea of God sufficient? Diving into Kierkegaard and want to hear /lit/s take.
Yes.
>veneration and reverence for the idea of God
So by this do you mean you find the idea of God appealing and worthy of worship, but not necessarily real?
>>9019130
Essentially. This is how I, and a lot of other people, think I feel in reality. Doubt is a motherfucker
Yo /lit you guys are smart and like books and stuff. The pipe weed they smoke in lord of the rings, is that the devils lettuce?
>>9019097
It's not marijuana but it does get you high.
not to the same degree as today's laboratory manufactured super-weed
>>9019097
Alexisonfire sucks balls, man.
>>9019097
Is it
Alex is on fire
or
Alexis on fire
Any good books you could recomend on the topic of globalization, both pro and anti?
my diary desu
>>9019124
FUCK YEAH HE DID IT
>>9019093
my diary desu
(I'm not a faggot god damn it!)
Opinions on this?
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2011/04/is_ulysses_overrated.html
I'm re-reading Ulysses myself along with Ulysses Annotated, and wow, am I loving it. Understanding the majority of clear references allows me to focus on what Joyce was doing, i.e., as far as I can tell and crudely put it: examining life's minutiae and portraying it beautifully with words. This Rosenbaum queerbo, as much as I like to hear the other side of things, makes some bold claims.
>Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they've wasted reading it.
He also says that the only people who defend the book are English majors who only do so because they want to back up a reason for slogging through the thing.
AND, the most striking thing he writes is about the Molly Bloom soliloquy. He says men always make fools of themselves in talking about that chapter, because they say, "I really related to Molly Bloom, you know."
REALLY? Is that what men say? That they related to Molly Bloom? Holy shit, /lit/, if anything, on a first read-through from someone whose experience in literature is relatively mediocre, I can say that I sympathized, not empathized, with Molly Bloom. If that chapter doesn't enlighten your view on women, it should at least challenge it.
>>9019051
>tfw a white male writes about the female experience better than any female has
lmao female writers actually btfo
Slate? no thanks
>>9019056
lmao this. don't even need to click the link senpai
What kind of man would that make me if I think that killing people who deserve to fucking die is ok? For example ISIS or people who think they're doing the right thing deserve a bullet to the face which is showing them mercy since it's a quick death. Only way I would do it is enlisting in the military(usmc) to do it since no repercussions because it's war. Also don't fear death, if I die in the process then so be it.
Edgy child.
Every word of this was torture
A normal one who is unencumbered by feminist rhetoric.
What am I in for?
i couldn't get past all the gay singing shit with tom bombadil
>>9018959
You're in for a slow, yet wonderful, ride. It's a world where you're free as a bird, where men are expected to be morally upright and mature, and where danger is only as threatening as the amount of space left between yourself and a knife. If you're going fro an audiobook or one of the radio plays, be careful- they change sequences and events. Go for the original book.
>>9018959
Gay midgets go for a hike. You will read the slavishly detailed description of trees for a several hundred pages.
The relationship between altruism and balls will always be to that between collaboration and division exactly the reverse of what the relation of art or babel to commitment is to that between collaboration and commitment.
>>9018894
uuuuuhhhhhhhhh
>>9018894
altruism
balls
balls are balls
relationship between altruism and balls... altruism is cooperation, balls are division
men are divisive, they don't like to work together, the nature of a man is to be independent (not necessarily a bad thing, feminists)
exactly the opposite of what art (=babble=building a tower of Babel, trying to reach divinity, implicitly unsuccessfully) to commitment is
to the relation between collaboration and commitment
because collaboration is necessary to build the tower of babel
idk
>>9018894
never read McElroy
but i bet that as soon as i did
/lit/ would start memeing some
other obscure bullshit
and then i'll be out of the loop
again
Is Gravity's Rainbow science fiction?
>>9018852
Not really. It's more like fiction with some asides pertaining to mathematics and science (among a lot of different things).
It's literary fiction.
Speculative metafiction
What do you think of Vonnegut?
wrote one good book.
>>9018850
I like what I've read so far:
Cat's Cradle
Slaughterhouse Five
and about half the stories in Welcome to the Monkey House.
I'm reading Player Piano now and I am enjoying it. I also think it's relevant in light of the recent U. S. election and the importance of manufacturing jobs in it.
>>9018850
He's pretty hit or miss. I love Slaughterhouse 5, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. Most of his other stuff is decent, but some of his later books are thinly veiled rants disguised as novels (Slapstick and Timequake)
So what exactly should I read before i get into this semen demon? I know, Frege and Russell, but what works of theirs exactly?
>>9018820
badump
on the technical side, if you're starting with TLP, you can get away with knowing the basics of first order logic with quantifiers and a little bit of set theory. more seriously, you could study the basics of Principia Mathematica by Russel and Whitehead, and Frege's Grundgesetze (Basic Laws of Arithmetic).
on the more traditionally philosophical side, Russell's 'On Denoting' is important and his 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism' is helpful since it was heavily influenced by the TLP, which was still unpublished at the time, and covers some similar ground. for Frege, his articles 'On Sense and Reference' (Uber Sinn und Bedeutug) and 'The Thought' (Der Gedanke) are important, and his book 'The Foundations of Arithmetic' (Die Grunlagen) is also important for understanding the whole logicist project in the first place
for PI, just start with TLP (plus the above) and then read some of the stuff in between, especially Blue and Brown books
>>9018929
thanks so much my main man
About 50 pages into this. Is it just a rip off of the Bible? Or does it get better after all the Valar parts?
>>9018811
>Or does it get better after all the Valar parts?
It doesn't
>Heavy Bible influence
>Bad
>>9018824
There's a big difference between being influenced and just changing the names boss.
https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/5ptyd3/longtime_harris_fan_peterson_just_changed_my/
>If you're anything like me, Sam Harris has basically been my hero. He's the one that fills that hole in my heart. I wake up every morning and check his twitter. I imitate him in my interactions with others. I listen to every podcast. The sound of his voice makes me smile and feel at ease.
Oh fuck this is beyond parody. I can't stop laughing.
>>9018770
Why does a Sam Harris board even exist? Even for reddit I'm disappointed.
I bet you wrote that yourself to farm for (You)'s faggot
>>9018802
What, you're such an intellectual midget you can't imagine anyone agreeing with Harris? You've never met someone with differing viewpoints from yourself before? Fuck off back to /v/.