Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 3837. page

Art should be pursued by the spirited and spirit should be accessible to all mankind equally

art being inaccessible is usually just the result of the "masses'" own inherent ignorance and disinterest in anything artistic rather than a forced active agenda by any "elites"

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only aurtists actively think about being aurtistic enough 4 the whole world 2 see like the little faglord aurtists they are

it's a new york times best seller and won the pleblitzer prize

it's shit

Anthropologist here. It's bullshit used to justify both white guilt and white supremacy, in that now we're supposed to get involved constantly and fix everything by making them "as advanced as us" (see "bringing democracy to the middle east" and so forth).

For evidence that Jared Diamond's view is basically "states and capitalism need to get in on all this shit and control errybody," see this article:

http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8958

He's also not trained as an anthropologist or a historian, but is a fucking ornithologists.

The only thing that's valuable about his book is that he criticizes the tendency of some social scientists to downplay too much the influence of nature and environment on the way that things develop, but then he turns and dives headlong into environmental determinism.

>>8033213
This is/may be a good argument

>>8033200
This isn't and will never be

I'd like to sticky this thread as an example of how /lit/ should work

>>8033112
hating existentialist philosophy is the meme. i don't think people hate existentialism, but they hate the types people it attracts. most people use it as a fun mental exercise, or an introduction to philosophy, but those who pose as intellectually savvy for fashionable purposes is the target of ridicule and disgust.

>>8033112
sartre is disliked for multiple reasons- I personally believe he was the least prodigious of the french resistance. he was lazy and pompous. his jealousy of camus opened a huge character flaw of his, he misinterpreted Heidegger, and his fiction was an attempt of Celine's style, even though the two despised one another.

i forgot- his support of leftist/marxist movements made him even more laughable. an opportunistic tapeworm that can't even look at you straight in the eye

ps later on down the line, he tried to take the novel prize and money

>>8033140
> that can't even look at you straight in the eye

obvious gag and low-blow but i still laughed

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>be Russian
>pick up saxophone on a whim
>holy shit I'm really good at this saxophone
>don't really need any training at all
>just doodle doot doot on the saxophone, people love me
>amazing at this saxophone
>people ask how I'm so good
>tell them I can smell colors
>"I just smell them," I say
>"This note is blue" *toot*
>"This one is orange" *toot toot*
>everyone claps
>release one magnum opus after another by tooting the correct color combinations, directly from my soul to your ear
>listen to other saxophone players
>clearly I am better
>listen to some of the ones considered the absolute best in the world
>none of them are fucking blue enough
>get angry
>call them all shit erratically
>randomly say certain ones are okay
>people ask me to explain
>"can't you see? there isn't enough blue in that one! the orange balance is all off!!!!!!!!! this fucking guy doesn't even put reds in his yellows after a green movement!!!!!!!!!"
>try to found a new aesthetic theory where the search to understand harmony and beauty and soul and emotion are all retarded horseshit and everyone should just listen to my personal toot toot theories about color combos forever
>die a bald russian faggot
>unique synesthesia brain rots in ground
>burn in hell
>no one cares about my aesthetics ever again for eternity
>people keep quoting my toot ratings out of context because they're vaguely familiar with my symphony about child-fucking

I really, really, really like this jif, do you by any chance have a webum version

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>>8033054

People just suck at annunciation and/or have bad memory. Prior to widespread internet usage and smartphones people held their misconceptions totally unaware that they might have misremembered and/or misheard. Now that you can look-up the Berenstain Bears instantly on a smartphone people go into denial when they realize they've mispronounced it for so many years.

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>americans have no education and no attention span
>they try to explain their being retarded with fucking multiverse theory

These are all easy mistakes to make. Simple miscommunications. Why would you claim it's anything else?
>b-but it's possible!!!!!1!

my diary desu

Who has ever said to themselves that they want a life where they do nothing? I'd rather be dead.

>>8033263
Doing nothing is fun, mate.

retarded feelposter gb2 >>>/r9k/

read the words of hermes trismegistus and become brown pilled
wear a floppy conical hat that looks like a fresh corn cob everywhere
read borges too

maybe bukowski?

At the moment I'm more interested in modalities as adjoint functors in dependently typed (programming) languages.
I started Kripkes book years ago, but put it down. I've since then found out he's one of those literal (literal) autists (it's a pain to hear him talk) and it kind of takes from my potential admiration

>>8032867
He writes very clearly though. Yeah I can't listen to him speak without squirming either, he came to my uni a few weeks back and he looked homeless.

I suggest you pick it up again, but it's hard to follow without having read Locke, Kant, Hume, etc and impossible to follow without having read at least Frege and Russell

100% worth it though

>nearly anything, granted it abides standards of well-formedness and meaningfulness, can be translated to formal languages
>properties and limitations of natural languages (vagueness, ambiguity) and first-order logic (nonfirstorderizability, etc.)
>translating formulae in and out of two different formal languages (classical -> intuitionist and vice versa, say)
>syntax vs semantics distinction
>type vs token distinction
>object language vs metalanguage distinction

>>8032839
It's pretty clear that you've never read an article of his. His prose can rarely be labelled as "autistic" (I really don't care that you addressed his talks and not his prose). His more technical work (think his theory of truth where he tries to improve upon Tarskian hierarchy of metalanguages and truth predicates), of which N&N it isn't, are so much more pleasing to read if you have the right background.

>>8032737
>the title is a fucking calendar year

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>the first two words are a response to the first two words of a play from shakespeare

>>8032784
I love this picture of Harold Bloom, its like he's going to go outside but then its raining so he just stops for a moment and looks out as the weather gets even worse.
except its a metaphor for the humanities

the davinci code

>>8032745
the davinco code isn't the masterpiece of the decade

>>8032721
He's kind of a tool and his model of morality is one where it is impossible to be a good person. Of course it's utilitarian and egalitarian minded so it's wrongheaded from the outset, but the conclusion is fundamentally one that no human being could abide by.

I mean this man's moral calculus is as follows: Your son is drowning in a lake. You're on your way to donate $100 to a family with 3 African babies. The African babies will die if you delay your donation at all Therefore you should let your son drown because 3 lives are more valuable than 1. If you ACTUALLY BELIEVE that any given human life is more or less equally valuable (controlling for disability of course, which is why cripples hate Singer since he's in favor of euthanizing people who fall below his idea of a utility curve), you've kind of missed the point of the entire human experience.

He quite literally says this shit. And on top of that he spends thousands of dollars visiting his invalid mother in Australia. When pressed on that he admits that he is a terrible person. So even the originator of a mode of morality cannot bring himself to operate under it.

>>8032793
I think his system that he created is quite interesting though.
Though every moral system i have come across until now was flawed in some way, i think he has come closer to one that could be, if presented differently, quite good.
But being a hypocrite isn't the way to go, i must admit that.

>>8032721
Great philosopher, great public intellectual.

Of course, he does have pretty extreme views, but it's not as if he doesn't argue for them and hasn't thought about obvious objections like
>>8032793 's
The main line, I think, is that he thinks we can give a debunking explanation of partial but not impartial moral intuitions, undermining the strongest evidence in favor of rejecting utilitarianism.

But anyways, I think he's more important for his work that doesn't assume and doesn't argue for utilitarianism. Try "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" or Practical Ethics. Or if your not up for that, maybe one of his popular books, like Animal Liberation or the Life You Can Save.

>>8032479
Go to the gay literature section in your local book store and your bound to find something.

>>8032479
>being james dean

>>8032759
How does one become James Dean especially seeing as how he's dead?

>>8032462
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

>>8032462
Ant particular edition/translation I should get? What is it translated from anyway?

>>8032482
I have the Steven Mitchell translation. It's translated from Akkadian, which is a Mesopotamian language.

Yes you should read it. Besides being the earliest complete written story we have, it also shows how the early semetic peoples (i.e. Hebrews) shared myths.

How can I know happiness without sadness?

>Is death good or bad?

Neither, its a certainty.

>>8032236
Certainties can be good or bad.

>>8031985
>Has anyone on /lit/ read this?

no

I don't thinks so.It doesn't look very appealig to me.Anybody with a more in depth opinion?

>>8031985
some info pls?