Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 4350. page

>>7696870
Have you ever even read any philosophy book, paper or journal ?

Depends what you mean. Most modern philosophers whom you would think of as "philosophers" and impressively so are academics of some kind. But academia is also filled with millions of workaday number crunchers and curators of Fichte's grocery receipts. There are impressive, self-educated, non-academic philosophers in the same sense as the impressive academic ones, but there are also millions of non-academic hacks and pop writers.

All modern philosophy is apologism for fringe political ideology. Since you're posting on 4chan it's safe to assume you're a neo-Nazi, and while that is indeed a fringe position it is not what philosophers are looking for.

STONER

I thought Santa Clause lived in the North Pole.

Yeats' poetry. Nothing is better on this theme.

Small Gods, because it's not a series.

Mort was cool. Series are overrated.

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>>7696783
The best are usually standalones (The Truth, Small Gods and Monstrous Regiment are awesome), but the Watch series is peppered with whodunit, faux hardboiled and even time travel elements that are difficult to dislike. Feet of Clay and Night Watch are great, but in general they are all OK until Vimes got actual superpowers and Willikins got retconned as some kind of conventional streetwise badass in the last one

>>7696782
What type of books are you asking for. Do you want insights into secret govt programs.
http://bookzz.org/book/609665/d4fdf7
Do you want mildly satanist early 20th century /x/ stuff?
http://bookzz.org/book/1996884/34959b
Collections of conspiracy shit?
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:02ad0158f3b88d9a6375d6bd9f51132fa9e0491a&dn=mixed%20books

What subject matter do you want.

What you believe is the extent of the Western canon is actually a mountain plateau above clouds that obscure the infinitely larger landscape below. Most people will never even master the plateau, let alone venture beneath the clouds, and the few people who do the latter still end up doing it too late, by accident in their 40s, and realising there are actually about 646 guys they should have read if they were "interested in [philosophical topic]," and now they're too fucking old. And the few people who make it down there, and do so on time, have the entire process repeated, this time with the earth vis-a-vis the oceans, the former of which they assume to be the absolute extent of the available terrain (emboldened as they are by the rarity of their discovery of even that), without ever thinking that the much larger ocean floor, and the ocean waters which are much more difficult to penetrate than the clouds ever were, are where the real mystery and mystical lay.

If you want to at least penetrate the clouds, start reading a lot, start reading early. Read messily rather than not reading until you have a perfect grasp. A random foray in a random direction will yield more fruit than a night wasted in a familiar camp mulling over the plans for the next day's foray. Make friends who have been beneath the clouds, or if you're lucky, ones who are maybe learning to swim.

Everyone beneath this level of effort inevitably winds up provincial in their thought. To invert the metaphor in its content and in its length: Every time you reach a peak, remind yourself that it's the ground from the perspective of the next peak. Don't stop climbing until there are no more clouds.

>>7696916
I wanted to call you a redditfag but damn, that was well-said.

First learn the difference between intelligence and knowledge.

Nothing is necessary.

>>7696686
*preferable

start with greeks, read what you want from there, but dont be dumb. read the pre-requisite shit if there is some.

First person narrative is very late literary development in the history of the West, allowing more psychological complexity even than the psychological novel (also very late). It doesn't just presume inner complexity like the novel, it gives actual access to interiority.

It also presumes a certain topography of interiority. It shows the processes of doubting, deliberation, difficult choices, but also of "bad but understandable" behaviours - it lets you merge with and understand a character who nevertheless wants to do something that might in some exterior philosophical framework or worldview be judged as bad, like killing out of revenge or yearning to fuck a preteen. It presumes psychological complexity in a way that more ancient narratives never did, because they judged actions, not motivations. It presumes that motivations exist and are complex. It presumes that we can sympathise with motivations even when they lead to bad outcomes, or even if they are in themselves wholly bad.

It therefore assumes a lot of things implicitly about the nature of consciousness, choice, action, responsibility, etc. You could trace fundamental changes in the nature of cultural perceptions of identity by showing that post-Freudian (e.g.) narratives tend to assume a subtly post-Freudian structure of mental topography, unconscious drives, etc. Many many other applications.

Tied into the complexity of thought, character, and action that it allows, it also allows us to dissolve our own interiority into the author's. Unreliable narrator is a big thing. You can find yourself swept up in the actual motivations of the author, merging your identity with this and making assumptions ABOUT identity. Because anthropology for instance assumes the psychological and cultural structure of "identity" concepts are incredibly malleable (google that shit), this could be worth thinking about.

I think Ong talks about Dickens and the psychological novel specifically if you want to rip some good famous quotes.

You're such a great son
Asking us for advice on selling off your dead mothers things you're too much of a greedy fuck to donate. Piss off.

>>7696618
I did say donate too if you actually read my post anon.

I'm not asking for profit, I'm asking a way to get rid of these without literally throwing them out.

I figured people buy this kind of thing, because I wouldn't think local libraries would take paperbacks like these anymore.

And salvation army doesnt seem right either.

>>7696618
>here is my opinion and an insult, based on questionable moral values

I was about 14.

He would have loathed it.

>>7696600
I've had existential nightmares since i was four and just accepted them, rather reluctantly, as a part of my nature.

>>7696600
>Neoliberalism

here goes that buzzword again, why don't you define neoliberalism for me champ

Whatever you interpret it like.

He's "estranged." It's why it's sometimes translated as The Outsider.

It's a story about a man with none of the arbitrary connections to life that make up being human.

the books pretty blatantly obvious about itself. look at its opening line.

"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure."

Apathy, detachment. Those are qualities that most people say are negative ones to have, but the book makes the appeal for you to try to understand that there are people who live outside of conventional ideology. He's a stranger to society, and he realizes through the weight of his punishment his own identity in relation to the society he coexisted with.

These are my thoughts three years after reading the book.

>>7696568
I enjoyed Kafka on the Shore

>>7696568
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Salman Rushdie

>>7696568
>I know 90% of /lit/ dislikes the guy's works but
he fell for the "/lit/ has opinions worth listening to" meme and the "other people's taste should dictate yours" meme too! Good work guys, we've been good tempting wilderness spirits so far, let's not give up now!

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>mfw

>yfw john green doesnt even know what dactyllic hexameter is, but all he wants to talk about is muh misogyny

>>7696547

There's a much better guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrQhBHpqUc

>>7696519
Throw some "for instances" out,
What books and characters do you picture as 2d lolis?

Like, in Cervantes when Don Quioxite and Sancho Panza go to the inn, and it devolves into slapstick. All of the participants were lolis. I had to take a break to beat off.

I sometimes imagine my characters with Japanese voice actors

Ask >>>/sci/

>>7696486
/sci/ might be better to ask for practical stuff. I asked a similar question there once and they (to my surprise) told me to do "messy" self-education, with lots of repetition and overlap, e.g. just tearing through every single pre-university level math book I can find even if it's partly redundant, as opposed to any one Canonical Set of Math Texts. Hard to explain, but the sentiment they seemed to convey, and which has always stuck with me, was that the lion's share of math ability (aside from innate genius or something) is in building up your own personal heuristics and intuitive comfort, again rather than some linear and progressive set of rules to be learned.

For logic, not so sure. Maybe check the Stanford Encyclopaedia Article(s) on math for some basic outlines? I do know that understanding the history of math is often considered vital, since it's less a gigantic morass of rules and more a developmental process you can more easily compartmentalise.

t. dilettante

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It
&
http://www.amazon.com/How-Prove-It-Structured-Approach/dp/0521675995

And look at the standard curriculum (order) of math subjects at university.
Oh, and some people like that Khan academy website for entry stuff. It's probably effective.

t. physics PhD

>intro to mathematics class

Professor wants us to give proof of Turing's work. Is this what you mathematicians do? Copy other mathematicians work until you understand it?

In my class we just wrote what we want and every student takes a copy home to critique, it was pretty fun. Although I kinda wished we talked about dramatic structure in a formal fashion, I had to learn all that stuff outside of class.

>>7696476

No he makes us read it a lot. Like a lot