Hi /lit/, About a year ago I started reading more, primarily

>>9532249
Bump

>>9532249
You should unironically read Greek and Roman philosophers.

>>9532249

Just b urself

>>9532347
I read some Aristotle, Plato, and Heraclitus. Aristotle and Heraclitus were cool but the whole "existence precedes essence" part of existentialism is what resonates with me the most which is pretty much the antithesis of what the Greeks believe (from what I understood of it). The whole idea of some realm or being transcendent of our world designating our telos and nature, unless a metaphor, felt like it was too much of a stretch. It can't be proven.

>>9532378
>The whole idea of some realm or being transcendent of our world designating our telos and nature, unless a metaphor, felt like it was too much of a stretch. It can't be proven.

Man, if only Aristotle explicitly and repeatedly denied this and approached being from a totally different angle...

>>9532389
I wasn't aware. What do you reccomend reading by Aristotle?

>>9532389
Also why do you prefer Greek philosophy over more modern (post-Hume) philosophy? I know religious philosophy is heavily influenced by Greek metaphysics so I know a lot of religious people prefer that. But I know there are a ton of modern Christian existentialists today.

>>9532391
Honestly if you like existentialists just read those. If you want to read Aristotle for the sake of having a foundation/reference point, for a metaphysical angle, especially with regard to forms, you'd probably most want "on ideas" and "metaphysics" although frankly I think the metaphysics will be very hard without the physics, which is already a tough read and probably not super relevant if you just like modern existentialism, and also probably requires most of the Organon to itself be intelligible. Probably not worth it.

>>9532396
I'm not >>9532347 and know basically nothing about modern philosophy. I was just piping up to point out that the Greeks didn't universally approve of Platonic ontology.

>>9532435
Yeah Plato's whole realm of forms and ideas theory to me was a bit too much. Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Epicurus made much more sense to me. But when I got to Hume in my class, Hume has his "Hume's fork test" which said if you can't prove a belief through both rationalism and empiricism then it is not worth focusing on. Which basically says metaphysics in general cannot be proven so it's not worth thinking too much about. I honestly agreed with that. That's why everyone who was influenced by him doesn't focus too much on metaphysics as much as the Greeks did.

>>9532448
I haven't read any Hume but his name has been popping up quite a bit in the commentaries I've been reading on Aristotle's physics. Hume's disconnected "cause" as (I think?) a mere inference based on observation, rather than a certain deduction, is a direct challenge to Aristotle's causes. I think Hume would rear his head more often in considerations of Aristotle's metaphysics, and honestly the commentaries on Physics which reference him most often are a bit over my head so I'm struggling.

>For Aristotle no more than for Hume does the agency of the agent consist in a mysterious extra change which is the exercise of its "efficacy." The only change, when X acts upon Y, is the change in Y...But within a conceptual system such as Aristotle's it is no paradox that the transitive activity of [e.g.] heating should consist simply in the fact that [Y] becomes hot when in contact with [X]...Given that it is the nature of fire to fly upwards, there is no need and no room for some further activity, a tertium quid binding the fire to its own natural movement. If this were necessary then it would be false that fire of itself shoots up...The potential agent would not BE a potential agent if on encountering the potential patient under suitable conditions it needed some further metaphysical mechanism by which to administer its effect. Aristotle's system excludes a tertium quid between agent and patient not because there is for him no efficacy in the world, but because efficacy is anyway present, in substances whose nature it is to have change happen in and around themselves.

Again I'm only circumstantially aware of Hume's ideas as they relate here, and again I'm struggling to stay afloat with this commentary in particular, but it seems here that Hume's criticism is possibly (?) circumvented at least in terms of simple substances performing things inherent to their natures. But Hume's criticism apparently holds in more complex interactions, e.g., a teacher/student interaction:

>This case is not at all like that of heating. In heating there is no reason to postulate an extra activity whereby the hot body propagates its heat once contact is established under suitable circumstances. But unless the teacher, apart from standing in the correct relation to his pupil, also engages in a definite activity of propagating knowledge, the pupil will not learn.

Frankly puzzling situations like this are at least in part why I like the Greeks, and why I like dabbling in metaphysics, provable or not.

>Existentialists like Sartre and Camus
>Existentialists like Camus
>Camus
>Existentialists

triggered

>>9532249
my diary desu

I wanna fuck Melanie Rios