What have you been reading?

[bechkafish]

Hi all,

I thought it would be fun - now that the application season is juuuust about over and we're all starting to breathe and maybe even relax / read again - to have a thread to post about what we've been reading. If nothing else, maybe we can give each other some exposure to new titles and authors that we otherwise might not have stumbled across! And while I have in mind primarily philosophy, I don't feel that this thread has to be limited to philosophy proper: if there's anything you're reading that has you excited or has gotten you thinking, across the disciplines and genres, feel free to share!

I'm currently in the midst of two different books:

• A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros. Not necessarily philosophy in the rigorous academic sense, but I find it wonderfully engrossing and engaging, particularly for the thinker who likes to wander. I'm about at the halfway point, and so far Gros has been spending a lot of time talking about the correlation between great thinkers / writers and the activity of walking: Rosseau in Saint-Germain, Nietzsche in Sorrento, Thoreau in the forests of New England, Rimbaud in the desert... If nothing else, this book will make you want to get up and get outside, which, let's face it, is something we pasty bookworms could probably use.
• Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski. I love this book. Love, love, love. Rybczynski's project is to analyze the evolution of the home, or "private space", over the course of European and American history, from the Middle Ages to contemporary times. Fundamentally, he asks, At what point did building and arranging shelter evolve from a practice of physical utility to emotional utility? How new of an idea is "comfort"? (Spoiler: very new). And while this project doesn't necessarily relate to philosophy, I feel there's a lot of good fodder here for discussions of continental philosophy and the historical divides between public/private, community/individual, etc.

What have you been reading?

Edited April 12, 2016 by bechkafish

[dgswaim]

• Life's Solution by Simon Conway Morris. Sort of an entertaining read. Just enough real science to be (somewhat) respectable, and just enough wild speculation to be really entertaining.
• Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection by Peter Godfrey-Smith. This one is a re-read. 
• History of General Physiology by Thomas S. Hall. I'm reading volume 1 right now. It's a 2 volume history. Really cool stuff. Volume 1 covers the ancient Greeks up to the enlightenment. I'm learning quite a lot about the history of medicine that I did not know, and especially the medical profession's historical relation to the biological sciences. 

[MentalEngineer]

• The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu
• Arkwright, by Allen Steele
• Rebel of the Sands, by Alwyn Hamilton
• Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton
• All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders
• These and other diversions are in service of trying extremely hard not to read One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness, by Graham Priest.

[matchamatcha]

I'm thinking of rereading Killing Time, Feyerabend's autobiography alongside finally reading his Against Method.  I read KT alongside Wittgenstein's Poker last time, and I can't recommend that reading pair enough.  Both are basically in the same timeframe (since WP goes through a bit of Wittgenstein's life story), and tell vastly different stories about two fascinating philosophers and their approaches to philosophy.

Other philosophy I'm reading slowly is Unifying Scientific Theories by Margaret Morrison, and The Reign of Relativity by Thomas Ryckman. (Can you guess what my AOI is? )

As for fiction, I recently started reading The Station Eleven Agent by Emily St. Mandel and have been listening to the audiobook of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie.

Edited April 12, 2016 by matchamatcha
I'm a silly who mixes up movie names with book names.

[MentalEngineer]

6 minutes ago, matchamatcha said:

I'm thinking of rereading Killing Time, Feyerabend's autobiography alongside finally reading his Against Method.  I read KT alongside Wittgenstein's Poker last time, and I can't recommend that reading pair enough.  Both are basically in the same timeframe (since WP goes through a bit of Wittgenstein's life story), and tell vastly different stories about two fascinating philosophers and their approaches to philosophy.

Other philosophy I'm reading slowly is Unifying Scientific Theories by Margaret Morrison, and The Reign of Relativity by Thomas Ryckman. (Can you guess what my AOI is? )

As for fiction, I recently started reading The Station Agent by Emily St. Mandel and have been listening to the audiobook of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie.

Station Eleven was incredible! Have you read that yet?

Edit: I think these may be the same book under different titles. It's still an incredible book.

Edited April 12, 2016 by MentalEngineer

[matchamatcha]

9 minutes ago, MentalEngineer said:

Station Eleven was incredible! Have you read that yet?

Edit: I think these may be the same book under different titles. It's still an incredible book.

*sigh*. The Station Agent is a movie I've been meaning to see so it's been on my mind.  I did indeed mean Station Eleven.  I'm only a chapter in, but I like what I've read so far!  It does seem like a book I'd enjoy, so maybe I'll report back in once I've finished!

[MVSCZAR]

Starting two projects which I had begun years ago but had to put off. I'm picking up reading Shakespeare's works starting with the histories and reading again Being and Time, but this time linearly. 

 

Mad continental...

[notorious_biv]

Nico Orlandi - The Innocent Eye

Matthew Fulkerson - The First Sense

Mike Birbiglia - Sleepwalk with Me

The Walking Dead Vol.18

[MVSCZAR]

Anyone here like Borges? 

[MentalEngineer]

10 minutes ago, MVSCZAR said:

Anyone here like Borges? 

I'm pretty sure I'd like him if I read him. I've done enough thinking about "Pierre Menard" that I should probably just read the damn story, and then some others for good measure.

We can keep playing this game, though. Anyone else for Steven Millhauser?

Edited April 12, 2016 by MentalEngineer

[Eudaimon]

11 minutes ago, MVSCZAR said:

Anyone here like Borges? 

Love him. I read Baudrillard for a while and he brings up "On Exactitude in Science" at the beginning of Simulacra and Simulation. Since then I've read through a few of his short stories. 

Borges has some poems on Albrecht Dürer's engraving Ritter, Tod und Teufel that are worth reading if you haven't already.

[Cogitodoncrien]

Who doesn't like Borges???

William T. Vollmann's Seven Dreams, currently on Argall, Vol. 3 (but published fourth in the series)

Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World

Gareth Evans' The Varieties of Reference

Edited April 12, 2016 by Cogitodoncrien

[MVSCZAR]

11 minutes ago, Eudaimon said:

Love him. I read Baudrillard for a while and he brings up "On Exactitude in Science" at the beginning of Simulacra and Simulation. Since then I've read through a few of his short stories. 

Borges has some poems on Albrecht Dürer's engraving Ritter, Tod und Teufel that are worth reading if you haven't already.

I haven't read that! Thanks for the recommendation! 

 

I think, for me, in a way, reading Borges is a lot like reading Plato in that he throws you into a sense of aporia. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about what makes reading Plato fundamentally distinct from reading anything else. For me, it's the most pleasurable thing in the world but t doesn't bring me out of the world. Idk what you all think about that. 

[MentalEngineer]

14 minutes ago, MVSCZAR said:

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about what makes reading Plato fundamentally distinct from reading anything else. For me, it's the most pleasurable thing in the world but t doesn't bring me out of the world. Idk what you all think about that. 

I know what you mean, but it comes from rereading Philosophical Investigations. Plato is the other "most pleasurable thing in the world" - jumping up and down, screaming, and frothing slightly at the mouth while knowing that I'm completely warranted in doing so.

[dgswaim]

28 minutes ago, MVSCZAR said:

I haven't read that! Thanks for the recommendation! 

 

I think, for me, in a way, reading Borges is a lot like reading Plato in that he throws you into a sense of aporia. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about what makes reading Plato fundamentally distinct from reading anything else. For me, it's the most pleasurable thing in the world but t doesn't bring me out of the world. Idk what you all think about that. 

Reading Darwin (especially The Origin and Notebook B) is just pure joy for me:

"As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications."

I've spent weeks at a time just thinking about that one sentence...

[Glasperlenspieler]

30 minutes ago, MVSCZAR said:

I think, for me, in a way, reading Borges is a lot like reading Plato in that he throws you into a sense of aporia. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about what makes reading Plato fundamentally distinct from reading anything else. For me, it's the most pleasurable thing in the world but t doesn't bring me out of the world. Idk what you all think about that. 

You might be interested in some of Joshua Landy's work. He talks a little bit about Plato in this vein in his essay "Formative Fictions", which I think is a reworking of the introduction to his "How To Do Things With Fictions" which has a whole chapter on Plato.

 

And LOVE Borges.

[Eudaimon]

9 minutes ago, MVSCZAR said:

I think, for me, in a way, reading Borges is a lot like reading Plato in that he throws you into a sense of aporia.

Definitely. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" has this section at the beginning that says that the first two pages of the following account are missing, feigning that it's an historical account, and then proceeds into this myth that ends up talking about another myth within it. The latter ends up being a myth about the construction of a labyrinth that is itself a myth, that myth is about time, but the myth never explicitly mentions time in it. Given the structure and layering of myth intermingled with dialogue, and in particular that last bit about how the myth itself is about what it never mentions, I think there is a strong connection between the two (Plato and Borges) regarding this kind of poetic [un]concealment.

 

[Cogitodoncrien]

58 minutes ago, MVSCZAR said:

I haven't read that! Thanks for the recommendation! 

 

I think, for me, in a way, reading Borges is a lot like reading Plato in that he throws you into a sense of aporia. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about what makes reading Plato fundamentally distinct from reading anything else. For me, it's the most pleasurable thing in the world but t doesn't bring me out of the world. Idk what you all think about that. 

 

39 minutes ago, MentalEngineer said:

I know what you mean, but it comes from rereading Philosophical Investigations. Plato is the other "most pleasurable thing in the world" - jumping up and down, screaming, and frothing slightly at the mouth while knowing that I'm completely warranted in doing so.

 

30 minutes ago, dgswaim said:

Reading Darwin (especially The Origin and Notebook B) is just pure joy for me:

"As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications."

I've spent weeks at a time just thinking about that one sentence...

 

I think that, for me, this feeling comes from reading Moby Dick.  It's hard to describe what it is that causes such strong emotional reaction, but I would say the chapter The Try-Works is a good example of the heights Melville's writing can reach.

[SamStone]

I've mostly been reading Deleuze. Honestly, I can't get enough of him right now—reading him feels like reading Nietzsche in a lot of ways (the passion, the humor, the thoroughgoing critique of philosophy, the wild ideas, etc.). I'm just over half way through Thousand Plateaus with a reading group, but on my own I've just read his Nietzsche and Philosophy, Kant's Critical Philosophy, and am almost through What Is Philosophy? and I'm planning to move to Proust and Signs next. Although, I do hope to read his major texts, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, soon...but I don't think I'll be able to tackle those until my thesis is done. I think i've been having so much fun reading Deleuze because his work almost reads like fiction (as he says, "a book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, and part a kind of science fiction"); and, (almost) no one really touches him in American philosophy departments, so reading his work really feels like "outside" reading (even though he's a far more creative philosopher than most I've read). 

Other than that, I just got a copy of Hölderlin's Hyperion and Kaja Silverman's Flesh of my Flesh.

[SamStone]

7 hours ago, notorious_biv said:

Nico Orlandi - The Innocent Eye

Matthew Fulkerson - The First Sense

Mike Birbiglia - Sleepwalk with Me

The Walking Dead Vol.18

How are you liking Orlandi's book? I thought it was really great. 

[MVSCZAR]

11 hours ago, SamStone said:

I've mostly been reading Deleuze. Honestly, I can't get enough of him right now—reading him feels like reading Nietzsche in a lot of ways (the passion, the humor, the thoroughgoing critique of philosophy, the wild ideas, etc.). I'm just over half way through Thousand Plateaus with a reading group, but on my own I've just read his Nietzsche and Philosophy, Kant's Critical Philosophy, and am almost through What Is Philosophy? and I'm planning to move to Proust and Signs next. Although, I do hope to read his major texts, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, soon...but I don't think I'll be able to tackle those until my thesis is done. I think i've been having so much fun reading Deleuze because his work almost reads like fiction (as he says, "a book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, and part a kind of science fiction"); and, (almost) no one really touches him in American philosophy departments, so reading his work really feels like "outside" reading (even though he's a far more creative philosopher than most I've read). 

Other than that, I just got a copy of Hölderlin's Hyperion and Kaja Silverman's Flesh of my Flesh.

The initial difficulty in reading Deleuze is incredibly frustrating, but it does dissipate after you start reading him as a sort of creative writer. That's to say, as dancing on the edge of the really real and pushing against the limit. I've never read A Thousand Plateaus, but I've read Nietzsche and Philosophy and What is Philosophy?. And I read some of Anti-Oedipus. It's the only book I've ever thrown out of a window, by the way, because it was so frustrating. But I suppose that goes to show that my strong opinions aren't meant to be held eternally. 

 

I'm planning on reading Hyperion this summer, too! Twins!

[frege-bombs]

Russ Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence. 

It's awesome. 

[ABrown]

Just finished rereading Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness.

Currently working on reading the following:

• Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals
• Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism
• Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market

Next up, but not yet started:

• Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind
• Michael Thompson, Life and Action

 

 

[Transparent]

Phillipa Foot's Natural Goodness is quite a good read. But I finished reading it with the sense that a lot went unfinished. Especially the part concerning Nietzsche. I got a similar sense when I read Christine Korsgaard's Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity and Integrity.Both are great reads and give a good sense that philosophers in meta-ethics are trying to show how we can be responsible for ourselves and our motivations while being present in the world. To me, meta-ethics feels very existential. Korsgaard's first line in the first chapter of Self-Constitution literally says "Human beings are condemned to choice and action."  Both are also something of a continuation of the tradition from G.E. Moore.

Currently reading:

The Possibility of Altruism, by Thomas Nagel

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, by Bernard Williams

The Claim of Reason, by Stanley Cavell

 

[notorious_biv]

17 hours ago, SamStone said:

How are you liking Orlandi's book? I thought it was really great. 

I love it! So much of the philosophical literature on vision focuses on output states; it's nice to switch gears and discuss what actually goes on within vision. I also really appreciate how clear she is about what the notion of representation is, as well as its role in prominent theories of vision. Honestly, I find her arguments against cognitivism/for EV to be pretty compelling. When I'm done, I might return to Origins of Objectivity. I think I have a clearer understanding of what Burge is up to having read Orlandi. 

Edited April 13, 2016 by notorious_biv