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I'm going to stop reading A Dance with Dragons and the two Star Wars books for now and wrap up Empire, Incorporated and Determined while I continue on with Das Kapital.
Bonus question:
What do you PLAN to read later on?
Enjoy!
Nonfiction: been reading through a number of different translations and commentaries on the pre-Socratics (or, as I prefer to think of them, the pre-Aristotelians; as I think pre-Socratic is too Platonist of a framing). The big standout has been rereading Kahn's The Art and Thought of Heraclitus; Heraclitus being my favorite ancient philosopher (I got into him thanks to a positive mention in one of Lenin's philosophical notebooks).
Fiction: All Systems Red a short, very fun sci-fi story about a cyborg that calls itself Myrderbot. I love that the main character is non-gendered. Murderbot is extremely relatable.
Plan to read: the rest of the Murderbot books, as I loved the first one. And then all of Plato that I haven't read before. I've read all the dialogues that are commonly read in undergrad programs, like the Republic, Apology, Meno, Crito, etc., but there are many others. I have a pretty low opinion of Plato, but I think he's important to understand.
I'm genuinely curious - why pre-Aristotelians and not pre-Socratic? Wouldn't they have similar problems as terms?
Mostly I just hate Plato and love Aristotle.
So, some of the "pre-Socratics" were alive at the same time as Socrates, so the name is already a bit silly. Further, almost everything we know about Socrates is from Plato (yes, I've read Xenophon, the man didn't have a philosophical bone in his body tbh), so when we say pre-Socratic we're really saying pre-Platonic. This presents Plato as some kind of revolutionary figure: there was philosophy before him and a new philosophy after him. IMO he was a great writer, but philosophically a hack whose interesting ideas were already present in the pre-Socratics, especially Parmenides. He was basically a Pythagorian number worshipping mystic who's followers basically destroyed "Western" philosophy for 2000 years. Aristotle was actually a revolutionary philosopher and a real genius. Marx, for example, is basically an Aristotelean.
IMO, Plato is just another pre-Aristotelian. And far from the most interesting one. I think it's a historical tragedy that so much of his corpus survived, while we have only fragments of fascinating figures like Heraclitus and Parmenides.
Now, this hatred of Plato may be somewhat exaggerated. But given the calamitous effect of Platonism and Christianity (as coopted by the Roman empire it was essentially neo-Platonism) on thr history of philosophy, I think one has to hate Plato beyond what just his dialogues themselves merit.
I always thought that pre-Socratic wasn't really a temporal boundary (after all, Aristotle and Plato were alive at the same time, so pre-Aristotelian also doesn't work in that regard), but rather one of method. My understanding was that most pre-Socratic (sorry) philosophers were essentially speculative, whereas Socrates (or Plato's Socrates) was the first to establish the need for a far more rigorous approach, which all subsequent philosophy is indebted to. So the division, while obviously still artificial, is useful in defining certain trends in philosophy. In any case, Plato (or the Neoplatonists for that matter) is hardly the one to blame for Christianity getting co-opted, that's almost entirely on Paul and Constantine
That's fair. I don't really think "pre-Aristotelian" is a particularly good categorization of philosophers though, just a funny rejection of the term "pre-Socratics".
Really the big gap between Plato and the pre-Socratics is that we have many intact texts by Plato, while with the pre-Socratics we have only a handful of quotations preserved in later texts and some dubious paraphrase and summaries, so it's hard to pin down exactly what was going on. But, as far as I can tell, it was really Parmenides and his followers (like Zeno) who established the need for a more rigorous approach. For example: great developments in logic were needed to defeat their arguments that motion and plurality were impossible and only an illusion.
Platonists might not have caused the cooption of Christianity, but most of the really objectionable elements of Christianity are Platonic. Like I'm 100% not a Christian of any kind, but Jesus seemed like kind of a cool dude who wanted to create the kingdom of heaven on earth: a just society were people hold all things in common and shit. All the metaphysical bullshit about souls and the trinity and hating your body and shit is from Plato, Pythagoras, Orphism, and shit like that.
Like, I think even had Christianity not existed, things would have been pretty much just as bad. Everything I hate about Christianity already existed in the Roman empire. In a world without Christ we just get two thousand years of useless wank about the Monad and Dyad instead of the Trinity; hardly an improvement.
Oho, the Bobbiverse! ...I think? Ah well, the Murderbot series.
Good taste.
My mom highly recommended the Bob books to me, I wanna get to them at some point here!
You'd like 'em, I think.