alexflint comments on Rationality quotes: March 2010 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Morendil 01 March 2010 10:26AM

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Comment author: thomblake 18 March 2010 02:39:08PM 3 points [-]

If you don't have much experience with philosophy, I would not recommend starting with anything postmodernist, or anything along those lines. Before bothering to try to understand what those folks are up to (not much, in my opinion) you might as well look at more worthwhile stuff, like:

  1. Logic. Learn sentential (propositional), predicate, and modal logic. Learn how the recursion theorem guarantees a function to exist which maps freely-generated syntax to semantics.

  2. Ancient. Read some (Socrates) Plato / Aristotle. "The trial and death of Socrates" plus the Republic is a good package of Plato, and Nicomachean Ethics is enough Aristotle.

  3. American. Read everything by Emerson, and some Peirce and James. Also Wittgenstein - he counts.

  4. Contemporary. Dennett is always a good read. Also probably some other stuff.

  5. Existentialists. I'm not quite sure what they're doing, but it's weirdly thought-provoking. Read whatever Nietzsche you'd like (other than Will to Power), some Sartre, and whatever else falls off the shelf. Now you're getting dangerously close to postmodernism, so expect a lot of it to not make any sense.

  6. Utter nonsense. If you're serious about taking postmodernism seriously, you need to read a lot of their forerunners. Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger are particularly bad examples. You can skip Marx, since practically everything he said about economics was wrong, and everything he said about anything else was already said better by Hegel.

  7. Postmodernism. Feel free to complete the descent into madness by reading actual postmodernism, or just read whatever shows up here. Also consider looking in the dark places of the world, invoking the True Name of one of the elder gods, and ripping the skin off your flesh with your fingernails while blood eyeballs leak from the ceiling ichor Nyogtha permeates my face

Comment author: alexflint 19 March 2010 11:37:15AM 0 points [-]

Thank you very much for this Tom.