Currently Reading

Books and Papers
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I’m currently still reading Pilgrim by Timothy Findley, with a few options for my next book:

  1. Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era by Vera Michlin-Shapir.

    This one looks really interesting. It argues that what has happened in Russian politics and culture since the 1990s is largely a response to globalization: Russia’s trajectory is not uniquely abnormal, ethnonationalist, or inherently authoritarian, but reflects global pressures on identity and sovereignty. This goes against the borderline Russophobic cultural essentialism so common among Western commentators on Russia. The central “fluid” concept she uses is from the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

  2. Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman.

    I read his book on the Holocaust last year and thought it was very good. Liquid Modernity is his classic, which introduces the big idea that in contemporary society, identities, institutions, and relationships no longer form solid structures but are always shifting, precarious, and “liquid”. It’s a challenge to the idea that we live in the postmodern era: Bauman argues that we are still in modernity, but in a new, fluid phase marked by constant mobility and uncertainty.

  3. Selling the Work Ethic : From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR by Sharon Beder.

    Talking of modernity, part of its ideology has long been the work ethic: the idea that work is a moral duty and a sign of virtue. It’s also been part of my own Calvinist milieu, and I’ve always disliked it in a fairly vague kind of way. I hope to get a better grip on the history and function of the idea.

  4. Robert Louis Stevenson: An Anthology selected by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges.

    It might be interesting to see Stevenson’s work through the eyes of two modern Argentine writers I like.

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I am currently reading Boxwood by Camilo José Cela.

It was the last of his novels, published in 1999 after being awarded the Nobel Prize (he is the last Spaniard with such a prize) and three years before his death. When this novel was published, Cela was already 83 years old – it is astonishing how his mind and creativity skills worked until the last of his days.

Perhaps, Boxwood is not one of his most famous works, but it is one of the funniest. The plot is set in a Galician port village, where whale hunters, boxers, high-ranking state officials, Englishmen shipwrecked from a gold-laden ship, and Galician widows all come together in this story.

I don’t know what to read next yet – but I have novels by Albanian and Czech writers which are waiting patiently on my bookshelf.

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I like the sound of that.

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Instead of reading about the history of the value of hard work to locate a justification to reject it, how about just admit you don’t like it because you’re lazy? That feels like the lazier response.

With the new site, comes a new Hanover. Only snark. Enjoy!

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I’ve been waiting all day for you to come along and say that, and you finally rose to the occasion. :clap:

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I’m using this as my first post on the new site, just to test things here.

Just read “The Burnout Society”, which I think should be read by everyone. Very short, but very prescient. Although, I think it needs to be updated as the achievement society has quickly changed into an attention society, in which it’s not about achievements; generally much more common with Gen X and older Millennials; but rather with the desire to be noticed and logged by the world. To do whatever breaks through the noise of the modern condition, otherwise you are fading into nothing. People, especially young people today, are willing to risk social stability and status in order to just get noticed online. This goes against the principle of the achievement society in that an achievement can be for yourself, while attention requires a second person to notice.

Testing the quote mechanics now…

Isn’t this what the metamodern condition is? A synthesis of modernity and post-modernity, acknowledging the breakdown of the rigid, while still operating on a path to, and attempts at finding meaning that were mostly ridiculed by postmodernity.

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I’m reading a 2007 book by Joe Bageant, “Hunting with Jesus” about the heavy weight of the work ethic / corporate PR on the working class in Winchester, Virginia, where the author grew up. Rubbermaid is the main employer in town. It is not a happy place. A major theme is how the working class is sold the Republican, corporate view of the world. It made me rage!

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Now you’ve got me raging too!

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The idea that Republicans are duped is thematic among the left, as if only a puppet would accept such ideology and that it could not be voluntary. If a corporate executive votes against his immediate economic interests by voting Democratic, he’s considered principled, but if the working class votes Republican against his immediate economic interests, he’s considered manipulated.

Also, as an aside, how does the right box know what I’m about to write by saying exactly what I say in the left box? It’s like it reads my mind.

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Of course working class embrace of Republican/conservative/corporate ideology is voluntary. That’s what makes it so tragic. Just guessing, but the corporate executive Republican probably isn’t switching to a diet of grits and beans in voting Democrat.

This post was generated by a leftist AI called Karl.

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Hello, this is my first comment on The Philosophy Forum — either the new or the old. I have a BA in philosophy, I have published one undergraduate philosophy paper in an undergraduate philosophy journal, and I’m a lifelong philosophy enthusiast.

I’ve been trying to re-read The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World by David Deutsch, a physicist who helped pioneer the theoretical underpinnings of quantum computers. The book centres largely on epistemology and philosophy of science — although, as mentioned, the author is a physicist, not an academic philosopher — and Deutsch’s related theory of human progress based on the development of what he calls “good explanations”. Good explanations, per Deutsch, are explanations that are hard to vary. Hard to vary means in a sense they’re fragile — if you change the details of an explanation, it fails to do its explanatory work. (This is confusing as I just stated it; it’s better explained through Deutsch’s examples which I won’t recapitulate here.)

The main thesis of the book is Deutsch’s (epistemological, philosophy of science) claim about the nature of good explanations and his (historical, futural) account of the role of good explanations in human progress. But the scope of the book is remarkably far-reaching, touching on other topics such as the mathematics of infinity and how quantum physics thinks about the multiverse.

A good entry point, for those curious, into Deutsch’s views and the contents of the book is his interview with TED curator Chris Anderson, which you can find on YouTube. Disappointingly, there has been nearly no commentary on the book from academic philosophers (at least that I can find, and I’ve looked). One of the few commentaries is a New York Times book review by David Albert. I agree broadly with the gist of the review — the book’s ambition and creativity is both inspiring and a reason for skepticism. (An otherwise good review is tainted by the reviewer’s strange drive-by conflation of the book’s thesis with a belief in the free market, but as far as I can tell, this is just a non-sequitur, not supported either by the book or by anything else Deutsch has said.)

I first read the book a number of years ago and never really stopped thinking about it. Lately, I’ve been wanting to read it again and have started on it. But it takes a lot of oomph to really sink into dense non-fiction books of this kind. Honestly, I’ve been wanting to read more novels because that’s something that has been missing from my life in recent years.

It’s a pleasure to be on the forum! I look forward to future discussions.

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Hey Welcome Yarrow - I’m a long time habitué of the previous forum and have joined here. I’m not a fan of Deutsch, I have to say, but I recognise that he’s very clever. But an interesting theorist, I will acknowledge. So, welcome. It’s a great online community.

In at least a somewhat similar ilk, I’m trying to read Roger Penrose Cycles of Time, about his radical ‘Conformal cylical cosmology’. I like the idea, because of its apparent similarity to the saṃsāra of Asian religions. But I’m finding the mathematics very difficult, in fact I think you’d have to have a solid grasp of post-grad mathematical physics to really be able to assimilate it.

Never mind, the idea of ‘repeating cycles of creation and destruction’ still resonates, even if they take place over unthinkably long aeons of time (like 10100 years.

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Thanks for the welcome. If you have criticisms of Deutsch’s theses in The Beginning of Infinity, I’d be interested to hear them. Maybe in a separate post to avoid derailing this one? Only if you feel like writing them up, of course.

I don’t know anything about Roger Penrose’s book and theory beyond what I found from a cursory Google just now. Two reasons I’m skeptical. First, it’s my understanding that cyclical models in general have fallen out of favour among cosmologists in recent years due to newer empirical evidence — although I don’t know if this actually applies to Penrose’s theory. Second, I have a general skepticism toward novel scientific ideas that are published in books written for popular audiences rather than in scientific journals. It seems like a model of cosmology should go through its paces in physics or cosmology journals prior to presentation in a popular book.

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Sir Roger Penrose is a fascinating character. He’s very active on YouTube where he does many interviews - amazing, considering his advanced age. I often read the descriptions of his books and agree with his ideas, but when it comes to the content, it’s very math-intensive and usually over my head.

For that matter, an OP on Deutsch would probably be a good topic for discussion.

Anyway, as I say, welcome to thephilosophyforum - no doubt there’ll be the opportunity to discuss these and many other ideas here.

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Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by Carl Jung.

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Habermas:
In fact this is precisely how Daniel Bell, a well-known social
theorist and the most brilliant of the American neoconservative
thinkers, understands the situation. In an interesting book8 Bell has
developed the thesis that the crisis manifested in advanced Western
societies can be traced back to the bifurcation between culture and
society, between cultural modernity and the demands of the economic
and administrative systems. Avant-garde art has supposedly penetrated
the values of everyday life and thus infected the lifeworld
with the modernist mentality. Modernism represents a great seductive
force, promoting the dominance of the principle of unrestrained selfrealization,
the demand for authentic self-experience, the subjectivism
of an overstimulated sensibility, and the release of hedonistic motivations
quite incompatible with the discipline required by professional
life, and with the moral foundations of a purposive-rational mode of
life generally. Thus, like Arnold Gehlen in Germany, Bell locates the
blame for the dissolution of the Protestant ethic, something which
had already disturbed Max Weber, with an ‘adversary culture’, that
is, with a culture whose modernism encourages hostility to the
conventions and the values of everyday life as rationalized under
economic and administrative imperatives.

So Bell sees modernity as a kind of super-subjectivized transcendence of traditional norms. But this is itself really just a kind of anti-modern / post-modern reaction. Personally, I think the whole Calvinist work ethic smacks of pathology…

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The File on H - Ismail Kadare.

A well-written and funny novel based on a real episode that happened in Albania—two Irish scholars travelled to Tirana to develop the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition. The Albanian Ministry of the Interior mistakes the two Irish scholars for spies when its bureau approves their visas, and the officials are suspicious of their presence because the scholars brought modern equipment, such as tape recorders. They then start a mission to discover scholars’ true intentions.

I believe that the point of Kadare was to lampoon the foolishness and blind loyalty of Enver Hoxha’s officials and bureaucrats.

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The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Kant, Heisenberg and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, William Eggington, Oct 2023.

A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe-the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind-and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world.

Excellent work in popular philosophy and science. Should be of interest to many here. It contains many biographical details of the principle figures. There’s a lot about the personal life of Kant which I never knew, that helps to humanise him as a figure.

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I really liked that one, my mom had given it to me for Christmas not long after it came out. As a Borges fan, I think he uses him to explicate philosophical issues really well. I am not sure if I would draw exactly the same conclusions, but it’s still a great book.

There is this great little book by a mathematics professor that looks at the Library of Babel story from the perspective of graph theory, information theory, etc., and that was also a lovely book. It uses a compelling fiction piece to make a lot of abstruse mathematics accessible, and their philosophical implications. I wish there were more like it.

That’s a classic. I feel like the era of social media and AI is going to catapult us into gasseous modernity.

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What haven’t you read, Timothy?:roll_eyes:

Incidentally, I haven’t read Borges, and it was those chapters that posed the greatest difficulty for me. Whereas I found the chapters on Kant and Heisenberg a lot more congenial.