Books, I want books.

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And a weird one that I found entertaining:

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so false.

and lots of good books i've had to read in the last few years in this thread, so to add one that people probably haven't read:

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pretty interesting, seems like its science fiction/dystopian the whole time, but it really isn't, great read.
 
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I think WWII is fascinating, i guess obviously haha. These are vastly different books, but all fantastic and ones I've read recently. I recommend Unbroken to everyone I know, it's one of the best and most inspiring books I've ever read.
 
Allow me to save OP the trouble:

Do whatever you can/want for stability and power regardless of morality. Do it early, do it efficiently.
 
hands down my favorite author. he may write young adult novels, but i think anyone can relate to them and love them.
 
I don't think the message is do what ever you want, its more about doing what you necessary to gain power. You gotta remember what Machiavelli was dealing with at that time. Governments could not hold power and that was more devastating than him advocating amoral actions of the governments to maintain power. At it's roots the book tells you how to get power and hold it. The main issue is those who read too far into the book and draw parallels with governments today. If anything you, when reading The Prince, you should find that our government is dated. When we have such a thriving global society, stability can come from places other than war and poverty.

We had to read The Prince in my senior year of high school and it irritated me how we studied the book as if it was giving us answers to today's problems. It is as if we were forced to tolerate our government's current direction. Political philosophy will never give us good answers, but it will can certainly lead us to ask better questions and discern the bad solutions.
 
true, I guess I should have said do whatever is necessary. I found the parts of that book I read incredibly repetitive, just different phrasings of that basic theme. I learned as much about Machiavellian philosophy from the first time I heard the phrase 'the ends justify the means' than from what I read in the Prince.
 
This is where it really starts to get out of hand with repetition. I wouldn't call Machiavelli a philosopher though. He touches upon some ontology and moral topics. I think the reason why he sounds like a philosopher is a result of his brilliant mind and terrible writing skills. If you try and read Hume, Kant, Hegel, or Hobbes you will find common themes in their writing. Just look at the table of contents in Kant's critique of pure reason. It's just painful to look at. Kant's prolegomena to any future metaphysics says the same thing as his critiques, but it is about a tenth the size.

People think that Philosophy is hard to read, but truthfully it's just extremely dry. It wasn't until the continental philosophers that you find a few decent writers like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein (his later works), and Sarte (who I think is a terrible philosopher).
 
Just did a paper on the tractatus, pretty cool I guess. Glad to be finished with that course though
 
I recommend you read Philosophical Investigations. If you read the tractatus and understood it, you will really enjoy Philosophical Investigations. He completely abandons the symbolic logic and takes a big step away from the logical positivism of Frege, Russel, and Moore. It's the most aesthetically pleasing and rewarding book I have ever read. It has completely changed the way I view language and philosophy.

The tractatus is an absolutely brilliant book, but Wittgenstein wrote the book knowing it's contents had no value. He actually cites the tractatus and says things like "The idiot who wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus would have said this about our current circumstance". He is constantly building bigger and bigger pictures of language until he cites the issue in our relationship with language. If you've read Bertrand Russel's Principa Mathematica (at least the first volume) it becomes obvious that there is no criteria or foundation for mathematics. You just keep digging deeper and deeper until you give up. That's one of the things that Wittgenstein gathers from language in the book.

I could write about the book all day, but I really do recommend you read after the Tractatus. It will take you two hours at most on your first read.
 
I will agree with that. The symbolic/semiotic movement was super interesting and yeilded some interesting and penetrating perspectives but ultimately it sort of dead end. That being said I also don't think either of the fields are obsolete by any stretch.

I'm surprised, somewhat, that you haven't mentioned Foucault. Though somewhat disparate, I've always felt the two had parallels in what/how they think. I liked the analytic movement, but was personally more interested by the phenomenological movement. Thoughts on that one Moegain? Or just PM me.
 
I've never read focault. I feel like I need to read up on existentialism and structuralism to understand post structuralism. I've been studying Philosophy on my own time and have not yet progressed so far in my studies. I'm really interested in epistemology and wasted a lot of time reading Kant and Hume. So honestly, I haven't gotten around to it. I don't know how interesting I find phenomenology, I know so little of it. I always heard Foucault in the context of post-structuralism or continental philosophy. After reading Sartre's Nausea, I lost interest in modern continental philosophy.
 
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