Is this the sort of thing, that a man, in his full maturity, plays with, as if a child?
TheAdlerian, you were trying to break my essay into paragraphes, now you are doing the same thing to my sentence. What’s next? You gona make me to write like t-h-i-s? Come on now, at least I’m not writing ancient Chinese here.
Uniqor is pointing out that I am using a rhetorical maneouvre to “show” that I am a living embodiment of the Nietzschean maxim…;
“Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”
…incidentally, something which Nietzsche borrowed directly from Heraclitus, who said;
“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”
[edit - as it is though, my response was designed to have a few different ‘tones’ in which to be heard. It is not simply dedicated to my Nietzschean readers…]
I have not before now heard Kant called “The Philosopher’s Philosopher”. As for me, I just turn to “The Philosopher” (Aristotle), who shows me how the few arguments I have read by Kant have simply unnecessary conclusions. His work shows part of the problem with chucking Scholasticism – if you can’t abstract principles other than definitions that is. His antimonies are resolvable, if you take a closer look at the arguments. I have read essential parts of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prologema to Any Future Metaphysics (and the whole of a short work on the categorical imperative. I may have read an article on What is Enlightenment? as well.)
Why do so many of these moderns write as if they had never challenged themselves to read and understand the Classical philosophers?
(Someone more knowledgeable, feel free to flame me.)
i’ve read some stuff.
its hard to understand.
personally, i thought the prefaces to the first critique showed some flares for the creative… didn’t he call metaphysics “the mother of chaos and night” …i don’t really remember, its been years. years.
Well, there are two ‘majorities’ in the academic world with regards to this. And it’s usually, Aristotle vs. Kant. For what it’s worth, I prefer Aristotle. However, I cannot deny the importance of Kant, by any means (and wouldn’t want to).
Could the people who voted for option 1 consider commenting on the writing style of Kant and perhaps some tips for those of us voting for option 2 (myself among them).
I’m reading the Critique of Pure Reason at the moment (I bought a copy) and I’m finding it quite difficult. As I read, I fade in and out of understanding, so it’s a bit depressing at times. Even though I’m getting the gist of some of the main points, I think his philosophy is like a lot of science in that you need to study it either at university or very intensely in private in order to get a proper grasp of it.
I’m reading him as a pre-requisite for Schopenhauer. If knowledgable persons on this forum could tell me which bits of Kant I need to understand in order to understand Schopenhauer, I’d be very grateful
THANK YOU! Agreed, and maybe its because I struggled with that book. It may also be that I just don’t like Kant. I’m an anti-essentialist with a radical-skeptics view of reason, so its quite contrary to the way I think.
Regarding Finnegan’s Wake, of course you can’t read it. Duh! That’s the point. I personally love FW and still read it. Though I never read it from start to finish, that’s because I have never started from the begining. I like to flip through it and read random parts and then flip to other parts and read them. Using this method I have probably read the book twice. Try it, you become the author, which I feel is what Joyces was going for.
i read CPR for an undergraduate class and found it rather inflated language, even though he had some strong points. Kant seems to be necessary to understanding a large majority of what came after him, but not really worth knowing to follow in his footsteps. This also goes with Aristotle as well, though. i’m not sure many philosophers nowadays are purely Aristotelian or purely Kantian.
Although, i did read his Prolegomena after CPR and found it an easier read. There was a point in my life that i wanted to be a neo-Kantian, but then i read Hegel…and wanted to be a Hegelian. Then i read Nietzsche and Heidegger…and wanted to be a pre-Socratic. One of my undergrad professors (Frank Schalow) wrote a good book on Heidegger and Kant entitled Renewing the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue. It’s a good read for understanding some parts of Heidegger and Kant…particularly how the two interact/intersect.
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