Member: pomonomo2003

Library3,290 books — see library

Reviews59 reviews — see reviews

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

TagsHistory (724), Modern Philosophy (543), Books with Table of Contents (406), Modern Political Theory (388), Criticism and Literature (381), Ancient Philosophy (278), Books with Comments (254), History of Philosophy (248), Postmodern Philosophy (232), Early Modern Philosophy (212) — see all tags

GroupsAncient History, Combiners!, Ethical Theory, Faith and Reason, FAQ, FYI, Girardians, Philosophy and Theory, Political Philosophy, Recommend Site Improvements

Favorite authorsHenry Adams, Theodor W. Adorno, Aristotle, Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine, Averroes, Gilles Deleuze, Farabi, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Etienne Gilson, René Girard, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Homer, Max Horkheimer, David Hume, William James, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojeve, Laurence Lampert, Georg Lukács, Niccolo Machiavelli, Alasdair MacIntyre, Moses Maimonides, Karl Marx, H.L. Mencken, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell, Plato, Plotinus, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Rosen, Carl Schmitt, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Oswald Spengler, Benedictus de Spinoza, Leo Strauss, Aquinas, Saint Thomas, Leon Trotsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Shared favorites)

About me I am but another late twentieth century postmodern nihilist who, thanks to reading the philosophers, is now appalled by said nihilism. Thus I am fascinated by modern/postmodern attempts to get around modern nihilism; including, but certainly not limited to, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kojeve, and Leo Strauss. My search has also led me to the ancient (most especially Plato and Aristotle) and Medieval (Al-Farabi, Averroes, Maimonides and Aquinas, e.g.) and also early modern (such as Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant) philosophers. But I have come to doubt that there is any theoretical solution to the fundamentally problematical character of our modern/postmodern world.

...So what happens? - The same thing that happened during the fall of the Roman Empire; a new extra-philosophical religion rises!

Now, I have several obscure obsessions to go along with that rather large one. I mention only a few here. First, Plato's Eleatic Stranger (in Sophist/Statesman) and his contrast with the Platonic Socrates. The dramatic dating of the dialogues Sophist/Statesman coincides with the beginning of the trial of Socrates. Thus we have Socrates death coinciding with the Stranger disappearing from history. In their own ways they (Socrates/Stranger) both chose silence. But philosophical silence is the possibility Plato passes over in utter contempt... The veiled speaking Plato attempts involves public (or exoteric) homage to Athens Nomos (or 'divine' Laws) and hidden (or esoteric) criticism and 'rationalization' of them.

The ramifications of Medieval Aristotelianism (and, naturally, Alfarabi and Averroes) also continue to occupy me. The possibility of Science (Wisdom) that they fought for against the Theologians (who, in the end, were only concerned with God's Freedom & Power) was doomed. In Islam, Averroes was virtually forgotten. No? Well, for example, many of his works that we have today only exist in non-Arabic sources. In the Latin West, some of the positions of Aquinas are condemned in 1277 in Paris, along with those of Averroes, Siger and Boethius. After Aquinas, and as a consequence of the Great Condemnation, Nominalism rises in Christian Theology but it is really only a Latin form of Islamic Kalam (Speculative Theology). In Islam Aristotelianism dies, but in the West the secularist 'Latin Averroism' goes underground (e.g., Marsilius, Dante) and emerges in the Renaissance. ...With consequences we are still reeling from today.

Nietzsche, who was the first to face up to the full consequences of the fact that it has proven impossible to found a culture on knowledge, is also someone I've spent a great deal of thought on. (See, for example, Gay Science, Book III, Section 110, on the impossibility of the needs and purposes of knowledge and human life ever syncing up.) Once one has accepted this disjunction between human socio-cultural life and knowledge - well, what then follows? Zarathustra follows! Nietzsche has set loose forces, behind the scenes and between the lines, that will result (much to the consternation of most of the members of the strange herd that call themselves 'Nietzscheans') in the rise of a new religion. Laurence Lampert is certainly the most intelligent and informed guide out there to this interpretation, I should say to the consequences of this interpretation, of Nietzsche.

Besides Nietzsche, some more contemporary interests are Marxism (Existential, Western, and Critical Theory), Anarcho-Libertarianism, Fascism (Cultural, even political, but certainly not racist), and the issues that swirl around Kojeve and Leo Strauss. But why are my most modern interests so 'political' while my ancient and medieval fascinations were so much more philosophical and, to a lesser degree, theological? Good question. Briefly, in order to deal with the murder of Socrates Plato sets loose forces that -whether he intended to or not is a separate question- transformed the world. It was the medieval philosophers from Farabi on, living in monotheistic 'Platonisms for the People', that first attempted to deal with this unexpected transformation. This 'dealing with' came to be understood, in the closed circle of Latin Averroism, as the attempt to secularize the world...

[Perhaps I can be forgiven a digression at this point: Why the hesitation in attributing our various Platonisms, and especially the first 'Platonism for the People' (Christianity), to Plato Himself? Because Plato is of the Classical Greeks, and a 'philosophy for the people' would have struck them (i.e., the classical Greek Philosophers) as a joke. But more; there was a desperation in Rome (late Republic, Empire) that was foreign to the Greek mind. It has to do (I think) with the vagaries of Empire: there is simply never enough Time! Wherever we look we find this desperation: Cato's trying to rally the Old Senatorial Values when the administrative needs of Empire were making them irrelevant. Or Cicero, in the Civil war, trying to cobble together an alliance between between the Old Irrelevancy and the New Realities (i.e., Senate and Dynasty, Cato and Pompey) that was doomed. We also see this desperation in the Empire, especially the later Empire, in the various, failed, doomed plans of Emperors to reinvigorate the Empire. The rise of any 'Platonism' (that is and for example: Christianity, Islam, Liberal secular Modernity, Communism) requires a desperation that Classical Greece never achieved. Properly speaking, the 'West' begins in Rome (essentially, the conquests of Alexander were an exercise in megalomania; the theory and practice of 'Universalism' first rises in Rome), and the History of the West is the history of the ramifications and sublimations of this 'Universalist' desperation. I mean, of course, the desperate attempt to make the world One, - which goes on even today... When will the next 'philosophy for the people' rise? What will it be? Digression concluded.]

The 'success' of this attempt to secularize the world led to the modern problem philosophy faces today; Ideology has replaced Revelation as the great danger and philosophy has leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. A thumbnail sketch of the history of Philosophy would thus read: Plato made (perhaps inadvertently) a world. Farabi began the process of understanding and dealing with this creation. This 'process' replaced (philosophically inspired) Revelation with (philosophically inspired) Ideology. And today? Philosophers as different as Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Kojeve propose to remake the world yet again!

Thus the history of philosophy would seem to (thus far) have a tripartite structure. First, the struggle against Sophistry (Nihilism) is begun with Socrates and then Plato. Note that although the Sophists were contemptuous of the nomoi (divine laws) of the various cities they really only drew the obvious conclusions that one would draw from the 'fact' of there being many 'gods' and thus many laws. In any case, this struggle against sophistry eventually creates a solution: monotheism. But it is eventually seen (first by the philosophers) that this solution (Religion) is only another set of problems. The philosophical attempt to solve the problems of universal revealed monotheistic religion results in the latest articulation of our philosophical history: secular modernity. Now, it has become obvious to anyone who thinks that this 'solution' has given us yet another set of problems. Thus Sophistry (or nihilism) and the opposition to it (Religion, Politics) have all posed (seemingly) insurmountable problems to philosophy. One wonders if these three opponents of philosophy (the worlds of Sophistic Nihilism, Religion, Politics) are all philosophy will ever face. And people wonder why Nietzsche named History the 'Eternal Return of the Same'!

Marx and Nietzsche have opted for Politics and Religion (of course, a 'different' politics and a 'different' religion) as 'solutions' to the modern crisis. But Heidegger, I mean the later Heidegger, amazingly proposes that we, in effect, withdraw philosophy from the world and allow the multiple nomoi to once again arise! This last can really be the only result of the fall of the 'metaphysical regimes' that Heidegger and his followers have been prophesying for the past fifty years. The world of Nomos gives rise to Sophistry, the resistance to sophistry leads to universal Religion. When this becomes a problem our modern secular (Political) world rises. It would seem that, according to Heidegger, we are now to start all over again. What makes Kojeve so interesting to me is his attempt to put Heidegger and Marx together in the Universal Homogenous State. This Final State (UHS) is made by our work (this is the Hegelo-Marxist component) but there is no philosophy (no metaphysical regimes, as Heidegger might say) there at all. Now, I have been wondering for a while if Kojeve erred in not making room in the UHS for a (Nietzschean or Hegelian) Religion. Now that is something that can be revealed only when the various sophistries (such as postmodernism), religions (Christianity, Islam, e.g.), and political ideologies (like liberalism, socialism, fascism) disappear.

...But nothing dies at the right time - absolutely nothing at all. And thus this 'second making' of philosophy, whatever it may turn out to be, will likely involve the horrible death of untold millions. ...Sigh. It would seem that even those that understand history are doomed to repeat it.

About my library Abandon all hope ye who enter here - Dante

These are the words that should hang over any intelligently stocked Library. History, at one and the same time butchers bench and insane asylum, teaches us that eventually everything falls apart; that all solutions are transient and only problems endure. But with continuous problems so too our bottomless responsibility abides. The fact that there are always problems does not excuse any of us from the necessity of dealing with them. We manufacture 'solutions' that we know will either turn into monsters or crumble into dust - but still we must all work to 'solve' problems. Generally speaking, the solutions that are (at least in part) philosophically inspired last longest. But the philosophers surely know, although they certainly will not say, that everything that they make must one day be destroyed. ...But why must they destroy their creations?

Philosophy is the strongest of all - it creates worlds!
But philosophy is the weakest of all that inhabit these artifactual worlds - it can never rule them...
If this were a syllogism (and it is not) I would conclude by saying that Philosophy (i.e., Western Philosophy) only reaps what it sows.

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear... (Milton)

Necessity be thou my good.

[Below is something of an an 'archeology' of my experience here at LibraryThing. It 'explains' how my Library achieved its current disordered state.]

Well, my library is now entirely entered. But it still needs to be properly catalogued. By catalogued I mean books correctly tagged, all authors and editors entered, Titles corrected, etc. When you enter books by ISBN you are at the mercy of someone else having done all this (i.e., the entry of authors, editors, titles, publishers, dates, etc.) right. ...We'll see if I ever find time. All that's now left to do is cleanup:
more tags need to be added, which is itself an endless task;
I still need to give ratings another pass;
duplicated book entries need to be chased down;
proper author, or editor, needs to be entered in the author field;
I also need to look at the Titles and make sure they are correct;
I would like to add the 'Table of Contents' to books that I thought intelligent, important and useful;
And so forth. Who knows when or if I will ever get to any of it...

I moved my Amazon reviews to LibraryThing. But when I originally did so I also discovered that my book reviews did not fit into the space LibraryThing allocated for reviews. As a workaround, I began to add non-existent second copies ('Phantom Copies') that I did not in fact own and I entered my long reviews (in a Part 1, Part 2 format) on each copy of the book. Of course, I always owned a single copy of the book reviewed and I only employed this workaround for reviews. I tagged these extra copies as 'Phantom Copies' and I did not rate them or give them any other tags. I really do wish there were a way to enter books and not have them count toward totals! (Besides an uncounted 'phantom copies' tag for review purposes I would also like to have a wish list that is also not counted.) Now, very rarely, I do in fact own two copies of a book. This is unusual and would only happen because the original copy fell apart due to underlining, notes, etc. -I really do ruin books!- or I want to see different translations of a single work. Also, there are about a dozen books that show I have them twice but I suspect that I somehow entered them twice. These are tagged 'Duplicate?'. I need to chase them down too...

Okay, Chris Gan, formerly employed here at LT, has fixed the problem that kept me from posting long reviews. Thanks Chris! I have gone back and consolidated all my reviews that had two parts residing on two copies of the same book. Thus the extra books, and the 'Phantom Copies' tag that I invented for them, were no longer needed. I have now deleted the extra books and the 'Phantom Copies' tag. Naturally, since I deleted all the 'part two' book reviews and the extra books my review total and book total has gone down.

I also have added, occasionally, comments (in the comment text box in my library) that range from brief personal notes to reflections that might one day become a review. In the comment column I also will try to remember to make a note of 'duplicate copy' where I have more than one copy of a work with an explanation as to why I have the extra copy. If I were not so indolent each book I own would have comments! ...But, fundamentally and fortunately, I am neither a collector nor a writer; I really am only a reader. My books are ruined with underlining and notes! -mea culpa, mea culpa, mea grosso culpa.

I now have comments spread out across many books. In order to keep track of them I have created a tag 'Books with Comments'. Why do I need the tag? Some of the comments can hopefully be expanded into reviews one day. I don't want to lose track of them. Other comments are little more than notes to myself. Hopefully, some remarks will be interesting to others. For instance, I occasionally provide the contents page of the book in the Comments column. - Okay, now I have enough books with the 'Table of Contents' to justify adding a 'Books with Table of Contents' tag.

What is the usefulness of listing a 'Table of Contents' in the comments field? Comments are searchable (all: *search item*) for the owner of a given library; but not, unfortunately, or so I believe, for visitors to a library. This allows me to have a richer understanding of my library's content. The problem is that I often forget that so-and-so discussed such-and-such in a certain book. And so, while I am online chasing down resources regarding such-and-such, I am overlooking resources in my own library! The more (searchable) tables of contents I list the less likely it is (I hope!) that this will happen...

Oh, another thing, regarding my 'criticism/literature' tag; yes, I know, the collection is decidedly skewed towards secondary literature. There are two reasons for that. First, most people are only interested in borrowing 'lit-crit' books. Sometimes they aren't returned and I forget where they went. Secondly, and more importantly, on more than one occasion I found that I had too many books for the space I had. In this case I've found that giving away 'classics' is the safest strategy because (unlike secondary sources in philosophy, for example) those books will always be available. Anyway, many of the older literary masterpieces are online somewhere...

Oh, let's face facts! Over the years my interests have really moved away from fiction. For pure aesthetic pleasure I now dip into authors I think of as my own private 'moralists', essayists and humanists, most especially: Homer, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch, Guicciardini, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Pascal, Voltaire, Chamfort, David Hume (qua historian), Boswell (on Johnson), Goethe (especially the 'Conversations with Eckermann'), Heine, Emerson, Jacob Burckhardt, Mark Twain (especially the posthumously published writings!), Bierce, Mencken, AJ Nock, Spengler, Trotsky (qua historian), Freud (the so-called 'meta-psychology'), Max Weber, Orwell, Kafka and Borges. That has satisfied my need for literature! The rest of my reading, these days, is almost all in philosophy. I certainly have other non-fiction interests, but my purchases are now almost all philosophy books. Although, now that (thanks to LT!) I am aware of my lack of fiction works, I will buy some of the best fiction (i.e., works I greatly enjoyed 20-35 years ago when I was still actively reading fiction) and put them back in my collection.

I suppose a note is in order about my 'Favorite Authors'; philosophy, of course, is paramount. I owe no fidelity to any school, but I try to read them all; asking, all the while, how is it that this philosopher could say this in the given circumstances he found himself in? The modern philosophical schools (i.e., methods) that most interest me are dialectics, esotericism, phenomenology, and (may the philosophizing gods forgive me!) postmodernism. After that, the philosophical theology of the medievals and the philosophical politics of the moderns is also a concern of mine. On a personal note, I tend to value pessimism far more than one perhaps should. So I have a tendency to mindlessly delight in authors as different as Henry Adams, the Critical Theorists (Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Marcuse of 'One Dimensional Man'), Ortega y Gasset, Mencken, Joe Schumpeter (who realized that Capitalism was both the most nearly adequate description of economic reality and that it was doomed), and Spengler. There are, of course, many others... I also expect that my favorite author list will change (or grow) over time. It is, like everything else, only a modulation of fashion.

Since several people have expressed interest in my tags I have put some further notes on some of my tags on my LT Wiki Page.

I suppose I should also, at this point, say a word about my 'Interesting libraries' choices. I did not pick these libraries based on whether or not I think their owner *agrees* with me. -Far from it! I am quite certain in virtually all cases the opposite is true. I, a nihilist, have, for the most part, picked Christians, Marxists, and Academics to add to this list. I have several criteria; the most important of which are:

1. Interesting Library means just that; a library that has books that I found interesting, usually, but certainly not always, philosophy books.
2. Intelligent Reviews can also land one on my 'Interesting Libraries' list.
3. Intelligent remarks in the various LT groups or on the homepage of a particular library can do the same.

I continue to have a private watch list. -Why? For several reasons; the most common of which is that many libraries, while interesting 'bookwise', are otherwise 'quiet'. By quiet I mean no (or very few) reviews, tags, comments, no (or little) content (in 'About me' or 'About my library') on their LT homepage, etc. My assumption is that people like this have no interest in LT social functions and probably would not like to have their Library mentioned on any other library. My private watch list is, and will probably continue to be, roughly the same size as my interesting library list.

My hope is that people who stumble onto my library will use my 'Interesting libraries' feature to view libraries that they can learn from. One should be ashamed to admit that their are intelligent people, whether Christians, Moslems, Liberals, Conservatives, Socialists, etc., that one cannot learn something from...

Things I most want from LT in the future:
1. A 'wish list' that is uncounted towards my book total. (I believe this is on the way.)
2. Fields to enter multiple authors and/or multiple editors here at LT.
3. Translators and illustrators need to be listed too. Some of these may also be multiple.
4. A way to keep oft-made combining (of author/works) mistakes impossible to repeat. A referee system perhaps? (We now have disambiguation notices which should help.)
5. A way to separate 'real' reviews from one or two line notes and links; perhaps by having separate columns for review 'blurbs' (with say a 100 word maximum) and review 'links'.
6. User generated recommendations, that is a place (a column?) where I could recommend 'X' if one has read 'Y'.
7. Private notes/comments/tags fields.
9. A way to distinguish authors with exactly the same name.
10. Better support for anthologies, collections and series, a content system would be a nice touch. Actually, a way to index articles and essays by author and the title of the work in which it appears is what I am looking for here. I've been listing Table of Contents for some of my individual books; - can't this be done at the LT work level?
11. More sorting options in users libraries. Why can't I sort on the Subject column (or the Comments Column) in any library?
12. Also, more columns in my library that could be user specific, i.e., date bought, location, cost, condition, etc.
13. Also, multiple sort in my library; i.e. first I sort by authors and then sort those results by dates entered, for example. (We now have this.)
14. Mini-wikis on author/works is interesting but one does wonder how this will be successfully refereed... (The LT Wiki system is now here. It will be interesting to see how it develops.)
15. If the above proves too troublesome to referee then perhaps a link to Wikipedia itself or some other more trust-worthy resource. (Yeah! This has been done.)
16. An 'open this book' feature that links directly to an e-text, maybe through Google. This was briefly done but no, the 'Google Book Search' Search is on indefinite hold...)
17. A collections feature that will me to segregate books into different groups and then take advantage of the services here at LT (most especially, Suggestions and 'Users with your Books' but also Tag/Author clouds and Fun Statistics) for each of those specific collections. Note that a collections feature is now on the way. Also, Suggestions can now be utilized at the tag level too...

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Member sinceJul 2, 2006