Pewdiepie Book Review 2025 discussion

Happy July!

Happy July everyone! How are we feeling about the book so far? I'm not a huge fan of the presentation of it. My favorite book of the challenge so far has definitely been the discussions from Epictetus, and I'm finding it really hard to enjoy the presentation of these other older philosophy books. Anyways, happy reading!

Finished it! Found some thought-provoking parts here and there, but it wasn't my most enjoyable read this far. Fingers crossed you guys enjoyed it more! And if you did, it'd be nice to hear you specify what you liked.

Halfway through it so far, so I may spend most of August finishing it. I liked the declaration that the ultimate goal in life is flourishing through the lifelong exercising of our goodness! I also enjoyed the explanation of a virtue as being the middle state between two vices; this reminded me of the Buddha's choice of the Middle Way between hedonism and asceticism. Balance is good! Though Aristotle then goes on to deep dive into every possible vice and virtue, which starts to feel a little tedious. :-) Happy reading!

July came and went and before I realized we were already at the end of August...

I remember reading a text excerpt of Aristotle's Ethics back in highschool philosophy class, so I assume it came from this book. I remember back then I had problems with how it was written, which is the same problem I've come to again.

Something I do remember from that class is when we went over something that Mr. Aristotle mentions at the beginning of the book - the idea of starting at the beginning vs starting at what's easiest. He is very adamant about the latter being the best in the book, but I personaly believe that it could go either way. I think it's something good to have present whenever you approach a new dsicipline or whatever else - some things might be better to approach first through its "start" while in others it might fit better to first approach it to what's more comprehensible.

As for something new I learned in this specific read: I was a bit surprised to see that the identification of three types of poilities, all of which have their own degraded versions, was found in this anthology of ethics, specifically in the book about friendships. The fact that there were two books dedicated to friendship (1/5 of the whole work dedicated to just that) in a treatise about ethics also was quite the surprise. I found it interesting how he ended up extrapolating his conclusions on friendship into politics. Something that I have never seen mentioned before is how he takes the example of different households to explain how his political system is seen in a microcosm.

Anyway I always overextend myself so I'll leave it at that for now. Hope you guys have been enjoying the Illiad!