MJD > Recent Status Updates

Almost...

I've decided that reading this book is like eating a durian (A durian being a fruit with a hard spiked skin that is difficult to handle and open, with a smell that is extremely unappetizing, and a fruit flesh that has a sickly slimy texture. But, the part you eat has a very sweet and satisfying taste and aftertaste. Overall, while the fruit is not the easiest thing to start eating, it is overall worth the effort.)

"Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it."

"Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive."

The German Gadfly has not disappointed so far.

I'm reading this, and the following two volumes, as a group read at https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Anyone is welcome to read, and comment, along.

After reading some Descartes, some Hume, a lot of Kant, a lot of Plato, some of the Upanishads, and Schopenhauer's earlier work I am finally at a place where I feel that I can start reading this.

Having reached the halfway mark things are getting a lot easier. [In other news, in my reading up on Kant on the internet I have ran into a lot of puns on his name such as: "Immanuel Kant But At Least Immanuel Tried."]

Just got to the section on Maimonides.

I have started reading it to my two month old daughter and she seems to like it (she seems to particularly like hearing me stumble with the pronunciation of longer technical words, particularly Latin ones).

I had to give up reading "Being and Time" (BAT) since it kept on referencing Kant in ways that where not entirely clear to me (i.e. BAT seems to be written for someone who has read Kant). As such I have started this. [Note: Kant's work so far seems to be very much in reaction to Hume's "Inquiry to Human Understanding" that I have thankfully read in the past.] Looking forward to getting back to BAT later.

Parable of the burning house in the "Lotus Sutra" in this collection seems very similar to the parable of the cave in Plato's "Republic."

I really like Ajahn Chan's no nonsense, Buddhist bootcamp-like approach to meditation.