/edu/ - Education

>>26218
Read all Plato's dialogues, especially the harder ones. Take your time, learn how to think. Don't buy the usual formulas, use the dialogues as conceptual workshops to make ideas clash with one another. Don't bother with the introductions unless they give some historical context and explains some of the complex terms, so you dont stumble into "false friends" (google it), such as ουσία and other such terms. Don't believe the usual interpretations, such as the supposed world of ideas vs world of the bodies and all that christian dualist crap, and also take the Phaedo with a grain of salt, don't go about reading the other dialogues basing your interpretation on the Phaedo, or on any other one for that matter. I say this because the usual crap that people say about Plato seems to take the Phaedo as the one and only dialogue he wrote. Dont try to fit everything in a single mega system that Plato supposedly had. Dont buy all the biographical crap, the introductions where they speak about Plato as if he was their neighbor, when we actually know almost nothing about his life. Dont bother with that, just use the dialogues to see how complex speculative concepts move, work each other out, transform into one another, destroy one another, etc.

This way, you will learn how to think, because Plato has put into the dialogues everything a philosopher needs. In the dialogues philosophy appears in its natural element, it's natural habitat if you will: two or more people talking about concepts, take advantage of that and treat them as if they were a friend you were reasoning with.

If I were you I would follow up with some Aristotle, some modern stuff (Descartes Spinoza Leibniz Hume etc) and then some Kant. Then, whatever you want, you are from that point onwards free. Take a word of advice from me: there will probably be a point you'll get into romanticism and/or existentialism and similar lines, be extremely wary of that because it's a phase not to get stuck on. Be wary of the philosophers that criticize Hegel saying he is an absolutist, that he rejects feeling, that he rejects this and that… Give good old Hegel the benefit of the doubt and approach him someday with an open mind, he is an endless source of complex concepts and manouvers no philosopher should abstain himself from. Marx himself said that Hegel "truly has the last say in philosophy". AlsPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>26223
Yes, Alfred Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle would be the most influential interpretation of Plato via scholasticism which is more or less a synthesis of the two and is still upheld in Abrahamic circles as a viable system into modern times. So one should definitely read those two authors.

Then as far as eastern philosophy, one should read the Upanishads and bhagavad Gita, Laozi, Zhuangzi and the I Ching, Visuddhimagga and Milinda Panha

>>26224
>Yes, Alfred Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle would be the most influential interpretation of Plato via scholasticism which is more or less a synthesis of the two and is still upheld in Abrahamic circles as a viable system into modern times. So one should definitely read those two authors.

First and foremost, Aristotelianism is but a small fraction of scholasticism. There are countless other schools and the Aristotelian one only got prominent in the end, and was never in a position of undisputed hegemony. Secondly, Aristotle in itself is very different from scholasticism, and Plato never ceased to be a direct influence in its own right, save for the long time in which most of his dialogues were lost in western Europe alongside most of the corpus aristotelicum. Even still, some dialogues always stayed in circulation, such as the Timaeus (for obvious reasons), and many of his ideas (or rather, ideas about his ideas), through Augustine, Boetius, Dionysus Aeropagite, and this general neoplatonic mileau of early christian thought. In the 1200s, the corpus aristotelicum was recovered, iirc, by translations from the arabic comissioned in Spain (translations themselves made from syriac, which themselves were made from greek), and Aristotle was back in the scene. All of Plato's dialogues were recovered afterwards, in the 1500s, after the fall of constantinople, when many greek scholars fled to Italy, along the original greek version of aristotle, again, iirc. Here Plato was truly recovered and had an immense influence in renaissance and early modern philosophy. If you read Descartes meditations after you read the Phaedo, you will understand, and this is just one connection.


Either way, I didn't recommend you Plato because he is an influential guy. I didn't even recommend it to you to get ahold of the philosophical canon and get your stuff together historically. In Plato's dialogue you will find a truly godlike philosopher showing how CONCEPTS work, what are their limits, what configurations can they work in, how do they clash, which ones are implied (often surreptitiously, unbeknownst to the user) by using and abusing other ones… By reading Plato you don't become a PLATONIST, you learn how to THINK, provided you approach the text without those plain formulas found iPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>Is it better to be patient or start with the harder texts and reread them?
It's not as if you have to waste your time with obscure works. You just need to read Plato and Aristotle as a preliminary to any further philosophy. It all begins with them. This is what Kant writes (1787):
<In relation to the origin of the pure cognitions of reason, we find one school maintaining that they are derived entirely from experience, and another that they have their origin in reason alone. Aristotle may be regarded as the bead of the empiricists, and Plato of the noologists. 
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/critique-of-pure-reason.htm
So Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" is a commentary on these ideas.
Philosophy is also related to various Wisdom literature, such as Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" (300 BCE), so I would recommend this in tandem.

>>26223
Plato is extravagantly dialectical, by displaying the very process of thinking from an original premise itself, and to the same end, he is often open-ended in conclusion, such as the masterful deconstruction in Parmenides. Indeed, such as Socrates says to Phaedrus, he is a mid-wife of the mind. One of the earliest dialogues I read was Euthyphro, which completely changed my stance toward theological disputes, since it showed how the commands of God cannot be moral by themself, and so God is subordinate to a higher principle of virtue. This is tackled only in part by Aquinas later on regarding the Will of God - if God is always good, then can he be evil? Aquinas resolves it into the Aristotelian position of the potential to do evil without its actuality. Freedom of the Will is the capacity to act, distinguished from activity. It is a sound rebuttal, but it makes us ponder in the typical Epicurean way; "whence cometh evil?" I think the only real response is what Plato devises in Sophist, that matter (as becoming) is not a being, but is the negation of being, which is always good. So, evil does not exist; there are only failures of perfection. Kant adds to this in part by denying the validity of absolute evil, for if one acts toward his own (selfish) end, he still acts for the good of one. There is a small honour amongst thieves. This only makes sense by an Annihilationist eschatology also, since if Hell is separation from God, and God is absolute being, then the wicked soul must be destroyed, by itself. Thus, there can be no coercion in virtue or vice, but all is freely given.

>>26023
im by no means and expert on judaism or whatever so i probobly should just stay quiet on this BUUUT if i am gonna say something based on the things that i already do know it feels a bit TOO reductive to frame the entirety (not saying thats what you're doing) as a "racialist religion" but like i said im not very familiar on that stuff so i could be wrong or whatever

>>26023
the concept of a "chosen people" is reactionary
cutting baby penises is reactionary

>>26026
it’s about the purest example for that concept there is… the religion is inherently tied to a perceived race…

Apparently his lectures are more accessible, so start with them.
Try read different translations and commentaries, there are a few different interpretations, the traditional metaphysical view, the revised metaphysical view (Beiser, Holgate, Stern) and the anti-metaphysical view (Pinkard, Pippin) and the esoteric view (Glenn Magee, Cyril O'Reagan

The Science og Logic (1812) us the most comprehensive starting point.

>>26208
>>26212
Thank you anons. Wasn't aware there were so many different ways to view Hegel (though I shouldn't be surprised really). I'll report on my findings in… maybe a month. Or more.

I tried to read Hegel once, but I'm to low I.Q to fully get.

>>26206

it's hard to get hegel if you don't get Kant, not the phenomena noumena Kant, the real shit, the critiques, and some Fichte too. This is the bare minimum I think, but after that, you can always check why Kant was so revolutionary, by checking Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Wolff, etc. And after that, you could go back to Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Proclus, or wherever you want.

>>26061
Growing up I would see villains in fiction whose ideologies are so retarded that it de-immersed me from what I was reading, but as an adult I've come to realize that reactionaries are simply like that and have podcasts and substacks where they say so plainly.

>>26172
I used to hate how cartoonishly evil villains were in some work of fiction, and thought moral ambiguity and all sides doing bad things was closer to the truth. Now I am an adult ruled and I realized real life is full of cartoonishly evil villains.

>>26061
Why did he not use horrors per square meter? It is a much more common measurement.

>>26063
Utilitarianism would be conservationism funnily enough

We need 100 Kaczynskis in every Chinese fast fashion factory

iirc the handwave justification is that the SRs were split between their left and right, with the left underrepresented because of outdated candidate lists, which justified ignoring the constituent assembly. the left-SRs backed the bolsheviks in shutting down the constituent assembly. they had both the numbers and the power to pull it off in practice, even if the parliamentary arithmetic didn't work out in their favor.

Basketmaker Culture and Puebloan Origins

Settlement containing a stela with Maya influences found at the site of a new housing development in Coatepec, Veracruz

New Classic Maya site with Rio Bec style temple and multiple monuments containing inscriptions found in the central Maya lowlands in Campeche. The site is notable for having no signs of looting.

Palenque: Discoveries You Haven't Seen Before
from Archaeologist Ed Barnhart (his personal youtube channel), who led the Palenque Mapping Project (1998-2000). He's an excellent communicator about Archeology and his professional focus is central and south America. This video is covering some lesser known details about the site.

>>20613
i know this is years ago but in that case, you could make a career out of that my man… ever thought of that?

No, I'm not a Marxist, I think Marxism has already run it course

>>26201
Whwt do you think has replaced it?

Bunch of irrelevant wannabe-intellectual bullshit. None of this is doing the working class any good

>>26164
Give me a serious analysis of this text.

To me, it is a genius and overlooked text of Marx's.
In the first part, Marx criticises political secularism as often being a motive for an intensified civic theocracy, as in the case of the US. This relates to Marx's reply to Bauer in general; that secularism is not enough, since the content of religion can transform itself in new ways. Such is the case of Judaism and Christianity; the Christian imagines that they have extinguished Judaism, but really, they are "inwardly circumcised" Jews, in the Paulian sense. The absence of the external Jew does not negate the internal Jew, and so on. Further, what is the spectre of Jewishness? To Marx and Bauer, the Jew represents capitalism in the realm of civil society, while the Christian sublimes this relation in the state. The Christian state thus preserves an inner Judaism, or as Marx says, the Christian has become a Jew himself (e.g. a capitalist), but in a more severe form, because he spiritualises it. The honest Jew is better than the dishonest Jew; that's what I interpret.

Im marxist-leninist but Im with Bauer when he said that everyone needs to renounce the religion they belong to, including jews. I mean Marx kind of did that, he never identified himself by his jewish ancestry. Communists are international class-conscious beings. Not some ethnically identifying followers of religion.

>>26193
But Marx's point is that mere renouncement is not enough. The US is a "secular" country, but still very religious. Bauer thinks that Liberalism can end antisemitism by abolishing Judaism, but Marx's point is that only Communism can do that. The two split on the topic of Marx's politics, like so many other Young Hegelians.

>>26193
Yes but it's idealist to think the masses will renounce religion, specially those who live in dire conditions due to capitalksm. Like this anon said >>26197 , economic emancipation will bring true liberty to everyone, and people won't need religion to cope anymore.