Maimonides, “Letter to Obadiah the Proselyte”

ashok

Not sure how to introduce this one: the letter certainly is very much about religion. I think in the comment below the letter, certain philosophical aspects are teased out.

ashok

Submitted because it is a very short - although thought to be spurious - dialogue. Sue Collins and Devin Stauffer have an edition of this dialogue with an excellent Introduction; I myself hold that it is an interesting comment on Pericles' Funeral Oration in Thucydides.

My own thoughts on the dialogue: http://www.ashokkarra.com/2009/11/briefly-noted-platos-menexenus/

ashok

Not sure how to introduce this submission. It's about a Greek work that definitely has historical content, but subtly informs Xenophon's work on Socrates.

ashok

That is inspiring to hear. Because you've made that comment, I'm going to read that much more and post that much more.

Good for you.

ashok

Sorry for putting a link to myspace: on my connection, the player takes a little while to load. Is the song worth it? I think so - it's synth-rock in the style of "The Killers," but with a lighter feel.

ashok

I did not know about this work at all until I was browsing around a bit. Submitted because there's plenty in the excerpts academicphil can quote from and discuss, if it so chooses.

ashok

Why am I posting this here? Heidegger was an actual Nazi (he did fall out of favor with the party), and his writings are notoriously dense. This is pretty dense - the whole lecture uses a metaphor which can be hard to keep track of intuitively. I know I didn't succeed in commenting on it before:

http://www.ashokkarra.com/2007/11/ambition-or-a-brief-comment-on-heideggers-building-dwelling-thinking/

Still. There are gems in this work. To take just one, from very early on:

"Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation."

ashok

I certainly enjoy /r/academicphilosophy :)

ashok

Yours is a really good idea too - it's easy to ignore the debates on ethics and forget that for years upon years the question was "how should we live?" Even now with concerns about the nature of mind, certainty, how language works etc. ethics is a big, big deal.

ashok

That's a great recommendation, and it's terrific you linked to the actual text. The book is very, very readable.

ashok

I'm not even sure what Plato is arguing 99% of the time. I'll go with the former?

ashok

I second this - Philosophy 1 has a number of essays that are easily readable; Sebastian Gardner's "Aesthetics" was a fun read. The stuff under "Philosophy of Mind" and "Philosophical Logic" is really worth it.

I'd recommend reading some primary sources in ancient philosophy, also. Plato's "Apology of Socrates" is a very necessary and not-too-difficult place to start; right now I'm working on Plato's "Protagoras" which is fairly accessible. An outline of the "Protagoras," just in case you want to see what issues are at stake:

http://www.ashokkarra.com/2010/07/socrates-in-hades-on-platos-protagoras-part-2/

ashok

The link goes to Project Gutenberg, unfortunately. Why am I linking to this? Because it is a short work of Nietzsche's that many of us who teach or are looking for paper topics should find fairly accessible. Nietzsche blasts Wagner in this for Wagner's anti-Semitism, shallow critique of Christianity, and embrace of the Reich. Not the Nietzsche most people think of when they hear the name.

I'm not working on this currently (still fighting with the Protagoras). The scholar I usually trust on Nietzsche is Laurence Lampert: the introduction to his interpretation of Zarathustra, "Nietzsche's Teaching," is a quick 10 pages that makes sense of a lot of Nietzsche (in my opinion). My notes from reading through this work a while ago myself are here:

http://www.ashokkarra.com/2008/07/towards-a-nietzschean-understanding-of-politics-notes-on-the-case-of-wagner-part-1/

ashok

TROPHY CASE

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