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Narakir: - Philosophy, to help myself to keep my mind open and not begin too negative.

Positivity? Ah, you must be reading the boring stuff. Read Schopenhauer.
Optimism is cowardice.
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Narakir: - Philosophy, to help myself to keep my mind open and not begin too negative.
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cioran: Positivity? Ah, you must be reading the boring stuff. Read Schopenhauer.
Optimism is cowardice.

Dear Lord no...at least not at first!! Are you trying to scare him/her away from philosophy?? Start with Nietzsche THEN go for the hard stuff (Schopehauer). Avoid Kant like the plague though.
Post edited August 19, 2009 by JudasIscariot
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cioran: Positivity? Ah, you must be reading the boring stuff. Read Schopenhauer.
Optimism is cowardice.
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JudasIscariot: Dear Lord no...at least not at first!! Are you trying to scare him/her away from philosophy?? Start with Nietzsche THEN go for the hard stuff (Schopehauer). Avoid Kant like the plague though.

Schopenhauer's essays are not all that hard to read, at least in English and German. What language are you reading him in?
As far as German philosophers go, he's a good writer, even if N's the one that's probably read the most often by the layperson. If you really want to actually understand Nietzsche (beyond the Cliffs Notes version), eventually you do have to read S's serious works, the classics and at least the Upanishads. Hegel's helpful for an understanding of N's earlier work (i.e. Birth of Tragedy) too. I wouldn't recommend anyone without formal training attempt to read Hegel though. Obscure if you don't have a philo background.
I'm not prescribing "The World as Will and Representation" for the neophyte. I was thinking more along the lines of a slim volume like the Essays and Aphorisms (Penguin publishes it, I think?) drawn from his Parerga and Paralipomena. That serves as an acceptable introduction. His essays are snappy, accessible and bitingly witty. Nietzsche's accessible, but frequently misinterpreted (he's also not a Pessimist). Cioran is also another solid pessimist (hence the screenname) with decidedly more existential leanings than N and S. Incidentally, Pessimism is one of my research areas.
Kant's a German academic. German academics are godawful terrible writers. Part of it has to do with translation and the nuances of the language, too - it's a language very conducive to philosophy for various reasons, and less conducive to translation, at least into English. Part of it has to do with the fact Kant just couldn't write. I'd recommend someone read the Scruton Very Short Introduction (series of great affordable, short books put out by Oxford press) before reading K. Scruton really nails Kant (even if he comes up a tad short on aesthetics from CoJ, IMO). Kant had a fairly solid (and interesting) system, even if science has proven a good portion of the finer details wrong. He was a huge influence on subsequent philosophy, including today ....perhaps least notably by convincing philosophers on the continent that obscurity was the heart of brilliance.
Oh incidentally, for English speakers, I'd recommend Russel's "History of Western Philosophy". That's the standard English one-volume on the subject. No clue about other languages. Wonderful writer and great philosopher in his own right, too. He has a tad bit of a bias against Hegel, though (long story, but the fellow wasn't popular with the school of philosophy Russel was, more or less, affiliated with).
Seriously, don't ask me about philosophy. I'll talk about it FOREVER.
Post edited August 19, 2009 by cioran
My Hobbies except for Gaming:
- Reading
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- Editing Photos with Photoshop
- School (If thats a Hobby ^^)
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cioran: Positivity? Ah, you must be reading the boring stuff. Read Schopenhauer.
Optimism is cowardice.
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JudasIscariot: Dear Lord no...at least not at first!! Are you trying to scare him/her away from philosophy?? Start with Nietzsche THEN go for the hard stuff (Schopehauer). Avoid Kant like the plague though.

Bah, never said or tough that optimism in the answer to negativity which is as much cowardice.
I've already red Kant, sure that's headachy but once you get in it becomes quite readable an interesting, the worst may be Hegel. ATM I'm reading Camus and I'll probably follow with Nietzsche.
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JudasIscariot: Dear Lord no...at least not at first!! Are you trying to scare him/her away from philosophy?? Start with Nietzsche THEN go for the hard stuff (Schopehauer). Avoid Kant like the plague though.
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Narakir: Bah, never said or tough that optimism in the answer to negativity which is as much cowardice.
I've already red Kant, sure that's headachy but once you get in it becomes quite readable an interesting, the worst may be Hegel. ATM I'm reading Camus and I'll probably follow with Nietzsche.

Have you read Spinoza?? What is his philosphy/stance on life in general? What about Sartre?? I couldn't not follow Sartre after a while because some of the concepts he meandered through started going off the way-too-abstract-for-me end.
Never got into Spinoza, but I've read a bit of Sartre (mostly at college), maybe you should read his novels and plays first : The Wall (le Mur), No Exit (Huit clos) they probably give a more concrete aspect to his tough but it's a very... "hard" philosophy.
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Narakir: Bah, never said or tough that optimism in the answer to negativity which is as much cowardice.
I've already red Kant, sure that's headachy but once you get in it becomes quite readable an interesting, the worst may be Hegel. ATM I'm reading Camus and I'll probably follow with Nietzsche.
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JudasIscariot: Have you read Spinoza?? What is his philosphy/stance on life in general? What about Sartre?? I couldn't not follow Sartre after a while because some of the concepts he meandered through started going off the way-too-abstract-for-me end.

"Optimism is cowardice" is a famous quote from Spengler, a fairly notable Philosopher of History. Suffice it to say there's a bit more to it.
Sartre's pure philosophy books "Being and Nothingness", "Between Marxism and Existentialism", etc all pretty much suck. His lit stuff is amazing, but his purely philosophical writings are frequently illogical and do an inferior job of stating the same thing. Camus' "The Rebel" more or less covers most of the same ground as "Being and Nothingness" and it's less boring. Broad strokes - what aren't you getting? Existentialism, the implicit irrationalism, the suicide, or "the nothing"? Second one is easy, third is moderately difficult and the fourth is extremely difficult (and to be frank I don't think Sartre gets it well enough to write about it). Oh, some of what Sartre writes is incoherent crap. That's one reason why you didn't get it. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem.
Short version. Read Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" if you haven't already, then read Sartre's philosophical writings. It'll make more sense.
Basically it's Dostoevsky meets Heidegger and Hegel. Don't read Heidegger. And if you do have the misfortune to have developed an interest in Heidegger, read Introduction to Metaphysics, not "Being and Time", I threw it out a window on two separate occasions.
Spinoza's dense but highly logical. What are you reading? Ethics? Or something else?
Hegel's obscure, but at least he has his merits. Trust me, there's worse. They're mostly French.
Post edited August 20, 2009 by cioran
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JudasIscariot: Have you read Spinoza?? What is his philosphy/stance on life in general? What about Sartre?? I couldn't not follow Sartre after a while because some of the concepts he meandered through started going off the way-too-abstract-for-me end.
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cioran: "Optimism is cowardice" is a famous quote from Spengler, a fairly notable Philosopher of History. Suffice it to say there's a bit more to it.
Sartre's pure philosophy books "Being and Nothingness", "Between Marxism and Existentialism", etc all pretty much suck. His lit stuff is amazing, but his purely philosophical writings are frequently illogical and do an inferior job of stating the same thing. Camus' "The Rebel" more or less covers most of the same ground as "Being and Nothingness" and it's less boring. Broad strokes - what aren't you getting? Existentialism, the implicit irrationalism, the suicide, or "the nothing"? Second one is easy, third is moderately difficult and the fourth is extremely difficult (and to be frank I don't think Sartre gets it well enough to write about it). Oh, some of what Sartre writes is incoherent crap. That's one reason why you didn't get it. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem.
Short version. Read Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" if you haven't already, then read Sartre's philosophical writings. It'll make more sense.
Basically it's Dostoevsky meets Heidegger and Hegel. Don't read Heidegger. And if you do have the misfortune to have developed an interest in Heidegger, read Introduction to Metaphysics, not "Being and Time", I threw it out a window on two separate occasions.
Spinoza's dense but highly logical. What are you reading? Ethics? Or something else?
Hegel's obscure, but at least he has his merits. Trust me, there's worse. They're mostly French.

Right now I am reading Plato's Republic. I have read most of Ayn Rand's work but she tends to repeat herself all the damn time in almost ALL of her works. If you read one book by her you pretty much have read them all.
I am interested in Spinoza and Hegel since I have heard about them by reading Nietzsche and for my own personal edification.
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JudasIscariot: Have you read Spinoza?? What is his philosphy/stance on life in general? What about Sartre?? I couldn't not follow Sartre after a while because some of the concepts he meandered through started going off the way-too-abstract-for-me end.
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cioran: "Optimism is cowardice" is a famous quote from Spengler, a fairly notable Philosopher of History. Suffice it to say there's a bit more to it.
Sartre's pure philosophy books "Being and Nothingness", "Between Marxism and Existentialism", etc all pretty much suck. His lit stuff is amazing, but his purely philosophical writings are frequently illogical and do an inferior job of stating the same thing. Camus' "The Rebel" more or less covers most of the same ground as "Being and Nothingness" and it's less boring. Broad strokes - what aren't you getting? Existentialism, the implicit irrationalism, the suicide, or "the nothing"? Second one is easy, third is moderately difficult and the fourth is extremely difficult (and to be frank I don't think Sartre gets it well enough to write about it). Oh, some of what Sartre writes is incoherent crap. That's one reason why you didn't get it. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem.
Short version. Read Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" if you haven't already, then read Sartre's philosophical writings. It'll make more sense.
Basically it's Dostoevsky meets Heidegger and Hegel. Don't read Heidegger. And if you do have the misfortune to have developed an interest in Heidegger, read Introduction to Metaphysics, not "Being and Time", I threw it out a window on two separate occasions.
Spinoza's dense but highly logical. What are you reading? Ethics? Or something else?
Hegel's obscure, but at least he has his merits. Trust me, there's worse. They're mostly French.

How are you abilitated call these works "crap" ? Don't you think others can make their own mind about the difficulty of these books without your extremely accurate judgement ? Did you wrote something so superior that I missed ? I don't like Sartre myself but I can't disqualify a work and call it "crap", doing that is like burning a book... be it French, German or American.
Judas, for Hegel, if you're interested in further reading I'd try "Outlines of a Philosophy of Right" if you're interested in political philosophy. Dense and fairly obscure but absolutely worth a read. I'm trying to think of someone good that wrote a companion piece for it that was readable (many modern Hegel scholars are even more obscure than he was). You might want to read relevant sections from Pinkard's intellectual bio on Hegel. Really great book. That should give you a pretty good overview of the Hegelian system. OoaPoR is a tough read though, so it'll be slow going no matter what. The Russel History of Western Philosophy I mentioned is also a great resource.
Spinoza's kind of a philosopher's philosopher. Great, but heavily axiomatic and kind of dry. Scruton wrote an intro on him, but his expertise is Kant. Not terrible, but not great. I've read him, but I'm not excessively familiar with him. I think it would be dishonest for me to really recommend anything in this area. I could always ask my friend Bob though. He's more well-read in Spinoza literature.
If you like Ayn Rand, but find her repetitive, try Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia". He's a rather famous libertarian political philosopher. Very plain-spoken, but extremely well-reasoned. I tend not to agree with his conclusions (practice differs a bit from theory), but his reasoning is extremely solid and he's a phenomenal writer.
If you're a bit further out there on the libertarian spectrum and interested in Anarcho-capitalism, Spooner, while turgid, wrote a really interesting piece on the US Constitution entitled No Treason, which is perhaps more interesting to us Americans, but is worth a read. It may be banned in some countries. It's very controversial. I really like the collected volume Mises (oh incidentally, if you're interested in libertarian stuff, the Mises Institute puts out a lot of stuff, not all of it's good though) puts out entitled "Let's Abolish the Government". Again, a colleague once mentioned the better part of my bookshelf is apparently illegal in parts of Europe, so you may want to check before ordering.
Oh, incidentally Narakir, I'm "abilitated" by a Master's Degree (that's 2 years of post-university education) and years of study. I have an article under peer review for an academic journal as we speak, and I'm working on two other Master's Degrees.
Post edited August 20, 2009 by cioran
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thevault314: If you need any help with playtesting or anything, I'm game.
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81RED: You could give my (rather amateurish) attempt at a vertical shooter a go?
Would appreciate any feedback really, primarily whether the damn thing runs at an acceptable speed and such...
Download here if interested: [url=]http://81red.dk/UnnamedShooter.zip[/url]
Also a Youtube clip of the thing in action: [url=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78dQOhDhU1s[/url]

I took your game for a spin. It was a good throwback to games like asteroids. The game ran really well on my computer. The gameplay was fun, and it was nice that you could change the speed of the game. It would be nice to see a few more powerups.
For me it got really tiring to hit the fire key over and over. Another minor issue was that the game seemed to keep track of my high score, but there was no way to display it (I wasn't using the online scores database). It would also be nice to be able to change the resolution of the game so that it wouldn't have to be played in such a small window. The editor worked pretty well except that it would crash when I pressed the 'R' key with a variable undefined at 0 error.
Hope this helps.
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thevault314: Hope this helps.

It helps a LOT!, thanks man :)
As mentioned in an earlier post, the powerup/firekey exhaustion problems might be alleviated a bit if I introduced an "autofire" powerup...Will seriously consider that.
The highscores (only top three is kept) are displayed automatically if you do not press anything on the title page for some seconds.
The lack of available resolutions is unfortunately out of my control, as it is an (as yet) missing feature of the graphics library I'm using.
And whoa! You found an actual bug. An embarrasing one even. The game and the editor
started life as seperate programs, and I obviously overlooked that one feature when merging the code. Fixed now.
Thanks again for the feedback, I owe you one! :)
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cioran: Judas, for Hegel, if you're interested in further reading I'd try "Outlines of a Philosophy of Right" if you're interested in political philosophy. Dense and fairly obscure but absolutely worth a read. I'm trying to think of someone good that wrote a companion piece for it that was readable (many modern Hegel scholars are even more obscure than he was). You might want to read relevant sections from Pinkard's intellectual bio on Hegel. Really great book. That should give you a pretty good overview of the Hegelian system. OoaPoR is a tough read though, so it'll be slow going no matter what. The Russel History of Western Philosophy I mentioned is also a great resource.
Spinoza's kind of a philosopher's philosopher. Great, but heavily axiomatic and kind of dry. Scruton wrote an intro on him, but his expertise is Kant. Not terrible, but not great. I've read him, but I'm not excessively familiar with him. I think it would be dishonest for me to really recommend anything in this area. I could always ask my friend Bob though. He's more well-read in Spinoza literature.
If you like Ayn Rand, but find her repetitive, try Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia". He's a rather famous libertarian political philosopher. Very plain-spoken, but extremely well-reasoned. I tend not to agree with his conclusions (practice differs a bit from theory), but his reasoning is extremely solid and he's a phenomenal writer.
If you're a bit further out there on the libertarian spectrum and interested in Anarcho-capitalism, Spooner, while turgid, wrote a really interesting piece on the US Constitution entitled No Treason, which is perhaps more interesting to us Americans, but is worth a read. It may be banned in some countries. It's very controversial. I really like the collected volume Mises (oh incidentally, if you're interested in libertarian stuff, the Mises Institute puts out a lot of stuff, not all of it's good though) puts out entitled "Let's Abolish the Government". Again, a colleague once mentioned the better part of my bookshelf is apparently illegal in parts of Europe, so you may want to check before ordering.
Oh, incidentally Narakir, I'm "abilitated" by a Master's Degree (that's 2 years of post-university education) and years of study. I have an article under peer review for an academic journal as we speak, and I'm working on two other Master's Degrees.

I know what's a master degree and I don't have achieved one for the moment, so I my look like a young petulant impudent but even if you where an renowned professor, I wouldn't believe that any serious academician can just call anything "crap" that's all. Give some justifications because I'm just a petty student that needs to be enlightened because he fails to understand why all philosophers writing in his mother thong are illogical.
By the way which kind of books do you have on your shelf that may be forbidden in Europe ? I would like to verify if it's actually right at least for my country, except if it's full neo-naziis pamphlets which I doubt.
Narakir, not everyone in the academy is a neutral old man.
I'm also interested in the Radical Traditionalists as well as Pessimism. Evola overlaps substantially with that group. He's anti-democracy, a cultural racist, anti-egalitarian and a number of other things that scare folks from your neck of the world. He also constructed one of the most fascinating metaphysical systems of the 20th century.
As far as I know these books are certainly banned because of the associations with Fascism. A lot of the rest of the stuff I own in political philo is controversial. You've probably never heard of most of it, especially the American and Weimar German stuff. Doesn't get read much in Europe.
I also have most of Gentile's books. Brilliant political philosopher, probably the greatest Hegelian scholar of all time, and wrote a magnificent treatise on education. Ghostwrote Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism, hence the damnatio memoriae.
Having had work censored in my own country, I tend to be very cognizant of these things.