Monday, May 17, 2004
Cheap thoughts
These last few weeks I've been reading Nietzsche as a part of a reading group led by a couple students from Creighton, where I will be a student in September. Early in Nietzsche's career, at least in the books we've been reading so far (Untimely Meditations and The Birth of Tragedy...), the philospher Schopenhauer was a very strong influence on his thinking.
I'm a literature person, not a philosophy person, but English literature has a way of talking about itself called critical theory, and critical theory is essentially the way we appropriate all the different philosophical, sociological, linguistic, and other strands of thought for the discussion of literature. So, while not many of us literature people have a good grounding in philosophy, it helps to be at least functionally literate with it, since you need philosophy to talk critically about literature.
Even given this basic literacy I've acquired, in a straight philosophical discussion about philosophy I'm about as helpful as a pimple on the butt. I needed some remedial philosophical education, and still do. So I was delighted by yesterday's find, when I stumbled upon the Do-It-Yourself-Deity game and the others, because it led to that parent page, The Philosophy Magazine Online, which is helpful enough to give "snapshots" and overviews of some philosophy basics with its Primers. Alas, no Schopenhauer here, though it does cover Kuhn's stuff on philosophy of science, a new field we talked about for the first time at the reading group tonight.
I was so excited to read some of those snapshots, and then I found the catch: It's one of those joints that makes you pay for its services.
Instead, I'll be headed on over to Philosophy Pages, which provides an amazingly comprehensive review of philosophers and their connections to one another. It seems more comprehensive than the TPM site. It's a fantastically easy site to navigate, since everything links to everything else. You can just follow your curiosity through the strands of philosophy, and get so lost in it all. For free.
I'm a literature person, not a philosophy person, but English literature has a way of talking about itself called critical theory, and critical theory is essentially the way we appropriate all the different philosophical, sociological, linguistic, and other strands of thought for the discussion of literature. So, while not many of us literature people have a good grounding in philosophy, it helps to be at least functionally literate with it, since you need philosophy to talk critically about literature.
Even given this basic literacy I've acquired, in a straight philosophical discussion about philosophy I'm about as helpful as a pimple on the butt. I needed some remedial philosophical education, and still do. So I was delighted by yesterday's find, when I stumbled upon the Do-It-Yourself-Deity game and the others, because it led to that parent page, The Philosophy Magazine Online, which is helpful enough to give "snapshots" and overviews of some philosophy basics with its Primers. Alas, no Schopenhauer here, though it does cover Kuhn's stuff on philosophy of science, a new field we talked about for the first time at the reading group tonight.
I was so excited to read some of those snapshots, and then I found the catch: It's one of those joints that makes you pay for its services.
Instead, I'll be headed on over to Philosophy Pages, which provides an amazingly comprehensive review of philosophers and their connections to one another. It seems more comprehensive than the TPM site. It's a fantastically easy site to navigate, since everything links to everything else. You can just follow your curiosity through the strands of philosophy, and get so lost in it all. For free.
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