Comments by "James Power" (@jamespower5165) on "Jared Henderson" channel.

  1. Stoic philosophy isn't about indifference to worldly things directly. The question that it tries to answer is how one can control one's life. And that of course depends on not externalizing our sources of happiness. We can always control our own actions, the quality of our effort, what emotions and priorities we give our time to, and of course how we respond to various situations, good or bad and our virtues. To the extent we learn to situate peace and happiness in such things, we are in complete control of our lives. It teaches as you say merely indifference not only to material things but just all externalities in general, events that don't go to plan etc, rather than any rejection of them or refusal to acknowledge their place. It's not just about being more reasonable but the practice of stoicism involves becoming inherently noble, whereas Christianity mostly emphasizes prudently holding out for the long-term goal of heaven. It's prudence and patience rather than nobility. Stoicism is ultimately humanist, it pays respect to what humans are capable of, and that's its real appeal especially to young people nowadays
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  2. Indeed. For beginners, a book like Nigel Warburton's Philosophy, The Basics is much better. And anybody's first Wittgenstein should be The Blue Book, and even then after having read something like Russell's An Outline of Philosophy
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  3.  @Toodoi  Anything can be complex when one starts with faulty logic as all continental philosophers do. Then they quickly wander away from philosophy proper and start spinning social theories. I'd say go from Plato, who asked good questions, to Bertrand Russell directly. Then we can return to certain older philosophers, like Descartes and Leibniz, as necessary.
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  4. Three Men On A Boat and The Golden Age are also excellent reads if you are nostalgic about a simpler time. Also Diary of a Nobody. These are part satirical but primarily they just emphasize a simple good life
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  5. Stephen King isn't known for his brevity. But two great novellas are The Shawshank Redemption and The Colorado Kid. The second one especially is underrated
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  6. Also Symposium
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  7. No. In fact the effect of teaching people the names of some common fallacies has made internet debate much worse because people are only interested in catching their opponents out in fallacies. First of all, there are infinitely many kinds of mistakes you can make in argument. Obviously not all of them have names. Secondly, the correct way to debate is to carefully listen to your opponents, reframe their arguments in their strongest form and then respond to those. If you don't think your opponent deserves this consideration, you had best not talk to them at all. This business of focusing on a few named fallacies instead of respectfully and attentively engaging in the discussion is a net negative to the quality of internet debate
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  8.  @rafaeliglesiasdefigueiredo5342  Any talk of a higher purpose is actually the corrupting influence. Because ultimately it makes life a long game strategy, and pandering to power. There's nothing noble there anymore. And the overemphasis on material things alone leaving aside the uncertainties of the modern world is also a mistake. And you make it sound that all manner of material pleasures are easily available to everyone. Not only is that not true, nobody is that much of a voluptuary anyway even without a philosophy. A lot of impulse buying is because people are antsy from stress, not greedy. People are far more bothered by stress and uncertainty. And the increase in commodities is hardly a new thing. It has been happening throughout history. Even ancient stoicism is far less about contempt for the material plane. Deriving pleasure from observing the beauty around you is frequently advised in, for example, The Meditations. Stoicism as ridding you of the fear of externalities and stoicism as cultivating nobility have always been its most attractive features. And even Stoic virtue has been about satisfying the dictates of one's own conscience.
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  9.  @randywaldron2715  Shirley Jackson was probably the greatest horror novelist ever. While we have always lived in the castle is more wringing because of its realism, The Haunting of Hill House has to be the greatest ghost story. What is wonderful is that nothing really physical happens. The ghosts are in the minds of the people,specifically just one person. Anything physical, some actual person does it, just not of their own influence. And of course the reason the one person is picked and the explanation of the opening(as well as closing) lines of the book is brilliant. On this head the longish short stories of Daphne Du Maurier have to be mentioned. Those are ethereal and chilling. The best I've ever read in literary horror
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  10. Two interesting complementary books would be Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and First Blood by David Morrell(the original Rambo was actually a Frankenstein figure!) The whole book is a ferocious piece of anti-war propaganda(a bit different from the movie! - which was nonetheless also very good)
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  11. Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones. An oddly moving dystopic coming of age story which emphasizes instead of the coming of age, the loss of childhood.
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  12. For that matter, for psychological reasons, Bloch's classic Psycho is also a one-day read
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  13. Kenneth Grahame, same guy who wrote the Wind in the Willows
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  14. Indeed. A good read alongside it is David Morrell's First Blood. The original Rambo was really a Frankenstein figure with war instead of unthinking technocracy as the culprit
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  15. If you have ever geeked out obsessively over anything - from computer programming to whiteboards to robots or models, let alone actual mathematics, you will love Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture. Breezy yet heart-wringing, the toils and travails, the dizzying ecstasies and the paralyzing lows of a career in big mathematics are laid out with a warmth and relatability that belies its short length
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  16. Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper is lovely. Maybe he can't read it by himself but reading it to him would be worth the effort
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  17. Of course it does. I don't think any tradition except the logicist has anything worthwhile to say about epistemology or ontology or anything that concerns itself about the nature of the world. Existentialism I'd call primarily a literary and cultural movement connected to human perception of life, and as you suggest, the paradox of choice. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both considered the problem and reached radically opposite conclusions! - and the discussion persisted well into the last decades of the twentieth century. Of the two, Kierkegaard seems more like he is philosophizing honestly rather than using rhetoric to argue conclusions he has reached ahead of time. I don't agree with his conclusions but his intellectual honesty is in plain evidence throughout his process
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  18.  @sharonbre9347  Certainty nothing that hasn't been comfortably superseded in the logicist tradition. Take Descartes's inability to understand how pain or any other mental state can have a physical reality without postulating an independent reality of purely mental phenomena. It never occurred to him that what is physical isn't just stuff. That stuff can be arranged in logical configurations and the properties of those configurations will also make a difference to the physical reality. That, brain states, can make up mind. Or his saying that if a being with desirable qualities exists, an optimal such being must exist. Does that mean we can simultaneously have a spear that can pierce any armor and an armor that can resist any spear. Because there are spears that can pierce some armors, and armors that can stop some spears, the optimal counterparts also exist? It's a rookie mistake and one nobody trained in logicism, would ever make. Or take Hagel going on about existence and non-existence as predicates and then literally building up a tangle of concepts to build on this illogical foundation. In logicism, we do this very easily. Existence is not a predicate because then nonexistence would also have to be(because the negation of a predicate is also a predicate) In reality we never talk about existence or non-existence, only the unsatisfisability and satisfiability of certain predicates. When we say a round square is nonexistent we really mean the predicate 'round square' is unsatisfiable. We have nothing to learn(on this head) from the pre-logicists. Sometimes they asked good questions and their mistakes are illuminating. But their contributions are no longer directly valuable in any way
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