Comments by "John Warner" (@johncrwarner) on "Jared Henderson" channel.

  1. My partner and I went on holiday to Switzerland and rented a flat in a small town It didn't have Internet and in that week I read three chunky books that I brought with me and it was a great detox.
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  2. For the festive holidays I received a few books. Several I would group as philosophy books in the traditional sense of those words - «Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy» by Alain Badiou and «What is Philosophy?» by Deleuze and Guattari (which is supposed to be very tricky). I also have some books on “information management“ in a computer sense - mostly focused around computer pioneers and their thinking. This is background reading for developing a non-linear reading notes methodology / approach to reading. I am doing a reading project for my sixtieth year which ends in April 2023. For that project I am reading books published in 1962 the year of my birth. And this therefore includes some philosophy. J. L. Austin who died in 1960 had two lecture series brought to press in 1962 and the John Macquarrie translation of Heidegger's «Sein und Zeit» was published. Also a translation of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji into English (in eight volumes with parallel original text, English and modern Punjabi) so that is a little bit to work on.
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  3. For me a commonplace book is like a written scrapbook
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  4. One of the earliest philosophy books I read and engaged with was A. J. Ayer's "Language, Truth and Logic" at age sixteen. It was also one of the first books where I saw flaws in the argument It marked the movement from being a sponge reader to being in dialogue with the writer and I had the Penguin/Pelican edition and the margins were scrawled over because logical positivism just destroys itself with its own arguments. My first philosophy book was "The Prince" by Macchiavelli which as a thirteen year old on a camping holiday in the Malvern Hills in England with my family was a bit bored and begged for some pocket money and got given 50 pence to buy books and a comic (this was 1976 BTW) I paid 35 pence for the George Bull translation in a Penguin Classic edition and was enthralled by it.
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  5. When I got serious about reading aged 13 I started with Machiavelli's The Prince and I set targets of finishing chapters and fortunately the chapters in The Prince are very short.
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  6. I graduated from the children's library to the adult library when I was about eleven or twelve I was a bit of a precocious reader I wasn't terribly interested in fiction so I spent a lot of time in the languages learning section and in the same area was philosophy so I moved to the philosophy of language reading people like J. L. Austin as well as Russell and moving not randomly but like a network out and ended up reading the Kaufmann translations of Nietzsche and as a teenager loving them.
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  7. When I studied Classical Chinese, as part of an evening part-time degree course in Chinese Language and Literature, we read a lot of Hanfeizi, who was a legalist political philosopher / thinker, the Chinese was crisp and clear, though his philosophy was very authoritarian. I would thoroughly recommend reading some legalist thinkers, and counterbalance it with some Confucian thinkers. The Daoists are the anarchists of the Chinese world who challenge your thoughts on self, state etc. I never read The Hobbit myself my mother read it to me as a bedtime read As she was a trained Kindergarten teacher she used to do all the voices etc. I was spellbound.
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  8. The impossible task as much philosophy is a response to other works. I did an evening class on Emmanuel Levinas (I lived near Oxford and that was what was offered by the university - not sure other places have that sort of evening classes) The Levinas course changed my thinking and that was because in ten weeks I came into dialogue with several other philosophers Heidegger, Husserl and early analytic philosophers. There is a sense that it doesn't matter where you start there will be dialogue with many other philosophers and you can and should construct your own list.
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  9. Like the fourth statue in Trafalgar Square London where there is an empty plinth but no statue Perhaps your audience can suggest an eighth book? I would suggest The Prince by Machiavelli short, carefully constructed and even though it doesn't represent his own thinking it is a well crafted argument. The Discourses by Machiavelli is a more worked out book but "you cannot read it in one day".
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  10. I found the interesting thing was when I retired with lots of "free time" but my reading routine was disrupted significantly and I discovered I had been doing a lot of reading on my commute from home to work and it was very productive reading too. I had to rebuild my reading schedule which I had not expected. Being in hospital was a trigger to start using my eReader and I now use it for novels and continuously flowing texts. If I am learning something or it is a tricky or novel text I, like you, prefer a physical book. I did an experiment with different media, in a project to read texts associated with my birth year, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote and published three novels in his Perry Mason series, I read one in physical form one on my eReader and the third as an audiobook. I didn't feel a difference between the eReader and physical form but the audiobook - sent me to sleep and I had to keep replying sections to get even the gist of the story. So until my eyesight becomes very problematic I don't think audiobooks will even be a primary source of consuming texts. I use a command line journal programme called jrnl to make quick notes and have a tiddlywiki set up as a Zettelkasten à la Niklas Luhmann (BTW his actual Zettelkasten - lots of index cards is held by the University of Bielefeld and was part of an exhibition at the Art Gallery called "Serendipity" where stochastic methods were used in art and thinking.)
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  11. I will have to stop watching your videos as I now have two new philosophers to explore Elizabeth Anderson and Nick Bostrom (Nicklas Boström in Swedish) I think that is enough from one video! I think a short YouTube film of Nick Bostrom's Pascal's Mugging might be interesting to do. My first encounters with philosophy in literature were with Tom Stoppard and his plays which explored a lot of the Analytic Philosophical scene of Britain and North America at the time.
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  12. I remember when I first encountered highlighter pens they were newish on the market I basically highlighted everything in a book I then realised that it was technique rather than technology that helped reading and in this case remembering.
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  13. Retiring helped me and having to do caring for my handicapped partner I have a lot of dead time so I fill it with books. Not being in what I call the "American mindset" I am a European I am glad I have not had the culture that I must read more and faster to claim the prize of having read so much. My reading is varied and I definitely avoid the BookTubers who read a load of books for quantitative reasons. I hit sixty this year and so I decided to do a project of reading books / texts published in, awarded a prize or translated into English in 1962. My #1962project started in hospital this year and have been collecting and reading some interesting stuff. My favourite in terms of memorability and impact was Eugène Ionesco's "Le roi se meurt" (known in English as "Exit the King") My mother is 92 years old and slowly dying and this work is about dying is funny and philosophical and had strong observational tendencies too. I read it in French and have also purchased Ionesco's "Notes et contre-notes" some of his theoretical writing also published in 1962.
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  14. I had purchased an eReader in a sale at my local bookstore but didn't really use it. Then I had a bad flare up of my autoimmune disease called myasthenia gravis and was hospitalised for two weeks plus. My eReader saved my reading life as l couldn't hold a big physical book. I was however able to hold my eReader in my hand and with my mobile phone download new books onto it.
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  15. I have just added a "Quotes" to my tiddlywiki called "readingNotes" and I like to put one quote and attribution on the each tiddler. The first stage however is using my electronic notepad that my mother got for me and writing it in long hand then transferring it to my tiddlywiki. I was getting my disabled partner up a few days ago and the sky was grey. I quoted outloud Theodor Storm's poem "Die graue Stadt am graue Meer" and it struck me. So I added it to my tiidlywiki and got a eBook of all of Theodor Storm's poetry. This chimes with my study of Chinese Classical poetry. etc. I mix "commonplace" book ideas with reading notes and get ideas and projects going.
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  16. In my Zettelkasten (I use an open source electronic system called Tiddlywiki) and I write out things in my "quotes" and they are just listed alphabetically and it functions as my commonplace book. As I read physical books mostly I cannot copy and paste texts I even write out Chinese, Greek and Punjabi quotes and I do that on my smartphone which has multiple keyboards.
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  17. I use note cards for the first level of note taking and then move them to a Tiddlywiki with added backlinks Technically not a Zettelkasten method even though Niklas Luhmann lived and worked in my town and even has a tram named after him. I have built a huge set of links between items and with my personal reading which as a retired teacher is to quote Zhuangzi 逍遥游 "wandering without a destination" (though Zhuangzi is notorious for being very hard to translate) The Tiddlywiki is a great tool as it enables me so far to build an interesting collection of cards even going beyond my project x reminds me of y reminds me of z etc. I also do sketchnote responses to poetry too I haven't integrated that yet but it is possible with Tiddlywiki. BTW Tiddlywiki is open source and runs on my smartphone on an open source emulator - and is backed up to my cloud.
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  18. BTW seven years ago the local art gallery Kunsthalle Bielefeld had an exhibition called "Serendipity - Vom Glück des Findens" "Serendipity - the luck of finding" and the ground floor exhibition was part of Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten This was my first introduction to this form of note taking.
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  19. I prefer physical books, music CDs and film DVDs. I have a Tolino which is linked to my local German book seller.
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  20. The quotation from Richard Feynman that "If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood" is perhaps him expressing your point about explaining things to others.
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  21. I think you are right about seeing a performance of a play like Dr Faustus rather than just reading it on the page. I have a love for Shakespeare fostered by my parents taking me to see Shakespeare plays from aged eight. I still remember seeing the RSC production of The Merchant of Venice with a memorable series of casket scenes and the caskets being life-size. But also Shylock's house popping up from the middle of the stage for the elopement scene. I had seen ten to fifteen Shakespeare plays by the time I did any formal study of one play - and it was dreary in the extreme in the classroom but I had laughed at a performance not long before.
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  22. I have found a digital tool that fits my scatter gun mind I use a very flexible self-contained package called tiddlywiki and structure my journal through my reading.
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  23. I started it in hospital where I hadn't got any nice paper or pens But had my smartphone.
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  24. I was wondering whether it as aspect of what some people have been called neo-feudalism?
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  25. I once commented to a friend who is a professional philosopher that "mathematics / logic is where philosophies go to die" There are so many problems around logic and mathematics that if you go one way it causes problems and go another way and you get different problems ALL of which are unsolvable! Was the alleged statement over Plato's Academy valid?
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  26. In the summer of 2021 I read "The Lehman Trilogy" in Italian It is over eight hundred pages long and it took me six weeks to complete. It was a wonderful experience as my Italian was very rusty But the novel was written in verso libero (free verse) so there was repetition and short sentences which helped. It was my first verse novel - as an adult and was a fascinating experience.
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  27.  @jshaers96  And the longest I have spent on a single book as well.
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  28. In the last year's of Pope Benedict XVI reign I went to Regensburg - where Joseph Ratzinger had been professor of Theology and in the theology section of the cathedral bookshop There was a huge amount of Nietzsche and I felt they were wrestling with it. I read Nietzsche as a "teenage" read not that you have to be a teenager to read it but that when you are looking critically into what you had received Nietzsche is a witty and sparkling critic who makes you think about what you believe. I think for me Nietzsche is someone whose writings I have returned to over and over again and gained from them though my philosophy hasn't moved to be like his he has influenced it.
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  29. I think you are right about Ayn Rand I remember someone being bitten by the Rand bug at college in 1980 - the start of Thatcher and Reagan and I read it and found the book I read "bilge water" and felt it was a cult. I was on the left but not a Marxist Marx always struck me as a good sociologist but not very interesting philosophically and Capital is truly boring - I feel sorry for the folks in Eastern Europe who had to read it. (I read a biography of Engels and he comes across as a nicer chap lol) I also like the quote by George Orwell: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." Neither Camus or Sartre do I see as philosophers more philosophical novelists. Weirdly as a teenager I tried to read Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and got through half or so but the artifice of it made the points too opaque for me. I then tried "Beyond Good and Evil" and was more to my taste Like he had to get the artsy stuff out before writing it. BTW in Regensburg Dombuchhandlung in the THEOLOGY section which served the Department of Catholic Theology which Benedict XVI had been head of there were more Nietzsche books than in their philosophy section. I think someone was doing Nietzsche in a course in the theology section LOL.
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  30. I use Linux and downloaded them and did a conversion job and uploaded them to my Tolino. It was easier for me than other folks have found.
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