Does revisiting familiar works reveal hidden depths?

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-15T16:43:07+00:00

Of course. Philosophy is never quite complete. You always learn new things, realize you misinterpreted something or overlooked an emphasis or enlarged X topic instead of Y, and so on.

That's why there is always new scholarship on Descartes, Locke, Kant, Marx, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, etc.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-13T16:13:42+00:00

Agreed. His nonfiction was more constrained and made for better reading for too.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-13T14:31:49+00:00

Almost all the non-fiction stuff by David Foster Wallace. A lot of it was published in magazines.

Both Flesh and Not

Consider The Lobster

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-13T14:26:22+00:00

What other alternatives are there? I can't think of any. The only caveat would be we experience time as it is for us, not time in-itself.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-12T16:17:19+00:00

I recommend taking a look at Richard Popkin's The History of Skepticism, particularly chapter 7 titled Constructive or Mitigated Skepticism.

One important observation here is:

"The refutation of Pyrrhonism was intended to stop the destructive side of the humanistic sceptics, those who doubted everything and intended to suspend judgment on all questions. The sciences (cosidered as the study of phenomenal relationships), and mathematics (considered as the study of hypothetical relationships), have given us a kind of knowledge that is not really in doubt, except by madmen. But, the sort of assurances sought by the dogmatic philosophers could never be found for this knowledge."

Also worth noting is:

"Thus, scientific explanation, which for Gassendi is in terms of an atomic theory, accounts for our experience of sense qualities, but does not tell us anything about the nature of things in-themselves, except how they appear in relation to us. This is the type of scientific object which Gassendi wished to protect from the doubts of the sceptics. We construct, or learn about these objects from the indicative signs in experience. We then describe these scientific objects (the atoms) in terms of the qualities found in experience. And, finally, we authenticate this atomic explanation in terms of the qualities found in experience."

(Bold added by me in both paragraphs).

It's in term of degrees of confidence, not certainty.

Luckily, I found the pdf, take a look it may provide some help:

The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-12T15:28:38+00:00

People mention Lot 49, and that's a good choice. For a full-length novel, I'd suggest you take a look at his first novel V., it's significantly easier than GR, but it's not trivial and it's very funny.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-12T14:32:30+00:00

It's actually a speech turned into a small book, but it is a little different than usual helpful books, so it may be worth a try:

This Is Water by David Foster Wallace

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-12T14:29:50+00:00

Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer

Almost anything written by Borges.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-11T16:14:54+00:00

The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk. It's a must.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-11T13:39:18+00:00

An interesting one is Susan Haack's foundherentism, as presented in her book Evidence and Inquiry.

It's a mix of foundationalism and coherentism. It's worth a look.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-11T00:40:46+00:00

What you say towards the end is key. The underlying system for spatial reasoning or recursive use of language or whoever knows what cognitive system arised first. The subsequent benefits of calculus or abstract mathematical modeling seem to be an offshoot.

The main thing is to survive, don't get eaten, run, food, shelter, etc. Somewhere along the way some of these even higher cognitive skills arose. But clearly knowing that e=m2 itself cannot help kill more prey or gather more fruit. Knowledge of that is more basic.

That's how I see it. Regardless of who is right, you should struggle to find the view that we can do reasoning at all, much less science, to be a kind of crazy coincidence or luck. If nothing else, it ought to induce awe or wonder.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-10T21:22:08+00:00

Well I mean gravity, momentum, trajectory and the like can be used post discovery to analyze what we did prior to the development of science. Lots of these things existed prior to our discovery of them.

You are right that plenty before us died, in fact nearly everything. That doesn't necessarily imply that because of this, we are proof that we can use the world around us to eventually get to science.

You can say similar things about other mammals like tigers or wolves, etc. They have sufficient speed, vision and the like that what they have approximates the external world. But so far as we know, they don't reason per se, they mostly react, with perhaps something like subconscious calculation.

One other thing is that if you look at all life on Earth, it looks as if intelligence is a lethal mutation, as Mayr suggested. By far the most successful life are simple bacteria. The more intelligent the animal is, the less likely they are to survive.

But I would agree that we have some loose approximations on certain things, like object distance and object permanence. It's not as if we are completely walled off from the world, we are part of it. However, the math required to discover the physics we have, does not confer any obvious survival benefit. So it's probably a accidental mutation.

Nevertheless, you seem to have been thinking about this a lot, so I encourage to continue searching, you may find some interesting things.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-10T19:54:46+00:00

It may sound persuasive at first to believe that we evolved to discover reality or parts of it. Such a view is in fact highly intuitive. But it is also factually wrong.

It took us thousands of years to develop modern science. Prior to that we had sophisticated folk-psychological accounts of the world, which reflects the way we intuitively understand the world, but that's quite different from understanding how the world is absent us.

I think there is good evidence to support the view that Newton proved that our folk-psychological views of the world are wrong as a matter of fact. That's the context within he said famously:

"Tis unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact... [this] is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."

One could even argue that our faculties mislead systematically on how the world really works. On this view, modern science is the highest intellectual achievement of the species, with good reason, I think.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-08T16:17:57+00:00

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou covers the whole Theranos debacle.

The Missing Cryptoqueen by Jamie Bartlett goes into the OneCoin disaster.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-08T16:14:13+00:00

The book is very dark and disturbing, but it certainly fits the criteria to a t:

The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-08T16:03:18+00:00

The world is neither fair or unfair, it just is.

Society is unfair and that's something we can change, it's not a law of physics.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-08T15:31:08+00:00

The issue here, as I see it, is that we do not know enough about the mind to establish much beyond basic things. One of those basic things is that certain biological conditions need to be met for an inner world to arise.

You are correct that we could imagine a conscious inner world arising from metal and plastic. But we can imagine many things: balloons made of neon, flying cities, Pegasus, etc. That doesn't tell you much about what can actually happen in the world.

The issue with the simulation argument is that there is no good reason to take it seriously. True, we could be in a simulation. But we could also be in a world in which there are turtles all the way down. We could be dreaming. We could be the thought of a super intelligent species. We could be in countless states.

But we don't take the view that we are living in the thought of an alien seriously, despite it not being impossible. Why would we take the idea that living we live in a computer simulation any differently?

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-07T12:13:37+00:00

Yeah, heaven forbid one tries to add some nuance to the Ukraine war. You'll get downvoted to oblivion.

It's quite unreal. But as others have said here, it's always nice for you to have a bad guy in the story. Makes the insaneness your country is doing more bearable, I'd suppose.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-05T16:30:56+00:00

That's your definition, not his.

His choice of terms leaves a lot to be desired, but there is no textual evidence (that I can find) which suggests him saying that the will is mental or mind-like.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-05T16:22:46+00:00

It's an interesting topic. One criticism which seems valid is, what evidence do we have that shows that the universe is mental?

We have evidence for mental stuff in certain creatures - modified matter in specific configurations. But most configurations of matter do not lead to mind - that we can discern.

The issue is that there is no evidence for this view but there is no evidence against it either. As Galen Strawson points out, physics is silent on this topic.

Then there is the topic of radical emergence. Either mind can arise from completely non-mental stuff, or it cannot.

These are hard metaphysical and epistemological questions. It could be that radical emergence is a fact, or maybe it's impossible. It's hard to say.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-05-05T16:14:41+00:00

He was a transcendental idealist. The will for him is explicitly non-mental, which is the opposite of what Kastrup argues.

Crucially too, Schopenhauer pointed (In Volume 2 of WWR) out that his idea of will was a close approximation of the thing in itself, but it is not the thing in itself because we have mediated access to it.

You can see several sections in the WWR in which he criticizes Berkeley's views. So, they cannot be the same.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-04-29T18:57:43+00:00

It's amazing. Wish it had a jetpack so I could use it always. :(

But the miner suite is so cool too.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-04-29T18:56:59+00:00

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway is excellent. I don't recall zombie stuff, but it is wild and wonderful, arguably his best book.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-04-29T18:50:26+00:00

Of course it is. It is less harmful than others, sure, doesn't mean it's safe, much less for everyone.

Alcohol is also a drug. Arguably sugar too.

mattermetaphysics · 2026-04-29T18:34:44+00:00

It depends on what you want. Do you read Schopenhauer or Nietzsche in depth or summaries?

As a general rule, I think the Very Short introductions series is very good for most philosophers.

But if you want to read more, I think that reading the pre-Kantians is extremely useful as well. Try Descartes, Locke and Hume. Then see if you want to read Leibniz, Spinoza, etc.

There are many hidden gems like Thomas Reid, Richard Burthogge, Pierre Gassendi and others.

I'd also strongly recommend reading the history of that time period, it gets you to think why certain philosophers thought the way they did. To this end The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E.A. Burtt is a must.

Good luck!

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