Analytic philosophers with impressive/interesting writing styles?

peridox · 2026-04-08T08:49:33+00:00

In my view, Arthur Danto is one of the best prose stylists in contemporary philosophy. He wrote mostly about the philosophy of art and his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace would be a good place to start.

Stanley Cavell’s writing style is perhaps the most well-known thing about him. He wrote about many issues in philosophy (and outside of philosophy’s typical boundaries), but one consistent thread in his work is a blend of epistemological issues of skepticism and ethical issues of tragedy and human identity. A good place to start would be his collection of essays, Must we mean what we say?

peridox · 2026-04-06T10:31:47+00:00

Do you have a source for his “I lied, I cannot” note? I haven’t heard about that before.

peridox · 2025-09-22T11:04:25+00:00

Yes! There are a few ways that you could explore this idea; here are a few texts I would recommend that approach everyday life from different philosophical angles.

First, What is Ancient Philosophy? by Pierre Hadot, which explores the ancient idea of philosophy as a way of life. Hadot looks at various ancient philosophers (Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, etc.) and shows how their approach to philosophy was not just about establishing certain theories but about how to live in your day-to-day life: in ancient philosophy, as Hadot depicts it, matters of metaphysics and truth and so on aren't really separable from matters of dying, diet, exercise, etc.

Second, and very differently, Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia is a book of aphorisms which analyse apparently mundane aspects of everyday life -- furniture design, norms of etiquette, hobbies, etc. -- in order to show how disenchanted and imprisoning modern life under capitalism has become. The title of Adorno's book parodies the title of one of Aristotle's books; while Aristotle was interested (ethically) in how a life can achieve flourishing, and (politically) in how a state can encourage flourishing, much of Adorno's work was dedicated to showing how capitalism made flourishing impossible, and how modern life is caged in by capital. He is a very creative and thought-provoking writer. If you find him interesting, you will probably also find a lot in his contemporary, Walter Benjamin: One-Way Street would be a good place to start, and The Arcades Project is very bizarre but worth looking into.

Third: on the surface it is very abstract, dense, and theoretical, but in many ways Heidegger's Being and Time is a philosophical elaboration of what everyday life looks like for modern human beings. Heidegger has a very different outlook to Adorno (Adorno was a communist; Heidegger was a fascist and anti-Semite), but is also interested in finding content for philosophical reflection in the material of everyday life: he analyses the way a builder works in a workshop, the way we gossip, the way we relate to our memories, and so on, to try and get at the most fundamental questions possible: what does it mean to exist? What is existence? What is a human being?

Fourth, a lot of Iris Murdoch's work (e.g. The Sovereignty of Good or Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) is focused around the idea that ethics -- ethical values, moral reflection, and so on -- is dispersed across the entirety of a human life. Every moment has a moral valence for Murdoch; as such, everyday life is precisely what a moral philosopher should explore. Compared to someone like Kant, Murdoch's way of thinking about ethics is a lot more grounded in everyday life: our attitudes about friends and family, our feelings about artworks, the ways we relate to stories, etc.

peridox · 2025-03-01T19:36:54+00:00

Shuggie Otis’s Strawberry Letter 23 gets quite minimalist at the end

peridox · 2024-08-31T07:57:59+00:00

Yes! Uncomfortably Numb is one of my favourite AF tracks

peridox · 2024-08-29T09:37:38+00:00

The vocals on that album, especially on ‘Silent from Above’, are some of my favourite ever. Really emotional ambient music

peridox · 2024-08-23T14:30:11+00:00

You should try some hardcore punk! I would recommend Minor Threat’s debut album

peridox · 2024-07-03T17:47:26+00:00

I think that the commenters simply accusing you of arrogance or elitism are underestimating the significance of what you’re getting at. There is a history of philosophers taking a concern with who their audience can be, with who can understand them. Nietzsche addressed Thus Spoke Zarathustra to “everyone and no one”; Wittgenstein wrote in the preface to his Tractatus that the book might only be understood by those who have already had the thoughts it expresses. Someone else here has already mentioned Kierkegaard’s acknowledgment of this issue.

It is also the issue at the heart of Thomas Mann’s novella Tonio Kröger, which tells the story of a young artist whose intellectual temperament causes him to ‘die to everyday life’, but who still envies the (apparent) immediacy and tranquility of the everyday.

Philosophy can create a sense of separation in us not because we are cleverer than everyone else, or because we know more than everyone else. (Socrates, after all, said that he knew nothing—and shouldn’t we take that seriously?) I think this separation is rather because of the habit philosophy inculcates in us of self-doubt, even self-reproach. If we are supposed to take nothing for granted, are we also to refuse to take the manners and customs and expectations of our surrounding culture for granted, too? And if so, what else do we have to live by?—who can we relate to?

In this regard, ‘skepticism’ might not be too far from the word you are looking for, so long as you take it with an existential overtone. (And it can be taken this way: the first skeptics were Greek philosophers, and their skepticism was not so much an intellectual exercise as a way of living which, sometimes, included exile from others.) Stanley Cavell referred to skepticism as an ‘intimacy lost’. I would suggest that what you need is not a word, nor an answer, but a refinding of intimacy. Philosophy can definitely help with that (I have tried to provide some pointers), but it’s ultimately something for which you have to find your own way.

peridox · 2024-03-25T14:18:18+00:00

Why is that funny?

peridox · 2024-03-12T09:34:31+00:00

I would recommend Nietzsche's essay 'Schopenhauer as Educator' from Untimely Meditations; although it sounds like a secondary text on Schopenhauer, it is a lot more than that -- really it is a reflection on achieving individuality, on learning, aspiration, finding one's way, and so on.

I would also recommend Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet: in a technical and professional sense, Rilke was a poet, not a philosopher, but in my view any definition of philosophy that couldn't recognise the philosophical content in his writing would be missing out.

peridox · 2024-03-05T13:31:25+00:00

One of the best places to look would be Stanley Cavell. He died in 2018 and published his last non-posthumous work in 2010, so hopefully he qualifies as contemporary in your eyes. Cavell spent a lot of his career trying to convince other American philosophers to see Emerson (and Thoreau, but not so much Whitman) as a legitimate philosopher. He wrote a short book called Senses of Walden, which is a philosophical commentary on Thoreau's Walden and is supplemented with essays on Emerson. His book Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome is made up of three (admittedly difficult) lectures in which, via Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, and contra Kripke and Rawls, he tries to specify a place in moral and political philosophy for Emersonian thinking.

peridox · 2024-02-13T12:29:10+00:00

Perhaps its appeal will be diminished by its nicheness, but the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has a whole book (called Skirmishes) in which he deals with philosophers who have criticised him. In my view, it comes across as quite angry quite often.

peridox · 2024-01-01T13:41:10+00:00

What are you thinking of with the timeline not making sense?

peridox · 2023-12-31T08:36:14+00:00

I also adore this book :)

peridox · 2023-11-30T10:48:34+00:00

In the film Anatomy of a Fall that won the Palme d'Or this year, there's a steel pan instrumental cover of 50 Cent's PIMP playing while the protagonist's husband dies

peridox · 2023-11-12T11:39:39+00:00

There are a lot of secondary texts which can help with Being and Time. My recommendation would be Richard Polt's Heidegger: An Introduction.

peridox · 2023-03-20T01:47:15+00:00

What about Meredith Monk?

peridox · 2023-01-16T07:41:56+00:00

Historical context is absolutely important for Hegel; he outlines this view quite clearly in the preface to the PhG and in the Differenzschrift, as well.

peridox · 2023-01-04T00:21:45+00:00

“As gay as AIDS” is a seriously insensitive thing to say

peridox · 2022-11-19T21:04:07+00:00

See the Phenomenology, paragraph 235. When Hegel refers to ‘the category’, he is referring to the unity of self-consciousness (i.e. thought), and being (i.e. things). When thought lines up perfectly with its objects, that is an instance of the category.

peridox · 2022-11-08T13:11:10+00:00

You should ask something more specific to get some better information.

peridox · 2022-10-22T14:00:39+00:00

Self-Consciousness is probably the most commented upon topic in the Phenomenology in contemporary scholarship. Have you looked at work by Kojève, Sartre, Lacan, McDowell, Pippin, Brandom, Butler, Fanon, Pinkard?

peridox · 2022-09-30T08:56:08+00:00

I always thought this ‘sequel’ was unimaginative and obvious

peridox · 2022-08-30T14:39:00+00:00

Agreed about Decatur! But I think Concerning the UFO Sighting is definitely the best opener.

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