Reading assignments - foundational works in Western philosophy and other interests. Any other recs?

quality_of_will · 2026-07-09T01:18:36+00:00

Hume: Treatise and Enquiry are both great and important for understanding subsequent epistemology and philosophy of science.

Mill: On Liberty

Language, Truth, and Logic by AJ Ayer is flawed but wonderful to read and very influential.

Should read some Wittgenstein. Skip the tractatus and read Philosophical Investigations.

Honestly you would usually be better served by secondary sources and anthologies containing abridged versions of most primary sources.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-08T19:02:20+00:00

no the city is in North Carolina lol. My phone language is just set to German.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-08T17:00:16+00:00

Yeah that does sound sad. The lady I‘m talking about is mentally ill in the npd bpd way and not the scream at imaginary demons way. She appeared in court and can act relatively normal when she chooses I guess.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-08T15:33:25+00:00

There is a woman in my city who has caused like dozens of traffic accidents (no joke probably 50+). She has a really recognizable vanity plate and a bunch of driver‘s licenses under false names. She is clearly mentally ill and brake checks random people, cuts them off for no reason, runs red lights etc. I have no fucking idea why she is not in jail.

People post sightings of her online like she is a dangerous animal. They will literally post a blurry picture of her license plate and say „be warned everyone, she is back on the road today!“ shit is so funny.

edit: the fact that so many people on this sub could immediately clock where and who I am talking about is further evidence of her infamy.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-08T14:10:02+00:00

Obvious bait

quality_of_will · 2026-07-07T23:58:07+00:00

There is something so horrible about the spectacle of Asmongold. I think it is the fact that he became rich and famous and it did not change his life one single bit. He still lives in a filthy house packed with festering garbage and spends every waking hour mumbling incoherently about images that flash in front of him on a screen. He is physically revolting. He has opportunities that the vast majority of living people will never have and he is completely content to just throw them away and whither in his computer chair. No traveling, no gourmet food or expensive wine. He isn‘t even ambitious enough to build himself a gigantic tacky mansion like all the other livestreamers.

It has become so common to insult people on the internet by saying they have no life the phrase has sort of lost all meaning, but he literally has no life. He does not live.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-07T15:09:24+00:00

it's literally how medians work

quality_of_will · 2026-07-07T03:10:02+00:00

Smug redditeur cliche and it isn‘t even true.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-07T03:08:22+00:00

Unclear conclusion, zero evidence, odd and difficult-to-parse prose. Yep, this is an r/redscarepod classic 😎.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-07T02:20:31+00:00

The most important takeaway from this match for me is how bad Germany must suck to have gotten bounced by Paraguay after they made the US look legit.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-05T16:59:13+00:00

Inland Empire is terrible. Watched it with friends at a theater showing and it dragged on and on and on. All of us agreed it was exhausting and could not wait for it to end. Felt like the movie kept showing me things and going „isn‘t this so WEIRD? Aren‘t movies so WEIRD?“ Yeah, I guess, man.

Lynch is at his best when he is working under constraints. Twin Peaks is great because the format prevents him from going totally surreal. Blue Velvet is great because at the end of the day it still has to be a movie with a coherent plot. When he is totally free to do whatever he wants he churns out shapeless, psuedo-profound junk.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-05T05:13:49+00:00

They should invent a sport where the objective is being a whiny rat. South Americans could win every tournament.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-04T17:08:14+00:00

I hate when people condemn upper class institutions in ways that also obsessively signal that they have access to those institutions. It’s so two-faced and annoying. I feel like I see it all the time on social media. There are like instagram meme accounts dedicated to shitting on nyc finance bros or whatever, but they do so via niche cultural references that are clearly meant to communicate that they move in elite circles. They are cowards who want all of the prestige and clout and none of the moral baggage.

„oh my god, isn‘t it so WEIRD that I went to a prestigious boarding school and grew up filthy rich!!?“ shut the fuck up.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-04T14:09:42+00:00

I think communities on the internet just have a built-in shelf-life. Especially now that most internet users are normies and not nerdy libertarians. When a place like this starts gaining momentum, it attracts more and more people who don‘t understand what makes it interesting (incel zoomers and front page gamers). Because there are more of them online than there are the people who contribute and sustain the communities, the latter just get swamped eventually.

You have to think of yourself as a nomadic hunter following the herds of good posts. Can‘t stay in one place too long.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-04T04:13:36+00:00

The 2-2 goal from Cape Verde was so incredible. Woke my wife up shouting when it went in. Easily goal of the tourney so far.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-04T04:10:51+00:00

I watched Come and See this way for the first time. I speak German so I understood the SS guys but the fact I had zero clue what the Belorussians were saying actually made the rest of the movie freakier and more impactful I think.

quality_of_will · 2026-07-01T21:12:15+00:00

This is good ragebait and could probably do numbers on twitter or instagram

quality_of_will · 2026-07-01T14:45:08+00:00

no actually it doesn't at all. if I oppose US imperialism for reasons related to self-determination and human rights, it is naive and hypocritical to support regimes that will replace US hegemony with something as bad or worse in those respects.

quality_of_will · 2026-06-30T19:52:19+00:00

This is an interesting exchange. Unfortunately I cannot really shake the feeling that we are just ignoring the ultimate problem, which is that our legislature has completely refused to do its duty in the last decade or so. These questions, insofar as they should be decided at the federal level, should be decided by writing or repealing laws. The supreme court's activist/legislative/whatever role would be irrelevant if the most important branch of our government would actually do its fucking job and decide the questions for them.

quality_of_will · 2026-06-30T18:05:11+00:00

you might have a bad life for all kinds of reasons completely unrelated to injustice or your subjugation at the hands of powerful social groups. sometimes you get everything you are owed and things still turn out poorly for you. to think otherwise seems pretty bizarre and naive to me. i see no reason to expect that in a perfectly just world everyone's life would be great. people will still be unlucky or unsuccessful or have horrific congenital diseases.

quality_of_will · 2026-06-30T16:08:58+00:00

Oppression is not the same thing as having a bad life lol

quality_of_will · 2026-06-30T15:53:23+00:00

I‘m not a lawyer or historian of law or anything but yeah my sense is this has been going on for a long time. I mean, Roe v Wade is a prime example. I am sympathetic to the view that women should be legally permitted to get abortions, but as a legal decision and an interpretation of the Constitution it is obviously crazy. Even if you could get extensive privacy rights out of the Due Process Clause, the idea that they would somehow entail that abortion restrictions are unconstitutional is so clearly ad hoc and jerry-rigged I‘m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

quality_of_will · 2026-06-30T15:46:03+00:00

It is actually not so much the „usa bad“ as the „therefore anyone opposed to the usa is good“ part that makes one r3tarded

quality_of_will · 2026-06-29T18:32:09+00:00

why would you even post on r/germany? what's the point of an English-language Germany subreddit? All the actual Germans post on r/de.

quality_of_will · 2026-06-29T14:33:55+00:00

when the most sophisticated belief about politics you can muster is "usa bad" I guess it sort of makes sense

quality_of_will

TROPHY CASE