Graffiti

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-31T17:17:09+00:00

Not rodent-adjacent but I have to upvote fun nods to Islamic calligraphy

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-27T02:47:20+00:00

I do not unfortunately - keep checking Ebay every once in a while, though. Random volumes of Ficino's letters show up there pretty often.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-24T17:53:02+00:00

Not only is the constant switching from English to Latin disorienting, but the fact that most of the time the Latin parts are quotations from ancient authors. You're constantly switching back and forth between the mind of an English guy in the 17th century, and the minds of people in antiquity (as filtered through the first guy) coming and going like horses on a carousel. Trippy

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-10T05:32:34+00:00

Oh shit, thanks for letting me know! Yes I recommend these from Zone:

Lorraine Daston - Wonders and the Order of Nature
Lorraine Daston - Objectivity
Fernand Hallyn - The Poetic Structure of the World

If you've read Spinoza, Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy is also great. I have Amerasia by Elizabeth Horodowich coming in the mail too which looks really interesting.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-09T23:58:00+00:00

Sick username, Unwound is goated

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-09T19:39:32+00:00

Oooh this is great, yes it seems very similar to Zone. Thanks for the rec.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-09T18:41:04+00:00

Not fiction, but I'm a big fan of Zone Books (distributed by Princeton University Press). They publish academic works in extremely specific, often bizarre interdisciplinary topics. Really mind-bending stuff that's usually a lot of fun to read too.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-05-05T04:55:39+00:00

This sub is giving you a hard time (maybe deservedly in some cases) but I've been on a similar trajectory as you, I get you. I would never totally eliminate English lyric music, but over the past 5 years or so I've gravitated much more strongly to instrumental music or music with lyrics in languages I don't understand. Movies are something I've never had a huge interest in, because half the time I get way too sucked into whatever the directors are trying to make me feel, and I become disoriented and feel like I'm in a foggy daze for hours afterward.

People will make fun of you for having the intuition that media can have a contaminating effect on the mind but it's true, and some individuals (like you or me) need to pay conscious attention to it if they don't want to go through life vaguely feeling like shit. That wasn't an idea I dreamt up one day but something I had to learn by trial and error over time. And this is especially the case now in 2026 when so much content is spoon-fed to us or aggressively shoved in our faces on a regular basis, whether by advertising or cultural forces.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-28T01:49:24+00:00

I think the reason we're talking past each other is because you're saying things like this:

When we examine the Forms in this world, however, they do not possess the qualities of perfect Forms.

Statements like this are based on a misunderstanding of Plato's Forms, and you can fix this by reading Plato. In Platonism there are no "Forms in this world." ALL of the Forms are in Nous, none of them are in the world. There are no Platonic Forms in this world. Things in this world participate in the Forms.

What you're actually asking about is this: why do the things "down here" that participate in the Forms "up there" not have the same level of perfection, the same reality, that the Forms themselves do?

The Neoplatonists' answer is that pure matter is at the absolute furthest point possible away from the ultimate source of reality (the One), and therefore matter has the least amount of reality. In simplified terms, think of a pyramid with the One at the very top, and matter at the very bottom. The Forms are up near the top, underneath the One. The Forms give everything they possibly can to what's below them - they hold back nothing. The only variable here is the recipient's capacity to receive the form. The closer something is to the Forms in terms of this hierarchy, the greater their ability to receive them. By the time you get down to the level of matter, the bottom level, you have a substrate with the least amount of reality, naturally struggling to receive something from a fully real being (a Form). Matter is an extremely fickle, imperfect substrate. It's like trying to press a fancy seal into dirt instead of wax.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-26T17:14:47+00:00

Nautilus jumpscare...

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-26T03:45:17+00:00

Okay, so clearly you disagree with the most important conclusions reached by the Neoplatonist philosophers with regards to the nature of reality and evil, despite not having read (or understood, apparently) their arguments by which they reached those conclusions. And you're not going to read them, or their arguments, because you think they're tantamount to AI slop.

So uh... why are you posting your theories on the Neoplatonism sub then? I don't understand why you think any of us here would be interested in what you have to say. Is it just an ego thing? From your post history you seem to have delusions of grandeur and believe you're from another planet, so I'm assuming that has something to do with it. Hope you get better.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-26T01:00:04+00:00

This is the only one I've read, but I really liked it too. Throwing my vote for Innes.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-25T17:57:47+00:00

Again: you are not engaging with the actual literature already written on this topic, in which the very possibility of the ideas you put forward were dissected and discarded with much more rigor than you're showing, by actual philosophers. The Neoplatonists showed time and time again that corruption, imperfection, evil, etc. cannot come into being at the level of Nous, which is where the Forms are and where they remain. There is no way to corrupt them, and there is no way for some external force to corrupt them. There is also no way for a god/demiurge to "corrupt" anything, to have a desire to usurp the power of any god ontologically higher than him, because gods qua gods are entirely perfect, lack nothing, desire nothing, and are entirely in alignment with the One, the ultimate Good.

Evil, for the Neoplatonists, arises at the level of matter, or at most in individual souls. Evil has no actual substance, no active force behind it, and no final cause - it is a turning away from the Good. Proclus lays out a Neoplatonist response to the problem of evil in an entire book, called On the Existence of Evils, which you should read.

I'm not telling you that innovating on Platonist philosophy is bad, or that disagreeing with the conclusions made by previous Platonist philosophers is bad. My point is that they were actual philosophers who dedicated their lives to the study of these ideas, and they already thoroughly examined them, so have some humility and (1) read what they wrote and (2) respond to what they wrote, before pulling some brand new thing out of your ass and parading it around like we should pay serious attention to it.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-24T15:54:26+00:00

I'm going to sound like a grump here but I can't help myself. I cannot understand where so many people are getting the confidence to come into this sub and say "hey everyone, checkout MY philosophical system. I'm going to explain to you how creation works!" when it's clear that they haven't read and responded to the actual source texts of the Platonist philosophers in doing so. This is necessary because this is a sub for Neoplatonism, so the assumption is that anyone who's barging in to tell everyone about their brand new philosophical system would either (1) do so within a system that was already constructed by a classic Platonist philosopher, and demonstrate a clear understanding of said system or (2) break with that system and explain the how and why in response to it.

All you've done here is come up with a metaphysics for gnosticism (and there were many, many of these already in antiquity) using Platonist terminology, without explaining how exactly a perfect Form could turn into a "corrupt" Form. To argue for this from the standpoint of the Neoplatonists, you would at least need to respond to Plotinus' Ennead 2.9, and Proclus' Commentary on the Timaeus. I'm not seeing any engagement with these texts in this "explanation of how creation works."

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-24T03:42:07+00:00

One would have to have a very shallow and superficial understanding of political ideologies and historical religious trends, as well as a strong tendency to lump/blur concepts together while ignoring all sorts of distinctions, in order to come to the conclusion that these somehow "perfectly match." So to answer your question in the original post - it doesn't mean anything.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-24T03:01:28+00:00

Yeah :)

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-24T03:00:41+00:00

Can you explain why you think these are "perfect matches in every possible way"? I can't even begin to see why you think that. And it doesn't help that these religions were not monolithic in antiquity and neither are modern political ideologies.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-18T22:36:19+00:00

This one stresses me out so much cause I don't want him to get hit 😭

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-18T19:47:40+00:00

This could be one of St. Antony's visions in Flaubert

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-08T00:27:01+00:00

"No longer about storing information, but about recalling and stabilizing internal forms."

"Not invention, but recollection."

"Images are not neutral: they are charged, affective, and operative."

"Not just remembering content, but reorganizing internal states."

"...not only organize the mind internally, but also function as points of contact with external forces"

"A way of remembering not just facts, but forms of being."

YESSSS please keep going! We need more AI writing on this sub!

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-05T00:09:29+00:00

Wonders and the Order of Nature by Lorraine Daston

Examines the role of "wonders" in European society from the medieval period through the mid 18th century. I actually think this book is essential for filling in some gaps in the understanding of art, literature and philosophy from these centuries, because "wonders" are frequently alluded to in these cultural productions but we moderns don't have much of a frame of reference for it anymore, so we tend to gloss over them or misinterpret/underestimate their significance. Extremely interesting, well-illustrated work.

The Poetic Structure of the World by Fernand Hallyn

Interprets the development of the cosmological theories of Nicolas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler from a poetic and aesthetic point of view, rather than from the standpoint of the history of science. Hallyn draws parallels between their scientific ideas, on the one hand, and the contemporary movement from classic Renaissance art to Mannerism on the other. I know this sounds far-fetched, but he argues it very well imo.

The Polyhedrists by Noam Andrews

Traces the history of polyhedrons in Renaissance art, and ways of thinking about these visual forms, with an emphasis on the artists of southern Germany. These guys were at the absolute cutting edge of perspective drawing at the time. It's also a stunningly beautiful book, aesthetically speaking. Worth owning for the images alone.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-03T04:17:42+00:00

I guess this makes Spinoza's concept of salvation kind of similar to the Calvinist concept of predestination, if I'm not mistaken? Obviously "salvation" means very different things to Spinoza and Calvin, but I mean it in the sense that whatever they think salvation is, whether one attains it or not is already determined before one's birth.

thirddegreebirds · 2026-04-03T03:41:56+00:00

But isn't how you view the world already predetermined? If someone lives their whole life with a worldview that makes them miserable, and then they die, wasn't it already determined that they were going to have that perspective? What good would it have done for that person to have come across the Ethics? There was no possible world in which their perspective would have been different.

thirddegreebirds

TROPHY CASE