Current Readings

I suppose it is long past due for another post. I have fallen out of the habit of writing over the past two months, which is a shame, but that sort of thing happens from time to time.

Comments are again enabled. They were disabled because of issues that I shouldn’t discuss here. But that’s a different story.

This morning, I started yet another book, which brings my total of current readings projects up to some uncountable number. This was is simply titled Aristotle, by Christopher Shields, a “Tutor” of Ancient Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. I am not exactly sure what the title of “Tutor” means, but a quick look at wikipedia states that it is comparable to American “Teaching Assistants,” ie, post-graduate students who assist a lecturing professor and frequently run lab-type study groups. But he’s a scholar, and it’s been refreshing to read a well-written and informative account of Aristotle’s life and philosophy. Aristotle, of course, wrote on nearly every subject under, over, and including the sun, and it is doubtful that any single individual in the history of Earth has had a comparable influence on intellectual pursuits. I have only read a small fraction of his works, namely Ethics, Poetics, and parts of Rhetoric, Categories, Metaphysics, Politics, and De Anima. Nevertheless, I have spent 10 years studying philosophy and 4 teaching it, and that has inevitably given me a basic understanding of his most important concepts, such as his four causes and the substance/attribute/accident divide. Philosophers throughout Western civilization have used and/or critiqued these concepts, and they are as familiar to most philosophers as Aristotle’s logic. Anyway, I’m excited about the book because it will help me quickly and efficiently fill in a lot of my gaps and refine the knowledge I already have. Hopefully someday I’ll have the time to read more of Aristotle’s gigantic corpus.

For lighter reading, I’ve started reading George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I read the “Song of Ice and Fire” series’s first four books six years ago, but with the recent release of the fifth book, A Dance of Dragons, and the new HBO series, I thought it was time to start again. I remember when I first read these, though the going was initially slow, I was eventually reading for 16 hours straight, occasionally staying up until 4am. It brought me back to my high school days when my true introduction to obsessive reading began by reading Dungeons & Dragons inspired “Dragonlance” novels. Though a fantasy series, ” A Song of Ice and Fire” is quite subtle in its fantasy elements. Although from the very first chapter, the reader knows there is a supernatural presence in the world, from the perspective of the vast majority of its world’s inhabitants, the supernatural is not confirmed. In other words, the lived experience of most of its characters, at least initially, is very realistic, perhaps even exactly what it would have been like to live in Europe in the 14th century. Then, there was so much about the world that was unexplainable, and so many myths and fears about supernatural powers, that pragmatically speaking, the supernatural was as real for 14th century Europeans as it is for the overwhelming majority of ASOIAF inhabitants. The world is gritty, some people are horrid and others heroic, but usually in a very believable way. I remember reading this and loving it because although I knew there was some supernatural force in that world, I didn’t know to what extent it was real, where the truth ends and the myth begins, and I felt some measure of the fear that the characters also felt.

I picked up A Dance of Dragons today, even though I won’t get to it for a while. I was going to wait for the softcover, since the hardcover is huge and expensive at $37! But I saw the book in my favorite bookstore, “Unabridged Books,” it was so beautiful, and at a 20% discount my resolve failed.

Here’s a quicker list of the other books I’m currently working on:

The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Steven Nadler. Nadler is one of my favorite current Spinoza/17th century philosophy scholars, currently teaching at UW-Madison. Possible Worlds is a historical/scholarly book is ostensibly about the metaphysical and theological debates between Leibniz, Malebranche, and Arnaud. However, it is much more than that, introducing the reader to a large panoply of figures, as well as the world of Paris and Europe in the late 17th century. I am thoroughly loving it thus far, though lately I’ve been reading a mere few pages per week and even decided to start over.

Pensees, by Pascal. I read this last fall, but it has such tremendously profound sections that it has been a constant companion for months. With few lengthy and no technical arguments, it is a great book to pick at casually.

The Essays, by Michel de’Montaigne. This is a massive collection of essays written by the grandfather of essays himself. I have been very slow-going at this. I started by reading one essay every morning, but then I hit some much larger ones and haven’t forced the time. Supposedly, Pascal said, after reading this, that it granted him 30 years worth of experience and wisdom. High praise, indeed. I have loved the Essays thus far, and believe I have grown in my wisdom because of it, but thus far, only by a year or two.

Nichomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, though I am reading this for my class. It makes me happy.

A number of essays about Spinoza, picking at them, not completing them.

The Seven Ages of Paris, by Alistair Horne. Inspired by reading the Nadler book, I decided I wanted to remedy by ignorance about this personally under-appreciated city by reading this highly acclaimed history. Did you know that Paris was legendarily founded by that very same son of King Priam, the man who basically started the Trojan-Greek war and killed Achilles? I guess I should have guessed.

The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer and A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. Both books on education, they both deliver a good message. I’m nearly done with Courage, but haven’t touched it in a couple weeks, and have only just started A New Culture. Courage‘s basic message is that a teacher needs to get in touch with their inner-selves and channel that to influence guide their teaching and connect with their students in an authentic and beneficial way. That’s a great message, but one that I’ve fortunately learned from my teaching mentors, as well as from philosophers like Nietzsche, Socrates, and Dewey. It’s probably a lesson that a lot of teachers could use. But I’m just hoping to pick up a couple of good lessons and finish this book as soon as possible. It feels like a lot of fluff.

Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, by Robert Pippin. Pippin is best known as a Hegel scholar at the University of Chicago, but this examination of Nietzsche is excellent and interesting. Not since Kaufman’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ has a book about Nietzsche been so eye-opening. I started this book last September, and it was Pippin stating early on that Nietzsche was more influenced by the French moralists than by traditional sources that turned me on to Pascal and Montaigne. I put it down for a few months because I lack discipline (there is much of that in my life) but have been back at it, though I started over.

So, that’s basically it. Most of my reading time is actually taken up by whatever class readings we are doing, so this list is quite incomplete, but it’s hard to list because they are so frequently changing.

I guess my version of “light summer reading” is “light reading of many heavy books,” though there are admittedly a few light ones in there as well.