/lit/ - Literature

>>14664748
>Or is this meme just a cope from people who don't want to read contemporary philosophy
Nailed it

>>14664748
>Reading Chomsky, Thomas, or Focault

Well that is your first mistake.

>>14664748
You don't need to read the Greeks to understand modern philosophy. You need to read the Greeks in order to become an actual thinking human being. Reading Chomsky will make you a virus, a rat, an intellectual hobo.

>>14664756
Gay and untrue

>>14664761
>He actually reads chomsky

I am going to put my money on you being gay partner.

>>14664755
Which contemporary philosophers build their philosophy upon the foundations laid by the Greeks?

>>14664766
None. That is what I am saying. If you read contemporary philosophers and buy what they are saying, you are going to fuck your mind. You will turn yourself into an insufferable /lit/tard who thinks talking in obtuse postmodern theoretics substitute for actual though.

You should read all of Plato, not just the Republic. You should understand Greek philosophy because, depending on what perspective you want to take on the reality of the presuppositions, it either laid out the ontological presuppositions of (nearly?) all subsequent philosophy or it discovered them. You can't understand the rise of modern science, modern epistemes and regimes of knowledge and paradigms and forms of theory-laden perception and so forth, unless you understand the deliberate Greekifying tendencies of the early modern scientific revolution. You can't understand German idealism unless you understand the scientificizing and mathematizing worldview of the early modern period, derived from the Greeks. And you can't understand anything subsequent to German idealism unless you understand German idealism. The French are deliberately (albeit badly and in a garbled way) derivative of German idealism, while the Anglos sit in the dust and masturbate over pseudo-problems sublated by German idealists.

If you view philosophy as a toolkit from which to derive the bare minimum of tools necessary for serving some social function you value a priori, like dismantling technocracies or beheading plutocrats, then reading Chomsky or Foucault in a vacuum might be for you. But if you want to actually understand the conceptual cosmos from which Chomsky and Foucault sprang, you need to understand the history of spirit, and to start with the Greeks is to get as close to the roots of the history of spirit as you can get without venturing into reconstructive mythology. Even if you presume that the history of man should be studied through some kind of discipline like anthropology, to understand the history of that discipline is to understand the development of its metaphysical and methodological presuppositions, which is to understand the history of philosophical anthropology in the last two hundred years, which is to understand the history of German idealism, which is to understand the history of early modern philosophy, which demands understanding the Greeks.

>>14664748
chomsky is a pseud popfigure who only knows linguistics
focault saw himself as a historian; academic historians don't; he failed his way into being taught only in english depts
Plato won't help you because you don't deserved to be helped

>>14664765
I actually haven't read any Chomsky. But reading Plato can't "teach someone to think"

>>14664748
plato will teach you how to recognize and construct arguments from a series of smaller components. it's from this method that we build things like common law systems.

From I gather, and this is a rough sketch, is that philosophy is a "great conversation" and requires context. The dialectic began with the greeks, and we've moved forward since. The question really is, how much of a conversation can you miss before the topic totally resets, allowing for an entry into the conversation without needing to know what topics came before? Beginning with the greeks and moving onward really is just for context.

>>14664748
Study Zen > Study the Vedas > Read Ramana Maharshi > watch as many videos on the subject as possible > apply until exhausted > throw it all away > read UG Krishnamurti > throw it all away

There you go

>>14664789
Foucault gets taught to masters students in philosophy.

>>14664908
Lol, And? I am supposed to be impressed by the philosophy masters the academy is churning out?

>>14664918
>and
and that contradicts what you said, you are not correct.

>>14664928
I am not the other anon.

all philosophy is just footnotes to Plato lmao

Because the Greeks were baby-tier brainlets. A child watching Baby Einstein knows far more than the Presocratics and nearly as much as Aristotle.

>>14664936
The East dumps on the West in philosophy. Plato is nothing.

>>14664950
t. brainlet

>>14664777
This, bravo. Actual trips of truth.

>>14664950
This. Guenon refuted Plato.

>>14664950

Cuba Gooding's career is worth more than the whole of Greek 'culture'.

>>14664962
>>14664957
Your abstractions got dunked on by the East. The vedas single handily dunk on all the West. Cope

>>14664972

>>14664890
This! When will the brainlets wake up?

>>14664983
Stop posting pictures of yourself

>>14664748
I haven't read anything Greek and generally I don't have problems understanding the philosophy I read. I 100% agree that you need to understand something a philosopher is directly responding to like Kant, but otherwise I don't think you have to read the Greeks unless you are just interested in that.

Also this from Vico
>127 To this conceit of the nations there may be added that of the scholars, who will have it that whatever they know is as old as the world.

>128 This axiom disposes of all the opinions of the scholars concerning the matchless wisdom of the ancients. It convicts of fraud the oracles of Zoroaster the Chaldean, of Anacharsis the Scythian, which have not come down to us, the Poimander of Hermes Trismegistus, the Orphics (or verses of Orpheus), and the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, as all the more discerning critics agree.
>It further condemns as impertinent all the mystic meanings with which the Egyptian hieroglyphs are endowed by the scholars, and the philosophical allegories which they have read into the Greek fables.

>>14664755
/thread

>>14664766
Most recent would be Heidegger.

Go to the Wikipedia article for “Plato”, then check the “influenced” section. Not to mention Plato’s dialogues are a blast to read.

>>14665261
This, Socrates making puns for 50 pages in the cratylus had me rolling.

>>14664950
Plato was initiated in Egypt

>>14664960
>>14664950
>>14664972
Tomberg destroyed Guenon and the Eastern religions. Cope.

>>14664766
Wyand de Beer

>>14665545
Where?

>>14664748
Because those writers read the Greeks

>>14664777
This

>>14664890
>>14664984
oh no im heading down that path somebody save me!

>>14664748
>noah chomsky
lmao
>Focault
To understand Focault, you need to understand Nietzsche's method of genealogy. And if you try telling me that you don't need to read Plato to really grasp Nietzsche then you're retarded

>>14664777
>>If you view philosophy as a toolkit from which to derive the bare minimum of tools necessary for serving some social function you value a priori, like dismantling technocracies or beheading plutocrats, then reading Chomsky or Foucault in a vacuum might be for you.
No. This is utterly and completely false. Those toolkits do not function properly without the gestalt.
Otherwise OP completely and utterly BTFO'd to high heavens.

>>14664755
/thread

>>14665545
As if. Guenon cannot be refuted.

>>14664748
You don't need Plato and Aristotle to understand Chomsky, but you'll need him to understand most of the political thinkers he references to. Even if you think that their political theories are bunk, they're still worth reading because of the endemic influence they've exterted on all the thinkers that came after them. In fact not even Chomsky and Foucault avoided them, you can find references to Plato and Aristotle in many of their books, lectures and interviews.

>>14664945
Yes. Let's just watch movies than read books; same thing & easier to digest

>>14666164
his cryptobuddhism refutes itself

>>14666192
Where's the lie? The Killing of a Sacred Deer has all of the elements of Socrates and Aeschylus. We have surpassed the Greeks in every way.

>>14664964
Snow Dogs alone is worth more than everything done by Chomsky.

>>14666304
Goddamn anon, are we getting old?

>>14664748

i'm tired, so this will be quick:

direct link from plato's idea of the "noble lie" to Chomsky's stupid fucking 5 point consent framework; chomsky basically tries to map out (poorly) what the production of the elite noble lie looks like from the perspective of those being lied to

nagel: the whole idea of a "view from nowhere" is the sublimated version of platonic idea of "forms": plato suggests that there is a world beyond the world we see, that all is illusion, and true knowledge involves looking beyond/through these mortal falsities to the eternal "truth." nagel disagrees, and his position only makes sense because there have been some 2 millennia of others working out positions viz. plato. nagel is hopelessly unoriginal.

foucault: lots to say here, not least of which is foucault's own commentary on the greeks and his return, again and again, to the "technologies" of power/sexuality that were inaugurated with the whole "know thyself" paradigm. more specifically, the soul/city analogy throughout greek literature set the metaphorical/analogical stage for understanding things like madness and civilization in terms of normalcy, degeneracy, strangeness, etc.--the development of these categories are derived from epistemological greek origins (see also canguillem)

and these are only superficial readings, connections

why the fuck are you just so terribly uneducated, so terribly ignorant, so terribly dumb and resistant to knowledge? why is this board such a fucking shithole of morons?

>>14664748
It's a long conversation, and it's sort of like jumping in the middle of it when picking a random late text. It's not a requirement, but it helps to have a general sense of what's going on.

>>14664748
i hope you are kidding? how can you be so stupid? never ever has this board triggered me more lmao

>>14664777
/thread/

>>14667779>>14667564

Hrs probably that one Uber post-modernist that’s been here a while.

>>14664774
This. The Greeks were big brained and could articulate themselves well without sounding like an alien. Despite the fact that they are arguably a lot more detached from us, the modern man.

>>14664777
Aw man, I thought the Republic would be enough

>>14666226
From an insight seeking perspective sure, there is no need for reading the presocratics. But from an anthropological perspective of course its important to know how and why western civ behaves the way it does

>meme cope cringe seethe why should i read book??

zoomers are hopeless

>>14670181
I have no problem reading The Odyssey or Oedipus Rex. Fictional stories have an intrinsic aesthetic value that is independent of influence. The same cannot be said of non-fiction.

>>14664755
no.
the mistake were the greeks themselves

>>14664766
me

>>14668095
If anything you can skip the republic. It's on the lower side of Plato. It's main draw is that it's longer and tackles multiple subjects whereas other dialogues are much more focused. That makes it livelier and more 'realistic' as a discussion (as opposed to doctrinal exposition on dialogue form). It's also quite funny.
In particular regarding politics, people reading the republic only will have strange and contradictory views compared to those that read the political and the laws. But the same can be said of other subjects such as love or beauty or knowledge.

>>14672047
>If anything you can skip the republic. It's on the lower side of Plato.

>>14672058
Yes.
I don't think it has a place in a top ten. It only contains vague analogies and weird ideas just thrown around.
Compare that to the developments of Parminides, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Phaedo, Timaeus, Critias, Meno, Laws, Gorgias, etc...
The republic reads like an 'introduction to Plato' written by the author himself.

>>14664777
Fuck Hegelians