A nine volume series originally written for Catholic students, the fairness, scholarship and objectivity of the work made it popular far beyond its intended audience. The author believes that understanding the context of philosophers, whom they were responding to, and what influenced their views, is vital to engaging with their work in good faith. The history stretches from the pre-Socratics to Sartre.Next week we begin the first volume; giving a few days of grace in case you plan to read from physical copiesIf you wish to keep track of threads or look for other resources, they will be posted on the Criterion Club server on the philosophy and math channelhttps://discord.gg/XhFGx57VKm
Why do it over discord? We have a very nice board here.
>>24976196Audiobooks when?
>>24976824We are doing it in the board unless there aren't enough takers to sustain threads
I've had these books on my shelf for years, so this might give me an excuse to read them, but I. will most likely skip books II and III.
I might participate but I fear that I will get bored during the first three books. I've already read vol.4 and was looking to read the 5 and 6 during next year
Looking for recommendations on futurist novels. It seems like their literary output was mostly poetry. There's pic rel but I don't think it has a complete English translation unfortunately.It doesn't have to be Italian or strictly within the movement, a novel with "futurist themes" would be good too.
>>24976071you didnt answer my question, you copied from a review or synopsis someone else wrote and didnt mention the prose at all. either way i had a flight so i downloaded it and read the first few chapters, its decent but nowhere near as energetic as mafarka and so far not much extended metaphor. i might give it time to make its case (after all, the second to last chapter of mafarka is by far the best).
>>24971558I really need to learn Italian. So much interesting literature
>>24976332French anon, French. Mafarka was written in French and only translated into Italian by somebody else.
>>24976385Yes yes. But Marinetti wrote other novels in Italian. Also Palazzeschi, Corra, Carli, Rosà, Papini, Bontempelli, ecc.
>>24976897All only relevant insofaras theyve been translated to french, sadly.
The purpose of literature is to entertain. Since time immemorial, from the fireplace to the stage to the big screen, the primary function of the storyteller is to entertain.Grug's tale of the hunt is entertainmentThe Iliad is entertainmentThe Oresteia is entertainmentBeowulf is entertainmentShakespeare is entertainmentFlashman is entertainmentWhy did literature turn away from entertainment in the 19th century? For example, Moby Dick is a patently boring book. It is impossible to enjoy. It is not an engaging story. You could not read it out to someone and expect to keep their attention. Yet it is praised for every other reason than being entertaining. It is praised *despite* the absence of anything compelling.In my view, someone who reads fiction for reasons other than entertainment is a decadent and degenerate. They pretend to read. It is subterfuge. They have ulterior motives. They are liars.Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
I've got midwit fatigue
>>24974777Entertainment is only bad in proportion to how much it makes you forget yourself. Any arrangement of activities that puts *you* in control, in other words doesn't appeal to pure senses, or pure reason alone too much is good.
>>24974777>The purpose of literature is to entertainSays who? Consumerism is relatively new.>Moby Dick is patently boringAs opposed to the thrilling plotline of Symposion or Leviticus?
>>24975229>>The purpose of literature is to entertain>Sez who?Sez me>>24974777Boy do I have an author for you
>>24974777The claim that “the purpose of literature is entertainment” oversimplifies the entire history of storytelling. Entertainment has always been one function of narrative, but never the only one. From ancient epics to medieval sagas to Shakespeare, stories have served to transmit cultural memory, teach moral lessons, explore identity, critique power, and shape the imagination. Even the works cited as “pure entertainment” — the Iliad, Oresteia, Beowulf — were deeply tied to ritual, religion, and moral instruction. Reducing them to entertainment alone flattens what they actually were.The idea that literature “turned away from entertainment” in the 19th century also misunderstands the period. That era didn’t abandon entertainment; it expanded the possibilities of fiction. Popular writers like Dickens, Dumas, and Conan Doyle thrived, while others used the novel to explore psychology, society, and metaphysics. Works like Moby-Dick may not appeal to everyone, but calling them “impossible to enjoy” is a subjective reaction, not a universal truth. Many readers genuinely find them profound, funny, or moving. Disliking a book is fine; declaring that anyone who likes it is lying is not a literary argument — it’s projection.More broadly, fiction has always been more than amusement. As thinkers like Chesterton argued, stories shape the moral imagination. They help us rehearse virtues, empathize with others, and imagine what a good life looks like. Children instinctively use stories this way, and adults need it just as much. When fiction is dismissed as mere entertainment, we lose sight of its deeper role in forming character and meaning. A culture that stops telling rich, aspirational stories doesn’t stop needing them — it simply forgets how to cultivate them.
I've never personally found any argument against suicide that really convinces me. The more philosophy I read, the more many common objections seem based on instinct or emotion rather than careful reasoning. When people call suicide "murder" or "unnatural" they often ignore that a right to life should also include the right to give it up, and that nature itself isn't a moral authority. If it were, we wouldn't use medicine to prevent or delay natural deaths. The claim that suicide is selfish also feels very one-sided. It can just as easily be seen as selfish to expect someone to keep living with unbearable mental or physical suffering simply so others don't have to feel grief. None of us chose to be born, and being stuck in a life that has become intolerable is a tragedy, not a moral failure. I think society has a strong optimism bias that makes people assume life is better than it really is for everyone. When someone experiences life mainly as a heavy burden, ending their life can be a rational way to take back control over something they never chose.
Any conception of reason necessarily negates suicide. Only the living have purpose.Any values whatsoever demands a life to have them. So unless death leads to a better life then suicide is self defeating.
>>24976419How many times must I explain thisDon't commit suicide, go out in a kamikaze strike against politicians, CEOs, critics, insurance bankers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists etcThe argument against suicide is that by only killing yourself then you're wasting a life that could be used to kill actual parasites instead
>>24976672Idk man, seems evil to send people with mental illness or chronic pain to hell for killing themselves after you engineered their existence
>>24976771>bringing new lifeIt's just recycling
>>24976441>>24976529Totally absurd. The Father killed countless times, even, and especially, when banishing Adam and Eve. The Son killed the fig tree, and possibly some demons. The Spirit killed Judas. Angels killed Sodomites. Your salvation is contingent on yourself being, at least partially, killed.
I just want to learn what's so appealing this genre
Do you have any more images like your pic?
>>24976243Read the title of the thread before posting
>>24976052Just admit you want to fuck a tall, blonde, big breasted Norwegian woman who knows how to wrestle.
>>24976287lol
>>24976052>I just want to learn what's so appealing this genreAnon, are you familiar with the concept of masturbation?
Whenever I read literature pre-1960s I kind of amused at how normalized it is for characters to seek out prostitutes. I was just reading lolita and Humbert has many moments with french streetwalkers in the beginning.It's almost like they were a normal facet of men's lives back before internet porn and feminism. It's almost like the concept of casual sex with a normal woman was unimaginable Were brothels really that common back then?
>>24976815But they're hypergamous they would much rather date wealthier more educated men
>>24974623this is bait
>>24976759Paris
>>24974649He's right tho, catholic countries have historically been less sexually prudish. Protestants don't have the confession sacrament.
Yes, very common, consider how much more widespread poverty was, what was the path of least resistance for a starving woman who was also attractive? Consider also courtesansNowadays we are much less lustful too. Imagine in the past when men were not eating much processed slop, weren't pacified by the internet, and engaged in hard physical labour, their libidos would appear demonic to us, the men of past would make us look like sissy faggotsIn general, the underworld of the past was much more prevalent. Hell even in the last 50 years you can see how much the underworld has disappeared, what was once a place of freedom away from the constraints of "peaceful civilisationn"
Hey guys, I'm from /tv/ and wanted to talk to you guys about the best translation for the odyssey to read before I watch the movie. Do I also need to read the illiad as well or can I skip that one, I've heard its sort of a prequel but surely isn't that important if they're not making a movie of it. I've done a a bit of digging and heard that Fitzgerald, Wilson and Fagles are among the best translations but wanted to know what you guys think. I know these might be stupid questions but please go easy on me guys, I don't really read books with translations (or books in general) but wanted to give it a shot.
>>24975070Fagles or nothing
>>24975489Lattimore for accuracy, so you can properly understand what's being said.Fitzgerald for the poetic experience, so you can appreciate it after you understand it.
I recently heard someone describe Green's translation as "the modern revision of Lattimore's more faithful translation of the Illiad". Any anons able to confirm or deny the validity of this claim? I wanted to like Lattimore but he has some real odd word choices here and there that really pull me out of it. I want to read something a little more faithful to the original Greek text before reading a more poetic version that takes artistic liberties.
What's a good Spanish translation?
What the closest version to the Butler but with greek God names rather than Roman?
no i amn't
>>24976147
>>24976184looks like a fag no cap
>>24971735>>24976046>>24976184Imagine the smell.
I would like to have sex with a beautiful trans girl
Kind of impressive that a man can profess Marxism for decades, study it to its entirety comfortably from the ivory tower of a cushy position in literal Marxist academia under a Communist regime, finding out from a sympathetic position everything that there is to be found about Marxism from its earliest proponents to its latest ones, the least and the greatest, only to eventually arrive at the conclusion that... it's all fundamentally wrong and can never workI mean when even this guy with all his sympathy and effort gave up, it's telling, isn't it?
>>24976163Newtonian physics is a model used because it works for everything that isn’t subatomic or going at non-relativistic speeds. I take it Marxism is a model? Value in an economy is a quantifiable metric, it needs to have formulas to derive it.
>>24976175What do you propose the agreement to quantify it be based on?
>>24974879Orwell already observed this back in the thirties. It's a fixed characteristic of Marxism.
>>24974879Every other group of people pretends the working class is doing fine, which necessarily means they have to pretend their plebeian degeneracy is 'fine'. Workers don't understand what's good for them at all.
>>24975233>no one would pay for 8 hours of labor creating mudpies,This is clearly false. Many people do get paid to do basically nothing productive or they produce useless things people pay lots of money for. And they are often not capitalists but wage slaves. What's the explanation for that? Is it entirely a psychological side effect of people living under capitalism? I doubt that very much. >>24975794How does the LTV account for the quality of different nail designs, raw material and labor being equal? How can these fundamental aspects of a commodity's value be quantified based on labour alone? How is the unit of labour value even computed in the first place once mechanization is implemented?Also what about the systems that need to be designed, refined, implemented, and maintained to actually create the means to produce commodities, let alone innovate? Those do not require any labour per se and produce no commodities directly, what is their value?It seems obvious to me that fitness for intended purpose or some other metric that depends on the buyer's perceived value of the commodity is just as if not more important than the labour input.
We will be reading picrel books, one a month, in the next year. Who's with me
>>24974759link pdf and i'll shill it on the cord for a week>>24974771i was only assigned Shakespeare(pbuh), although amerifats made to study fagger in the rye probably cannot relate
>>24973020half those books are like 150 pages how are you gonna space them out over a month
>>24975023you have to supplement it with bom. but i am still preparing the epub.>>24974822i'll be ready in early jan
>>24975053cool cool, excited to read it anon
>>24973020Replace To The Lighthouse or The Waves with Three Lives and probably replace Tristam Shandy, I don't see many here getting through that in a month.
What do you think?
>>24975433it works better as a prompt for chatgpt than as a religious text
Basically the most perfect book ever. It alongside Joseph Smith's other works perfect the whole series of revelatory books.
>>24975433Heresy of the most ridiculous sort.
>>24976879Actually no, there is nothing heretical about the Book of Mormon, it even says on the title page if there are any faults they are the mistakes of man, that basically means it can never be (and shouldn't be anyway) imposed as a rule of faith, whereas heresies force people to believe in added words of man.
19th century version of this
So Holden was a tard wrangler?
He raped his sister, Phoebe.
What books did you receive from Santa this year /lit/?Not gonna post a pic but I got: >The Encyclopedia of Demonology & Witchcraft>The Imago Sequence by Laird Barronand>a first edition printing of Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison Fairly modest haul but you know what, I'm satisfied. Merry Crimbus everybody!!!
>a confederacy of duncesAbout halfway through it and loving it>the pickwick papers by Dickens >candide by Voltaire
>random house's version of the egyptian book of the dead>frieren vol 8>1st volume of that official elden ring mangai dont typically buy at retail chains but i got a $50 b&n gift card
Just returned from Indigo. Here's my haul.
>>24976662Why bother with softcover books when you can get a lot of these books at the library?
>>24976714It's honestly a pretty solid boxset. There are better bound books for each but if you're just looking to explore authors there are worse places to start.
This board just doesn't get it.You complain about how the industry is just women writers and publishers now and yet you all talk and act like women.The few who don't, run and hide in 100 year old books as the current time is just a little bit too difficult for them.You were born in the one time that truely needed male writers and yet you ignore the call. Just know that all those old authors you read look down on you in disgust as they watch you let the flame of literature burn out under your watch while doing absolutely nothing.
>>24976793Im working on a novel, I may also consider a poetry project of a new type of poetry that the world has never seen before, but the novel has to come first.
>>24976800Nice work, Anon.I've had several short stories and about a dozen poems published, and have been at work on a major project since 2020 that I'm on the verge of beginning to self-publish.Take heart, we're all gonna make it. We WILL save literature.
This board is a containment chamber for idealists who need to justify writing their novels, conflating that with literature still being meaningful. If you disagree, they unleash their pedantic midwittery upon you, choosing to argue over semantics and definitions and completely missing the point. It's basically a place where people who can't accept no one cares about reading anymore come to console themselves, me included.
>>24976800Hell yeah. Admittedly, I'm a better essayist and editor than a novelist, so I don't think I'm going to make the next Great American Novel. I sometimes think it'd be nice to have something of a fraternal literary circle, a digital Stratford-on-Odeon for young men wanting to buck the system. I think the romantic notion of the author being an individual who follows their genius is attractive to a lot of people here for pretty obvious reasons. But it's much more typical for writers to know publishers or other writers, seclude themselves, and then return with their work later. The internet is great for getting good work to the top... but it's fucking shit at developing talent.
>>24976761I'm here because I enjoy reading books and, tangentially, people writing about books.
Every year I make a couple reading lists, fashioned after a syllabus, for certain topics I want to know more about. Pictured is an example for someone wanting to get into some Early Modern Philosophy. I also make one every year as a general reading list. More recently I've been wanting to make one for general occult knowledge, but only have Manly P Hall's The Secret of the Ages. Anyone have a good occult reading list?
>>24973356what app u did that in?
>>24973748neovim
>>24973356There are many lists on Goodreads, but since anyone can add any book, they offer variety but not always quality. However, there are some good lists.Rene Guenon is one of the authors who wrote most seriously about occultism. He should be on every list on the subject.https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/14729https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/5058
unironically lurk /x/
>>24974224is that a markdown extension?
