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Wow! I haven't posted here since Christmas, shame since it's fairly pleasant; it's a much nicer place (than Twitter) to just dump thoughts I think.

I finished Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity a couple of days ago and was surprised about how much of it I liked. It was good to work through (not really finished working through it really...) and I think that I'll write up some of our points of disagreement to help sharpen my own position.

In fiction... More D. H. Lawrence, I finished Lady Chatterly's Lover and enjoyed it an embarrassing amount. There was an article I read a while back. though, that said Lawrence's favourite topic was himself and that's very true. I also finished Austen's Mansfield Park which was great, I think I've read all her novels now and this and Persuasion are probably my favourites (I need to reread Emma though, it's been a while).

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decided to read The Handmaid's Tale while I'm at home and can borrow my mum's copy and this is really just a bit much for me

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my little "understand d h lawrence's whole deal" is probably going to force me to reread Nietzsche I fear

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merry christmas tumblr

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hello tumblr... currently making my way through these, they're pretty interesting

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Don't know why I'm planning on reading MacIntyre's A Short History of Ethics almost immediately after a week or so of getting really frustrated with After Virtue but I am

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if you wanna use a sort of Kuhnian notion of paradigm to talk about philosophy do you need to give a good account of "normal philosophy" as part of doing that?

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Reading Kathi Weeks' Constituting Feminist Subjects and it's pretty good... there's some stuff in it that I find very useful and some stuff that I think I disagree with pretty strongly. Not sure about the application of Kuhn's whole concept of paradigms to "theory"/philosophy really, there's something about his analysis that I don't think meshes all that well with those fields but I'm not sure why I think that yet! Her use of the concept is pretty good in this case though and works more or less pretty well.

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I finished Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished today, it's a genuinely incredible book. As well as helping me to understand the ways in which abstractions actually come to rule our lives (the relationship between the law, the economy, and political institutions really 'clicked' for me reading this) it is a deeply moral work that made me furious and sad all at once. It's also a fantastic example of the ways in which theory and history can work together and produce some really impressive historical writing.

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Injury Impoverished is incredible, I should have started reading it long ago

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I love the little phrases philosophy uses: "such-and-such", "so-and-so"

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Putting together my next reading cycle...

Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished is on it because I (shamefully...) only just got a copy.

Not sure about some of the other stuff though, I've been thinking about some arguments that I need/want to be familiar with and I think I'll be looking to get more familiar with different approaches to ethics (and politics, etc.) so I'm going to put some MacIntyre on it but I'm not sure if After Virtue or History of Ethics would be better. Probably the former just because I think he's simultaneously right and wrong about emotivism in the bits of it that I have read.

Otherwise though I'm not sure if I wanna look at more Hume/Smith biographical stuff. For Hume that'd be Hume: An Intellectual Biography by James Harris and for Smith I'd probably take a look at Ian Simpson Ross' biography. On the other hand, my copy of Theory of Moral Sentiments came in a while back and it looks v. interesting...

If I don't look at that stuff though it'll probably lead me to looking at some more feminist history/philosophy, I've been wanting to read Constituting Feminist Subjects for a while and have a few ideas about how it might be relevant to some stuff I'm currently interested in.

Fiction-wise I'm gonna keep going with Lawrence (Rainbow, I've also been reading some of his essays and I've been slowly going through Look! We Have Come Through! by Lara Feigel because I find Lawrence odd and kinda wanna figure him out...) and Tolkein (I will finish the whole trilogy this time). I also want to read Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James and know that the library has a copy.

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Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? is quite good but gosh it's pretty terribly organised. It's got some good analysis of what social construction actually is and what sorts of questions we need to keep in mind when we hear people talk about it though.

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you can basically get to any position you want from the work of any philosopher. this is why I think reason is basically fake.

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I just reread a bit of Bounds of Sense and realised I totally misunderstood it the first time but this time I think I got it... it's a pretty impressive reading of Kant I think, I should read it all sometime

p f strawson...

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p f strawson...

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There's something important to me about writing and the way that the whole process of drafting and editing helps me to organise my thoughts and work through an argument. I think it's kind of sad that so much writing happens in a school context which isn't (in my view, at least) particularly great at getting people to learn and think about the stuff they're interested in. And once it's over it doesn't really feel like there are always a lot of opportunities to write I guess.