Re: Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, on Humanism and Sartre

On 22 May, 23:12, Lance <LanceG...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 22, 3:12 pm, pas...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Ashby) wrote:

Paul Grieg <pgr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Anyone else have 'high profile' writers they have struck from their
reading lists?

I have tried several times to read Derek Parfitt's Reasons and Persons.
I am told it is close to genius and I am interested in moral philosophy.
I just find it too turgid, it simply sends me to sleep. So I haven't
struck him from my list, partly because I hate to have books I haven't
read (no, I don't have A Brief history of Time). When I have finished
Consciousness Explained I will have little else to read, so maybe one
more time...

Peter

I have given up on Hegel and on Heidegger. In fact I nowadays avoid
most continental philosophy.

I've tried starting Being and Time a couple of time but I've never
made progress.
I recently read through Dreyfuss' "commentary" which sort of made me
want to make another attempt, but I've been putting it ioff for
months :-) My trusted advisor Bryan Magee thinks Heidegger worth
reading. And he doesn't just praise 'big names' because he really
slates Sartre and variou sother obfuscators. Then again, Bryan also
praised Wittgenstein enough to mak eme attempt the Tractatus (again).
I've only just forgiven him for that.

Magee recommends that with difficult philophers you may need 'the best
book' about them to get into them. He specifuies Hegel as being such a
philosopher. Being a devout Schopenhauerian it is surprising that he
recommend reading Hegel at all! Having read Schopenhauer I have been
totally put off reading Hegel.


I am also not that keen on Jung.

I just tried reading the latest 'best of' book of Freud collated by
Adam Phillips in Penguin. I now will never pick up Freud again.literay
types (Harold Bloom) tend to recommend Freud for his style. IMHO its
even wors ethan the worse parts of his substance (Oedipus complex?
Yeah, right.)

Also in said collection various translators are used and you don't
even get a consistent translation for key terms like ego and id, and
there's no explanation of the different terms used. Obfuscation piled
upon obfuscation. Then what can you expect from Adam Phillips. When
writing his own books, he is one of those dangerous writers who appear
clear but deliver nothing but clear mud (his book 'Going sane' almost
drove me insane.)

Some years ago, an experiment was run showing that people would vote
an paper delivered by a skilled actor but deliberately written to be
nonsense as better than a genuine paper delivered by the real author.
So i think we have to be careful with praising writing and delivery.

Yes, Adam Phillips springs to mind again. I think actual physical
appearance also introduces a bias. He has the kind of looks and tonal
qualities that Andrew Lloyd Weber is looking for in his Joseph. Very
dangerous--those types get publishing contracts far too easily (like
all those photogenic young British novelists with nothing to say).
Then again, Pinker is also in that category but he is well worth
reading (How the Mind Works and Blank Slate were superb). So we musn't
get too biased against the good looking ones:-)


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