Frobisher Smith
A fantastic and haunting novel. Written and published at a time, in 1938, right before the onset of WWII, the books perhaps contained a “geopolitical” dimension that would be largely absent for a reader today. But that by no means diminishes its power. A dark and dreamlike story of an officer and his life at a distant desert fortress, with its clockwork, quotidian existence, that beyond the foolish hopes and secret desires, remaining unspoken within the soldiers of the fort, is a canvass for a life empty of meaning. Mindless adherence to labyrinthine guard protocol leads to the death of a young, exuberant soldier. Minute glimpses of hope kindles within the men, and festers into delusions that they allow to sideline their careers and lives, remaining at the Fort when they could leave. And then, when the time comes to leave, it is too late. Modern life is cruel in ways not present in older ages, it drains existence of its meaning and this novel is a stark warning and frightening vision of a life lost to empty hope and the ghastly inertia of believing one “still has plenty of time.”
A rather dry introduction to the topic of annotation, with a focus on current projects and technologies making use of comment and annotation systems. I found it interesting, but a little too shallow of a dive into the meaty issues of ethics, power, as well as issues of credibility and access, which were hardly touched on. The book is mostly focused on the educational and social aspects of annotation, and so if that is your background you might get more out of this. There was also only a very minute amount of text covering the history and evolution of annotation, which I feel was a major misstep. I recommend it as a part of a study of the practice of annotation and current issues surrounding it, but not as a casual read – it is too dry and technical for that.
This monumental work telegraphed nearly the entirety of the alternative research after it, it is the very definition of influential. The History Channel exists primarily to spin-off material covered in this book. Giants, mutants, ancient mysteries, alchemy, parapsychology, the occult origins of the Nazis – it is an omnibus of the strange, sometimes disturbing, but always compelling world outside of the staid, scientific perspective prevalent in our normal daily lives. It took me a while, I put it down for a bit, because it is so dense and packed with information. Highly recommended! If you have claims of being an alternative researcher yourself, or merely a lover of the arcane, this is an essential item for your library.
Lakatos' wit and brilliance shines though in even the most dense and technical sections of this collection of essays written by him on the Philosophy of Science. His main thesis being that specific theories or notions of paradigms do not adequately explain the actual functioning and history of science, and that science can be better understood as a competition between research programmes in various states of degeneration or progression, with scientific progress being tied to an increase in the novel content of scientific theories and what Lakatos refers to as a “progressive problemshift,” or the shifting of a scientific issue towards a higher understanding, without assuming this process will eventually terminate with absolute, unerring Truth.
He is primarily in conversation with Popper and Freyerabend throughout the text, though he cites numerous other philosophers and scientists. It can be said that he deftly moves beyond Popper's falsificationist framework, though it is less certain he adequately answers Freyerabend's critique. It seems to me that Lakatos is generally correct in his reasoning, and his historical and theoretical considerations on Science are of a quality unmatched by anyone else I've read. He has a depth of understanding that should not be ignored, and I highly recommend reading this if you have an interest in the History and/or Philosophy of Science.
Lefebvre argues here that the modern world we live in is bounded by the philosophies of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Separately, these philosophies are incomplete and partially applicable to the reality we see today. But, taken together, can be seen as an almost inescapable philosophical penumbra which we all operate under. Today one can see easily that they are the Hegelian subject, the Marxist class identity, and the Nietzschean body, all at once and seemingly unavoidably. This shadow realm is bounded up with the State, with Capital, and with Will. Yet there is light beyond this, Lefebvre insists. Beyond the realm of shadows is the possibility of the production of space, and of a “double breakthrough,” of both the objective and subjective worlds – of a world not as political, as ideational, but as a truly social and poetic space.
This is a deep and deftly woven discussion of, in Lefebvre's estimation, the three most unavoidably important philosophers of our contemporary era. His reading of Nietzsche is regarded as particularly influential, being one of the earliest “leftist” interpretations. He makes a point to note, in this book, his disagreement with Lukács, whose critique of Nietzsche from the left is quite harsh. However, it was his section on Hegel here that I personally found most interesting and informative. All in all this is an amazing and engaging work that I recommend to anyone remotely interested in Philosophy.
This took me quite awhile to read, but I am very glad I did. Not sure I can do it justice with a short review, it is dense, well argued, nuanced, and highly detailed. The world of Ancient Athens is painted in close detail, as an examination of the material conditions brings into relief the real values and power centers of the city.
There is a full-throated defense of democratic ideals, and of their genuine importance to Athens success. Woods gives a strong argument that the Democracy of Athens was not dependent primarily on slaves for its basic agricultural production and labor, and instead was mostly dependent on the farmer and the peasant farm-worker, and indeed this is why they ended up with such an elevated status, for that time, as Peasant-Citizens and given a democratic voice.
While Guenon is limited in certain ways, and has a few idiosyncratic interpretations of things, he is nonetheless a fantastic source for comparative religion and mythology. This book is his major attack on materialism and the lesser ‘spiritism' of the parapsychological world, which he identifies as a purely psychic, inferior (“infernal”) source of energy, removed as most as can be possible from the true source of spirit, the divine.
He maintains that the materialist scientism inaugurated by Descartes, culminating in the “Reign of Quantity” which can be rather readily described in the world around us today, has already largely run its course, yet a “return to tradition” will not happen. Instead, the development of a false, “counter-tradition” will take place that will set the stage for the final drama of the age, and then in a turn of events that is not comprehensible to us profane, who are trapped within the understanding of things available to us in this age (the Kali Yuga), there will be a final “rectification” and the entire cycle of ages will begin again, complete with its own golden age to start out with.
In some parts Guenon is even accelerationist, describing how this “quantizing” process of modernity will speed up and this will speed up the reckoning of time itself, the tempo of everything will accelerate until a point at which the cycle shifts, and the “quality” of time, seen in the cyclical dance and shifting emotionality of seasons and lunar cycles, reasserts itself. The book is a bit dry and repetitive, but there's still plenty of interesting things in it. I personally think the little esoteric asides and notes are well worth the admission price of the sometimes dreary Traditionalist prose.
A wonderful little compilation of poetry by Classical Roman poet and practical philosopher, Horace (Horatius), rendered in the original Latin as well as in some decent, certainly passable English verse by Stephen Harrison, whose expert commentary is also quite welcome. The choices are arranged by the topics of finding the good life, friendship, love (and lust), and, the final frontier for us all, as Horace reminds us frequently: death. Selections are pulled from the full range of Horace's works, Odes and Epistles featuring most heavily.
I really enjoyed reading this, and if the other editions in the Princeton little hardcovers series of “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” are of similar quality, I could see myself having a number of them in my personal library. Very recommended as an introduction to the poetry and wisdom of Horace.
An exceedingly good book by French polymath scholar Amaury de Riencourt. Riencourt must certainly be in the running with Toynbee for producing the most-prescient Post-Spenglerian account of history. His “spiral” formulation of the path of history deftly accounts for the cyclical evolution of culture to civilization to moribund tyranny and the slow, but real progression and advancement of world civilization as it journeys nomadically from empire to empire.
In this, his most well known work (first published in 1952), he argues that only an abnormally high civilizational self-awareness coupled with supreme effort can stem the historical tide of America's process of turning from a republic to a world empire led by an autocratic Caesar. Not only because the USA purposefully modelled itself on the Roman republic, but because the Western European culture that is the heritage of American culture, is itself the result of this cyclical process, the logic of social organization from loose confederation, to united republic, to world empire is, one might say, “baked in.”
The Caesars are coming, and it will not be a partisan dispute, as just like in Rome: there will be Caesars from both parties. Some might even argue, they are already here.
A very nice introduction and summary to Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorem in which he proved any sufficiently complex formal system that can be represented within an arithmetic system has to be in some way incomplete. In short, he demonstrated that within a formal system there are statements that it will be capable of generating that must remain undecidable, as well as the existence of theorems which are true but which cannot be derived from the axiomatic statements of the formal system.
I highly recommend this if you are curious about Gödel's Theorem and have a basic understanding of set theory and formal logic. I think it does a great job taking you through the steps of the theorem and explaining things along the way, as well as explaining why it is important, as it points to the limits of formal systems and to the nature of their meta-statements, which cuts to the quick of mathematics; limiting certain notions about provability in maths all the way down to basic number theory and arithmetic.
Essentially, this is a mixed bag of early 20th century thinkers involved or associated with the Cosmism movement: a fantastical socialist utopian ideology that revered science to near worship-level and felt the telos of society was pointed, ultimately, towards immortality and interplanetary life. There are many intriguing highlights and interesting portions of this, but also a large amount of absurd notions and half-baked ideas.
The opening essays by Alexander Chizhevsky are very interesting and eye-opening, and the one essay present here by Nikolai Federov is truly inspiring. Valerian Muravyev's essay, “A Universal Productive Mathematics” was a delight, and deeply informed philosophically. It intriguingly prefigures notions currently being developed today, such as the Constructor Theory of quantum physicist David Deutsch. Far less enjoyable were sections written by “Anarcho-Biocosmist” Alexander Svyatogor, which I struggled to get through, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's essays were, in some aspects, interesting, but mostly very dated and bizarre. The final part, a short story by Alexander Bogdanov, is very good.
Overall it was quite enjoyable, though one can't help thinking while reading it, “ah, so this is why Cosmism never really got anywhere...” It's a shame, in a way. We have come so much further with science and technology than the early 20th century when this material was written, but have lost much of the wild imagination this contains, as well as the belief that the stars are our true birthright. Humanity can, and has, done much worse things than to work faithfully (albeit naively) towards physical immortality and an interplanetary civilization.
If you can get beyond the silly ostentatious writing and Victorian-era science worship, it is a decent enough introduction to a few key Hermetic principles. However, for such a short book, it is incredibly repetitive. As must be explained, it is not The Kybalion itself, but is a commentary on The Kybalion (which most likely doesn't even exist); written not by three sages, but by one guy, William Walker Atkinson, and is largely comprised of his own ideas informed by the occultism of his day. I hesitate to recommend it at all as an introduction to Hermeticism, but it does organize and explain many principles more inappropriately than incorrectly and is, all said, pretty short.
If you are an educated reader who is ready to jump into the subject with both feet, I would skip this and head directly to something like a translation of The Corpus Hermeticum. If you are just vaguely curious as to what it's all about, this will likely suffice. But, be prepared to be annoyed by it's style if you have little patience for pompous gasbaggery.
Wolfgang Smith attempts here a powerful rebuke of relativistic physics, and endeavors to solve the metaphysical morass engendered by quantum theory. His coinage here, of “vertical causality,” certainly has some use to it in understanding the difference between the deterministic, mechanical “horizontal causality” of starting conditions on a closed system and the causality associated with free will and the observer effect on quantum waves and particles. I can't say he really hits it out of the park, as this ingenuity is then followed by an attempt to rehabilitate an Aristotelian, geocentric cosmology.
That said, I found his discussion of the various philosophical issues with modern physics quite interesting, as was his use of the geometric metaphors of line, circle, and point to elucidate a tripartite, traditionalist cosmology where there is time and space, but no space-time. I think while his Thomist apologetics might be forgettable, his conceptualization of “vertical causality” is quite useful and will likely be picked up by future thinkers.
It's pretty good, and I definitely enjoy the MIT Essential Knowledge series and will pick up more of them. Felt a little rushed near the end, Cuonzo takes us from Pythagoras to Kant to current philosophy of science with Popper/Kuhn/etc. in about 50 pages. Also, it surprised me that a book so heavy on discussion of the Liar's Paradox (“This sentence is false.”) and recent developments in Logic as a field of study did not mention Gödel's incompleteness theorem at all. That very paradox lies at its heart and was an important (and explosive!) piece of modern formal logic.
Still, it is very good for what it is meant to be – a thought-provoking introduction for the average reader. It's exploration of Bayesian analysis was especially informative to me, as I was pretty unfamiliar with that.
Mark Fisher deftly outlines the contours of our world as it appears today in Late Capitalism, and how Capital rules even our very imaginations through its logic of desire and production. He shows how everything in our world, even public services and universities, must act as though it is a business providing a product, that we are rational actors, that science and statistics can guide us to the truth, etc. His blistering critique points out that it can't be actual reality that capitalist realism is dealing with, as we are all anxious, miserable, confused, and alienated; and this shows no sign of being resolved through Capitalism, as it is in fact the result of Capitalism and of Neoliberalism's reign legitimized via Capitalist Realism.
He makes a good case, however, that Neoliberalism, while it employs capitalist realism to enforce its ideological supremacy, is not identical to capitalist realism, which does not, by necessity, have to carry a neoliberal flavor to it. Neoliberalism, Fisher argues, stands defrocked and delegitimized by its handling of the 2008 global financial crisis, and as such we, here among the ruins at the “End of History,” can still find new alternatives and build them – alternatives which embrace collective responsibility and a generative constraining of desire in ways the Neoliberal world order, by its own ideological constraints, can not.
Excellent little book of essays examining culture across species lines. Covering everything from gut bacteria to gardens to ants & to the charismatic social mammals, and moving across levels and layers of theory from the work of nigh-forgotten early sociologist Gabriel Tarde to Deleuze and of course to the father of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, it shows new ways and lines of thought that a biological consideration of culture, and a cultural consideration of biology, can be arrived at.
Through the use of fable as heuristic, which Hartigan deftly demonstrates has been part of social science since its beginnings, and an informed and responsible consideration of the currents of sociobiology, while using domestication and cultivation as conceptual points of departure, we can begin to expand our understanding of culture into new areas. Areas, as Hartigan also shows, where culture has resided, quietly, this whole time: in species outside of the order of primate.
Land's thoughts on temporality, Shanghai architecture, and closed time-like loops here are as recursive and convolutional as his subject matter. Touching on the latest as well as some of the greatest time travel fiction and the very real city of Shanghai, he explores time circuits, doubles, auto-production, paradoxes, and finds these are things already with us today, embedded in Modernism and Capitalism, and of course, per Land – these features and the templexity they produce will only increase in frequency and intensity as time goes on.
A wonderful set of essays, anyone who enjoys weird fiction and mindf*ck sci-fi movies and wants to think deeper thoughts about them should read this book. His thoughts on the collapse/confusion of ontologies was especially interesting to me. Bringing Freud and Lacan, among many other thinkers, to the discussion, Fisher demonstrates again and again how the weird and the eerie found in fiction is a mirror to weirdness and eeriness present in the human condition. Here in the postmodern age, I believe we have all experienced the “Zenonian condition” of the inability to feel a true progression in any process, and that strange lack of realness to our reality.
Ballard's intense dystopic sci-fi short stories are generally worth a read, and in this collection won't let you down if you want a look into Ballard's dark meditations on spatial and temporal constraints – the inherent scarcity of physical existence, how modern living pushes us against these constraints constantly, and the paranoia and disorder this leads to.
Hard sci-fi fans might be annoyed by his sometimes very fantastical set-ups, but it might be good to think of these stories as allegorical future fables, mirrors to the insanity of today, rather than as dire warnings of possible futures. It might seem that Ballard is just trying and failing as a trenchant cynic, and predicting futures so dark they are simply impossible, but what is key here are his insights into social psychology and the human condition. He shows us through clarifying extremity the way our lives already operate and how the inescapable absurdity can be deathly oppressive.
This is a very well researched book, Knight and Butler have made some interesting discoveries. There interpretations and conjectures, however, are pretty weak. I suppose they wanted to stay roughly within scientific consensus with this book; however, its not that any “scientist” is going to pay attention to it anyway, so it seems like a lost opportunity to create a stronger thesis than “the megalithic yard is real.” I understand that their research is ongoing, its just a shame because the material in this book would work much better as a scholarly article, but who would publish it? Alternative research is always going to suffer in this manner I think, until the community coalesces in such a way so that alternative scholarly journals can exist and thrive. My advice is to read Knight and Butler's latest works as this one is more of a stepping stone than a monograph.
A series of discourses delivered by Rebezar Tarz, ECK Master and one of Paul Twichell's primary spiritual guides. I'm giving it three stars because it is very dense and full of digressions and aspects of the ECKANKAR teachings are better explained in other books. While I think it was a good read and informative it is not a good place to start if you are new to the path of ECK, the Flute of God and The Key to Secret Worlds are much better if you want an intro to ECK from Paulji.
