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Gonna buy some
Habermas - "The Theory of Communicative Action"
-Suggested by oneofthem, general introduction to Habermas
Rorty - "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity"
Rorty - "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature"
-Some American analytical stuff
French stuff:
Lyotard - The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Lyotard - The Postmodern Explained
Foucault - The Archaeology of Knowledge
Foucault - History of Sexuality vol.1
-Intro to Lyotard and some Foucault I haven't read yet.
Would like to add more analytical stuff. But Wittgenstein seems to be only about language, logic, metaphysics and less about society? Bertrand Russell is too old compared to those above though he's the only one who writes in English. Besides them I can't think of anyone else. Should probably throw in something older to build my fundamentals but there's a lot of stuff to choose from.
My recent history with philosophy started with reading Michel Foucault for a research paper I chose the subject on. I looked to numerous secondary resources, the internet, and even TL for help but eventually, towards the deadline, I realized I couldn't possibly write anything meaningful under 50 or so pages unless I literally shat from my ass so I chose to abandon the paper and eventually withdraw from the course completely. By the summer I had become fasinated with Foucault. I'm trying to finish the research I originally intended to do while on break in China. But before all of this, I had only taken one logic class with some brief introduction to Kant and Russell taught by a brilliant teacher and at college, an intro level course with some terrible intro to philosophy material and the basic Descarte, Hume, Locke, Kant, etc. Because of my weak continental philosophy fundamentals I'm finding myself more and more paranoid in reading Foucault since I do not have knowledge of many of the sources that influenced his ideas. While debating with oneofthem on TL I realized for the first time an "other" to French continental philosophy, the philosophy of logic, pragmatism, North Americans. That is where I want to go after Foucault. At the same time I will try to continue expanding my knowledge in French continental philosophy, where I started from. I am the most concerned with society, then metaphysics, then science/art/literature. So following this goal I think Habermas will be a good next step. Hope I can control my ADD.
Lyotard is on recommendation from Mr.Stimey RIP
  
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Belgium9947 Posts
Lyotard is awesome, but really requires some knowledge of Wittgenstein's language philosophy
Foucault is really cool too.
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Dude, get Wittgenstein. He is too important to skip over.
Foucault Lyotard are very good, nice choice there.
Noam Chomsky, but you probably looked into him already.
I don't know if you read him or not, but Marx is essential.
If you want to have a look at language theory and its links to societal construction, have a look at Emile Benveniste, Saussure, Bahktin and Roland Barthes (old) and Fredric Jameson.
Also have a look at Psychology such as Freud and Jung. They tie in greatly with language and society.
If you read all of those + the ones you mentioned, you will have a very strong philosphical basis and a great cognitive framework for ... life I suppose.
Anyway, it is up to you, but I would suggest looking at all those authors. I can only recommend it.
BTW, you can get some of those through academic journal databases and online libraries, so have a look around. Some wrote primarily essays rather than publish complete works.
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Friedrich Nietzsche maybe?
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8748 Posts
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main problem is I can't focus on too many things at once, I'm skipping anything existentialism and psychology. Existentialism because it seems to have the most to do with art and literature, and I've read a loooooooooot of Kafka. Psychology because I took a really good class on Freud & Jung and read Man and his Symbols. I'm trying to not diverge too much from Foucault so I can come back to him in the future with more knowledge. Although Habermas, Rorty, Wittgenstein are completely different from his philosophy but I think discuss some of the same issues with their metaphysics and whatnot. I think, this is all from useless "introduction to modern philosophy" books. So no Jung, Freud, Kiekergaard, Sartre, Lacan, etc, but I'll know vaguely what they're talking about when people mention them, hopefully.
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Being and time is like 60 million pages and really difficult to read I heard. Nietzsche is easier to read but as in like actually reading without zoning out. But Dreyfus sounds good, American too
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
rorty is excellent in general, but he's a bit of a maverick, and i think it is fair to get some responses to him.
habermas is ok.
i really must recommend wittgenstein.
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which work by wittgenstein
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8748 Posts
Being and Time is difficult to read, but some people get used to it and it's not so bad if you have a commentary to read along with it (Dreyfus wrote one himself). But hey man you have a whole lifetime ahead of you so you shouldn't worry about the difficulty or length of things. If Heidegger isn't the direction you want to go in, that's understandable, but I just thought that I'd point out that there's some really cool stuff written about Foucault/Heidegger parallels. Maybe it's something you can return to once you've fleshed out all the things that are currently appealing to you.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
philosophical investigations. there are various important offshoots of wittgenstein that help you get a better sense of wittgenstein's arguments, like ordinary language and speech act.
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Yea I'm reading that Dreyfus piece on Heidegger/Foucault and it's excellent. I'm getting that feeling that if I read it I won't need to read the primary source it's based on, hmmmmmmmmmmmm
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
hehe, reading that article, interesting. though, wonder how 'power' in that article applied to foucault himself would look. still, some of the stuff, can be pushed further, to say the least.
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I think he's ignored all of the questions addressed to him about how his philosophy works on himself. He prefers to view himself not as a subject but as some inspector/historian outside of power/discource that dissects everything objectively using all parts of history. Don't know if that works or not. It's the primary angle people criticize him from.
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By describing Rorty as maverick you mean he's different from the other analytical philosophers? I heard he hates on the trancendental subject and scientific truth, how does he do analytical philosophy then?
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
he basicaly goes too far, although he is not going against analytical philosophy as a field. but you know, analytical philosphy has long dropped the transcendental project anyway, ever since wittgenstein owned russell. right now, the issue is truth in limited systems, which is hardly transcendental in the cartesian sense.
currently, it just looks like a quabble over the word 'truth,' with no substantive consequences. and personally i think rorty goes too far in crippling 'truth,' particularly in the sciences. like, please do some physics before commenting, please.
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Never managed to read through Being and Time, but I randomly received another of Heidegger's shorter books called "Poetry, Language, Thought" for christmas. I recall that was a great read, I love how poetic/metaphoric his observations are.
<3 Philosophy
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dude fuck that critical theory/continental philosophy bullshit. I've read most of it as they cram it down your throat when you're at art school. Stick to analytic philosophy, you'll actually feel competent to hold positions on things. My partner reads a lot of philosophy all the time, I'd recommend Thomas Nagel "Mortal Questions" and Saul Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" as starting points and then moving into more technical work about your specific interests. Also, read "The Sokal Hoax" by Alan Sokal for info on the bankruptcy of continental philosophy for anything other than poetry.
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if you are still searching for books to buy i would really recommend nietzsche. read his work ecce homo first 
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I know of the Sokal Hoax but I mean, the incident itself I think proves that many respected philosophy journals in America were poorly ran more than that continental philosophy is a pseudoscience or something, which many North Americans seem to think. I read Bertrand Russell before any French stuff so I'm always on the lookout for bad logic, questionable interpretations, so fourth. That's one of the reasons I'm reading primary sources only, really tired of stuff that's from some other stuff translated from the original French to German then English then to Chinese then to English, then someone else interprets it then you read it, etc.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
well geez that's a bit limiting. granted i dont really see continental philosophy at face value, but at least there are insightful observations and such made in it. analytical philosophy's original project, teh destruction of nonpositivist discourse, has failed, so there is no reason to limit yourself to that. the human problems that affect real lives and the direction of civilisation are still very much debated, and a large portion of that debate is being carried out in continental circles. at least for this practical reason, it is useful to at least try to understand what they are on about.
further, in some areas, such as a social theory, the problems are complex not only horizontally but vertically as one paradigm may fail to accurately translate or reconstruct insights from others. specifically, the empirical methods, although foundationally sound, cannot operate wtihout a normative theory or a theory of ideology. (people dont just 'go mad,' they say and think and whatnot, and your empirical theory should be able to work with this) since the projects of comprehensive, total analysis encounter difficulties that reveal inadequacies in their language or theoretical framework, (behavioralism is a fine example of this), the investigation requires fine attention to detail in order to avoid glossing over real problems.
to be honest, i think the angle from which continental philosophy (namely the postmodern) address things is in itself assuming many things (difficulty is, they dont readily try to examine such) and sometimes is amateurish and impatient, but this is not the only direction continental philosphy could go.
i dont know what critical theory you've read, but the thing has a foundation and cannot be taken at face value. for instance, you need to know what hagel was on about. it at least makes sense enough to influence productive and exciting developments in a host of fields.
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EPT
