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Old 06-05-2010, 06:37 PM   #17
WT Sharpe
Bah, humbug!
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Originally Posted by Sparrow View Post
I've enjoyed the Plato Dialogues I've read - I thought they were very clever.
Yes, and it's fun watching Socrates always getting the better of his opponents, but we have to remember that, as history is written by the winners, so also were the dialogues written by his pupils. I wonder just how one-sided those exchanges actually were.

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Originally Posted by Sparrow View Post
Thomas More's 'Utopia' is another good read.
In reading it, I was surprised that he wrote the book at all, being that the utopian society he described was hardly completely in keeping with the religious ideals of the day. Perhaps that's why he wrote it as fiction rather than as a philosophical treatise.

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Originally Posted by Sparrow View Post
I'm mainly drawn to writings on the moral philosophy around animal rights (e.g. Peter Singer, Mary Midgeley) which is an area that interests me. Descartes seems to have been an idiot as far as I can make out - he thought cats were machines.
Although I don't believe I've ever read one of his books, I have read many articles by Peter Singer, most of them in the magazine Free Inquiry where he is a regular contributor, so I feel I'm familiar at least somewhat with most of his arguments. He has a remarkable mind, and isn't afraid to follow an argument to its logical conclusion, which has put him in trouble with more than one group of detractors. And you're right about Descartes; his beliefs on animals were appalling. I really think it had more to do with his religious sensibilities than his philosophical speculations. In his worldview, to equate animals with having the powers of rationality in any degree would have been tantamount to endowing them with a soul, which would have placed them on a more equal footing with the species he considered the crown of creation. In his view, animals didn't even feel pain. The appearance of pain in an animal was simply a mechanical response. There was no ghost in the machine to feel pain or any other emotion. Anyone who's ever owned a dog knows better. There may indeed be no ghost in animals or humans, but there is consciousness at least to the degree that there is the ability to enjoy pleasure and feel pain; and as Singer says in Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), "To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being."

Of course, it's the sentence immediately following that has so vilified him in pro-life circles. "But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account."

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Originally Posted by Sparrow View Post
Although I have also read the first couple of sentences of Wittgenstein's 'Tractus' a few times - "The world is all that is the case."
I have a hard time getting into Wittgenstein and others who followed his lead. I'm probably being overly simplistic, but it seems as if he would have made a great English professor; for he seems to be more concerned with language as if it were not merely a tool, but the very essence of philosophy itself; as if properly phrasing the question was its own answer. I have a great Will Durant quote in my mind, and if I can find an ebook of The Story of Philosophy, I'll quote it. Unfortunately my son stored all my paper books in a rather inaccessible place after he broke my bookshelves, including my extremely annotated and underlined copy of that book.

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Originally Posted by Sparrow View Post
Bertrand Russell's 'History of Western Philosophy' is a fabulous book.
Yes it is, although it's rather lengthy. I find his shorter collections of essays to be much more enjoyable reading. Too bad that ability to write meaningful prose for popular audiences didn't rub off on his student, Wittgenstein.

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Originally Posted by Sparrow View Post
I think a lot of Buddhist writings are at least as profound as a lot of the western philosophy I've encountered.
I agree.
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