The God Delusion

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can't praise a book any higher than to call it life changing. That is what The God Delusion means to me. It opened vistas of intellectual exploration to me. It taught me that atheism need not lead to nihilism.



The key argument in this book turns the tables on a deist argument best expressed by theologian William Paley. The argument is called 'Paley's Watch' and its central idea is that only complexity can account for complexity. Dawkin's simple but devastating argument against the existence of God as an answer to anything can be crudely summed up as follows: Complexity is improbable, yet to solve the problem of complexity by positing greater complexity just restates the problem on a larger scale. And we thought that Charles Darwin handled this over 150 years ago.



Richard Dawkins is for evolutionary biology what Carl Sagan was for astrophysics. Both crush the stereotypical view of science with poetic eloquence that evokes a childlike sense of wonder at the edge of reality. As Dawkins asks, "Isn't it enough to admire a garden without having to imagine fairies in it?" With Dawkins and Sagan as guides, the answer for me is a resounding yes.



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The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Third Policeman is a wonderfully disturbing little book, postumously published, by Irish novelist Brian O'Nolan under nom de plume Flann O'Brien. It could perhaps be described as a sort of exploration of Parmenidean paradox infused with Irish Catholic folklore. Hell is apparantly a place where bicycles are of central importance.



It is said that when the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides advanced his position that movement was illusory owing to the infinite number of spatial divisions and was therefore impossible, best exemplified by his follower Zeno's 'fletcher's paradox', his audience's reply was to simply get up and walk about the room. Yet it moves. The limits of rationality are contrasted with the phenomenological in the Third Policeman to comic heights, but the dark Catholic terror provides this work with a tone of vertiginous dread.



For something very different and refreshing, this is an excellent read. Philosophical satire that rewards close reading, the Third Policeman is Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland for adults.



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Pornography

Ask most folks what the best Cure album is, you nearly always get Disintegration in response. They are wrong. The correct answer is Pornography, knaves. It's a great way to seperate the wheat from the chaff.

Yes music was literature long before books. Anyone who resonds "who is the Cure?" can safely be disregarded.

On The Road

On the Road: 40th Anniversary Edition by Jack Kerouac

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Awful. Full of grammatical errors, On the Road chronicles the stream-of-conciousness of Jack Kerouac (thinly veiled as the fictional Sal Paradise) as he travels with insipid friends, and reveals himself as a handsome bore. Kerouac profoundly lowered American literary standards, and as I read this rambling mass, the criticism of Capote -- that this was less a book than typing-- rang true.



To break new ground in literature; to defy convention, one had better have some power of insight. Without said insight, one may come across as merely disrespectful rather than innovative. Written with the vocabulary and style of an uninspired grade-schooler, Kerouac clearly lacks the genius to successfully depart in the radical new direction he attempts.



I remember as a teen the "grunge music" of Nirvana, and how it seemed so fresh. And it was fresh when compared to the pop music of the time. Now grunge music is considered an artifact that was hyped beyond it's cultural relevance factor. Time will pass, and certain artistic movements become esoteric, and certain people who can't move on become laughable. Think girls with Bettie Page hairdo's and rockabillies in general. Think Beat Generation, hipster moron's with Kerouac at the forefront.



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Lolita

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Turgid, pretentious tripe. That Nabokov is a skilled writer seems to be a point he intends to make with every word of this revolting book, which presents a sense of desperation and a lack of humor. It's as if he prepared a wonderfully eloquent cake made of shit, and demands you admire the cake for it's eloquence. Humbert Humbert is a disgusting lecher, and spending time with him is highly unpleasant - as much for his overblown sense of self as his pedophilia.

A Platonist might present this as exhibit A in his prosecution against poetry:

"What is the redeeming feature of this novel? I'd argue that it is as imbalanced to write with eloquence on the subject of garbage, as to write garbage on the subject of eloquence."

Humbert Humbert is a cynical pedophile who commits the unforgivable sin of being boring. Lolita is sensationalism with a thesaurus.

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The Stranger

The Stranger by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The abdurdist masterpiece. Meursault is the antithesis of the emotion obsessed post-modernist who checks his feelings as if they were a thermometer registering reality, and not the result of a reactionary culture's indoctrination against the stoical, jingoistic Roman inheritance. He is not immoral, but amoral, and he sees no point to anything other than physical desire. Finally, he arrives at the conclusion that the question of the meaning of life is meaningless, that the only logical response to an indifferent universe is indifference toward the universe.



If a case can be made for the maxim that "less is more", The Stranger would be the literary example. At just over one-hundred pages, and with the most basic vocabulary of our taciturn protagonist, this novel speaks volumes on the absurdity of the human condition. It should not, however, be understood as the philosophy of Camus in microcosm. Camus's myth of Sisyphus is a succinct answer to the problem of nihilism for those with existentialist leanings. The Stranger presents this problem in spartan first-person prose wonderfully.



Best book ever.



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Selected Dialogues of Plato

Selected Dialogues of Plato by Plato

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hayden Pelliccia de-Victorianizes Benjamin Jowlett's translation of five writings - mis-titled Dialogues, as the Apology is almost entirely a monologue - selected for their literary representation of Aristocles. The first three dialogues are named for the interlocuter engaging Socrates.

'Dialogues' begins with an un-intimidating dialogue in Ion. This humorous and short writing has Socrates overwhelming a witless antagonist, who has such a broad definition of his art that he equates it with generalship.

The second dialogue, Protagoras, pits Socrates against the greatest sophist. This epistemological dialogue deals with the nature of virtue and justice, and is notable for Socrates promotion of the idea that no man commits evil willfully:

"All who do evil and dishonorable things do them against their will."

Following this idea through, we arrive at the idea that virtue and knowledge are synonymous, one of the core principles expressed throughout the philosophy of Plato. Protagoras and Socrates end in precisely the opposite positions they began with; Protagoras in the position that all of virtue is one identical inherent entity; and Socrates with the position that virtue, as equated with knowledge, is therefore a teachable subject.

Phaedrus is of enormous impact to the Western spiritual tradition. Plato has Socrates demonstrating, a priori, the immortality of the soul:

"Beginning itself cannot be begotten of anything. For if Beginning came out of and thus after something, then it would not exist from the beginning."

Here, as usual, Plato had difficulty grasping the fact that words are abstract symbols conveying our ideas of the universe, and that as such they have no objective truth value. This error of arriving at empirical truths by means of reason alone more than pervades the philosophy of Plato, it is the core of his thought, and this religious approach was a major force in stunting the growth of western science for over a millenium.

As the immortal soul espoused by Plato was of enormous influence in St. Augustine's reconciliation of Neoplatonism with Christianity, it is interesting that the means prescribed by Plato for the elevation of the soul was pederasty. I resist a cheap joke at the expense of the clergy with some reluctance.

The crescendo of Plato's literary genius is reached in the Symposium, a work comprising seven monologues on the nature of Love (personified) and the lesser plebeian love, as well as the nature of beauty. Beauty is first apprehended by the eye, which leads us to the form of an eternal, unchanging, perfect beauty of which only the intellect is capable of grasping through (what else) philosophy.

This collection is a well-annotated and readable sampling of writings from the philosopher who influenced Western thought more than any other.


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