How has reading philosophy changed your life?

How has reading philosophy changed your life?

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my shitposts have significantly improved

i read the greeks and after that i got more serious about reading / studying in general. thanks Veeky Forums

Its made me laugh out loud at students whining about gender constructs and women’s rights. i almost pissed myself listening to my phil professor try to explain how a Self can exist when neuroscience basically precludes it. Other than laughing meanly at others, which i do enjoy, its done little for me since I anticipate authors’ ideas before I read them. Anyone who learns from phil is stupid.

I learned a lot about semantics and how easy it is to be manipulated by those who control the words you use and its meanings.

made extremely cynical

How does neuroscience preclude a self from existing?

This. Except I learned how to use semantics to improve myself.

No problem.

read Metzinger, its just a model its not an entity or a substance. it disappears constantly, is automatic, is ephemeral, it has no clear horizons or dimensions. its contents are not continuous or even remotely relevant to what the brain is actually doing, even when concerned with activities like information procession, problem solving, subvocal speech, its all disconnected from any sense of interiority or self which is in and of itself illusory. You aren’t even a witness to what’s happening, you’re just not there at all. Decisions happen many milliseconds before you feel you’ve made them, you also have literally no control over your motor functions or appetites. there’s just nothing going on there that resembles an agent. lots of modular, networked together subsystems that resonate and intermingle but no consistent process we could call selfhood. its worse than you think, read Being No One

So the Buddhists were right?

So Stirner was right?

>Decisions happen many milliseconds before you feel you’ve made them

Is he referencing Libet? The tragedy of Libet is that no one reads the actual study.

Helped me let go of stuff, therefore made me a happier person.

Good luck to ya'll.

Unironically made me find joy in abstract analytic metaphysics with no relation to the human experience. I only care about the necessary structure of reality now

I have a useless way of measuring my intelligence against other people and therefore feeling resentful for my comparatively low position in life.

>yfw you realize (zen) buddhists were right about most things

How did you use them? I'm really curious.
As a non native speaker I'm fascinated by the subject.

That's actually a scientific and empirically proven fact.

I now truly believe in God and do not fear death. Thanks based Platonists.

heidegger's ideas about dissolving the cartesian/kantian subject-object distinction have actually had a big impact on me

Why even bother?

t. Wittgenstein

witt please

I find it worthwhile to just have learned. On the downside most philosophers at my uni are absolutely insufferable and emotionally immature, and feel the need to break of into disparate cliques based on ideology and fling shit at each other all day. Like what the fuck that is so sad.

>witt please
I'll use this from now on.

i dont get it

fpbp

It made me appreciate great poets so much more.

Well I realized ethics is absolutely worthless when it comes to real life.
>JUST DONT LIE EVER LMAO

Wow m8 stop reading anytime.

Semantics lets you reframe situations , feelings etc.
If you have a neighbor who throws his trash at your doorstep everyday, you will probably feel angry. Stoics would tell you not to be angry. Consider your options : convince him to throw it elsewhere, pick it up and throw it yourself. If you can't convince him, then realize that his judgement is not good and have pity instead of being angry. Since you know that your neighbours judgement cannot differentiate good from bad. Isn't reason not the most important thing in a person? So doesn't that make a person of impaired reasoning someone to pity?

We've successfully changed your feelings towards the neighbour.

are you retarded?

I thought you were going to manipulate you neighbor to throw his trash elsewhere through semantics instead of being a cuck and manipulating yourself to accept it passively. It's better to feel pity instead of anger because the latter is emotionally draining, but still

if your neighbour leaves trash at your doorstep everyday you call the cops

Stop feeling pity

Fuck off, buddy.

Libet's studies and the subsequent were disproven. Read Mele.

Also this

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810009001135?

And if you had read them, you'd also know that Libet did another study which demonstrated a time in the brain where we had the power to ''veto'' an action. Now, again, his studies do not mean anything to us, but if you still think they are relevant, his own studies demonstrate that we have a self, althought he believed we had no free will.

>believing in the Self

Does anyone actually, unironically do this?

Me

Silly boy, when will you realise that you are nothing but a "nothingness capable of God"

My problem is I read philosophy as thought experiments, sealed away from my actual experience and relegated away from having any influence over my life.
I can read a philosopher and find him intellectually satisfying, but I can't find the writing prescriptive towards any potential action in my everyday life.
Philosophy for me is like a museum, filled with objects I can appreciate and understand and find fulfilling in some higher sense of the word, but I am prevented from leaving the museum with anything of practical value.
I don't know what to do and what I should feel when I read a philosopher others find life changing.

Forgive and move on. Don't let bad experiences turn you into a cold person.

>dude just stop caring lmao

>dude just let bad experiences dictate your eventual character as a man and unwittingly afford as much psychological power as you can to those people to mold your mind and later life
D U D E great idea.

Stoicism is buddhism for plebs

>DUDE DON'T LEARN FROM YOU MISTAKES JUST FORGIVE AND MOVE ON IF SOMEONE THROWS THEIR TRASH IN YOUR YARD DON'T GET MAD BECAUSE THEN IT MOLDS YOUR MIND AND LIFE JUST FORGIVE AND MOVE ONE

>all these half-truths lacking in unity and coherence
Such is the pagan life

I'm not a stoic, but wasting your anger on something like that would be fucking retarded. Everyone has a finite amount of mental energy, spend it on raping professional competitors.

Yes, just remember that section in Notes From Underground where he spends weeks obsessing over a guy he bumped into in the street.

If you don't know who throws trash in your yard becoming angry only makes you suffer and make you more angry so you harm the people you love, it doesn't solve the problem desu

Actually I just want to die

>DON'T LEARN FROM YOU MISTAKES
Literally the opposite of what I'm saying.
>IF SOMEONE THROWS THEIR TRASH IN YOUR YARD DON'T GET MAD BECAUSE THEN IT MOLDS YOUR MIND AND LIFE JUST FORGIVE AND MOVE ONE
There is no reason why you can't call them out on that. No one is saying that you need to avoid confrontation. But you shouldn't be getting heated over every little thing.

Don't let callous and cruel people mold who you are going to be. There are psychos and sociopaths in this world. If you let them turn you cold then that'd be a shame, because they personally don't feel shit about it either way. You should work on building proper emotional boundaries. To go this far the opposite in a spiteful way is what happens when you aren't working on those boundaries. You should be trying to keep away from these people, both literally and figuratively, not emulating them out of spite. They're emotional vampires who want to change you too. Don't let them.

In the original post you're referring to we know exactly who threw the garbage into your lawn.

If you're calling them out on it then you're heated. You don't do something about it unless your mad. If your neighbor throwing garbage into your yard doesn't make you mad, why would you do anything about it? Anger is a motivator and people who want you to avoid getting angry either have ulterior motives for wanting to make you passive, or they're passive themselves. Neither type of person should be listened to.

>I almost pissed myself listening to my philosophy professor try to explain how a Self can exist when neuroscience basically precludes it.

You sound very opinionated.

Just because something only exists in concept does that mean you should treat it as if it doesn't exist? It almost seems to me like you're using the excuse that since the mind has to have an underlying system that means nothing above means anything. Should we treat every person on earth as if they have no identity?

yes

...

>If you're calling them out on it then you're heated.
This is a youngfag thing to say. You can easily call someone out calmly and assertively if you want to. Then if they do it again on principle you decide how you want to play it from that point on. But freaking out right away over something that benign which also involves a person that you still need to live right next to in daily life is dumb to say the least.
>Anger is a motivator and people who want you to avoid getting angry either have ulterior motives for wanting to make you passive
In 99% of situations anger is a misstep that leads to violence in a scene that didn't call for it. Your fight or flight response is through the roof because you feel that you always have shit to prove, but that is all in your head.

Sounds like you may be reading analytic philosophy, mate. Philosophers who have been frequently described as lifechanging include Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard, as well as Kierkegaard and Plato

...

>reading edgy philosophers
why not read the Gospel sometime and some Tertullian and Kierkegaard?
captcha: ree stop

If your neighbour indeed is knowinly dumping his carbage to your lawn, chances are he's an asshole who won't listen to your reasonable plea not to dumb his carbage in your lawn.

You're the one who should get out of the dusty library and get a dose of real world. It is, of course, better if you can to avoid any violence, but some people just don't get it any other way.

Let's quit with the garbage example because these endless, stupid thought experiments and "intuition pumps" have decimated contemporary philosophy and helped to make it inert. The question "has philosophy changed your life" would have been absurd only a couple of generations ago because the good life has always been synonymous with what philosophy is. But today that question has become relevant because trolleys and marys rooms and a bunch of other meaningless shit that who gives a fuck

>You're the one who should get out of the dusty library and get a dose of real world.
You're just a kid who wants to prove himself. I get it. But you need to be more self-aware about the real impetus behind your attitude here. There is a reason why most trained fighters are calm and collected people who don't go looking to start conflict. Do they not understand the "real world" quite like you do? Or is it rather that you are in need of finding any excuse that you can to prove something to yourself?

You don't need philosophers or to read philosophy to lead a happy, fulfilling life. Philosophy can merely prance around consepts such as 'happiness' or 'good and evil', but nothing profound will ever come out of it.

Vast majority of philosophy is just academic circle jerking and a waste of research grants. Veeky Forums was right all along.

it hasnt because i read science and law and not brainlet philosophy

Did I say you should go kick in your neighbour's door with a baseball bat in your hand?

Who knows, maybe your neighbour had more respect for you if you showed some backbone instead of standing by the window analyzing your feelings.

So now we've gone from wanting some hypothetical neighbour (a scenario that you're weirdly obsessed with by the way) to stop an action that was annoying you to having them "respect" you for it. I see.

Do you think the fact that you are now associating the word "respect" here that it might indeed have something to do with you wanting to seek approval like I've been saying all along? Or should we just ignore that part?

I now have words for feelings I had before

Convince, not manipulate. That's the first thing I would try with the use of rhetoric.

So yeah, you've only read contemporary phil. Didn't start with the Greeks like we told you to. Sad!

>I read law
Shut the up and kill yourself

>should we treat every other person on earth as if they have no identity
That would be really interesting and an enlightening experiment. And it would probably work just fine.

If you can't be angry without being violent then that sounds like a personal problem. I never said you had to be violent, I said angry. You should learn how to handle your emotions so you can use them rather then ignoring them.

I used to know nothing. Now, I still know nothing, but with a twist.

well I'm not dead yet so that's a start

I'm much more rational and humble.

And reading Nietzsche taught me about going above and beyond in life. All I knew before was mediocrity.

Penis got bigger

>ou can't be angry without being violent then that soun
Let go of what kind of stuff? Care to elaborate?

literally who?

If it weren't for philosophy and obtaining a degree suma cum laude in the process I would never have overcome my severe anxiety and sadness (it wasn't clinically a depression, but it was a constant feeling of anguish that led to anger and uneasiness). I felt a deep shame for myself and I was very seclusive, I had difficulty adapting to new social environments. It was all due mostly to a profound inferiority complex. Formal education was very negative for me because it reinforced an unhealthy need of external confirmation (by my grades) in order for me not to feel inferior. I was never an exemplary student (although I always had excellent grades) but I would always suffer from fear of not being confirmed by my grades as something I really am not and can never be. I always felt I would be excluded if I didn't live up to my own unreasonable expectations of myself that required me to be like an object (I denied my own subjectivity in order to be the student I wanted to be by conforming myself to an objective measure - the grades -. Formal education took so much from me in what regards my own interior, my own well being. I can only blame myself because I am completely responsible for what I feel and what I choose for myself. But I will never look back with any tender feelings for the education I was subjected to. The philosophy that was essential for my understanding of myself and enlightened me in so many ways was Sartre's Existentialism (specifically Being and Nothingness). It shed a light to the reason that I suffered such a severe anxiety and anger towards others. As an example, the concept of mauvaise fois was fundamental for me to understand my inferiority complex and how it was related to my own alienation towards the objectivity of high grades that I earned and how it all related to the fear of being (economically, socially) excluded. As a neomarxist, I feel I shouldn't be as sincere as I am over my feelings, especially in an anonymous imageboard. Regardless, I can positively assert that philosophy led to my overcoming of most of the negative feelings I suffered by allowing me to understand myself (Existentialism) and the world around me (Marxism). Much of my anxiety was from not properly understanding the reality I live in and denying my subjectivity.

Me, myself.

I got to cite that bit in The Republic where Plato talks about women being able to be auxiliaries etc. to shut down a bunch of SJWs hating on the Greeks in my compulsory Gender Studies unit. They won't talk to me anymore (and say I have internalised misogyny) but the look on their faces was priceless.

Kek

>mfw

Anything other than White Catholics deserve total eradication.

/thread

This really resonated with me and your descriptions of anguish and perceived inferiority are uncannily similar to what I’m working through at the moment. I’ve picked up some Kierkegaard recently, not to directly address these issues, but out of pure curiosity. It’s heartening to see that you found answers in digesting philosophy. Was it a gradual process for you, sorting through different books and schools of thought? Or was Being and Nothingness the silver bullet for you?

Yes, it was extremely gradual, it required me to experience many things without ever really chaging my mindset, it was as if I was carrying a pernicious dead weight without ever realizing it. It was all a build up that led me to be able to overcome those feelings of anxiety, shame and inferiority (positively, not completely, I still feel those feelings, but not intensely as I did before). It wans't that I directly perceived myself as inferior. I would say anguish and its consequences burdened my heart and it was because I was subjecting myself by my own volition to experiences that were very negative to me (formal education, grades, pressure over work). The main problem was in how I valued or perceived those experiences. not that I directly lived them. It all correlates to the existentialist thought really, as in l'Esprit du Sérieux (how I exagerated my obligations towards certain institutions), Mauvaise Fois (how I thought that being an honor student would intrinsecally determine who I am), Angoisse (all my feelings were mostly related to it), Délaissement (I felt as if I were abandoned, all alone, which led me during my adolescencce to an unhealthy pursuit of friendships), être-pour-autrui (it explains my shame and social anxiety and it shed a light that led me to become more natural and relaxed, making me adapt better to new social environments)... This "enlightment" (I think this exact word is too "Kantian") was due to a cooperation of my own experiences and the amazing significance of the existentialist philosophy, especially its ontology contained in the Being and Nothingness. If it weren't for Sartre, I wouldn't understand my feelings, my anguish, anxiety and it weren't for those feelings and negative experiences I do not believe I would understand Sartre's philosophy as clearly as I do now (I even wrote my final paper on it).

why does that woman look like that fat cunt off girls?

it was a mistake to read kirkegaard with daddy issues at 16
but now
now I aint give a shit
morals and art dont go together
stick a shoe up your ass
love me, or else~!

philosophy is like religion for smart people

it's fundamentally changed how I see and understand the world around me

this is the most retarded thing ive ever read

Only pain.

> Now I have been bitten by a more painful creature, in the most painful way that one can be bitten: in my heart, or my soul, or whatever one is to call it, I am stricken and stung by his philosophic discourses, which adhere more fiercely than any adder when once they lay hold of a young and not ungifted soul, and force it to do or say whatever they will

I want to start reading the Greeks and become a learned man.

The other day someone suggested starting with Mythology by Edith Hamilton but according to this I should read Ancient Greece before. Should I?

Also, is Apollodorus better than the Edith Hamilton book?

Sorry I'm new to this and not very smart.

you could get 5 different answers from 5 different people

just pick one and see where it leads you, or read a little of both first and see where you're at

what do i need to have read before diving into Sartre?

A lot of these old farts reference mythology and the epic poems, so start with the Edith, go on to the Odyssey and Illiad and some plays, whatever of the most popular ones interest you and then move on to the presocratics and so on. It'll be a while but you'll get going.

I started to believe in God so I probably came a lot dumper

This is not a good feel bro. I am here... What are you telling me..