What should I expect, Veeky Forums?

...

>*Appeals to tradition*

old is time, modern is space..

idk its not like i remember much about it

One of the most interesting theories of history you'll ever read

wrong

>anything that argues in favour of tradition is a fallacious appeal to tradition

Why do we allow pseuds on here?

The first "big nietzschean history project". Also an early attempt at breaking eurocentrism and something of a precursor to postmodernism. You can get some pretty good stuff out of it if you ignore the main theory.

>ignore the main theory

Yeah, Spengler tries to twist the evidence to fit into his civilizational cycles. I think the theory may be partly correct, our fertility for example has taken a massive hit, though. sorry I am a bit drunk at the moment.

sign regimes don't exist

Kek, I was about to make the same thread

What should I expect, Veeky Forums?

>lol nothing important happened before the Peloponnesian war
>implying any western scholar would say this about any major war we've fought in
Spengler was 100% right about the Classical Culture having a different outlook on life. I'm not 100% sold on his metaphysics, but I think it's at the very least a working model.

A hard read with hard words.
But ain't bad.
If you have interest in the politics of the XX century and/or nazism/facism in general, you will soon see why the book was of great influence on the movements.

>A hard read with hard words.
What can I do to make it easier? I've got a pretty poor attention span

excellent Amazon review user, I found this helpful

Alright Veeky Forums, you're the only place I can actually discuss this. Do you think Spengler's assertions about numbers are true?

As I understand it, his main ideas are:
1. Numbers represent different forms for different Cultures
2. Numbers carry an almost religious significance for all Cultures
3. No theory of numbers is "correct" except to the Culture who uses it. There has been no progression of mathematics except within Cultures.
4.
a.Classical Culture saw numbers as finite and sensuous forms
b. Magian Culture saw numbers as unknowable dualistic forms
c. Faustian Culture sees numbers as infinite and functional forms
d. Indic Culture saw numbers as circular and eternal forms (not sure on this one)

I'm inclined to agree with him on points 1, 2, and 4. 3 I'm not so sure about, I feel like although each Culture has its own ideas about numbers and we can find different uses for them, so future cultures benefit from assimilating the mathematics of previous cultures into their own mathematics.

I agree with all of his points (you missed 4 though). As for 3, this seems true in a way, but not entirely; different cultures can accept the same theories of numbers as true.

The fact that this is in a history book interests me, since I'm a math major. How are these assertions about numbers relevant to the central point he tries to make?

You never read the book, did you?

That book was written exactly 100 years ago. Obviously you can expect it to be extremely dated. The author predicted absolutely nothing of what was going to happen in the 20th century.
Read it if you're into philosophy of history, but only if you are going to read more contemporary authors and you wish to get some context.

A morphology that is attractive in parts but sort of falls apart because of his lackluster knowledge and grandiose claims (based on dubious observations) about antiquity. There's a part towards the beginning where he explains his system in a fairly straightforward way, you'll see some pretty glaring errors concerning, for example, old egypt and ancient greece. If you can live with that (I couldn't), there still might be some value to be extracted from it.

Is there an unabridged English translation somewhere? I can't find one.