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I'm currently reading The First Mountain Man: Blood On the Divide.

I'm reading The Silmarillion right now. I think I'll actually finish it this time, though I've renewed it from the Library twice already.

Next on my list is Mortal by Ted Dekker.

The Fellowship of the Ring.

I'm reading The Silmarillion right now. I think I'll actually finish it this time, though I've renewed it from the Library twice already.

Next on my list is Mortal by Ted Dekker.

I just finished reading a part of a series of books called the Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart.

Quote from: Professoralstad on July 07, 2012, 09:20:55 PM

Great Expectations. Not my favorite Dickens novel, but ok.

Why anybody would read that voluntarily is beyond me...

I've been downloading free books on my phone recently...I haven't been able to find too many other good ones that I haven't read yet.

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Holmes, all of the holmes books.

Read most of those, except 1 or 2.

The Two Towers by that one weird guy.

What weird guy? 

I'm also reading some books by David Eddings. The guy who wrote the Eragon books got a LOT of his inspiration from this guy. I'm in a summer reading program, and the grand prize is a Kindle! I plan to win.

I am currently reading Fateful Lightning, a new Civil War history by Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College (and a former seminary professor of mine). I will follow that up with While Mortals Sleep by Kurt Vonnegut, a posthumously-published set of early short stories. I am starting to really enjoy my Nook for reading (although it's not so great for study).

A bit less than a year ago, with the help of my philosophy professor, I read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

A few weeks ago I finished Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

I'm rereading his Tractatus now. I'm actually really really really enjoying reading it from a therapeutic point of view. And one of the philosophy grad students I spoke to here seemed to hint that he thought it was written ad absurdum, which is something I never would've thought of by myself.

If anyone wants to talk about it, feel free. Here's a link if anyone is interested. Although Wittgenstein was pretty critical of Russell's intro. My favorite propositions/comments/statements are 1.1, 2.225 (YAY EPISTEMOLOGY), 6.544, and 7 .

Reading "Love Does" by Bob Goff. The stories he tells are absolutely crazy.

"Company Aytch" by Sam R. Watkins and "The Hobbit."

His rabbit was in Philosophical Investigations, not the Tractatus. I really really prefer the Tractatus simply because Philosophical Investigations was too straight forward. I'm glad I read it, but I don't plan to ever read it again. The Tractatus is a book I could see myself reading many times over. In fact, I know I have to read it at least four times: once with the "Wittgenstein is a genius" mindset, once with the "Wittgenstein is an idiot" mindset, once with the "Wittgenstein is a therapist" mindset, and once with the "this is reductio ad absurdum" mindset. And the best example in Philosophical Investigations was clearly the beetle .

I like early Wittgenstein more than later Wittgenstein, by a pretty wide margin. I've noticed myself using the terms "nonsense" and "senseless" a lot more as a result. I guess I just have two major issues with it: I know the Tractatus is, ultimately, a book on ethics, but epistemology is my favorite subject in philosophy, and I don't understand where comment 2.225 came from (EDIT: and 2.223, and whatever other relevant ones there are). I know Hume believed in a posteriori knowledge exclusively also, but his philosophies seem to make sense to me more than Wittgenstein.

The difficult issue I'm having is related to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. I know that's probably why he abandoned his Tractatus (assuming it wasn't written reductio ad absurdum like I mentioned earlier), but I've been reading a lot of other philosophers defending his position on Godel's Theorem. Anyway, why isn't Godel's Theorem avoidable? Doesn't redefining mathematics to have a finite amount of numbers fix that? Arbitrarily claim that Graham's Number is the largest number. Trying to add a number to that or going to more decimal places just can't be done - it's undefined. You'd be able to test any statement. You'd have to redefine irrational numbers as numbers that cannot exist, but can be closely approximated, but that's about the only issue I can think of.


I'm a Freshman engineering student, but considering I finished all my generals in highschool, I have tons of room in my schedule for whatever classes I want. I'm going to load up on philosophy - it'll be awesome. I almost took a graduate level course in symbolic logic this semester, but my counselor talked me out of it. I plan to take either that course or a 3xxx level course on metaphysics (hah.... taking metaphysics when Wittgenstein is my favorite philosopher... awesome....) next semester .

There'd still be axioms, but wouldn't they be listable? Wasn't that the point of Hilbert's Program? The same thing would apply to philosophy. I suppose those axioms would need to be a priori, which is why I was wondering about where 2.223 came from.

Straight forward is wording it poorly, considering you can't get more straight forward than the Tractatus. I guess.... refreshing... is a better term. PI didn't really alter my mindset like the Tractatus has.