How Does Philosophy Affect Your Life?

[Kharakov]

Negatively.

 

[WAB]

Something from Descartes. Paraphrasing from his times, apply yourselves to problems that are solvable, leave the rest to the astrologers. Something I carried with me as an engineer.

Back in the 90s I'd walk through a bookstore and pick up what looked interesting in religion, philosophy and history. On a whim I picked up Mother Teresa'a book and found it a good insight into the nature of suffering and commitment.

There is a lot out there outside of religion.Marcus Aurelius showed that human power politics and intrigue really has not changed much, just the forms. As a Stoic he believed suicide was an honorable way out of a moral dilemma that could not be escaped. Death before dishonor.

Have you read the novel The Hero, by Somerset Maugham? Or The Awakening by Kate Chopin? They are both brief and deftly written, and center on the bits above that I bolded. Depressing novels, but true to reality and the sometimes sheer cruelty of happenstance, along with the oppressive moral constraints put on people in society, particularly "polite" society in more old-world cultures. Another great work on the theme of suicide is the short story "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather.

Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, are just a handful of great English language authors who treated such dark themes.

As for how philosophy has affected my life, it's enough to recite Socrates, via Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living." The philosophers who have most deeply impacted me are Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Sartre, and Nietzsche.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is known chiefly as a poet, but his The Necessity of Atheism is enormous (in impact, not word-count), and he displays a consummate philosophical and scientific knowledge in his copious notes to Queen Mab. His death at 29 was arguably the greatest blow to the Romantic age; as the death of poet and philosopher/scholar Philip Sidney's death at 31 was the greatest blow to Elizabethan England. Sidney's An Apology for Poetry is a seminal and important work, touching on far more than poetry.

 

[steve_bank]

Hamlet is my faciorite moral dilema. He figures out who killed jis father, and has to choose between shutting up and living the life of priveledge or doing the right thing.

 

[ruby sparks]

Negatively.

Word on the street says that although you don't realise it, things would have been a lot worse for you without it.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Hamlet is my faciorite moral dilema. He figures out who killed jis father, and has to choose between shutting up and living the life of priveledge or doing the right thing.

Really? I thought he wasn't sure who killed his father and spent most of the play setting up a sting to be sure. It is only when Claudius is clearly struck with guilt at the play that Hamlet is sure:

HAMLET
O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a
thousand pound. Didst perceive?

HORATIO
Very well, my lord.

HAMLET
Upon the talk of the poisoning?

HORATIO
I did very well note him.

Hamlet then goes to murder Claudius at the very first opportunity, stopping only because Claudius is praying and Hamlet doesn't want Claudius to go to Heaven. There's not much dilemma there. Macbeth, on the other hand...

 

[WAB]

Hamlet is my faciorite moral dilema. He figures out who killed jis father, and has to choose between shutting up and living the life of priveledge or doing the right thing.

Really? I thought he wasn't sure who killed his father and spent most of the play setting up a sting to be sure. It is only when Claudius is clearly struck with guilt at the play that Hamlet is sure:

HAMLET
O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a
thousand pound. Didst perceive?

HORATIO
Very well, my lord.

HAMLET
Upon the talk of the poisoning?

HORATIO
I did very well note him.

Hamlet then goes to murder Claudius at the very first opportunity, stopping only because Claudius is praying and Hamlet doesn't want Claudius to go to Heaven. There's not much dilemma there. Macbeth, on the other hand...

Thou art correct, good Subsymbolic. Score!

^ pretty traditional line of IP blank verse, with some typical metrical sub (pun intended) ikk ikk ik yih, um minih...minih..yih...sub.. sub.. ih minih yih...stitutional...um minih yih...substish...ikk ik yih... substitutions.[Porky Pig voice] stitutions.

"The play's the thing...
to catch the conscience of the king..."

 

[Phil Scott]

Philosophy has had little influence on me. I mostly treat it like another branch of literature, an idea I got from Richard Rort DAMMIT

 

[Elixir]

Philosophy contributed to my dropping out of high school. Self-adoring 11th grade philosophy "professor" in a very small class (8-10) spent so long with his convoluted description of Plato's cave analogy... by the time I got the point, it was like DUH! I asked if Plato understood the reflections that comprise our human experience to be internal or external phenomena, and the prof was at a loss. Actually got angry with me as if I was changing the subject. Less than a year later I dropped out of school, left home and fended for myself. No hifalutin abstractions needed.

 

[fromderinside]

Pausing now to bow heads in remembrance of paths not taken, faded, der tote stadt.