Lately I’ve been enjoying the works of Rumi. His writing hits home to me.
I was thinking of an answer like this one. Read all you can, get your conclusions.
And BTW, Plato is overvalued 
Aristotle is far more important and influential than Plato. In fact, I consider Plato harmful, although not as harmful as Rousseau. 
On the other hand, phylosophy is a complex subject in which people are trying to explain everything, most times based on other people previous works or criticizing them… so you need to read a lot, basically, and also know the historic environment of a thinker too 
philosophy flame wars (phlame wars?) are so much more civilized than regular flame wars.
Perhaps a little off topic, but I would also like to add that I am reading the wind up bird chronicles by haruki murakami at the moment, and it is excellent.
Hey! Sneaky basterd…!
Of the classical philosophers I like Socrates. But as far as cutting edge progressive cosmology goes I can’t find better reading than than Laurency:
His writing style isn’t the most fluent as it’s a translation. Well worth mapping through if you have the time as it’s quite heavy and comprehensive.
In a basic nutshell: consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality alongside physicality and energy. This goes against the grain of most modern status quo thought which is heavily materialist.
If you’d like me to discuss more just ask.
Transcender > The intellectual elitism of France you are talking about is pissing a lot of French people too.
Because this elitist community (more a political and mediatic community than an intellectual one) has become a true thought police.
We may like it or not, but the whole “western culture” is mostly based on ancient Greece philosophers, and the 16th/17th centuries “Philosophers” where there are a lot of French, and more than anything else, on the Bible.
And now here is the problem in France, human rightisms is a new sort of religion, an extremist one, human right and egalitarianism are considered as absolute holy values. You can’t criticize, you can’t doubt those values without risking problems with the laws or without being pointed as a fascist by the French intellectual thought police (the irony is that those people claim they defend the ideals of philosophers like Descartes or Voltaire).
Now to stay on topic, most of writers labelled as philosophers today are at best rewriting the same piece of ontology shit we’ve been reading for centuries, at worse, thought police and propaganda agents of the system, explaining us that the ultra liberal economic system is true freedom. And still, the vast majority of past and present philosophers have only been grand bourgeois, where their only problems in existence were: “Do I fck my slave maid, or is it morally wrong to lick the crotch of my dog?”.
The philosophers of the “age of enlightenment” are the best examples, Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu or Hume and Lock. All of them were on the dominant and tyranic side of their society, they spent most of their time copulating, nearly of them were slave traders, but they wrote what is good for human, and draw the line of our actually fucked up civilisation. And their dared to call themselves Humanists, give me a break.
Nearly all the philosophy movements in the western culture after rationalism have destroyed inch after inch all the moral values we had as a society, leading us to our current state of decadent civilization of amoral individualists, where our only goal in life the research of pleasure. The degree of your happiness being rated by your social rank, rank being determined by the amount of money you earn. The amount of pleasure you are allowed is directly based to this scale.
Philosophy is the hobby of people with way too much free time because of their higher social rank and lack of intelligence (back in time, nobles were forbidden to work, their only activity was saloon discuss, copulation, or science studying for the more intelligents of them (Newton, Descartes), the others had to call themselves philosophers and talk about nothing like nobody else to copulate with more courtisanes; this nearly hasn’t change.).
That’s why all of those people are defending the human rights like if their life depended on it, and are against any form of eugenism. Because they are the most useless thing that the human race can produce.
I agree with some of your points, Lunat. Though your statements are a bit black-and-
white here and there, I can relate to the overall message. It sounds like you actually
despise philosophers for their views being always “external” (like: outside the masses),
but I don’t think the philosophy of the “common man” would be very different, if he
was given the chance and opportunity to evolve in the way those “saloon nobles” did.
Also, man has believed the earth was flat, man descended from god and our children
are tabula rasa. I doubt it’s very surprising that humanists never thought of other
races as humane. And like you sayd: Western philosophy is mostly based on Greece
philosophy… and they did a lot of slavetrading and fukking… as did the Chinese…
and the Japanese… it’s WRONG obviously! BUT it’s considered wrong NOW BECAUSE
humanism was “invented” in the age of enlightment. Rome wasn’t build in one day!
Progress takes time, takes generations of trial and error. Philosophy is the legacy
of countless mistakes and victories.
Other than that: people like to fukk. So let them fukk! It makes great conversation material and that’s EXACTLY what any (self-proclaimed) philosopher needs. And I sure that will NEVER change because it would be the end of us all.
I LIKE TURTLES!
THE END OF US ALL, I TELL THEE!!!
Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, and Leonard Jacobson. Not really philosophy, if anything then reality.
Thomas Metzinger - Being No-One
For a lot of people, the most important book on consciousness ever written.
Heavily rooted in computational neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology, etc. Never gets tied up in linguistics or classical philosophy. It’s just a hardcore dissection of the human mind at the subpersonal level, backed up by mountains of psychiatric case studies, and all ends up building a huge case for the Self being a transparent computational process. Basically, there is no subject in subjectivity. (Which hits you like a brick when you fully grasp it - took me a year+ with the book.)
Good lecture up on Google video “thomas metzinger.”
Otherwise I’m a Kant and Thomas Nagel fan. Metzinger’s really the logical step on from them.