![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading Life
Jun. 28th, 2016 04:17 pmI am still reading the introductory material before Hume's "Enquiry", which certainly has not done anything to blunt my fascination for this material. I was especially surprised to apperceive that Thomas Hobbes came prior to Locke and Hume. Hobbes is such a stone-cold materialist, and he brought it to political philosophy. It seems more intuitive to me that his work should come after establishing a more solid foundation for the materialist perspective of how we know things in general, as set in the works of Locke and Hume, going from natural science to social science. As we have the timeline, Hobbes really seems outrageously ahead of his time. I suppose the way one can look at it and make the timeline more intuitive is that Hobbes speaks of his materialist philosophy in more general terms, in terms of state and governance, and Locke and Hume then come in to establish the epistemological, psychological basis that underlie tacitly Hobbes's work, establishing the science for Hobbes's political philosophy, even if they might not have agreed with Hobbes's absolutist government, which is doubtless, as the age grows more individualistic.
Although I am fascinated by the material, as I spend my mornings reading it, I feel a biting doubt that this is what I should be doing with my time. It is quite likely that I don't have more than a few years to live my life thus, and is this really the best way for me to spend what might effectively be my last hours, trying to play catch-up on 18th-century philosophy? Well, I am not inclined to just drop it now, especially since I have yet to even begin Hume's actual work. However, I am prepared to draw in my reading life more. Instead of spending my morning's on this stuff, as was planned, I think I will just treat the philosophy as an extra book, in the same way that I fit in the biographies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Though, for now, I will compromise on that, since I think it might work well to go back and forth between Hume's enquiry and Mann's letters for my morning reading, while continuing to give my afternoons and early evenings to Mann's "Joseph" novels. And then we will see how I feel about things.
Although I am fascinated by the material, as I spend my mornings reading it, I feel a biting doubt that this is what I should be doing with my time. It is quite likely that I don't have more than a few years to live my life thus, and is this really the best way for me to spend what might effectively be my last hours, trying to play catch-up on 18th-century philosophy? Well, I am not inclined to just drop it now, especially since I have yet to even begin Hume's actual work. However, I am prepared to draw in my reading life more. Instead of spending my morning's on this stuff, as was planned, I think I will just treat the philosophy as an extra book, in the same way that I fit in the biographies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Though, for now, I will compromise on that, since I think it might work well to go back and forth between Hume's enquiry and Mann's letters for my morning reading, while continuing to give my afternoons and early evenings to Mann's "Joseph" novels. And then we will see how I feel about things.
