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The most difficult philosopher(s) you've read

Belisarius

Belisarius

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Thought this would be a fun thread to see what everyone has read (or tried to read) in the philosophy department, to see where our limits are and discuss things.

The toughest philosophers I've read (or tried to read):

--Quine's thesis on the analytic-synthetic distinction

This is an important paper, or so I've heard, but it was really tough to read, especially for someone with no background in the philosophy of language or science. Without the help of a prof, I would have probably drowned in it.

--Plotinus's "Enneads"

This is one of those books I pull out a couple of times a year, thinking I can handle it, only to be hopelessly lost in a few pages. Yet, I'm consistently amazed at the number of lucid commentaries on it--how do these guys extract his philosophy from all he writes? It seems hermetic to me for now, but maybe that will change with practice. Not surprisingly, in spite of the age of this work there are only two or three historically recent English translations of it.

--Anything by Kant

It seems like Kant uses 50 words to express an idea that could be done with 10. Then again, he is a guy who wants you to know exactly what he's talking about, so I suppose being verbose was a way to cover all his bases.

--Anything by Spinoza

Some people find Spinoza easy, but the mathematical/geometric nature of his writing was a tough nut for a (mostly) non-linear thinker like me to crack.
 
Taking a lingustics or a logic course helps a lot with reading tough philosophy (you can break down the components of each sentance and "mathmatically" reconstruct the idea, as well as test the theory).
 
I've heard that "Being and Time" is pretty intense as well...I had no idea that we have to read (some of) it at my school in continental philosophy. :P

One of the philosophy profs here has sort of stated in a roundabout way that one of the most difficult philosophy books is Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", which he says some Hegelian specialists take decades to master...
 
David said:
This guy Friedrich Nietzsche. His writting is a little strange, but I like it.
Click to expand...

Actually he's probably my most admired philisophical figure. He was a product of his environment though and did have some sexist overtones and comments along the way, but i think if you ignore the gender issue, he's pretty great.

The only thing he wrote i had trouble with was the Birth of Tragedy. His first work. Needless to say i wasn't up on my greek tragedy and half-way through it i had to give up, read up on the plays of Sophocles, and then start all over again. I got the jist of it, but i still don't think i have it figured out completely.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra was amazing i thought. The Will to Power, Beyond Good and Evil, Anti-christ, and On the Genealogy of Morals were all great reads too.
 
"The Will to Power", although not a real book in the sense of the word, was by far, my favorite. I must have read it twenty times, and still don't understand what he was trying to get at with his notes, fully. I eventually gave it to some guy that I met recently. He was interested in Nihilism, so I gave it to him. I hope it does him as much good as it did me.

That book, in particular helped me through a very difficult time in my life. Sounds strange, but it's true. Simply trying to grasp some of his thoughts on religion gave gave me insight into what I truelly feel on the topic.
 
Jacques Derrida. Kant is really tricky, but not entirely impenetrable; it was often difficult to grasp the meaning of the sentence due to its extreme length (germano-english translations always add some length anyways), but if i read it 10,000 times i could sort of understand each paragraph ;) Derrida... well, that's just different; with all these intense philosophers, if you start small & work your way up it's much easier than simply jumping in the deep end.

http://www.erraticimpact.com/~20thcentury/html/derrida.htm
 
"the laws of the leaf" writen by Budha Cloud. His scribling is the most complicating herbology philosophy iv ever read.

:D
 
Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit".
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "The Chiasm".
...man, if i weren't taking a class in these guys, their writings would be lost on me.
John Dewey is frigging awesome and borders on comprehensible.

ebola
 
My votes are for Kant and Hegel. I think one of Kant's problems is that he has such precise definitions for everything--so you have to figure those out first, and then figure out what he's trying to say. A lot of the terms seem illogical to me--like intuition to me mean 'things that are discovered from sensory experience'. As for Derrida, I think he is very difficult, but I think a lot of that is his intentional vagueness--which helps misdirect attention away from the flaws in his arguments.
 
flaws?

i'm intrigued! :)

part of the difficulty in grasping derrida is coming to terms with his intentional terminological substitutivity, which is of course part of a process of highlighting the constant workings of deconstruction; but not all of it.
 
I could be alone here, but I found Kant farily comprehensible, if not densely verbose.
You can pretty much get the gist of his project without having the distinctions between judgement, concept, intuition, etc. down-pat. well, you can at least understand it well enough to figure out how flawed his project is. :)

ebola
 
Maybe the problem with understanding Derrida and other writers like him is that they don't understand that clarity of writing and thinking are in binary opposition with the dissemination of signifiers like phallogocentrism in the midst of hypergrammatical constructions. I, for one, see the differance.
 
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