Just picked this up. What am I in for? What biases should I be aware of that Rosen might possess in his writings? Thanks

Great post. I came into the thread to make a less informative version of this post pretty much. Glad you did it instead.

I haven't read this book. I liked his critique of analytic philosophy and his book on nihilism though. Where do you think Rosen ends up? It seems to me too like he wants to defend metaphysics in a real way, but I admit I kinda just assume it will end in the same milquetoast bourgeois presumption that TRUE metaphysics is impossible that you always get these days, even when the person plays around with the idea of a bourgeoisified and aestheticized "metaphysics."

Maybe just Amazon? I haven't seen anything on b-ok or any other ebook sites, though there's a shit ton of other Rosen books available.

You might be able to find individual essays from it by searching the chapter titles in the articles section of b-ok. I know I've seen the Kojeve chapter floating around online (called "Kojeve's Paris").

Thanks user!

Kind of hard to say, re: where he ends up. I think he thinks Nietzsche's way is a dead end, and he at least seems to agree with Strauss that liberal democracy is a "least worst" alternative and not the best polity available, but he also seems forward enough to admit that he's firmly a modern, and that whatever problems the Enlightenment introduced aren't going away. I kind of got the impression that he was starting to look to Hegel (not Kojeve's Hegel) as a real alternative, hence his final work being his study on the Science of Logic. I still haven't put together how he sees his work on Hegel as being related to his work on Plato, who's the obvious figure of merit for him. I guess one suggestion is a little aside he makes (I think in his general book on Hegel) that one way one could look at Hegel is that his work is something like the unity of the Platonic dialogues. I.e., looking at Plato, it sometimes seems like there's this impossible opacity to overcome, with all of these different approaches to the forms and the soul, with each dialogue discretely seeming to come to its own aporias, but when put together form the Hegelian circle of wisdom.

It's hard to say.

Fuck it. Here's a .rar of the vast majority of his writings; books, articles, reviews, and even a few of his poems when he still fancied himself a poet.

mega.nz/#!7EwmnApD!0vlNzqzlL0nISF90HvDX6oxPp1WHD9bLmcVNlr2MOpc

A few of the files are in djvu format, but you can find good free readers for those pretty easily.

Damn that's interesting. Thanks for the rec, eager to check this out now. I had definitely unfairly written off Rosen then. Honestly I just hate Straussians so much that it even distorts my appreciation of Strauss himself sometimes.

Oddly enough I was just reading Kolakowski this afternoon and thinking seriously about whether a "back to Hegel" movement, not a pragmatist Hegel or some other "French" or Marxist Hegel stripped of metaphysics, but really Hegel, would be interesting.

Speaking of pragmatist Hegel shit, I read parts of exchange between Pippin and Zizek that was mostly boring but Zizek did say that he dislikes the "let's 'modernize' Hegel by really sanitizing him of icky metaphysics" approach and thinks the most interesting part of Hegel is the fact that he WAS clearly an absolute idealist.

Which is fair; some of Strauss's students can be really obnoxious (Bloom, Jaffa, and Pangle, come to mind, regardless of how clearly intelligent they are).

I'd love to see a "back to Hegel" movement, but I feel like besides Pippin, there's not many willing to press that at the moment. It'd be lucky if even the Kojevean Hegel was revived at this point.

I'm not familiar with the Pippin-Zizek exchange, but I'll have to look that up now. I guess Zizek is enough of a contrarian and shit-stirrer that I shouldn't be surprised that he'd be more interested in the real metaphysical Hegel.

>I guess Zizek is enough of a contrarian and shit-stirrer that I shouldn't be surprised that he'd be more interested in the real metaphysical Hegel.
I do believe this is where he says he's going to atm, albeit in his roundabout way.

Thanks for advice, i'll look in b-ok for it. Not using amazon only because when you living in third world shithole it's somehow expensive to buy books from that one, so to speak

But also, if you'd like the rest of his stuff (just about), try the link at . Cheers user.

Adding the Nihilism book to my to cop list. What's the deal with Bernadette? Worthwhile? I love Plato but can only wank so much to the dialogues. I feel the Straussian Nietzschean/Platonic dynamic is interesting tho. Read a book called Postmodern Platos which was real interesting -- goes over Nietzsche, Hedeigger, Gadamer, Strauss, and Derrida. I think the future is with Hegel and Plato too. Recently read Kojeve. Meaning to get to Hyppolite. Then Zizek. And I guess that Malabou gal too.

>esotercism is a means of hiding universal truth from the lower masses

What do you people think? Should the universal truths be taught in homogenous fashion amongst all classes of people?

>i'm glad i'm a beta and not an alpha

It was not a rhetorical question. I'm asking sincerely.

I've read so many people say that the truth must be hidden from the ignorant masses because they are not prepared to receive it.

This makes sense, but this quickly degenerates into "we should manipulate the masses to do blindly do our bidding", which I also think is foolish.

On the other hand, I've seen people shouting the truth to the four winds, essentially debasing it, making it sort of part of their persona, which is also something I find cringeworthy.

I think that if the masses aren't ready to realize deep metaphysical truths, then we should subtly nudge them towards it. Let the ready ones acquaint themselves with it.

What say you?

Benardete is, along with Richard Kennington, one of Strauss's best students hands down (and apparently Strauss's personal favorite of his students). His translations, essays, and studies are maybe the most autistically focused readings of Plato I've ever seen, but they require an aggravating amount of work to get into. You have to read whatever he's commenting alongside his writing, check every citation to another dialogue or passage, be able to glance at the Greek. But once he opens up, Plato very convincingly looks wholly different (as well as a lot of ancient authors; his 4 page essay on the Aeneid and his essay on Greek Tragedy are incredible).

He's very difficult, but rewarding. His students, Ronna Burger and Michael Davis, both offer more accessible readings rooted in his observations. Probably Encounters and Reflections is the best place to start with him, since it's basically just transcribed conversations between him and his closest students.

Not familiar with Malabou. What's her story, user?

Depending on how you read the Noble Lie passage in Plato's Republic, it looks like there's an argument that the lie is for the elites (the guardians and philosopher kings), because they're the only ones who'll have the strength of memory to keep it in mind. It seems like there's three classes: The many, the elites, and the true philosophers. The many are only dangerous if someone plays them dangerously, but it looks like it's the elites (people like the figure Alcibiades or Critias) who are the real danger. The trick seems to be whether the philosophers can convince them to respect (and otherwise stay out of) philosophy, and to be moderated such that they aren't a danger. This is one possibility.

Nietzsche seems to have a very different tact, but one can wonder what it means that such a sly writer writes so openly about the exotericism/esotericism of the philosophers as he does in Beyond Good and Evil.

Whatever the import of Hegel is for him (and I haven't read his last book) he's not just telling us to go back to Hegel, and not because he was 'metaphysical'. The issue is with Hegel as the consummate conceptual analyst, proponent of a presuppositionless rational science with the same basic model of rationality as Kant. Hegel is in a sense the culmination of Enlightenment. In The Limits of Analysis he regards him as a salutary slap in the face to analytics but apparently he overestimated their honesty. "The Hegel of our academic salons is a distorted version, a fantasm of the original. This version is not strong enough to perform the one service that would awaken analytical philosophers from their dogmatic slumbers: namely, to persuade them that the only safeguard against subjectivism and objectivism is a dialectico-speculative logic. I trust, however, that I have made clear that this is not my solution to the analyst's plight. It is a solution that follows from the inner necessity of analytical philosophy, or the will to conceptualize. This will to transform the world into a concept would at least regain its health and strength if it were self-conscious. Kantian dualism at its best is not enough to revitalize a technological doctrine of reason. Hegel provides a reinterpretation of Kant within which dualism is transformed into something analogous to the Platonic balance of man and cosmos. In other words, Hegel attempts to develop a conceptual logic of self-consciousness, which does not reduce the subject to an object or allow it to remain outside the boundaries of rational investigation. I prefer the Platonic original, but the Hegelian doctrine is a formidable attempt to transform the Platonic dream into an actual account of the whole. As such, it can be taken seriously in a way that analytical philosophy cannot." pp. 258-259

metaphysics is hella gay lmao

your face is hella gay.

I also like his willingness to read Kant analytically as well as historically and rhetorically (Limits of Analysis, Hermeneutics as Politics, etc.) which seems rare.

"But there is no intellectual intuition in Kant. The unity of apperception is a logical condition for the possibility of discursive thinking. It does not correspond to the apprehension of forms but is rather the unity of predication to which no form corresponds. Kant's Idealist successors transformed the unity of apperception into an absolute ego capable of intellectual intuition; but again, this intuition has no formal content. It is a kind of reflexive apprehension of the activity of thinking, something like Aristotle's conception of god as thought thinking itself. The move from the unity of apperception to intellectual intuition thus encouraged empirically oriented philosophers to reject intuition of forms. The distinct notion, going back to Plato and firmly rooted in common sense, of the intuition of examples, intentions, consequences of acts, looks, and the like, as well as of the application of rules, was then reduced to the status of a non-cognitive praxis. Philosophers like Wittgenstein, as we have seen, came to deny intuition even as they were calling it to our attention." pp. 36-37

"Is Metaphysics Possible?" is also recommended.

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By "starting to look to Hegel as a real alternative", all I meant was that he seems, at the end of his career and life, to be working out what in Hegel would most help philosophy and philosophizing, based on the problems he's commented on over the years and seen develop within philosophy. But your points are well taken, and it's certainly a pleasure to see an user well-versed in Rosen. Do you have any comments to add to OP's questions about Metaphysics in Ordinary Language?

You're probably right about that. After reading Limits of Analysis and its rather tepid ending I'm somewhat skeptical of the traditional enterprise called philosophy much less the million and one contemporary professionals. I feel like Rosen is too content to remain with the traditional, professional 'story' when he seems to know more is needed and he pushes up against it. I'm not convinced a last book on the Science of Logic is going to change my mind. There are so many resources available now, and threads to bring together. I havent read Metaphysics in Ordinary Language but have it.

That's probably right, unfortunately, re: whether the SoL book is enough of a response. I kind of take it sometimes that Rosen's seeming contentedness with having been a professional philosopher is a mask, as if he needs to pretend to fit in in order for his opponents to hear his criticisms at all. It'd certainly be a move somewhat in line with what Strauss might suggest. (His relation to Strauss puzzles me; he's clearly one of the brightest of the Straussians, much more so than his overrated friend Bloom, but sometimes his critiques of Strauss appear almost like an attempt to appear more respectable in his field. The chapter in Hermeneutics As Politics is surprising for how often Rosen acts like he's figured out Strauss's game, and then proceeds to give, what I think is, a totally wrong analysis, but, again, Rosen's no idiot, so it surprises me how often he offers these public critiques that miss the mark. But to add to that, his book on the Republic is strange for trying to make an argument that Plato in fact supports the regime discussed, instead of Plato offering a warning about political utopianism, as Strauss would have it, but then his argument transforms until it looks like he's making the same argument as Strauss, followed by an insistence that he's not. It's really curious.)

I suppose that's all to say that I agree that, as great as Rosen really is, it sometimes appears not to be enough, but I wonder if he's sometimes dissimulating like his teacher.

OP here, just finished the second chapter of Lived Present. Rosen really goes a roundabout and almost redundant way of proving consciousness is based upon past events and future desire through the use of historical philosophy. Is the whole book like this? Does he do this in order to make himself appear me “credible” and “legit”? Just seems like a waste of time.

That makes sense, his pretending in that way to be heard. He comes across as eager to point things out to his opponents/colleagues. But is it really so important? Why bother staying confined to this traditional story and the 'problems' that are insoluble but still must be kept open as 'problems' (which he treats sometimes like technical problems) with private, academically decorous responses? We know history didn't start with the Greeks and their autochthonous secular reason which had to be supplemented by Christian supernatural revelation which turns into 'religion' which is not real religion but papism/superstition so we have to return to revelation/Greek reason but also mathematical physics is how you know stuff...etc. Even more recent stories like the axial age and abortions of philosophia perennis like Traditionalism are not adequate.

I think your feeling of being underwhelmed is fair; that's one of the lesser chapters in the volume for what it's worth. As noted above, the book is a collection of essays and lectures from different periods, all that unifies them, if anything, is a kind of insistence on taking seriously ordinary experience as a starting point for philosophizing. In that particular chapter, there's admittedly an element of inside baseball at work, insofar as he's leveling criticisms against the procedures of the early phenomenologists. I suppose one way to characterize his argument is that they're not sufficiently phenomenological enough? But I think he's also working a bit polemically to show that some modern attempts to offer a more sophisticated analysis of phenomena than ancient philosophers might still fall short of the ancient analyses. The essays that more directly address ancient philosophy and early modernity are better, I think, but then I'm also a huge Plato nerd, and I think the break that the moderns had with the ancients is really important for seeing today clearly.

That's a good question, and I'm not sure what the answer is. If I put myself in his position, I suppose I'd have to admit that I don't think I'd have responded too differently. Especially with the Strauss relation, since he became a professional around the time that Strauss was first really starting to get attacked by other academics, while at the same time Strauss's students were becoming more insular and insolent toward other schools of thought. But I guess even further, would he have gotten his point across if he had been even more viciously polemical? (He seems capable of it; look how he shits on his old friend Rorty at the end of Hermeneutics As Politics.)

Could you say more about what you mean about staying confined to the traditional story and problems?