Friday, April 30, 2010

Hypatia's Girl Angrily Reads the History of Philosophy

Given that I'm starting to prepare to depart for some fancy-pants philosophy learning (hooray for escaping the surly death of retail!) in the south (good-bye midwestern winters!) I sort of figure I should read the recommended reading list, so that I might pass for a philosopher who knows a thing or two.

To make it fun and keep me honest, I'll blog the books I read, then you all can learn the history of philosophy with me.  The plan, as it stands now, is to read straight through, for those of you who want to follow along at home.  This plan, however, is subject to change upon my whims and attention span.  (She says, eying the medieval section with a sigh)

The list - or so they tell me:

I.  Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

1.  The Presocratics (Curd and McKirahan; Hackett)
2.  Plato, Apology
3.  Plato, Republic
4.  Plato, Theaetetus
5.  Aristotle, De Anima
6.  Aristotle, Metaphysics
7.  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
8.  Aristotle, Politics
9.  Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader (Inwood & Gerson; Hackett)
10.  Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations
11.  Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism
12.  Plotinus, The Enneads

II.  Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

1.  Augustine, Confessions
2.  Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will
3.  Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
4.  Avicenna, The Metaphysics of "The Healing" (Marmura; Brigham Young Univ. Press)
5.  Anselm, Proslogion
6.  Averroes, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy
7.  Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (abridged, Guttmann and Rabin; Hackett)
8.  Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings (McDermott; Oxford)
9.  Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings (Wolter; Hackett)
10.  Ockham, Philosophical Writings (Boehner and Brown; Hackett)
11.  Cusanus, Of Learned Ignorance
12.  Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man

III.  Modern Philosophy

1.  Machiavelli, The Prince
2.  Hobbes, Leviathan
3.  Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings (Cottingham, et al; Cambridge)
4.  Spinoza, Ethics
5.  Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics
6.  Locke, Second Treatise of Government
7.  Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
8.  Vico, The New Science (Bergin and Fisch; Cornell)
9.  Rousseau, The Social Contract
10.  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
11.  Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
12.  Kant, Critique of Judgment

IV.  19th Century Philosophy

1.  Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre
2.  Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom
3.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
4.  Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (trans. Payne), vol. 1
5.  Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy (Hackett)
6.  Emerson, Nature
7.  Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
8.  Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
9.  Mill, Utilitarianism
10.  Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
11.  Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
12.  Peirce, Philosophical Writings (Buchler; Dover)

V.  20th Century Philosophy

1.  Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
2.  James, Pragmatism
3.  Dewey, Experience and Nature
4.  Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
5.  Heidegger, Being and Time
6.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness
7.  de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity
8.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
9.  Arendt, The Human Condition
10.  Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
11.  Martinich and Sosa, eds., Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology***
12.  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
13.  Foucault, The Order of Things
14.  Butler, Gender Trouble
15.  Derrida, The Gift of Death

Saturday, April 24, 2010

In which Hypatia's Girl wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and contemplates whether or not Internet language is appropriate for the Internet.

(Are we still capitalizing "Internet," by the way?  I feel like we used to, but that maybe now we're over the whole ZOMG IT'S THE INTERNET kind of thing.  Someone call Strunk and White!)

I'm kind of unimpressed with this.  Kind of deeply unimpressed.

Look, this blog, she does not get a lot of comments.  A lot of that is that this blog, she is small, rarely updated (working on that) and I'm not totally certain how I want to develop it.  Now, I could post a bunch of meta-bullshit posts about finding my bloggy path and developing my interwebby tone, or I could recognize that I'm writing a fucking insignificant blog out in the hinterlands of blogspot, and, you know, just fuck around until I hit my stride.  This post (which will totes get interesting in just a minute) notwithstanding, allow me to assure you, 15 people on the internet (Internet?) who will read this one day, when in doubt I always go for the latter option.  For fuck's sake, I'm a philosopher, that's totally line one of my job description.

Anyway - comments - I don't get a lot of them . . . So I hadn't really had any hoops to jump through to comment on it.  In the same way as I don't really have a policy in my day-to-day life for what to do in case of shark attack.  And then, this morning, I wake up all cranky-pantsed and it's raining and some TOTES FOR REALZ FUCKING HELPFUL D00D CAN HAZ ANONYMOUS HANDY HINTS FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY LADYBRAYNE BUT CANNOT HAZ BALLS TO USE A NYM.  And now I'm all cranky-pantsed, and it's raining, and I'm deeply unimpressed with Anonymous Intarwebz D00d.  So now EVERYONE has to register to comment.  WAY TO BREAK THE TOY FOR EVERYONE.  Sheesh.

I mean for fuck's sake, the insane, anti-atheist, notorious internet troll Dav* Mab* can fucking have a name when posting crazy, vaguely anti-Semitic, death-threat laden, mass-produced comments.

Commenting under "anonymous" annoys me for two reasons, the first and most important, it removes the anonymous from the community.  I cannot respond to you by name or nym, and so I am addressing a blankness.  It's also fucking cowardly, and bespeaks a lack of imagination.  AID is probably relatively educated, and perhaps AID thinks that passive aggressive offers of helping my tone ARE REALLY FUCKING HELPFUL, but for seriously, why the fuck do you, who is simply a blank cipher, think that I should change one goddamn thing I do, because you think my using internet speak on the fucking internet makes me look bad.  For the fuck of shit, it's like saying "You know, Hypatia's Girl, using all that philosophical language in your philosophy paper makes you look pretentious."

And so, Anonymous Intarwebz D00d, allow me to devote the rest of this post to addressing YOUR ANONYMOUS HANDY HINTS FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY LADYBRAYNE.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

In which I dream of a world where justice is both swift and severe.

I'm sure I've covered this before, but apparently it's a phenomenally difficult idea to grasp, so I'll try to take it in easy steps.

1. I feel safe in asserting, doing no research whatsoever, but rather relying on what I already know about human reproduction, psychology and constitutionally "protected" medical procedures, that the primary reason a woman would have an abortion is because she does not want to be pregnant, or to give birth, or to have a baby.
1.a. Therefore abortions happen because there are unwanted pregnancies.

2. If you are genuine in your concern about abortion and not jut a fucking woman-hating fucking asshole, then if you want to prevent abortions you would do everything in you power to . . . prevent unwanted pregnancies.  Focusing on slut-shaming, restricting access to abortion, contraception and reproductive health measures is not at all in anyway whatsoever no matter how much you try to fucking lie doing a single fucking thing to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
2.a. Therefore unless you work to ensure women have true sexual and reproductive freedom, you actually just hate women.
2.b. Therefore Oklahoma is close to being the worst state ever.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Hypatia's Household Goes to the Movies and Hypatia's Girl Swears Off Pop Culture

That's it.  I'm done.
I'm over dude culture so hard.  I'm sure that life is really scary if you're a dude and all with women who do things like leave you and aren't super duper excited that you've impregnated them and want you do things like ZOMG hyphenate YOUR last name with hers JUST BECAUSE YOU GOT MARRIED.  It sounds fucking awful.

So Hypatia's Household was restless and went to see a movie.  We went to see Hot Tub Time Machine.  How could you possibly go wrong with a movie whose premise is there is a hot tub, and it's a time machine.  It has John fucking Cusack, for fuck's sake.  How do you fuck it up?

You make the whole movie an extended joke about homophobia, non-consensual sex, how fucking hard it is to be a dude and then you throw in some racism (just a smidgen).

What I learned from Hot Tub Time Machine:
Dudes are sad when their women leave them.  But sad only in a kind of plot point so that we know that John Cusack is kind of sad, it's hard to be him.  But it's WAY more sad when his high school girlfriend breaks up with him, WHEN HE'S 40 AND SHE'S ACTUALLY STILL A TEENAGER. Also it's not fucking creepy IN THE SLIGHTEST when you find out that you're married to a woman THAT YOU ACTUALLY ONLY KNEW FOR LESS THAN 2 HOURS.

(Black) dudes are sad when their women ask them to give up their dream of being a mediocre singer and are really emasculated when they have to sacrifice their identity, THEIR PERSONAL SENSE OF SELF by CHANGING THEIR FUCKING NAME WHEN THEY GET MARRIED by hyphenating with hers.  THIS, DUDES, IS THE WORST THING EVER, but it's probably ok if she changes her name to yours without hyphenating at all, in fact, it's probably fucking emasculating if not, because, apparently LIFE IS FUCKING SO HARD FOR DUDES.  Also dudes are sad when their women cheat on them.  But not so sad that they talk to the women about the email they broke into to find out about the cheating. And I'm assuming this is harder for Black dudes, because we all know how fucking pushy ALL Black women are.  For reals.

It's totally NOT AT ALL A RAPEY THING TO DO to get a woman drunk to sleep with her.  Nor is it at all to be remarked on that you INTENTIONALLY KNOCK HER UP.  AGAIN, when YOU'RE IN YOUR 40s AND SHE'S A TEENAGER.  Also, it's fucking HIGH MOTHERFUCKING COMEDY to make jokes about nonconsensual sex, so long as it's dudes blowing each other.  And it's NOT RACIST AT ALL to trot out "once you go Black, you won't go back" or that black dudes ALL UNIVERSALLY BECAUSE THEY'RE SO FUCKING SEXUAL LIKE THAT have REALLY HUGE COCKS.

I cannot tell you how fucking OVER I am of the pop culture meme that ZOMG IT'S SO HARD FOR MEN OUT THERE.  Dudes are just trying to be all dudely, and like THOSE FUCKING WOMEN WITH THEIR - well I'd say needs, but hot shit, owing to the movie's utter lack of character development of ANY of the characters, I'm not actually certain what WAS the fucking problem besides those dudes just generally being kind of huge fucking jerks.  And really, if you're a huge fucking jerk, LIFE SHOULD TOTALLY SUCK FOR YOU.

I literally cannot remember enough of the movie to do justice to how annoying it was.

But you heard it here first, kids, Hypatia's Girl is officially throwing down the gauntlet on PEOPLE NOT FUCKING GETTING IT.  I don't think that it should be hard to not be a giant douchecanoe.  This common-sense radical will be there, loudly asking you why you are a douchecanoe.  Oh, you think rape jokes are funny, huh jackass?  Why is that?  Oh, yeah, black guys have big cocks? Why are you such a racist piece of shit?  Could you please detail me the ways in which you are not ACTIVELY MAKING LIFE WORSE FOR EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PERSON EVER by not being an active, informed, committed feminist/anti-racist/queer-ally?  Because, dear world, frankly none of this shit ought to be hard any more.  We should fucking know better.  And I, for one, am 100% out of patience with this shit.