September 29th, 2022


Cast your sight down, and see how far you have turned.


I've finally finished moving the rest of my stuff from my old house and into the new one, although not without difficulty in moving and now present difficulties in adjusting. Before I finished moving, I finally finished my first reading of Peter Kalkavage's Logic of Desire and will be returning to Hegel's chapters on Spirit and Religion for the next few days, at least that's my current hope. I'm also highly likely to give Kalkavage a second re-read. My commute to work has blown up from being about 10 minutes away from home to now a bit over 30, so figuring out how I'm going to manage that is my current dilemma; not to mention having to get new furniture and spring cleaning the upstairs since it looks like it hasn't been vacuumed since the birth of Christ.

The other day I read an article on reading a written work 100 times and the author's argument for it was rather convincing, although I do think 100 is a rather arbitrary number. That in mind, I've decided that I'm going to be re-reading the Phenomenology of Spirit as many times as I can until it's basically chiseled into my brain. After I finish the chapters on Spirit and Religion (as well as Absolute Knowing) I will have completed the entire body of text a little over twice, so quite short of 100. Since I already have a copy of it, I'm going to stick to rereading the Miller translation over and over, but at some point I want to read the earlier Baillie translation as well as the later Michael Inwood translation. The Inwood translation has the convenience of much better paragraph by paragraph commentary in the back of the book and I'm quite curious about the first major English translation of the Phenomenology by J.B. Baillie. According to Wikipedia he was a British philosopher so I'm assuming his translation was the standard in the early 20th century since the first edition was printed in 1910. I wonder if it's the translation that the British Idealists were referring to and consequently, the translation that Russell and Moore were reacting to. As far as I can tell by taking a look and reading a bit of each, the Inwood translation looks the closest to the original text at the expense of being more readable, whereas the Baillie translation feels the most readable at the expense of being closer to the text, while the Miller translation seems to fit pleasantly in the middle.

I have to go on a bit of a shopping spree to get everything I need to make this new place comfortable and while I'm at it I'll go ahead and order myself a copy of the Science of Logic as well as a physical textbook for the CCNA certification I want to study for, while I'm at it I might as well get a second translation of the Philosophy of Right. A little over a year ago I went down to a local bookstore and I noticed they had a shitload from the Great Books of the Western World series by the Encylcopaedia Britannica and I couldn't help but get as many as I could since they were 4 dollars each, one of which was a collection of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and what I'm pretty sure is a rather rough earlier translation of his lectures on world history. The translation of the Philosophy of Right is the exact same translation referenced in my copy of Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right so I'm gonna have to give it a read before I attempt to read Marx's commentary, but before that I'd still like to read the Cambridge translation edited by Allen Wood.

I don't really know when I plan to get around to the Encylopedia of the Philosophical Sciences but I think I'd like to read all three volumes before I get around to the Philosophy of Right, but I'd like to go straight to the Science of Logic after I think I've spent an adequate amount of time obsessing over the Phenomenology, if only to familiarize myself with the contents of the Greater Logic. I think when I get around to reading the more recent Oxford translation of his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History I'll do my best to pair it with his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. I have a nice big collected volume of all 3 volumes of the history of philosophy lectures, and I'm somewhat disappointed that the standalone volumes available are the exact same translation and not more recent, so you might as well get the collected volume and save money even though the typesetting looks a little bit rougher. Whoever translated the history of philosophy lectures seems to use ancient systems for rendering Indian and Chinese terms into English so sometimes you have to stop and think for a bit to suddenly realize who or what Hegel's talking about (or do a bit of searching), so I do wish there was a more recent/better translation available.

Other than that, I found a couple books overviewing analytic philosophy that I'll want to take a look at soon, James Maffie seems to draw a bit from Quine so I'm thinking of getting an anthology/collection of his works as well to pair with the history of analytic philosophy that I want to read. I also found a rather interesting book called Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought that outlines the history of Hegel's reception in the analytic tradition, as well as how he's recently come to be adapted by a couple analytic philosophers. Another one I found that looks pretty interesting is Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy which attempts to bridge the divide between Derrida and various analytic philosophers. At some point after I read Capital I think I'd like to read Derrida's Spectres of Marx, even though I don't expect to be a fan of him. That's pretty much all I've been up to lately, moving and reading, signing off for the night once more.


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