I’m asked about approaches to studying and, broadly, how to go about learning outside of academia, more than anything else.

I’ll discuss helpful approaches to reading, studying, researching, the importance primary sources, and learning languages here.

x.com/i/spaces/1yNGa… For the space (1): Reading

A mini-thread of a few of my various discussions and threads about the origin, history, and philosophy of the word “worldview” and its relationship to “culture,” “nihilism,” and the Bible

First a recent discussion:

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https://twitter.com/athens_stranger/status/1802419193926799503

A second discussion, emphasizing its effects upon higher Catholic education:

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https://twitter.com/athens_stranger/status/1817608404409683996

🧵 on great math books for autodidacts or college math and physics students looking for assistance in their own courses. Here are the standard classics along with those I found most helpful for independent study for beginners through an undergrad math major and beyond:

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First, the classics. These are the intro undergrad texts often used at MIT, CalTech, Princeton, etc. They’re very difficult for self-study, but they’re crucial for helping you keep track of where what you’re learning stands in relation to the what the best are learning:

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🧵 Augustine on the weakness and cowardice of many Christians living amid wicked men:

“Many Christians are, of course, weaker men [than those who should reform the wicked]: they live a married life; who have, or wish to have, children; and who have houses and families. …

(1/5) … They are reluctant to reform and rebuke the wicked, even though such actions might correct the wicked, for fear that such correction would make impossible their own well-being and reputation, bringing them peril or destruction. And this is not because they believe…

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🧵 “Depth” Psychology

m’s thread is a thoughtful and thought-provoking assessment of, and response to, Nietzsche from a very informed knowledge of Jung.

I don’t consider myself qualified to assess it b/c I only took a few seminars on “depth psychology” in grad school…

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https://twitter.com/bidenhandler/status/1807831379847401550

…However, because I did at least take a few seminars on the topic at the PhD level from the psychology dept in supplementing my philosophy coursework, I can share some additions to his thread above by way of a bibliography.

To begin with, the following are great intros:

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Pious Christians acting as if their faith is a mere team sport by publicly mocking and flatly attacking pious Christians of other creeds or denominations do more damage to *the entirety* of Christianity than the shitlibs and “liberal Christians” could ever dream of doing…

(1/9) …and among the reasons why is that our age is an age of under-commitment, when not flatly nihilistic.

Most people are already very skeptical if not cynical of pious Christians capable of even exhibiting manliness instead of effeminate pettiness amid pointless debates…

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🧵Richard Weaver on Robert E. Lee, responsibility, rights, duty, and discipline:

“I would not represent Robert E Lee as a prophet, but as a man who stood close enough to the eternal truths to sometimes utter prophecy when he spoke. He was brought up in the old school…

(1/5) …which places responsibility upon the individual, and not some abstract social agency. Sentimental humanitarianism obviously does not speak the language of duty, but of indulgence. The belief that obligations are tyrannies, and that desires and not rewards should be…

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🧵 Early Heidegger: his PhD, lectures, courses etc (for quick reference):

Germany requires students to write two PhD dissertations in order to teach at university: a doctoral dissertation and a qualifying dissertation (known as the “Habilitationsschriften”)

First…

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https://twitter.com/athens_stranger/status/1797223316388020560

…Heidegger’s two dissertations are as follows:

—Doctoral dissertation [1913]: “The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Positive-Critical Contribution to Logic”

Noteworthy: Heidegger’s two minor subjects for his doctorate were mathematics and medieval history…

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https://twitter.com/athens_stranger/status/1798896152542355817

🧵 From barbells to “dance routines” (ie effeminacy) in gyms:

In 2015 Mark Rippetoe wrote on the rise of steroid use due to coaches/trainers not teaching athletes/clients how to properly lift. Much of it began with people simply wanting the smith and cable machines…

(1/6) …more than wanting to build the proper foundation through free-weight barbell lifting via the basics:

— squats, pull-ups, deadlifts military press and bench, etc

Most people simply enjoy the *easier* movements imitated by the cable and machines equipment — and…

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Martyrmade entirely fails to understand history or politics here which I correct in this thread:

The *liberalizing* of Christianity defining much of the Modern Enlightenment was *a deliberate project* to emphasize God’s goodness but at the insane expense of God’s justice

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Blaming Christianity, MartyMade shows he’s merely derivative of the Trojan-horse propaganda from the early Modern liberal founders of classical liberalism who deliberately sought to make Christianity radically tolerant by subverting it. Here’s my initial space with notes:

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https://twitter.com/Athens_Stranger/status/1708940648932651368

🧵 Nietzsche on pity, gynocracy, man, and technology:

Immediately after saying that he views “every type of ‘feminism’ as the closing of a door” that makes entry into his own thought impossible, Nietzsche says:

“You need to never have gone easy on yourself, you need…

(1/9) … to have *harshness* in your habits if you’re going to be cheerful among harsh truths.”
(Ecce Homo, “Books,” 2)

This is Nietzsche summarizing his teaching against the effeminacy of “pity” as a virtue while simultaneously describing his understanding of…

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🧵 on the foundations of thought definitive of the West

There are two characteristics that are most definitive of the tradition of thought that defines the peoples of the Western world. These characteristics are broadly referred to as poetry and philosophy, but…

(1/9) … I emphasize the “broadly” there because they refer to ways of knowing and, in the most important cases, knowing the following twofold phenomena:

— the divine, or divine revelation, and
— the immediate world of man

As they have come down to us through the tradition…

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🧵 Learning the depths of Shakespeare on your own without the nonsense of what academia is doing to him.

— Step 1 is to ALWAYS read the plays first, *without* the influence of other interpretations

*I prefer the Pelican editions, as shown here next to Nietzsche 😏

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https://twitter.com/athens_stranger/status/1755291499003285774

After having read any particular play or grouping of them, you will then want to see what a few of the best readers of Shakespeare have had to say about them.

I’ve found the following commentators the most helpful by far.

— For the Roman plays, these are outstanding:

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🧵 Love, honor, and Aristocracy in Nietzsche:

The revaluation of the value of “pity [Mitleid]” is central to Nietzsche’s teaching. However, it’s seldom noted — *especially* among his (mostly thoughtless) critics — how that speaks to Nietzsche’s more important…

(1/7) …revaluation of the value of love itself.

For instance, in perhaps his strongest statement on the significance of love for his (political) project of revaluing all values (but cf especially JS 334), Nietzsche asks:

“A love that has not even mastered the feeling of…

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🧵Nietzsche and Aristotle on friendship are helpful for understanding the title of this article and why it’s true for so many people:

It speaks to how far down the road of “last man” most people are. In our era of radical *under-commitment* this title is true because…

(1/7) … people want to keep all their options open for as long as possible. To be so radically risk-averse as most people are, they see this as a great boon. However, true love, true friendship, true family are all absolutely rooted in accepting and *embracing* great risks…

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🧵 On friendship, philosophy, anger, and law:

The fate of friendship in the Western tradition is a good gauge of the fate of the West in general. There was a time when it held a position of privilege in philosophy, but that time has long passed. Specifically, we now…

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https://twitter.com/athens_stranger/status/1709571464553476413

…speak of friendship so casually that true friendship has become like love had become for La Rochefoucauld: true love is akin to ghosts, everyone speaks of it but few have ever seen it (Maxims 76). Accordingly, in order to better know ourselves it’s worth surveying…

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🧵 on the Great books:

The significance of an education in the great books is that we sit atop the shoulders of giants.

Accordingly, if we merely presume to see further than they could without ourselves knowing them, then our vision is really a kind of blindness that…

(1/19) …is entirely ignorant of its own premises. In other words, that we can see further in some respects is meaningless if we lack the proper sight of ourselves — self-knowledge.

The temptation is always to believe that what is latest is greatest because we live under…

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🧵 Poetry, Philosophy, Technology

The richest understanding of what we call “technology” has little to do with anything written in the past hundred years, only possible exceptions being Heidegger and Jünger, but not those like Ellul etc or our contemporaries. I’ll …

(1/12) …explain why in what follows.

The great books of the Western world — and the first of them, such as the Bible, Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle — all have extremely rich teachings on the primary role of “technology” in the life of man” which we still have much…

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🧵 Origins of postmodern biblical heresy and America — on a forgotten controversy in late 18th cent Germany that radically changed the God of the Western world

All accounts of late-Modern philosophy heavily emphasize Kant, and rightly so. However, there is another…

(1/25) …philosopher whose impact was far more consequential.

It’s certainly true that Kant ushers in a philosophical revolution via his Critique of Pure Reason with its argument that human reason cannot fundamentally know “things in themselves” — ie, that our ability…

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🧵The Enlightenment, faith, God’s goodness, and American theology:

The counter-Enlightenment begins with Hamann and his critique of rational theology vis a vis Kant. Hamann ingeniously questions the universal applicability of the principle of sufficient reason (ie the…

(1/14) …claim that there *must* be reasons for *all* our beliefs). Specifically, Hamann argues that it is itself *unreasonable* to think that every belief is accessible to reason in a demonstrable way. Thus, to universalize the principle of sufficient reason is to presuppose…

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Historicism 🧵

One of the most interesting problems in philosophy by far is the emergence of “historicism.” The problem emerged publicly as a cultural crisis in the founding of history as its own field of study in 19th Cent Germany, separate from philosophy and theology

(1/10) In the creation of the modern research university, primarily with the university of Berlin, history first becomes its own department, its own field of study. Previously the study of history had been subservient to either the departments of theology, philosophy, and/or law

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