an eudæmonist › reading

2025

January

Federico Falco. The Plains. tarns. Jennifer Croft. London: Charco Press, 2024 (2020). [11]

Literary romance novel about a breakup; emphasis on the literary, although the psychological sophistication is fairly low. Has a sort of dreary cosmopolitanism to it that I found rather dull; I don’t go to Argentinian fiction to get recommendations to read Annie Dillard (by which I mean, I suppose, that I am clearly not the audience for this book).

Goce Smilevski. Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel trans. Filip Korženski. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2006 (2002). [10]

Interesting to reread this after having read some Spinoza (which I had not done the first time I read it).

René Descartes. A Discourse on the Method. trans. Ian Maclean. Oxford: OUP, 2006 (ca. 1633). [9]

Descartes writes such cute books, but the limits of his view of the world can be a bit grating. One wants to urge him to check his privilege, but one senses that he wouldn’t listen anyway.

Steven Nadler. A Book Forged in Hell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011. [8]

An approachable introduction to Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and its philosophical and historical context; Nadler is able to break down complex issues into comprehensible terms, and if he sometimes over-simplifies, it is usually apparent when that is happening. A solid and helpful bibliography.

Thomas Hobbes. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. ed. J.C.A. Gaskin. Oxford: OUP, 1994 (ca. 1640). [7]

‘For he that perceives that he hath perceived, remembers’ (p. 213).

Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer. New York: Dover, 1982 (1939–1945, 1953). [6]

The chapters on archaic Greek thought are the most memorable, while in pretty much everything thereafter 19th-century German thought crouches in any handy corner, ready to leap out and astonish the unwary reader. More concerned, ultimately, with legacies than with discovery, like most heirs.

C.G. Jung. The Undiscovered Self. trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011 (1950, 1957, 1970, 1990). [5]

The first essay is a sort of Civilization and Its Discontents for Jungians, while the second essay is a nice, clear cut overview of Jungian analysis; rather wish I had found this volume earlier.

Laura Cumming. Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death. New York: Scribner, 2023. [4]*

The impression is one of placidity, but with rather a lot going on beneath the surface. It was always a pleasure to see what the next plate would be.

Stanislaw Lem. The Cyberiad. trans. Michael Kandel. London: Penguin, 2014 (1965, 1972, 1974). [3]

I think I started this two years ago and found it very slow going, perhaps because I expected it to be very serious. It is not (primarily) very serious. It savored of the past rather than the future; the sort of eighteenth-century feel to it – the mechanistic universe – was not something I had expected and took some getting used to.

R.G. Collingwood. The Idea of Nature. Oxford: OUP, 1970 (1945). [2]

Collingwood thinks far more clearly and writes more cogently than I could hope to, but it is peculiar that he takes god as a given, even when advocating a return to first principles.

Torquato Tasso. Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection. trans. and edited by Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton. Berkeley, CA: Univ. California Press, 1982 (1580–1594). [1]

An unexpectedly charming selection of dialogues, mostly on social matters. Goes some way to redeeming the dialogue as a form.