Prolegomena

I’m not sure why I decided to start this today of all days, though it is certainly something I have been thinking of starting for a while. Since leaving college and my desire to go into academia as a philosophy professor over a decade ago, I have continued to read and study philosophy independently. I read it primarily because I enjoy it and find it extremely rewarding in-itself. However, I’ve always kept the idea of being able to make some kind of living off of this passion in the back of my head since entering law school. 

This blog isn’t exactly an attempt to make a living off of my studies. But if I were to attempt that explicitly in the future, this would serve as the foundation for it.

This blog primarily stems from my desire to have “something to show” for all of my reading. To have something concrete I have “done” as a result of my studies. Having knowledge and skills is great, but being able to demonstrate them and share them is something separate that carries its own benefits and satisfaction. Whether or not I actually show this blog to anyone is something I have yet to determine, but with this I will at least have something I can show myself. 

The form the blog possess will necessarily be disjointed. I’m sure there’s a more apt word to describe it, but I don’t feel like looking up synonyms on thesaurus.com for what is essentially at this point a personal journal entry. Why disjointed? Because I am typically reading a few books concurrently and I hope to document my thoughts and notes on what I read as I go. Now, I use “concurrently” somewhat loosely here: I don’ read from each of my current books each night. I could go days or even weeks without opening one of the books I’m “currently reading.” But so long as I keep it out, in my head it’s still in the rotation as something I’m reading. 

My group of concurrent books I read has historically consisted of: one philosophy book, one non-fiction (typically leftist history/political theory or ancient history) book, and one fiction book. More recently, most of my reading has focused on philosophy and (Catholic) theology and less on history or political theory. Since the books I read at a given time cover a range of interests/topics, so will my posts. I may write three consecutive posts about thoughts I have on Existence and the Existent by Maritain, and then not mention it for weeks as I switch over to Purgatorio or some aphorisms of Minima Moralia by Adorno.  One thing I’d like to improve upon over time is actually completing a book before starting another, but at least for now that’s how I operate. 

My operation is reliant more upon my mood on a given night than anything else. I have a full-time job as a  lawyer and after work I like to spend time with my wife and infant daughter. I typically don’t start reading a book on a given day until after they both go to sleep. But since I too have to get up for work in the morning, and have other interests outside of reading, my time to read is limited. I therefore would rather read something I’m in the mood for on a given night than force myself to read something that I’m just not feeling that moment. For example, after a night or two of reading Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, I may not be “in the mood” to read it until more than a week later. I’d then fill those nights with whatever I was feeling, or no reading at all. 

Last night I read from Maritain. Two nights ago I ready essays in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Tonight, I don’t know if I’ll read anything. Tomorrow, I may read either of the above or something completely different in my current “rotation.” Hence the “Scattered” in the title to this blog. 

At least in the beginning, I will treat this blog as an intellectual diary/notebook. Some posts may just be notes I have from a book, some may also include critical reflections on those notes, some may just be ramblings regarding a topic that occupied my mind that day. If anyone does come across this and is curious as to what topics read and will write about, here is a non-exhaustive list of thinkers/writers/topics in no particular order: 

Philosophy: Hegel, Marx, Aquinas, Kant, Augustine, Heidegger, Adorno, Marxism, Critical Theory, Deleuze, Existentialism, Nietzsche, Scholasticism, Anarchism, Spinoza, political economic theory 

History: Ancient Roman history, Ancient Greek history, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, intellectual history of Marxism, later Roman history (some incorrectly call it Byzantine)

Religion: Catholic theology - philosophy, history, how it relates to and/or informs existential reflection (I thought about putting this in one of the above categories but it didn’t neatly fit in either, at least in my mind)

Other interests: film and television; the literary “classics” of western history; contemporary socio-political and economic analysis from a leftist perspective; the Latin language; koine and attic Greek; relativity, quantum physics, and the philosophic implications of contemporary theoretical physics

As I said, this list of authors and topics is not-exhaustive or in any particular order; thought I expect the vast majority of posts on this blog to be a discussion of something listed above. 

That’s all for now, I think.