This is probably the last book I'll ever read in a state of despair.

Montaigne is not necessarily eccentric. What I found appealing in his writings is a certain spontaneity, or indifference, that makes his thought seem devoid of vanity or pretence. But at some level, I always thought the eruditeness was a bit unnatural. There aren't really any clear lessons in the book, but rather it is an experience, in which you are constantly amazed by the learning he has. The joy comes from the amount of satisfaction HE gets.

Everything is almost meaningless, but there is an urgency or immediacy to things that we cannot deny. In this book, I guess, we see the profile of a man who perfected the art of capturing the heart of a matter, and who managed to make every word count. As a picture of Caesar's mind, it is a rare artifact, that really needs to be cherished and revered. As a historical man, we must consider ourselves blessed, if we can compare ourselves with him.

Von Ranke had some philosophy that set itself apart from Hegelian philosophy, apparently. If we are to write a history-book ourselves, reading Von Ranke certainly can help us. Rationality helps us recover the way we do things, and we become extended. I guess reading Von Ranke extends us in an ultimate way, almost to the point of encompassing the whole world. But who really reads History books anyway?

After buying it in the store, I threw it away later when I went psychotic. I like the style, because indeed it reminds one of Jazz-music in the way he just rambles on; but how does he do it? When I compare myself with Kerouac, I have to see the fact that he was good at sports as the most significant difference: for him, writing was just exercise; for me, it is a test. He didn't care about his thinking; I am obsessed with mine.

Reading this book helped me do the work for my History program even though I was in a wholly unpragmatic mindset. It seems to be a good example of straight thinking, concentrated, that just sticks with the mentality required to understand its own assumptions. The notion of 'Quality' is a bit misguided perhaps, but so are the best philosophies of all time and he really seems to believe what he says, seeing a logic in it somehow. Force your actions.

Much of thinking is about history, but there is nothing in this book that influenced me in any way. Nevertheless, I think a lot about the Dutch Golden Age, and this book is basically set in the same era. I like the style too: it's very complicated and detailed, but still communicative. But I don't understand the French intellectual climate all that well: how does this fit with the brave philosophizing of Derrida? And why is Camus so irritating?

I always like to see this many words all together. Clearly, William Shakespeare mastered the art of thinking whatever you want, putting it to paper with dreamy consistency. It is the art of saying as much as possible, which makes him the ultimate philosopher. He just gets in the flow of his discourse and the words take on a life of their own. The art of abstract discourse is partly the secret behind all this, but there is much more going on.

They say that Aristotle's works were translated first by the Arabs and then transferred back to Europe, after which they were translated back into Greek. It is interesting to think about the process of writing that drove the Arabs to create an Aristotle, to some extent, and we can sense the conceptualist truths of the Arabs to exist in this text, even though it might be really Aristotle to some extent. The secrets of Aristotle might be in here.

William Shakespeare posited the famous To be or not to be - I guess Being and Time is actually less philosophical than that, but perhaps more artistic somehow. Is Being and Time a real book? - Heidegger also asked “What is thinking?“ - obviously, also in the same vein as To be or not to be; after all, I think therefore I am. - That's what Descartes said. But time, that's the real mystery, the secret: we don't know if time really exists.

One of the best books I've ever read.

Odysseus is said to be the smartest man ever. I see him as a kind of passive individual. Everything is dependent on things that we do. We can only perceive the stories as they come into existence: the things that are in existence are real to some extent. We can regard the story of Homer as a real story or as an unreal story - in either case, it is the story of certain legends, that have a real ideal meaning. I try to understand this but I can't.

The Voltarian philosophy allows us to return to ourselves in a dramatic way. Concentration is an illusion: thinking just happens as the objectification of the will, as Schopenhauer called it. We learn to see things objectively, too, through the constant examination of everything, updating our consciousness and seeing ourselves in everything and everything in ourselves. In the new world, all thinking happens on the level of ideas.

I threw this book away when I was in the madhouse. I don't know why, but it just seemed like the right things to do - I guess I did it because I realized that I was reading too many books or something, and it just seemed insane to read a man so closely involved in psychiatry. Nevertheless, I read it before - in my own language - and it seems to me a deep language-game, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, really capable of driving us beneath the waves.

Everything is a result from actual meditations on the ultimate essence of everything. The mind is the all-encompassing entity that breathes and knows the actual world in which we live. If we can capture the mind in concrete categories, we become aware of a smart and living eternity that is the ultimate cause for all action and that makes us artists. This process cannot be denied: it is simply what happens when people learn to see past the limited.

Freud is a great author who described some of the most disconcerting parts of our existence in a smart and thoughtful ways. Like Kant was said by Schopenhauer to bring about a change in the mind, so Freud brings about a change in our understanding of various deep psychological matters, notably dreams, civilization and religion. Gay's book is well-written too, I believe, approaching Freud in a interesting and meaningful way that makes the man live.

I think my own thinking is conflated slow and fast thinking, very annoying: I think about everything, yet can't grasp anything. I don't think Kahneman can teach us how to think without thinking, which is the highest form of thinking. As the Buddha says: whatever you think it is, it is something else. Our thinking is not thinking, but not thinking is not thinking either. We must avoid thinking altogether yet not lose our ability to think.

We see in this book a good extension of the philosophy of Schopenhauer into a moral system. Personally I would add two formula: “be useful“ and “force yourself“ both borrowed from Harrison Ford. Nietzsche describes the true form and actuality of the Idea, a word that we must use, which enables to be truly useful: not for trite human existence but for the idea itself. Ultimately the joy of speculation makes it possible for us to motivate ourselves.

Words have different sources. The discipine of logic manages to bring mental activity to something that exists only in a highly artful reality. Facts can be generated which gives discourse robustness. There is also a kind of mental activity that brings a organic formulaicness to things which makes words the same thing as the abstracted order. We can integrate this with other techniques which makes it philosophical. Or with discipline mathematical.

In the old tradition of (Calvinist) theology, Christ was taken as the relative word that could be understood and reasoned with. Everything was a matter of, as he says, starting over every time, using different logical techniques, or perhaps just expressing yourself somehow and motivating yourself to use all means available. The discoveries of this logic is as great as Wittenstein's Tractatus and must be regarded with the same kind of facination.

Can we really be laconic? It seems we can say things in a highly structured and cerebral way, and that's a good thing. But the place of such philosophy in the world is am mystery. We know that poetry is pithy, but it is not structured like this and it doesn't explore the idea that is somehow present in our minds this way; but we think about that idea. Maybe the logical business is just a dream, but that's unsatisfactory. I guess its just great.

We can say anything, but that doesn't mean that anything means everything. Perhaps Hegel meant this in his Science of Logic. We can learn a great deal about the world if we keep thinking about everything, but how do we know we are still thinking? Only through some feeling or a pleasure that arises from some conscious activity. What matters most in thought is that we are moving in the right direction: if we don't have to stop doing, we succeed.

Reading this book was one of the last times I really read something without trying to do everything at once. Dostoyevski writes from a kind of wisdom, which makes his style seem clumsy, but I found some of it very memorable. What is most impressive is the psychology, that sometimes really explicates some of your personal turmoils. The characters are all vivid figures, but what really makes them great is that they all seem to represent one thought.

I like this book because it really comprehends the concept of relativity, yet it does so in a way that is concise and logical. Thinking about physics is hard, because the subject matter is incredibly idiotic. Yet Einstein manages to distill the main points of the world around us into formula's that form the basis of physics. When we think about the success that Einstein has had, it may be wondered if he ever found what makes it all hang together.

Stoicism might work if you could just think whatever you wanted; however, I find that we are constrained by our conscience to only think weighty things, and it is not right to just blather on about “the substance of the universe“ and so on, which Marcus Aurelius does all the time. What that means is that stoicism is not really philosophical since it doesn't participate in the discussion very well. But Marcus Aurelius does provide positive answers.

Whether or not logic really helps us grasp the changing stream of consciousness within our heads is irrelevant: ultimately, we discover the practical meaning of philosophy through experience, not reflection.

The stream of consciousness can be suppressed, and we should never repress anything. To maintain joy, we begin acting in our minds and release full control over our activity in the automatic procedures of the body.

I have always been shocked by the narrative of Kierkegaard's life; but we realize that it has its consummation in the present. We learn so much from logic, but Kierkegaard's logic is based on a relativity that we recognize in Christianity. Still, we can grow in power: as we learn more, everything becomes more natural, and the truths that we came up with with one logic, get subsumed under a logic that is free from the consequences of that logic.

This book I knew would save me, but my salvation was still long time's away. If we know something, clearly, it has to be argued for eloquently; but if we don't know anything, maybe the best thing we can do is just show people how thinking works. Reading this book organized all the straw in my head and stored it in the spacious barn of Dennett's soul: this teaching me that I should learn more about psychology, that great path towards enlightenment.

I think Spinoza is a nasty piece of work. What I see, however, in this work, is also a kind of idea of the world as being locked in a constant battle for freedom. We see, in philosophy in general, a tendency towards the opposite, the enslavement of the mind to tradition and idiotic consciousness. When we compare Spinoza to Confucius, we see immediately that there is progress to be made internationally, and that Eastern philosophy is not perfect.

Philosophy has considered the matters of reason extensively. Most famously, Kant wrote a book called The Critique of Pure Reason, which makes a detailed analysis of the mind based on the idea that mental categories exist as extensions within the brain, and are understandable as esthetic functions of the world itself. The intial complexity of mental facts is simply a symptom of the limitations of our own imagination in discovering the facts.

I don't know anyone who mentioned this book to me, knowing it from Johan Huizinga's book. But it is a work of great importance. In it, the deeds of the countless characters from the history of the low lands are described. History can be known from the inside and from the outside. When known from the inside, we must jump to conclusions; when known from the outside, we must think generally and make broad conjectures. In the end something will stick.

Ideas are products of the imagination. Sometimes, the imagination is so stubbornly present inside our mind that it becomes overbearing. We can see that Plato was subject to something related to this process; but he had a lively enough mind to free himself from wrong conceptions. The question that occupies my mind is: to what extent are we controlled by the objects of our imagination? The organs of effective action aren't part of our inner essence.

I have thought about this book my whole life, if only because it seems to have such clear practical insights. Practical in terms of thought, that is. But what is practical thinking? No one knows. As a stoic, I lived to encapsulate the idea of non-action; making everything happen through inaction - it seemed like the best thing to think. Yet now, I return to my own personal childhood because those methods I had as a child are simply more effective.

I am a Jew. Not ethnically, but mentally. Nothing can make me anything other than a Jew, because nothing matters besides this; I see a great mystery in myself, that I have dedicated my life too, just like a Jew who writes a psalm is also completely attuned to some aspect of reality. But the greatest mystery of all, the Word, is not literally reflected within my personal representation: it reflects merely the deeper political theology of selfhood.

Space and time are mystically related. It was an arduous effort to make a coherent philosophy out of it, but the assertiveness it awakened in our breast alone made it worthwhile. We have to avoid wasting our mental resources on terms that have no content, he says. I agree. The challenge of our lives clearly is existing on the border between what we know to be logical and what we can only surmise exists in reality. Schopenhauer is a good aid here.