To help make ends meet and help you understand the origins of Christianity better than the Christians themselves would ever let you if they had their way, every season I’ll post three books from my long-standing recommendations list, and review and discuss their value.
And here’s how you can help: I am an Amazon Associate. So if you click through the sales link in any of my recommendation blogs (like today’s), or indeed in any article or page on my blog at all, I will get a commission on everything in your cart when you check out (even if you don’t buy the thing I recommend, and even if you buy a bunch of weird stuff like an Electric Cello or lovely outdoor Aztec rugs), as long as you fill that cart after following my link, and complete your purchase within 24 hours. I also get bonuses (on top of commissions) if my links pull enough sales volume every month. So it’s super great if you buy a lot of stuff through links on my site. Hitting Amazon’s bonus threshold of a thousand dollars in sales a month is hard to do, but hey, let’s try!
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In chapter 10 of On the Historicity of Jesus I survey a large array of literary features of the Gospels, and point out I’m just touching the tip of the iceberg there. When people ask where they can find more of that, I always recommend a slew of great books. The best three in terms of brevity, readability, and impact are Gospel Fictions by Randel Helms and The Power of Parable by John Dominic Crossan, both of which I cited and employed, and now The Dionysian Gospel by Dennis MacDonald—which wasn’t out when I wrote OHJ or I definitely would have included and summarized it there. There are more, highly technical books that cover far more examples and in more academic detail, but I’ll recommend those in a future post.
Why these? They are great introductions that ease you into mimesis criticism from three complementary angles. They are short, fun reads, and marshal the best cases. And once you’ve read all three, you will have a broad understanding of why this approach to the Bible is so powerful and so necessary.
Helms shows you how the Gospels use the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) as source material for constructing stories about Jesus, and how they do that in ways meant to be obvious to a discerning reader, allowing the “enlightened” to understand the message. Jesus is essentially a rewritten Moses or Elijah or Elisha, meant as a “superior” and “modernized” version of them to establish ideals to follow or comprehend. Helms surveys a selection of the best examples, practicing you in what to look for and how we know all this now.
Crossan then goes into how this fits exactly into ancient literary technique generally. The Gospels aren’t doing something weird here. They are doing what ancient authors commonly did, and in fact were all trained to do in schools of the time. The Gospel authors unmistakably achieved the level of compositional Greek, which means they would have been trained in these techniques, and been well familiar with a wide range of pagan and Jewish literature to emulate, riff on, and allude to.
Crossan situates this in the context of ancient literature (with examples outside the Bible, as I did in OHJ), and then surveys examples of how, as his subtitle aptly puts it, fiction by Jesus became fiction about Jesus. In Crossan’s approach, he assumes a real Jesus actually taught the parables that the Gospels then use to create and invent stories about Jesus performing the same service: the tales about Jesus are themselves parables meant to convey meaning, not record history (as Mark subtly suggested we understand). One need not adopt his assumption of historicity, however. We know from Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles that stories about Jesus could be built out of the teachings of entirely other people than Jesus, especially Paul, and possibly other Apostles and (as Helms shows) heroes, both Jewish…
…and pagan. Which brings us to MacDonald. Famously correct in finding that the Gospels also used pagan heroes as models to set scenes for Jesus to replicate and upstage them (see, for example, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark and Luke and Vergil: Imitations of Classical Greek Literature and Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles), as well as Jewish models (now thoroughly catalogued in his Synopses of Epic, Tragedy, and the Gospels), MacDonald has since turned his eye to the Gospel of John. Finding that early Medieval Christians found that the Gospel of John could be almost entirely retold using lines from the Bacchae of Euripides—essentially a Gospel of the pagan god Bacchus-Dionysus—MacDonald applied modern mimesis theory to find out if there was something to that. And there is.
It has long been the majority mainstream consensus in Johannine studies that our Gospel of John is the second redaction of a lost original (and a lost first redaction of that) and thus has been hacked-up, edited, and reordered, with original material deleted and new material added and some of the rest worked over. The field has already sought to identify which content in that Gospel is from the earliest layer, and MacDonald uses that reconstruction for his mimesis criticism, finding that the “added” material is less inclined to emulate the Bacchae but the original material is peculiarly exactly in line with it. In Dionysian Gospel MacDonald shows how this is evident, example by example. And his case is even more compelling than his original case for Mark emulating Homer, which was already persuasive. Even if some examples are weak, many are strong, and collectively become decisive.
I give many more examples of this process, from other books and journal articles and my own research and evidence, in my study On the Historicity of Jesus. From its bibliography you can track down even more studies shoring this up and covering the rest of the Gospels and their contents (and more examples have come out since, a good selection of which I cite in my coming sequel to OHJ, so stay tuned for that).
But these three books, from Helms, Crossan, and MacDonald are the best place to start.
Hiya Dr. Carrier,
This is irrelevant to your post (for anyone who hasn’t read those books, you should!), but I was wondering: d’you have a ballpark figure on when your sequel to OHJ is gonna come out? Are you going to come out with an audiobook version of it, also? Thanks for any info.
Hope you’re well!
Drayce
Yes and yes.
The book is in proofing now (I am checking the publisher’s paginated galleys for typos and building the indexes). I don’t control when it will go to press after that (that’s all the mechanics of the publisher). But based on past experience, it will be sometime this year.
I am now contracting my audiobooks to be read by KC Gleason (she read JFOS). She is on deck to do this one too. But audiobooks take a long time to produce and edit, and she can only start when the final proofs are delivered. So the audio will likely release sometime after the print and kindle editions. Although “this year” is still an achievable target for the audio, I can’t be as sure as for the book as a whole.
And all that holds same for all my future books.
I am already in contract for and still developing my sequel to Sense and Goodness without God. And I am planning a sequel to Hitler Homer Bible Christ, which will be an anthology of all my published papers in philosophy (HHBC was in history). And I have already completed and am shopping around yet another book (in a surprise subject TBA).
So books aplenty are in the pipe. But most of those will likely be out only in 2026.
Richard,
First of all thank you! I bought your “On The Historicity of Jesus” back in 2014, and it simply confirmed that I had most definitely made the right decision to walk away from my fundamentalist Christian upbringing, which I had left a few years prior.
Anyway, wanted to ask what the main differences would be between the 2014 edition and the new one? Is it (a) just edits and typos? (b) additional answers to critics? (c) some new extra evidence and material? (d) some/all of the above?
Apologies if these questions have already been asked and answered before – time is very limited for me to be checking up on these things. FYI, I’ll definitely be buying the new edition since your first ed. was worth every penny IMO.
Also, you ever thought of the possibility of doing an Australia tour?
Good question.
You might mean either of two things, so I’ll answer for both:
(1) In 2023 a “Revised Edition” of OHJ was released (it is now the one sold by the publisher). It has the same pagination and corrects mostly typos (plus a few minor facts are added or corrected). You can see a complete list of its changes in the second half of Errata for On the Historicity of Jesus.
(2) This year (2025) I am publishing a sequel, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus. That is a completely new book. It summarizes and addresses everything that was published of relevance in the intervening ten years (from 2014 to 2024), with the aim of showing the case for its conclusion has grown stronger, not weaker, since, and all attempts at challenging it have so spectacularly failed as to actually confirm its conclusion.
Its abbreviated TOC:
All these chapters aggregate things I’ve written the last ten years but also every one expands and adds new material (especially lots of new citations of scholarship supporting my various positions), and every one shores up arguments I made in 2014 but that now even more scholarship supports and the critiques have only been fallacious or even factually incorrect.
Perhaps the most novel and important chapter is the one on Docetism. That breaks startling new ground.
Next after that are the chapters on math. The first goes into a more tutorial mode in explaining how to use and vet the mathematical method of OHJ (which is adaptable to all other fields, not just this subject). And the second adds an important update: I analyze the mistaken criticisms of some new papers by Kamil Gregor et al. and find that their results actually narrow my original margin of error for historicity from “<<1 to 33%” to “<1 to 25%” (so, still within my original tolerances, but on their own argument we should be even more skeptical of historicity, assigning it a 1 in 4 best odds rather than 1 in 3).
Related to Christian origins, wondered if you agree with Robert Turcan’s assertion in The God’s of Ancient Rome (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) that annual festivals of Attis in Rome—‘conveyed the myth of Attis…who died and came back to life each year’—(p. 111) during the reign of Claudius. This is getting a lot of play right now on youtube Atheist channels.
He notes that second century authors mention Claudius permitted the Cybele-Attis cult yet Turcan’s evidence for the myth spans from the early second to the fourth century (often quoting from late Christian polemics), synthesising them into one picture. I found that rather unconvincing as he’s basically punting that no significant development or change took place in the myth, especially with the ‘came back to life’ part.
“No significant development or change took place” seems like a ludicrous place to start.
Mythic annual resurrection predates Rome, and history, and conceivably agriculture.
It’s not clear to me what you (Stan) and ncmcm are talking about exactly.
First, let’s take care not to confuse Adonis with Attis. The three-day death-and-resurrection festival and narrative for Adonis is well enough attested as pre-Christian (albeit by mostly post-Christian evidence, yet still good enough to entail it was not then new). See Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.
Second, although the idea of an early Attis resurrection belief is plausible, I am not aware of any concrete evidence of it; and the evidence we have is mostly against it. That is not the same thing as saying we should not believe it. It’s just saying that the evidence for it is weaker than for Adonis, which is an apt parallel because the pre-Christian belief in the resurrection of Adonis is based on post-Christian evidence, so that’s an example of having enough such evidence, and of the right sort, to entail the conclusion to adequate confidence. All I am saying is that we lack that for Attis. So it’s a weak case.
And again, please do not fall into the “black or white” fallacy and mistake me as saying “we should doubt” early Attis resurrection doctrine; I am sating, rather, that we should lack the kind of confidence in it that we have for Adonis cult. Which makes it a silly hill to die on. We have so many very well attested pre-Christian dying-and-rising god cults that we do not need Attis cult to be one to establish that Christianity was late to the game, and is just the Jews finally getting around to inventing one of those of their own.
If, however, some new evidence has come forward that attests a belief in the resurrection of Attis in the second (or even first) century, then please do cite it here and I’ll check it out. But it has to actually be that.
Hippolytus, for example, never mentions this in his entire discussion of Attis so it would seem he had never heard of that parallel, but rather only the parallel that Attis escaped death as (so far as we can tell from his description) a disembodied soul (which is not a resurrection), and that certain heretical Christians, not Attis worshipers themselves, equated this with the (bodily) resurrections of Adonis and Osiris and Bacchus. So one might see a hint of maybe something there, but it’s far too weak to hang a hat on.
The late antique belief was that Attis signals his eternal survival by his body never decaying and a finger twitching each year. But there is no story of him returning to that body and waking up (a resurrection) or assuming a new body (also a resurrection). The Attis believers believed they would share in his victory over death, but there is no clear evidence they believed they would do this by being resurrected, rather than just getting cool digs in the afterlife (similar to Elysium theory generally, a commonplace across paganism even since the time of Homer).
Even Firmicus Maternus is unclear that anything had changed by the 4th century. When he references the Attis cult’s belief in his “being revived” (revivisco) this word can simply refer to Attis’s living on in the afterlife (and signaled by his body remaining vaguely “alive” albeit in an eternal coma), because Maternus is speaking polemically (about the “claim” the priests sold to their queen, thus selling a mere preservation of a corpose as evidence of eternal life in heaven, just as Catholics would argue for some Medieval Saints).
So the evidence for an actually comparable “resurrection” of Attis is weakest of tea. The evidence for the other gods is far better and much clearer.
Unless I have missed some piece of evidence here. In which case, do please zero me in on precisely that actual evidence (and I mean not hours of rambling by YouTubers, but direct, actual citations of ancient evidence).
P.S. This might just be a semantic debate over what “counts” as resurrection.
But in that case, my point stands all the more: Attis cult shares the feature of all savior cults that the savior achieved victory over death that they share with their followers. But that is not the same thing as getting a new body to live in or rising back to life in the old one. It could be (maybe Attis cult taught the saved, and thus Attis, get actual bodies like all the immortal gods did, and did not live on as mere fleeting phantoms in Hades). That’s plausible (it would track common metaphysical beliefs of the time). I have just not seen any evidence to confirm that that was their view.
This does mean Attis is a personal savior god, though, and thus of the same mold as Jesus in that respect. Much like Mithras, who also did not die and rise, but whose victory over death was achieved by some other “passion” (struggle, suffering), and thus emulated other savior gods. The parallel here is the “suffering” act that achieves victory over death that those baptised in and communing with the god share, which just “happens” to be death-and-resurrection for many ancient gods, but others had that parallel realized in more creative ways (Mithras’s cosmic battle with the Great Bull; Attis’s achievement of Elysium and signaling that through his preserved corpse twitching every year). So it isn’t a resurrection parallel. But it is a passion-salvation parallel.
For more on the savior god mythotype see No, the Original Christians Did Not Loot Egypt.
I agree with what you’ve said.
The context was I was listening to a Gnostic Informant video about Attis and he made the surprising sounding claim to me that there was annual passion festival of Attis in the time of Claudius (c. 41-54) which included his resurrection. He asserted it as if we can know this is likely true.
Did some digging into his sources and Robert Turcan (1996, 2022) does indeed assert this, though like I said I think he’s going overboard with the evidence. Its certainly plausible but I found it a bit speculative.
I’m sure that is true. Attis was worshipped with festivals for centuries.
I think you may be falling for the conflation fallacy “Attis festivals are pre-Christian” equals “those Attis festivals involved resurrection tales.” The latter is questionable (in the ways I noted). The former is not.
Hiya matey,
Can you get an affiliate link for Amazon UK? I might use the .com site once a year; but rarely a month goes by without a British purchase. I’m waiting in for ‘Out-Heroding Herod: Josephus, Rhetoric, and the Herod Narratives’ as I type, part of an order that, with another the previous week, adds up to exceeding your $1000 threshold twice.
A thing I noticed following up the Prien inscription out of curiousity, was Augustus’ birth legend includes the Senate sending out a kill-all-the-male-babies command for the predicted year a la Herod the Great (Why “Great”? Unless this is for his talents in sucking up to the power du jour!).
The various cuckoo “Roman Conspiracy” “theories” mistakenly glom on to the Flavian and Julian “gospels”, and the mythology therein, that the Gospels mimic and transvalue: ‘Something greater than Caesar is here” indeed; but mimesis and transvauation were just part and parcel of how you wrote about gods.
Still, if Crossan; Helms; & MacDonald can’t work out the branch of David 😁️ they are sat upon, they themselves and their confreres in historicism have sawn through at least twice, what hope is there for dafties barking up the wrong tree?
I’m looking forward to all the new books coming along, on my usual habit of buying a hardback; a paperback; and one to fall apart re-reading, you could potentially triple dip on all four if you can sort out a UK affiliate link.
TTFN
I am an affiliate in the UK (and many other countries now). If you click through an affiliate link on my site, and you are logged online with a UK IP address (IRL or by VPN), it should convert to a UK Amazon site URL (if not, let me know because I need to track that; while in the meantime, you can use the generic multinational links here).
I’m really pleased about that! I looked up those “Aztec” rugs, I like and will probably get two: one to cover the carpet damage in my flat and the other to read your new books under a tree in the sunshine when they drop. The electric cello link goes to amazon.com; the rug link just spams this page again. No automatic conversion to the UK Amazon url. That was why I was presuming you might not have a UK affiliate set up. Thanks again, TTFN.
So, that will be because the rug and such aren’t sold in the UK or by that vendor. So there is no UK link to convert to.
Books are different: the same publisher will usually own the linked page for all nations they sell in. So there is a link to convert to.
There may be some other products that that happens with, but I doubt many. It’s generally only going to work for books (and maybe videos).
So you can do either of two things:
(1) Use a book link, observe whether it converts (if it doesn’t, that means the book isn’t sold in the UK or is not sold there by the same distributor or publisher, so try a different book), and then search for other products (like “rugs”) in the UK site, thereby filling your cart, and then checking out within 24 hours. Amazon will know this was all initiated by my affiliate link. And the rugs etc. you then find will be the ones sold in the UK market.
(2) Use one of the book links on my multinational page (those don’t have to convert, as they already point to each nation’s site where the book is sold) and then search for other products (like “rugs”) in the UK site (etc.).
When is OHJ 2.0 coming out?
Sometime this year. Exactly when is out of my hands. But the corrected proofs are in and indexes are being built. The rest depends on the publisher’s timeline.
when you wrote about the recent “new Josphus TF evidence” (Schmidt?) are you still of the belief that the TF is a complete interpolation? some scholars have always insisted there was something originally in there that Eusebius chose to both obscure and falsify. I’ve always thought that even if Josephus did say something about Christianity for the first time in 94 AD near the end of his life, that also totally obliterates the official story. The Church claimed that after the crucifixion the religion spread like wildfire, if that were true there is no way Josephus could spend his entire life ignoring it and still gain any validation or respect as a historian. . . nor is Josephus the only first century historian with whom first century Jesus is conspicuously missing. If the religion was that monumental than certainly Josephus father Matias would have recounted his direct experience to his illustrious son as Matias was a Jerusalem temple priest who likely would’ve directly witnessed such events as the trial/crucifixion/rumors of resurrection had they really occurred. Additionally, Christians would have been badgering all Jews including Josephus and Matias to convert, that was the point after all of the later gospels especially Matthew inventing Slaughter of the Innocents trying to implant a Moses meme. Josephus wrote reams about other Messiah wannabes he should have given Jesus that much attention and more if the religion “spread like wildfire,” not just a simple paragraph. Yet in his earlier work Josephus doesn’t even mention Nero slaughtering Christians, even though Josephus became personally acquainted with Nero when he attempted to negotiate the release of jewish hostages.
If Josephus actually met Christians near the end of his life, isn’t it far more likely there were of the possibly “gnostic” (Jesus came down fully formed at Capernaum) variety? This might even explain why Josephus would use the words “if indeed one ought to call him a man.” If his overall tone qualifies as snide, that says it all about what he thinks about such a “concept” allegorical or otherwise.
Paul wrote that Jesus was created in heaven using the seed of David on an un-named woman, so if Paul and Cephas invented Jesus (he came from their visions, not history) that’s what the earliest Christians would have believed as opposed to later Christians who sought to insert Jesus into history for their own purposes.
Yes. It’s 100% a Christian interpolation down to every last word.
See:
Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014
Schmidt is an apologist and uses nothing but specious arguments and distortions of fact (he relies on a ton of possibiliter fallacies and omitted evidence). For just one example, he never addresses the fatal arguments of Hopper, which can be expanded upon, as I’ll discuss in my next book (though it is in page proofs now so I can’t get in any discussion of Schmidt there directly).
But as to your notions, those are plausible. We just don’t have any evidence they are probable.
Also, note, Gnosticism didn’t exist. But if we take what you mean to simply be “Jesus was possessed by God’s spirit at the baptism and controlled like a puppet until his death” (a common “heresy” in early Christianity), then it is certainly conceivable that those are the Christians Josephus met, had he met any. We just don’t have any evidence he met any, or cared anything about them even if he did (the Palestinian Jewish wing was too tiny to spend any words on, and the foreign Gentile wing would be of no interest at all).
Also note, growing doubts exist in the literature now that there was any such persecution by Nero for Josephus to know about. I already argued this in my study of Tacitus. But more papers have come out on this since (I discuss this in my next book). The question then isn’t why Josephus didn’t mention that Christian event, but why he didn’t mention any Chrestus events at all (neither the riots under Claudius nor the mass execution of his straggling followers under Nero), since the evidence suggests these were followers of Chrestus, not Christ, i.e. just ordinary messianic Jews, not our Christians.
The answer (explaining both omissions) is that he could not spin this in any good way so he had to just “not mention it.” Josephus shows a concerted tendency to never discuss messianism in any clear terms at all (hence why the “Jesus Christs” he lists, the pretenders who duplicate an action of Joshua, hence “Jesus,” to usher in a divine victory, hence “Messiahs” a.k.a. Christs, he never ever calls Jesus or Christ: he conspicuously avoids the word messiah or its concepts, even though it was central to causing the entire war and threatened even yet more wars). So Josephus just “omitted” that whole history. He instead tells unrelated tales about Jewish expulsions from Rome to make it seem like “that covered it” (like the trivial scandal immediately following the TF).
Los trabajos de Dennis Macdonald han sido duramente criticados,hasta en su artículo de wikipedia lo dice,¿Por qué entonces lo sigues citando?
Dennis MacDonald is only slandered by Christian apologists. Wikipedia often is controlled by rabid apologetical trolls who fight any changes that go against their propaganda, so you generally can’t trust it on subjects like this.
Mainstream scholars have accepted and even build on MacDonald’s work. It’s mainstream now. See, for example, R.F. Walsh, Origins, 134–36. If you didn’t know this, it is because Christians lie about it. You should never trust a Christian to tell you the truth about things like this. Always check.
Here is just a short bibliography establishing the success and acceptance of MacDonald’s mimesis work:
Christopher S. Crawford (ed.), Greco-Roman and Jewish Tributaries to the New Testament: Festschrift in Honor of Gregory J. Riley (Claremont Press, 2019)
Brad McAdon, Rhetorical Mimesis and the Mitigation of Early Christian Conflicts: Examining the Influence that Greco-Roman Mimesis May Have in the Composition of Matthew, Luke, and Acts (Pickwick, 2018)
Mark Bilby, Margaret Froelich, and Michael Kochenash (eds.), Classical Greek Models of the Gospels and Acts: Studies in Mimesis Criticism (Claremont School of Theology Press, 2018).
Austin Busch, “New Testament Narrative and Greco-Roman Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative (ed. Danna Nolan Fewell; Oxford University Press, 2016), 61–72
Margaret Froelich, Michael Kochenash, Thomas Phillips, and Ilseo Park (eds.), Christian Origins and the New Testament in the Greco-Roman Context: Essays in Honor of Dennis R. MacDonald (Claremont School of Theology Press, 2016)
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This holds for the Dionysian Gospel theory as well. It was already proposed and defended decades before by mainstream scholar Mark Stibbe in John as Storyteller: Narrative Criticism and the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131–47. And it has growing support now. For example, Michael Kochenash, “Better Call Paul ‘Saul’: Literary Models and a Lukan Innovation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 138.2 (2019), 433–49; Charles Puskas and C. Michael Robbins, The Conceptual Worlds of the Fourth Gospel (Cascade, 2021); and Jae Hyung Cho, This Is My Flesh: John’s Eucharist and the Dionysus Cult (Pickwick, 2022).
Even remaining holdouts admit the theory has become (frustrating for them) mainstream: see Fergus J. King, “Hit or Myth? Methodological Considerations in Comparing Dionysos with the Johannine Jesus,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 51.2 (2021), 88–100. And King’s “rebuttal” is all apologetical and specious, not a real scholarly critique worth any heed. As is standard for Christian gatekeeping in the field even still.
Hello Dr. Richard.
Since you mention Dionysus, you reminded me of Nietzsche.
What do you think of continental philosophy?
Do you think it has anything to contribute? If you can, more specifically, what do you think of Nietzsche, Derrida, Schopenhauer, and especially Heidegger?
Not a fan. As it lacks the rigor of analytical philosophy it is more noise than signal, and hard to even find what signal there is. It risks meandering into isolated armchair pontifications and drunk uncling, which a more disciplined approach to philosophy would steer them off. See my discussion of why in You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If….
That doesn’t mean it’s all useless. There are useful insights to extract from Foucault, for example. But it’s work to sift the wheat from the chaff. And what was any use has already been put to better use by subsequent analytical philosophy in the growing scientific fields of sociology, economics, and political science. I also think there is utility in “meditations” that spur your own personal thought, hence Camus has value for that (and the Existentialists generally), but not for analytical progress in any subject, just personal. A third category of utility is when continental philosophy lands beachheads of ideas that can then be picked up and developed empirically by the sciences (mainly psychology and sociology), which is again analytical philosophy finding the kernels of use and improving on them. A good example of that is Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil.
I’ve never found any use in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Heidegger. But perhaps they started ideas I find better deployed now in more capable philosphies and sciences. I haven’t done a historiographical analysis on that (where did every idea come from, etc.). There is evidence I know that shows this for Derrida however. But I don’t see any further use in him, hence no reason to read him. Anything useful he said has already been taken up by more analytical minds and improved upon.
Thank you very much for your response, Dr. Richard. I understand that you see continental philosophy as something that analytical philosophers then develop further, and therefore it is better to read the analytical philosophers. But don’t they also sometimes concern themselves with unnecessary details, as you say in Is Philosophy Stupid?
I wanted to ask you something. In How I’d Answer the PhilPapers Survey you say that you are a non-skeptical realist. So I suppose you touch on topics of being and the like, since you are an Aristotelian, if I am not mistaken (Tomism, The Bogus Science).
All this leads me to look for what the analyticals say about realism. That external reality exists but we do not access it directly. In my view (I may be wrong, I am not saying this religiously, I would be very grateful for any counterarguments you may offer), Heidegger is more complete. Heidegger asks, what does it mean for something to be? The basic condition for thinking about anything is that it “is.” Well, what is being? Heidegger says that Being has always been treated as if it were an entity (a “being”) or a thing. ‘Being’ unfolds (that is, we can see it, but there is always something we cannot see) to Dasein (us, the being-there). I am not saying that it is more complete because it “sounds” profound. What I’m saying is that it’s more complete than talking about “reality” without even knowing what we mean when we say that something “is” reality.
Do you think I’m wrong? Or has this already been integrated into analytical philosophy?
On the other hand, I study in a continental department, but I try to read both analytical and continental philosophy. Is it counterproductive or irrational, or will studying philosophy in a continental department get me nowhere? What would you recommend in this scenario?
Indeed. Most philosophy is terrible. But analytical philosophy is always better. It is better methodologically, which makes it easier to vet and critique or build on or make use of. So even when analytical philosophy is wrong, it’s still better than continental, which makes vetting and use so much more difficult as to exceed the utility of even trying in most cases.
As for whether you can benefit from it, that all depends on your goals, your patience, and your aesthetic taste. I would normally not recommend it. But if you like it and have gotten good at making the best of it, go for it. Just know that any idea you find there can only be of reliable use (and can only be vetted as correct or not) if it can be reframed analytically and thus tested. So you need to know how to do that to not just be misled by ideological manipulation.
He ignores physics—even in his own day, much less all the physics he can’t have even known about that we know now.
That makes him largely useless.
The question of “furniture” has been well answered in physicalist philosophy (from Bunge’s Basic Treatise to my own Sense and Goodness).
For examples on my blog (this is in no particular order and in no way complete):
A Quick Brief on Identity Theory
Bernardo Kastrup’s Attempt to Bootstrap Idealism
The Argument from Non-Locality
The Ontology of Logic
Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination
The Evolution of Awe vs. The Aesthetic Argument for God
Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism
The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit
My book has a more systematic brief (of all the ways something can “be” and thus what it means to exist or not). These (and other) articles just build that out case by case.