It happens with me and I presume it must be happening with others too. When I talk to someone and while conversing I discover that he has same ideologies, belives and perceptions as mine then it gives me a vicarious pleasure; not because someone thinks like me but because someone else also is correct (everyone thinks that he is right and I am no different). And then think what a wonderful feeling it must be when your believes and ideologies which are contrarian to the normal gets corroborated in a book that is in vogue (as people are buying it; I am not sure about reading) and written by someone very esteemed. And then you feel that the only thing that is different between you and the author is the book; it’s just that who wrote it first and I know (i.e. my superego in Freudian lingo) that there is a great intellectual and epistemic chasm between me and the author but then feeling of epistemic equality comes from that part of me (the ID in Freudian term) which is not under my control. Last week I was reading 'The Black Swan' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
When I was reading the book I was happy and I was worried. Happy you know why; worried because I had the familiarity with the subjects of the book but I have forgotten their relevance. The Skeptics, the Rationalist, Algazel , Avveroes, Hume all these were was familiar to me but I have forgotten what they stood for except for the meanings of the adjectives like a skeptics is one who doubts , rationalist is one who beliefs in logic. My past endeavor of reading philosophy has completely gone down the drain. Whether Hume was a rationalist I could not remember. Philosophers whom I remember are Spinoza and Kant and the reason is that I have written a post on each of them. So I have decided the subjects like philosophy where I am getting initiated needs more dedication and time and hence I am going to write a blog on important topics. So I have again picked up the history of western Philosophy by 'Bertrand Russell' after six months and I am planning to blog what I feel is salient and needs to be remembered.
