Anthony Metivier's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Although I don’t use memory techniques in the ways Vost describes, I admire his clarity about how they can be used. Vost fills a void all too often missing from the world of memory training: A guide based on pointing mnemonics at a specific skill: which in this case is retaining the precise words offered by a variety of Stoic philosophers.

As I read, I memorized a few of the lines from Seneca in Latin. As often happens, what seems quaint or merely interesting starts to become much more profound when you have the words rolling around in your mind like a fine wine.

I love this book for its unique application of mnemonics to a variety of Stoics. It also includes several diagrams detailing the use of the Memory Palace technique. Above all, you enjoy thinking about Stoics in a different way. Instead of for reference or occasional consolation, you learn to hold their best ideas as a treasure in your long-term memory.

Your mileage may vary if you memorize the key points and specific words of any number of Stoic philosophers. But the greater point is that Vost teaches something more profound than mnemonics. He helps you focus their many lenses on specific outcomes, which in this case turns information into deeply held knowledge, and idea knowledge that almost certainly will help you better navigate the world.

Two years ago, I started re-reading as much as I possibly could of my university career, from the first year of my BA to the last day of my PhD. This is an obviously impossible task, but a worthy one, especially because it reveals many books I either didn’t notice before or wound up finding by doing some online research to supplement my re-reading. I finished in 2009, and believe it or not, the Internet then was not the robust tool it is today, so I am constantly unearthing things I probably would never have found back then.

In any case, Pure Immanence didn’t even exist back then, even if the pieces it collects did. It’s a small collection of essays, including one that is purportedly Deleuze’s last. I find it to be the clearest statement on what exactly “pure immanence” is supposed to be, something Deleuze often lets you puzzle out for yourself. It’s a fairly Zen concept relative to how many people seem to think about and describe reality, so it was good to find a confirmation in his own words that I have been basically “following the plot” all along.

Or… it could just be confirmation bias! ;-)

The instant I started reading The Philosophizer Trilogy, it felt like it was written just for a guy like me. The best part is that the book gets into questions like: Why is there a sense of a “me?,” and how could it be possible for a book to exist that “feels” like a “fit?”

It’s a lot of intellectual noodling, and the author is quite aware that there’s nowhere to go, nothing to arrive at, and for the wrong reader, his writing will be annoying if not thrown against a wall. But he needs to write it, and that sensation of need that drives the philosopher to philosophize is what Klempner investigates with many clear and incisive observations about how other philosophers have done the same. 

Klempner also has a great, quasi-Zen way of defining core terms like "ontology." Under his pen, ontology becomes an exploration of “what what the is is.” That may be puzzling for the uninitiated, but for anyone who loves philosophy and tangled specifically with ontology, it’s hard not to wish you weren’t nearly as clever.

Even though I don’t think I share many of Klempner’s tentative conclusions, it breaks my brain to think that someone so good is apparently so underground that he has to publish himself while algorithms basically push him into yet another “cloud of unknowing” because, well, we all know why and we do what we can not to judge in favour of philosophizing what what the is is.