Reviews for The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays: With Chapters Reprinted on the Philosophy of Re...

The average rating for The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays: With Chapters Reprinted on the Philosophy of Re... based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-12 00:00:00 John Jesenko This book is my favourite book; my desert island book. I can't get enough of reading it. It's amazing. Both its premise - the boldness of it - as well as the language (which is so crisp and clear that every other book seems tedious and unintelligent in comparison) continue to amaze me. I got really angry at this book, twice. I got really angry when I first read it. (I was so angry I very literally threw this book against a wall and vowed to never open its pages again.) It seemed to mock me on every page. It wasn't after I overcame my senseless rage and realized this isn't a book that can be read with intellectual, analytic distance, that I was able to pick the book up again and start over. This book needs, demands, to be read as a workbook. You need to live this book. You need to open your mind far enough to alow yourself to jump through every hoop that the author places before you. Only then will you be rewarded by a spectacularly simple, yet spectacularly profound new view on life and your place within it, that it continues to blow my mind - daily. The second time that I got really angry was when I finished this book. I realized I would probably never again read a masterpiece like this. It is an absolute understatement to say I love this book. I can't recommend this book highly enough. But don't make the same mistake I did. Don't keep an intellectual distance. Plunge in and let it change you, I dare you.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-26 00:00:00 David Fistein If I did not have a serious interest in philosophy (major in college and continued passion), I would have likely rated this with 3-stars and put down the book after finishing about half of it. The first 7 chapters are dense and worth slogging through if you want to watch Steiner eviscerate a multitude of philosophers including Kant, Descartes, Fichte, Schopenhauer and more which in and of itself is entertaining. The second half of the book is where the magic happens and the instruction manual is found. Each chapter in the second half answers the questions posed in the first half. Illuminating the way that he takes our power back rather than relying on the other (external forces, God, society, etc). We not only have the power to perceive/sense/experience but through our intuitive thinking in connection with these perceptions we have the ability to manifest our own destiny. This is the first work I have read by Steiner, but I am pretty sure I am hooked now. It combines some of the ideas of thinkers like Gurdjieff and Crowley and Leibniz in a way that in clear, actionable and empowering. Recommended for those who are either deeply interested in philosophy or who's intuition says that they have the power within themselves to create the world they want to live in. As a note, I found a cheat sheet/synopsis that helped me better understand the thoughts/ideas and follow the flow of the book here -