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colinmhayesonDec 5, 2020

If you find yourself struggling to parse traditional philosophy, which honestly is likely if you aren't planning on taking a philosophy course I'd suggest reading philosophical novels. Camus's the stranger and Sartre's no exit are great works that are foremost page turners while also demanding considerable thought. I like thus spoke zarathrustra a lot but it will be difficult with no background. If you want to get serious read the greeks. Beyond that it really depends on which area you're interested in. The Stanford encyclopedia is a great resource. I'd stay away from Hegel and Kant at first, although they are incredibly influential. They'll probably turn you away because it's so hard to parse.

noorononApr 25, 2014

No Exit is a Sartre play. I'm only halfway through the article so I can't speak authoritatively to why the title was chosen. My money says this is a pun, combining the the notion of the "exit" of a startup while implying that they feel stuck in a very specific manner similar to the characters of the play. FYI this is a very facile reading of the play, and Sartre is my least favorite existentialist.

I'm not an expert on him but if you want to chat about his main squeeze and intellectual better, de Beauvoir, I'll have more to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Exit

anon1253onMay 11, 2018

"The fall" and "The stranger" from Albert Camus, arguably the most accessible cornerstones of Existential philosophy, and they really make you think about your position in this world and as a person. The play "no exit" by Sartre is also very interesting, and works well as the audio version by Partially Examined Life (a philosophy podcast).

howard941onFeb 5, 2019

The Magus by John Fowles, and No Exit by Sartre. Changed the way I viewed myself.

ApocryphononMar 13, 2017

I guess the natural question is whether or not having markets be owned by a small number of companies prevents new entrants from competing successfully. I leave that point to be debated by others.

On a different note, it's interesting how the presence of the giants affects the startup world. I am reminded of a passage from No Exit by Gideon Lewis-Kraus [0]:

'All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.'

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902

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