I'm reading Being, Essence and Substance in Plato and Aristotle by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.
I've become fascinated by postmodern philosophical theology lately, and was surprised to learn there are deconstructive and constructive varieties of postmodernism.
The deconstructive vein – at least the radical variety of such thinkers as Derrida and Barthes – leaves me uninspired. The constructive vein of such thinkers as Ricoeur, Hans-georg Gadamer, and, to a lesser extent, Martin Heidegger is fascinating.
In this book, Ricoeur examines the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and critiques some of the presuppositions which have somewhat burdened the course of Western philosophy since antiquity, namely, the respective stasis of Platonic essence and Aristotelian substance, as each of these pertain to a general notion of being-itself.
I'm also slowly reading my way through a collection of early Coptic Gnostic writings referred to collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library – which was discovered in a cave in Egypt in 1945. Some of it is deeply, deeply fantastic (in the true sense of the word); much of it is tediously dull and unimaginative; some of it is inaccessably bizarre; and a little bit of it reads like some of the 'orthodox' religious sentiments of the diverse expressions of monotheism and ditheism in and around the Mediterranean of late antiquity.