Rolling Philosophy

Yeah Latour is certainly close to those guys, as is Michel Serres.

looking at After Finitude on amazon, looks pretty cool, gonna pick it up.

Thinking about buying Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville's Discovery of America, anyone heard anything good about it? (Yes, probably more of a history than poly phi, but I've wanted to read something Tocqueville related for awhile.)

God, I was grumpy the other day. To make it up, here is a neat comic done by my mate, called Being & Tim. It is mostly philosophy dork jokes, and thus is very funny.

A++ emil.y, your friend's comics are great

looking at After Finitude on amazon, looks pretty cool, gonna pick it up.

― ryan, Sunday, June 20, 2010 6:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

sorry, that exclamation point was maybe a bit much

If you guys wanna start a reading group I'll pick it up and participate when I get home.

been meaning to read it myself (really gotta work out what this big deal with correlationism lately is all about), so I would get involved with this.

would totally be into a reading group, need to kick myself off ILX more often

Bertrand Russell once referred to Kant as the greatest catastrophe in the history of philosophy, C.D. Broad commented that this position surely belonged to Hegel. Russell and Broad were wrong, because this title undoubtedly belongs to Martin Heidegger. Some years ago, Anthony Quinton spoke of Heidegger's 'pondrous and rubbishy woolgathering.' Until fairly recently, Heidegger was not taken seriously by philosophers in Great Britain and the United States. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. One goal of the present study is to stem this ride of unreason.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/manipulating_kids_for_the_shove_KPImNCo2nHfU6zOOeNVhqK/0

"RELIGION," a sheet from English class, handed out to eighth-graders, is provocatively titled. The typewritten paper presents some 20 quotes that can be described as anti-God, coming from philosophers from Kierkegaard to Schopenhauer. Even a "Yiddish proverb."

...

"Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake," wrote Pascal.
I'm not entirely sure of the meaning of that quote, contained on the handout. But at a time when kids need religion, family and strong schools more than ever, this kind of lesson is best left alone.

pff, Kierkegaard would totally be down with doing stupid shit in the name of God, they should be all over him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/7863036/Plato-ancient-Greek-philosophers-secret-music-code-cracked-by-British-scientists.html

hate hate hate shit like that

ugggggggggghhhhhh

quick somebody shoot dan brown before he has a chance to write a book about it

i mean i love the idea of umberto eco-style secret messages and shit but being all "i cracked platos code" its like... no buddy you didnt

millions of people have 'cracked plato's code' over and over and over by like... reading plato and discussing him

"i bring shocking news - plato was a fan of math"

lol @

Some experts say Plato is the greatest of all the Greek philosophers and together with Socrates, his mentor, and Aristotle, a student, founded modern Western culture and science.

not b/c I'm objected per se but to write that kind of crap e.g. "founded modern Western culture" it's like no you fuckhead culture isn't something one person can "found"

and then:

“It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unravelling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.”

I'm guessing the journo wrote that line b/c the "but basically I cracked the code" is not the sort of thing a Plato scholar would say...I think/hope? although in grad school I started a course with a Plato scholar who in the first week started going on about the golden ratio & was like "the key to Plato...is this equation!" and since I also do math I was totally embarrassed at the ludicrousness of this and dropped the course pronto.

yeah i really hope the journalist is embellishing the quote there

there is no "hidden philosophy of plato" unless it is "hidden" because you are "illiterate"

fyi I have encoded a secret code into all my ilx posts

if you take the time and effort to unlock the code ... you will be richly rewarded

I disagree with the idea that Socrates was strictly executed for "heresy" as well tbh

wow I didn't realise who this 'plato scholar' was but I met him earlier in the week on non-cryptographic business. he didn't seem like a guy who was about to drop one of the most revelatory jpegs in the history of philosophy:

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/48209000/jpg/_48209148_platocode_platobust.jpg

but then it wouldn't be v platonic of me to go by appearances. if yr curious, the much talked-up 'hidden meanings'/spurious correlations can be found here. nice to see he's worked the monochord into his theory, but I think harry smith employed it for better anti-platonic purposes 50 years previous.

fwiw im open to the idea of some weird musical pattern in plato

not down with cracking the code tho

ugh they were talking about this jerk and his theory on NPR during my drive home, maybe i should have punched the dashboard rhythymically according to his code for better enlightenment

http://www.source101.org/images/HFTNPD65.gif

i don't really understand what the guy is saying tbrr

Dr Kennedy discovered that some key phrases, themes and words occurred during regular intervals throughout, which matched the spacing in the 12 note scale.

hmmmmmmm

He argued that Plato did not use the code for pleasure, but instead for his own safety after his teacher was executed for heresy.

does he say what the secret message is?

xp
yeah, I'm not greek enough to subscribe to clear distinction between content and form, but I think calling identification of extra structural features in plato "finding hidden meanings" is nonsense. he seems like a nice guy.

idg how the interval between words 'matches' the spacing of the 12-note scale, though im pretty dumm

the lengths of speeches, the position of speeches within the
dialogues, the location of significant turns in the arguments, and the
absolute lengths of the dialogues all provide evidence for an underly-
ing stichometric organisation and, in particular, for the importance of a
twelve-part structure.

his points, when they are non-ridiculous and not about the golden ratio, are about the structure mirroring the content w/ forms that are maybe pythagorean. not sure how he's going to turn this into a best-selling book, esp if the jpeg upthread is anything to go by.

Anyone who reads Plato seriously knows that there's a lot of form/content games going on in the dialogues. So while I'm open to there being some musical connection with this, calling it a "secret code" is silly.

"The code supposedly hides Plato's dangerous idea, that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, not according to the whims of Zeus. But the celebration of mathematics is in plain view throughout the dialogues."

good takedown here, titled "Wanna crack the Plato code? Read Plato":

http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2010/06/30/Plato-code

i decided i would read history of sexuality vol. 1 again, and maybe someday i'll get to vol. 2

vol. 2 is a little nuts iirc

the hidden musical messages in vol 2 are better

needs more reverb imo

but just the right amount of flange

1 is so classic but 2 is confusing but worth it

xp bravo

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

hello science welcome to the 21st century

lolz. Finally the obscure ideas of a little-known fella called Nietzsche are gaining some momentum.

what y'all reading at the moment? I've momentarily given up on my Francophone and Francophile bros to read Peter Kivy's Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience - very clever, precise, and thorough, but a bit on the dull side. Reasonably successful at avoiding that typical analytic philosophy of music thing of only being applicable to classical and early romantic music (even though that's pretty much all he's talking about), though, so there are flashes of excitement in there.

omg the title of that piece

i sorta love those kind of trend pieces--helps when i try to convince students that philosophy is cutting edge.

what y'all reading at the moment?

I still really want to read "After Finitude," but currently planning to use precious reading time on the new translation of Isabelle Stengers' "Cosmopolitics" and very excited about it.

ah yes that looks interesting. Someone had better translate her Penser avec Whitehead soon or I'll be forced to finally learn French.

cosmopolitics looks interesting. I'm now reading marshall mcluhan's understanding media which is an unexpected&has a huge explanatory power which surprised me. among the many strands he ties together is stuff on language&maths not dissimilar to the maxticle, but historicised & treating the phonetic alphabet/finger-counting &c. as technologies w/ concomitant effects on 'ratios between the senses' & broader socio-economic patterns. full of artfully deployed amazing facts and I'd strongly recommend to anyone remotely interested despite not being philosophy.

oh i want to read that. def on my long list of classics to read.

he does what I'd hoped phenomenology might do in terms of tying/blurring thought&practice/inner&outer, BUT he does it as a way of making sense of societal change, and in turn uses his understanding of that macro-level of technological change&media to make sense of how people engage/perceive/act in&think about the world. love the guy & find his explanations of why things&ppl necessarily developed as they did really convincing. lots of stuff on electric lighting, the phonetic alphabet, villages&roads, and zero. written w/ unusual sense of style and restraint&slow to digest because of that but so worth it.

what is the meaning of life?