Rolling Philosophy

i fashion it out of the skulls of my enemies

currently reading Susan Buck-Morss's book on the Arcades Project, along with a random smattering of Benjamin (just finished the Baudelaire essay); want to add Adorno's book on Kierkegaard to the mix at some point, too. sometimes I think I could spend the rest of my life reading early-20th-century eurobros on mid-19th-century eurobros.

the Susan Buck-Morss book is great, tho her whole reading of dialectic images is kinda unpopular (lol inside-benjamin academic baseball)

what don't people like about it?/what is the 'right way' to read dialectical images? (funny question)

soft silly music is meaningful magical, iirc

deeeeeep

xp as far i remember it, it's an argument over whether it's an actual image or not -- buck-morss says it is and i think basically everyone else says it isn't

Robin Hanson always rocking it: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/brave-position-club.html

lot of discussion of moral realism, meta-ethics, on the blogs at the mo, mostly sparked by Sam Harris' TED talk. I think I'm a knee-jerk moral realist, but feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew about the subject, struggling to deal with even the basics.

Harris:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html

today's reading:
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2077
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/its-a-contingent-fact-that-we-care/

we are against any current philosophy that is not based in principles from evolutionary or cognitive science.

feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew about the subject, struggling to deal with even the basics.

I've been reading Structural Anthropology and I ran across a passage that's a little cryptic for me and was hoping one of you guys could contextualize it for me (google has already failed me):

These attitudes, far from automatically reflecting the nomenclature, often appear as secondary elaborations, which serve to resolve the contradictions and overcome the deficiencies inherent in the terminological system. This synthetic character is strikingly apparent among the Wik Munkan of Australia. In this group, joking privileges sanction a contradiction between the kinship relations which link two unmarried men and the theoretical relationship which must be assumed to exist between them in order to account for their later marriages to two women who do not stand themselves in the corresponding relationship.

Basically up until here he has argued that there is a terminological kinship (the linguistic level of kinship like father/mother/etc) and an attitude kinship (how one acts towards their father, for example). He is now showing that something the attitude kinships actually resolve tensions in the terminological kinship (showing that they are two distinct system of kinship), and is using the Win Munkan as an example. However, outside knowing who wrote about the Wik Munkan (Ursula McConnel), I don't know enough about them to understand how the 'joking privileges' between two unmarried men resolve the problems of the terminological relationship between them and their later marriages -- how does this all work, basically?

just looked up the article mentioned in the endnote on jstpr and it is a+

the wik munkan word for penis is, apparently, 'kuntj'; the word for clitoris, meanwhile, 'po'o ka', lit. 'vagina nose'.

anyway the bit about special kinship relations is written rather unclearly and i'm not sure i understand it the same way as l-s! As far as I can work out, exchanging slightly ritualised obscenities in public is encouraged between distant relations, while taboo increases with closeness of relation. So you have different 'joking privileges' with different relations or people who are in the position of a relation while not being related to you.

e.g. you're meant to not exchange many obscene remarks with your mother's elder brother (and you're not meant to talk to her younger bro at all). But if there's a 'crooked' (intergenerational?) marriage, so that your older maternal uncle's wife and your wife are in a different generational/kinship relation, you and the older man enter into a different type of joking relationship in which a great deal of licence is expected. The original kinship relation is superseded by the later one.

so the joking relationship, which is the attitude 'stylized, prescribed and sanctioned by taboos or privileges and expressed through a fixed ritual', is the more flexible relationship, the one that changes to reflect changes in people's circumstances, and the one that has more of a relevance to their everyday.

also, the wik munkan word for 'labia minora' translates to 'vagina ears'.

Thank c sharp -- the article is really excellent but like you noticed, even reading the article it's not so clear exactly how Levi-Strauss' point is functioning here. But your answer makes sense (even if it's still pretty vague -- I'd love to know exactly how these relationships work, and what exactly is the contradiction being sanctioned? that they have competing kinship relationships? why is that more of a terminological problem but not an attitude problem? couldn't terminology be something like, "the brother of my mother who is also my wife's uncle" or whatever?).

in our culture doesn't it often seem the other way around, that the terminal kinship smooths over the attitude kinship? for example, you have a difficult relationship with your mother, but "she's my mom." it could go both ways. am I misunderstanding?

c sharp was just giving an example -- it seems like there are very close relationships that are vulgar. Primarily the non-vulgar relationships are an older person who you need to show respect to. But a sibling is probably an opportunity for some good vulgarity.

we are against any current philosophy that is not based in principles from evolutionary or cognitive science.

― rage for the machine (banaka), Friday, 27 August 2010 02:00 (4 days ago)

levi-strauss makes me feel like any philosophy not based in principles of structural linguistics is worthless

relevant:

IAN BUCHANAN: [...] Do you still think myth criticism has a place or can be reinvented in a way that would be useful today?

FREDRIC JAMESON: This is a very tricky question. Benjamin asked himself this question in his Arcades Project and was attentive to the critiques of the Frankfurt School who were maybe more alert than he was at that point to the affinities of myth criticism with Jungianism and even a kind of fascist affirmation in it of the archaic impulses that fascism and nazism tried to resurrect. Clearly a myth criticism which takes that route is unacceptable. I would myself also want to say that sociobiology is a kind of positivist version of this same effort in that it attempts to link very complex modern societies back to the simplest of biological urges and thereby to simplify social reality in a way which is also mythic, although it certainly doesn't look much like Jungianism. The Marxist perspective on this is of course that these very archaic societies were also societies without power and without money: whether one would call all of them forms of primitive communism is much more complicated since of course some of them had caste systems and an aristocracy and all the rest of it. But it seems to me that the greatness of Levi-Strauss was to reopen a powerful path back to the social realities of those archaic societies and to all kinds of social relationships which we have lost in the modern industrial capitalist world. It is not so much a matter of recreating those things as it as a tapping of a properly utopian energy that's present in those older societies and that one can find in primitive myths. The point is not to re-mythologize our present, but to use this moment of the distant human past (as with other modes of production in the past) as a way of understanding what we've lost historically and as a charge of utopian energy on which we can draw.

(partic. the part about sociobiology, although I left the levi-strauss stuff in just 4 u mordy)

so would anyone be up for that casual Meillassoux reading group? Would be nice to keep my head in the game in as many directions as possible once I hand in my dissertation on Thursday. (I can quietly provide a PDF if desired.)

(bump)

yeah, I'd be down -- I ended up giving up after the first couple chapters, but I think I'm ready to take another shot at it.

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1583

I'm pretty sympathetic to the Wittgensteinian notion that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language", but this guy takes it too far. He seems to think that just because

ACK

... he seems to think that if a problem is expressed in terms that don't chime with natural language usage, then the problem, and the whole research programme behind it, are *necessarily* meaningless.

Surely to wonder what the sonar sensory experience of a bat is like, and if it is anything like vision, or anything like hearing, or something completely different, is perfectly simple, and understandable, and legitimate - regardless even of whether or not one is committed to the idea of qualia.

I see Dennett is mentioned in that article but really the dude needs to engage with what Dennett says rather than just bollocksing on and ignoring it.

I've never seriously engaged with Dennett meself. I'm a big qualia fan so I really should find out how he thinks he can explain them away.

Just argues that everything can be explained by biological process iirc. Agree.

Aye well. That's the leap I struggle with. Biological processes, or anything material, to conscious experience. I know this potentially makes me sound like some kind of horrendous dualist or epiphenomenalist. But could you find out what a bat's sonar sensory experience is *like*, just by inspecting the biological process?

The desire to find out what an experience is like, and the experience of feeling that likeness, seem totally explainable via brain function to me. I think the argument against is the harder case at this point in history.

Like, why add on an extra layer of mystery above and beyond the observable?

my experience is an observable!

What is it that's doing the observing?

Just argues that everything can be explained by biological process iirc. Agree.

Explain to who, though? To language using creatures who ineliminably see a world in intentional terms, or to unimaginable creatures who *know* it's biological process all the way down?

I mean how do they *know*?

Explain to human beings thinking about being human beings. Intentionality really has nothing to do with it, this feels like basic Occam's Razor stuff to me.

Dualism is such a busted flush.

Lucky you, so...

To say that *I think* my experience can be explained in terms of biological process - by which i take you to mean law- governed, predictable? - seems a performative contradiction to me. There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

xp

I don't think there is an I in the sense you mean. A theoretically predictable law also leaves room for tremendous difficulty of prediction, maybe up to the point where prediction is only a theoretical possibility rather than a practical one.

There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

Explain to human beings thinking about being human beings

Any human beings? Could you 'explain' vision, in terms of biological processess, to a blind person?

... yes?

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation. I also couldn't give a paraplegic the experience of playing Dance Dance Revolution, but I could still tell him how the game works.

GCSE Biology iirc

I'm down with Davidson here - monism, but dual-aspect, or some such. Perhaps engaging in philosophical thought when I have to leave the house in one minute is not a good idea.

Why can't it be thinking this as part of a biological process?

May it can be, maybe it is in some ultimately real way, but it can't 'think' this, if 'thinking' means what it thinks it means.

'Maybe it can be'

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation

well y'know to me that seems like a pretty big explanatory failure.

I begin to feel like this is almost a religious position - in the sense that those on one side just *feel*, intuitively and strongly, that there is something that the scientific picture leaves out, and those who seem to feel that there is nothing in need of explanation.