Rolling Philosophy

Anyone have thoughts about Alasdair MacIntyre and whether After Virture is worth reading? I loved Short History of Morality.

(braces)

mdx — I've seen that book before, although it was just called Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (assuming they're the same one — continuum press?) — couldn't make much of what I glanced at tho.

I'm not really reading any 'pure philosophy' at the moment (Derrida maybe the closest thing?) — mostly history-of-philosophy type stuff (just started on Martin Jay's book abt the Frankfurt School, which looks to be grebt, and I'm not sure why I put it off for long), + uh, various forms of 'theory'

ya, same book. not entirely sure what it's 'about' yet myself, but i've heard grant big-upped many times and he'll be speaking at a conference here next year, so i'm putting my faith in it.

Cool cool.

What's the, uh... occasion? context? something like that. of your reading him? Like, the philosophical background from which you are approaching him... or something.

xp,

Re MacIntyre - I have to teach AV at the moment to a bunch of trainee teachers who are being forced against their will to learn a bit of philosophy: they hate it, I hate it.

His basic argument is 'back to Aristotle' slightly via Hegel: What's Wrong With Modernity is individualism and the turning of us into atomised rule followers rather virtue- laden and valuing members of 'deep' communities, with high levels of commitment to defined and explicit ideas of the good. A bit dated in its attack on existentialism, and profoundly pessimistic in its prognosis for our future. Pompous with it.

my eternal love to the term 'hypokeimenon'

Gotta catch 'em all!

EXACKLY.

xps to Bernard - I mostly work on Deleuze and Grant himself is a Deleuze scholar (and he admits that the book views everything through a bit of a Deleuze-Guattari lens), so it seems like a good route into engaging with German Idealism beyond just passive interest. Also I've been nepotistically offered an open invitation to speak at the conference Grant will be at ( http://www.humanitiescentral.com/21st-century-idealism/ ), which I probably won't take up because I doubt I'll develop the appropriate confidence with the idealism in the time available, but I'll benefit from working towards it anyway.

I'm a big fan of MacIntyre fwiw. I know him also, fwiw.

"After Virtue" is great and well worth your time imho, it has a really amazing final turn to the contemporary and his local readings are sometimes rather startling (Jane Austen?)

I just read Reza Negarestani's "Cyclonopedia (Complicity with Anonymous Materials)" and it's a kerr-azy work of, ahem, "theory-fiction" that is a mashup of Deleuze and Lovecraft. It's not philosophy but it's not fiction either, a truly odd and original book from someone associated with the speculative realist turn but up to something else (a speculative surrealist?)

About to read Ray Brassier's 'Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction', will report back when done with that

ooh tell us more about the negarestani!! i was minorly obsessed with that guy when i was in my grim fascination phase with the hyperstition blog. which has since gone dark. his writing more than the others was seriously impenetrable and bizarre

nb i have zero philosophical training and don't read it at all, this was basically a weird internet hobby trying to figure it out

the book is incredibly dense at times, to the point of sounding like crazy repetitions of theoretical jargon swirled together, at other times it's a very strongly indebted to Lovecraft "story"/summary of the lost writings of a fictional academic historian of Persia whose theories about demons, oil, the Middle East as a sentient entity, the pressure dynamics of holes, calligraphy etc. are all coughed up in a delirious manner. There's a frame romance story that is not really dealt with much after the first thirty pages, it gets better and better as you just tunnel through it. It's definitely worth looking at if you like Deleuze and/or Lovecraft and/or the idea of those things turned into bouillon-cube-dense-prose stew.

ha yeah that sounds like his blog posts.

is he an iranian dissident of some kind? where does he teach/live?

i never really 'figured out' nick land either, but that dude seemed like a bigger dickhead

I interlibraryloaned that Negarestani book last year after coming across a stray reference to it on some blog (probably one of the speculative realism dudes)... it was uh weird as fuck

(I didn't finish it. don't even remember how far I got, in retrospect. but I do remember sitting in the window of my favorite pizza place eating+reading it!)

non-dissertation reading right now is Jameson's "Late Marxism" and Baudrillard "Ecstasy of Communication"

i am interested in the Negarestani book too! mainly because Amazon keeps pimping it to me.

mississipi gadamer

to wong foucault thanks for everything julie neurath

witt gen stein's money

While we're on the topic of philosophical puns, I'm writing an essay on the AIDS crisis, including a short part on the systemic exclusion/abjection of the (primarily gay) population of AIDS sufferers from the broader 'general population' thereby designating them as dispensable, 'bare life', unable to be mourned etc. I'm thinking about calling that section "Homo, Sacer"

I can't tell if that's witty or really tasteless?

idk, but i assume you're not inventing AIDs abjection on your own right? a lot of the heavy critical lifting has already been done on that issue (excuse me if you obv are)

No, it's a background component/context for an art history essay.

looooooooooooooooooool but yah that might be pushing it

really enjoying this, esp. the juicy lil intros to the context of each essay (plus he talks about Alphonso Lingis!)

http://anthem.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/harman_speculative_realism.jpg

I can't really stomach harman's style :-/

Why is it that the modern conception of literature begins with one of the worst writers of the philosophical tradition? Such is the paradoxical question that lies at the heart of Jean-Luc Nancy’s highly original and now-classic study of the role of language in the critical philosophy of Kant.

idk about the 'modern conception of literature'?

kant wuz a decent writer before he went mad w/ the critiques 2.

tryna see how kant is responsible in any way for 'the modern conception of lit'

initiated phenomenological notion of world as formed by perception of it, innit.

(say'n that as a bit o bullshittin, but now that i've typed it something from that direction sounds plausible.)

insofar as he changed the modern conception of just about everything, yeah

did kant write about 'literature'?

Kant's a terrific writer, get out of town.

yeah i thought so too

i've spoken to german people who prefer to read the critiques in english because they're so incomprehensible in german. maybe they're just dumb.

haven't read the book but I would assume nancy traces the lineage thru post-kantian aesthetic views of german romantics (a la The Literary Absolute, which I have read, and quite enjoyed)

philosophy/theory book blurbs are about 90% gibberish i find. i have books i know and love and have read multiple times and i couldnt even tell you what the back blurb was going on about.

a relevant passage from the translator's intro to said book:

What The Literary Absolute demonstrates is first of all that the concept of literature arises as a response to the problems posed by Kant's critical enterprise. While discussions of the conceptual genealogy of the Jena romantics often concentrate on Fichte's concept of the I and the beginnings of speculative dialectics, this study situates their texts more generally, and perhaps more pertinently, with respect to the "crisis" that arises in the aftermath of Kant. To condense the argument of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the problem of presentation that concerns us here, the presentation of philosophy and the subject of philosophy (of what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy refer to as the "system-subject"), is opened up by Kant. Kant bequeaths this crisis of presentation to his successors by effectively depriving the subject of its being-subject, i.e., of its adequate presentation of itself to itself, reducing the subject to little more than the logically necessary, purely regulatory idea of the unity of its representations. This crisis of presentation provides an initial context for the development of idealism and romanticism alike: "One must set out from this problematic of the subject unpresentable to itself and from this eradication of all substantialism in order to understand what romanticism will receive, not as a bequest but as its 'own' most difficult and perhaps insoluble question" ( 30 ). Idealism and Jena romanticism represent divergent yet intersecting responses to this crisis, responses that cannot be distinguished as simply philosophical on the one hand, and literary on the other. The imbrication of their responses is in fact already suggested by the two manners in which Kant third Critique had earlier begun to sketch out a potential resolution of the problems of the subject. The Critique of Judgment points toward a form of auto-presentation in reflective judgment, i.e., in the subject's synthetic function; at the same time, it suggests that a (simply regulatory) presentation of the subject occurs by means of the Beautiful in works of art, in the formative power of nature, and in history and culture, or the Bildung of humanity.

thanks snowy, that makes more sense

"A terrific writer" is about the last thing I'd think about Kant. "A terrific thinker", sure, but all the translations I've read are pretty awful.

My Kant teacher in grad school went out of his way to point out passages in the First Critique in which Kant was "vivid" with language, noting that "look, Kant isn't as dry or opaque as everyone says, he can use metaphors!" or some such. I found the attempt to liven Kant up endearing.

where do I start if I want to learn more about the concept about 'the other' or 'othering'

i suppose you start with hegel

levinas and lacan are probably your 20th century bros here, though their ideas of the other arent the same iirc

ugh lacan, avoid lacan

i suppose postcolonibros would be helpful here too

postbrolonial studies

^^ someone write this paper please

I kinda skipped over hegel in uni tbrr, supposed it's time to get into him again

lacan + maybe buber (who isn't as good, but easier read), levinas too. for postcolonbros i'd recommend achebe, said (def), um abjection theory should deal with this too

also feministbros

kristeva