Rolling Philosophy

A. W. Moore's new book sounds like it could have wide appeal too: http://www.amazon.com/The-Evolution-Modern-Metaphysics-Philosophy/dp/0521851114

Not that I'll ever read it.

that looks awesome but jeez that cover. not sexy at all :-/

Coffa's To the Vienna Station is a fab survey of the origins of analytic philosophy.

on Hegel, isn't it just better to read Charles Taylor's book?

i'm pretty sure this is the "preferred" phenomenology, or at least the version that was assigned to me in grad school:
http://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Spirit-G-W-Hegel/dp/0198245971

that's the preferred phenomenology, yes, but there's going to be a new translation, by terry pinkard, released in the near future, and it's currently available online - http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page.html (or is it? that's not loading for me at the moment.) it's likely to become the new standard version, and is definitely a much easier read than the current translation, but unfortunately i think that ease of comprehension is sacrificing some of the actual detail of the argumentation. and beyond that there were some pretty glaring mistakes too, we'll see what becomes of them in the published version.

curious to see if a new translation will finally help me understand the anatomy stuff

since we're here, i'll note that over the last few days i was at a major uk european philosophy conference (let's call it s3p f3p). my paper went p well, the overall standard of papers was ~alright~ i guess (i don't think they're hugely discriminating when it comes to accepting people), but the talk of the town was the absolutely mental paper given by alph0nso l1ngis (probably best known for his levinas and merleau-ponty translations, now rather old) - clad in a hawaiian shirt he, in near darkness, his paper lit with a handheld headlamp, delivered, in a rapid and rhythmic vincent price voice, a talk on subjectivity via lingerie, parrots, mirrors, babies... all over a soundtrack of chill koto vibes.

on the topic of the big overarching all-encompassing history of ideas thing, that'd be really interesting if someone could do it properly and well but i can't imagine doing it properly and well in under ten volumes. speaking of hegel, i think his lectures on the history of philosophy, up to and including his contemporaries, are really interesting and some of his most readable stuff. illuminating re his own project for those reasons too, especially when read alongside something like the phenomenology, which is really a huge engagement with the entirety of western thought without ever naming anyone he's talking about.

what was your paper on? (if you don't mind me asking)

it was on john cage and deleuze-guattari, a bit of a sketch of their shared projects wrt the relation between immanence and structure and so on.

reading anthony kenny's "rise of modern philosophy" atm -- it's surprisingly enjoyable but i don't have much to compare it with

ryan, this is some good stuff too:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Romantic-Conception-Life-Foundations/dp/0226712117

oh dang i think i need to read that one first.

merdeyeux: that sounds pretty rad. let us/me know if you publish it!

german idealism / romanticism is pretty well covered for those big surveys. frederick beiser's is good too - http://www.amazon.com/German-Idealism-Struggle-Subjectivism-1781-1801/dp/0674027175/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347060273&sr=1-2&keywords=frederick+beiser on 20th century french stuff vincent descombes is good - http://www.amazon.com/Modern-French-Philosophy-Vincent-Descombes/dp/0521296722/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347060396&sr=1-1&keywords=descombes

will do, ryan!

go hard or go home

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173297467l/269724.jpg

the braudel is great but not philosophy

btw ryan are you planning on reading the phenomenology on your own? if so i'd definitely recommend reading a secondary text or two alongside it. in terms of big important readings hyppolite and heidegger are very good, for super detailed analysis there's a book by someone yovel that's just an extensively annotated version of the preface, and there's h.s. harris's 'hegel's ladder', a maaaaaassive nearly passage-by-passage analysis of the entire book.

yep im reading it on my own, for "fun." I've read some Hegel before, but as I understand it the Phenomenology is a different beast altogether, so i'll definitely check out those secondary texts. very much looking forward to it, though I'm sure it'll take me a long time.

i wish I could find Blumenberg's "Legitimacy of the Modern World" for a decent price. been looking forever.

I got a copy on Amazon UK for £28, which seems OK

i put back a 20p copy of Braudel's History of Civilizations on Saturday cos i didn't want to carry it around town with me and three hours later it had gone ;_;

that sucks. have Structures of Everyday life v1 in bedside pile, was enjoying it just the other night.

I definitely wanna big-up my pal Katrin Pahl's new book "Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion" (Northwestern)- it's a fantastic reading of the way that emotion functions within the Phenomenology that gives you a very different way of thinking about the nature of the text and the disjunctions between the chapters. her re-reading of the dynamic of "anerkennen" in the master/slave section is particularly rich imo

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/113357/what-theodor-adorno-wrought-2

If this approach sounds familiar, it’s perhaps because it is the one favored by most nabobs who tweet, blog, Tumbl, like, poke, and otherwise pollute public discourse with ignorant and inflammatory pronouncements. And as is so often the case with dynasties, the children have none of the father’s luster: While Adorno occasionally made up for his failings with bouts of genuine brilliance, those who swear by him do not. He, for example, reversed Hegel’s view of history to argue that the course of human events is not one of progress but rather, to borrow my colleague Adam Kirsch’s phrase, a process devoted to “the inevitable working-out of a historical dialectic that culminates in Nazism”; allow capitalism and culture to sufficiently numb its citizens into acquiescence, and another Hitler will inevitably rise. The contemporary loons who troll the Net and are fond of comparing anything or anyone to Hitler are merely continuing in the same tradition, substituting Adorno’s theoretical underpinnings, flawed as they might have been, for sheer, dumb rage.

this is really very bad and only marginally different from, say, breitbart's "take" on adorno

what a weird, weak article. if you want to talk shit about judith butler just do it, dont hedge

judith butler looks way more wkiw than i expected judith butler to look

i saw her give a lecture and her whole vibe is wkiw. very approachable & super nice

her recent work looks really surprising and interesting, i had no idea she'd moved so far away from the line of thought that runs through gender trouble and bodies and the other one

i love that quote from her in that interview linked at the end: "I assure you: I am not completely immersed in the world."

Haven't read a lot of Butler, to my shame. My favorite is actually a book she did with Laclau and Zizek called Contingency, Hegemony, Universality in which I remember thinking she came off best.

it's funny, the old charge of "obfuscation" (which goes at least as far back as Schopenhauer vs. Hegel) always seems, at bottom, to really be about the priorities viz a viz philosophy and "social practice" or utility--that of philosophy determining its own priorities vs. being the handmaiden of some other objective.

like that quoted remark about the idol of "theory"--like how dare someone be interested in theory for its own sake. what's the real "idol" in that scenario?

I actually found the one time seeing Butler to be a tad over-simplistic. Kind of disappointing; still interesting.

welp i can tell from that headline and subheader that this is not an article i have any need to read. butler's recent thing w/ malabou on master-slave is really good. ('be my body for me', i think it's called.)

i suspect we could start a history of the philosophical charge of obfuscation somewhere around scholasticism but no wai am i going to be the one to construct that history.

I haven't read a lot of Butler either, but I'm halfway through Giving an Account of Oneself, and find it quite beautiful. She's trying to delineate an ethics whereby the self recognizes its own opacity to itself, and accordingly "allows" this to the other. This is ethics post-Lacan, I suppose. Aside from the substance of the argument, which I'm still digesting, I'm really struck by the tone -quiet, measured- and the way she engages (many) other thinkers -carefully, lovingly even, and without any great blaring of polemical trumpets. As a read, I find her edifying, in a very old fashioned sense.

so i got a copy of Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age--it's really tremendous (if a little dry) kinda throwing my thoughts in all kind of different interesting directions. It reminds me a lot (and is probably a big influence on) what I like so much about Niklas Luhmann's stuff (and whose Theory of Society was just published tho it makes Blumenberg seem downright excitable).

There is a chapter about 1/3 of the way thru where Blumenberg claims that modernity represents the "second overcoming of Gnosticism" that is totally mindblowing and worth reading all on its own.

Now I'm gonna copy/paste what I took to be the major thesis of the book as a whole since I typed this out for something I'm working on. It's basically about Blumenberg taking issue with Karl Lowith's "secularization thesis" about the modern age:

The only reason why “secularization” could ever have become so plausible as a mode of explanation of historical processes is that supposedly secularized ideas can in fact mostly be traced back to an identity in the historical process. Of course this identity, according to the thesis advocated here, is not one of contents but one of functions. It is in fact possible for totally heterogeneous contents to take on identical functions in specific positions in the system of man’s interpretation of the world and of himself. In our history this system has been decisively determined by Christian theology, and specifically, above all, in the direction of its expansion. Theology created new “positions” in the framework of the statements about the world and man that are possible and are expected, “positions” that cannot simply be “set aside” again or left unoccupied in the interest of theoretical economy.

i don't know if you use your ilx mail account but i sent u mail

received!

I thought this description of the "origin of time" in Neoplatonism so to be so cool i had to post it somewhere:

In the description of the origin of time from the self-alienation of eternity, also, the guiding idea is still the ancient contrast typology of the bustling inquisitiveness that forgets its own business. But here an attempt at motivation does after all show through clearly: The reposeful presence of eternity is perceived as a reservation, awakening the vaque idea of a possible greater possession, which seems graspable by the bold venture of self-appropriation (idiosis). Thus the repose of possession gave rise to motion, in which eternity 'temporalized' itself. The world arises from eternity's venturing forth into time as a result of a restless passion for the incommensurate, a passion that, as it were, produces its own objects and in its enjoyment of them goes outside itself. If this mysterious unrest in the essential self-sufficiency of the eternal is the origin of the hypostatic surplus, as which the cosmos is now conceived--and thus defined, in terms of its origin alone, as the object of an equally mysterious recollection of the truth of its origin, by which the degenerate being is awakened to itself and brought back.

Reminds me, as of course it would, of Peirce's remark: “The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.”

Ok what does that even mean. What would it take for it to be true, or to be false?

that's basically book XI of Augustine's Confessions, right? It's v beautiful.

As far as proof or disproof goes I don't think it can really operate on that level, it's more a transcendental argument about how we can experience living time at all. Thinking time as a mere moment by moment progression (Aristotelian time, basically?) seems impossible to reconcile with how we understand the world and ourselves, so if you're a Neoplatonist / Christian you do that by trying to work out how our everyday can be generated from some distant transcendent foundation. (The entire history of the philosophy of time has probably come down to grappling with this Neoplatonist formulation.)

what does "trying to work out" mean if there is no notion of proof or disproof? ok maybe i don't have the appetite right here right now to question this whole mysticism project and y'know if it makes you happy... but whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent imo.

boooo ur no fun. But I don't think it's necessarily an utterly ineffable mystical enterprise. Cuz we can and have criticised and built upon this kind of split between lived time and eternal time, or something like experiential time vs time-as-time - we can criticise Augustine because he's working on Christian presuppositions, or we can be chumps and criticise everyone who's ever written philosophy because they're presupposing a bourgeois individualist subject, or whatever. But even insofar as it's clear that we're not making it up and there's something real that we're engaging with, beyond the specific formulations that we have, defining our actual criteria for truth still seems to evade us in some sense. But then I kinda think that the entire enterprise of philosophy comes down to working out our criteria for truth, so the Wittgensteinian hand-waviness is v unappealing to me.

It also ended up becoming unappealing to Wittgenstein himself, so you're in good company... I really don't get when people quote the Tractatus like that, when even it's author figured out it was rubbish (and then wrote the most important work of philosophy afterwards)

Hey I'm all about the PI, I don't think it contradicts that particular nugget.

I'm not sure what the quoted passage is saying either, but I can follow what Merdeyeux is writing. Maybe this passage, from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, is helpful too?

The coherence of space has to mean the coherence of time too. Earlier, as we have discussed elsewhere, time was understood as complex. As well as secular time, the time of ordinary “temporal” existence, in which things happen one after another in an even rhythm, there were higher times, modes of eternity. There was what I have called Platonic eternity, the ever unchanging realm of essences, of which the ever- flowing ectypes were pale images. There was the eternity of God, where he stands contemporary with the whole flow of history, the time of nunc stans. And there was also the time of origins, a higher time of original founding events, which we can periodically re-approach at certain high moments.

As this last phrase suggests, the understanding of time saw these higher modes as woven into secular time, interfering with the simple coherent order of secular time- place. Two events very far apart in secular time might nevertheless be close because one of them approaches the time of origins. This Easter Vigil, for instance, brings us back into the vicinity of the original Easter, closer than last year’s summer day— although that was closer in terms of secular time alone. The original Passover in Egypt, and the last supper, are brought into close proximity by typology, although they are aeons apart in secular time. And so on.

I think this is just a game people play, where they pretend that their intuitions are in any way a useful guide to things utterly beyond human experience, that the concepts they are discussing are in any way meaningful. I ask again, what are the truth criteria for there being a "platonic eternity" as distinct from an "eternity of god" as distinct from "a time of origins"?

I'm not sure the games I prefer to play (around consciousness, free will) are any more meaningful. Certainly there is enough disagreement about definitions that an outsider might wonder if there is really anything fundamental being discussed, or if it is just confusion over concepts we cannot ultimately hope to grasp. But I have fun playing the games.

three concepts of eternity that can be spelled out fairly satisfactorily: I'm not gonna go through each of them with you (fuck you pay me), but I don't think they're just words that run together in a merely poetic way (not so sure about the first quoted bit btw).

"concepts they are discussing are in any way meaningful": well I guess if you want a "verificationist criterion of meaning" then maybe not but I think you're just closing yourself off to aspects of experience that most people are aware of, if only dimly, and would like to understand

As I read PI, Wittgenstein cuts the connection between language and 'truth'. You can speak of anything, as long as you and your speaking partner think it makes sense. And while it might not be 'truthful', it might have another function (social or whatever) so you should in any case not keep silent.

But it's not like I think the quotes are that interesting, and I don't understand them either. I've read enough to figure out I'm probably Einsteinian/Bergsonian/Proustian or something when it comes to 'time' but far from enough to actually understand what that means... Yay college.

yes but we all think we're doing more than just playing a social game here. and i do struggle with non verificationist accounts, 'tis true (i have verified it).

verificationists should think about math more often

(well, so should everyone, it's a thorn in the side of empiricists everywhere, thank goodness)