Rolling Philosophy

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)

while terms like "eternity" and the like are not now in fashion, i dont think that the neoplatonic concept of the origin of time i quoted above is really that far from the concepts like "order from chaos" or "becoming" in the physics of Ilya Prigogine or our understanding of self-organizing systems and how they relate to an "environment" to which they are blind. (hence the "eternal" as a label for what lies past or beyond the mechanisms of time).

there's another bit in the book, i cant remember who it was now but it was someone writing around 300AD, who essentially sums up Russell's paradox in regard to the same questions.

it's one thing to say these guys are mystagogues, and perhaps they are. but they were also incredibly sophisticated.

so if you're objection is "well we're deigning to talk about something that we can't really talk about"...well part of what's amazing about that bit i quoted (imo) is that it's about the essential movement of why our thinking is drawn past what we can "talk about."

agreed re Prigogine etc - as a line of philosophical thought it probably starts with Kant trying to work out what's going on in the sensible-supersensible relation via that mysterious middle ground that is the organism.

What do you mean re math, Euler? What's the current state of play in the fundamentals of philosophy of mathematics? (Utterly naive stance here assumes it to be stuck in a conventionalist-realist forever, but I'm sure the work going on there would be useful across the divide in helping us contend with the patent absurdity of yer Badious and yer Meillassouxs taking maths as an almost unquestionable philosophical axiom.)

conventional / realism are things for old people to believe in. before you retire to those "big" views, we have a lot of ground clearing to do, ground clearing the empiricists occluded in their rush to "prove" their dogmas. right now thus the main work in in understanding what's going on in mathematical practice. how is it that the Greeks studied the same text, Euclid's, that the medieval Arabs did, that we do: how could the content of that text be so ~flexible~ so as to accommodate those radically different cultures & mathematical practices? but it is! & so we have to understand those practices, & what they sought, & what we seek, & why, & fit it together in new ways. & leave the "big" views about ~ontology~ for the old.

Euler, I'm sure you get asked this all the time, but is there a good book for a mathematical layman that gives a good sense of the philosophy of mathematics in the past century or so? I'm basically willing to do some work in terms of trying to understand, but I'm also pretty stupid.

I have Howard Delongs "A Profile of Mathematical Logic" which I've been meaning to start forever.

the last century was pretty bad! well, up until 1931 things were pretty interesting, but then the logical positivists got involved, & things got boring. we're still recovering from this.

you & others of a continental ilk might find the this article interesting; it's written by a practicing mathematicians (friend of mine) in the recent staggeringly-great Princeton Companion to Mathematics. actually just reading some articles from that book would be a great way into the philosophy of mathematics as it ought to be done: which is, with our minds to the data. otherwise we are just serving some "big" agenda, such a boring thing to be doing in 2012.

I'm teaching a pretty historical philomath class next term, Kant to 1931 for the first half, out of primary sources obviously, then to topics in the philosophy of geometry since that's what I care about the most at present

just printed that out so i wont forget to read it. thanks!

that article was really cool. still digesting it of course, but it struck me as a very interesting examination of what you might call mathematical communication consists of. anyway, good stuff.

yes, mathematical communication is "a thing" now, in fact spending the afternoon refereeing an article on it! good times

This might be a stupid question/one that's been answered before, but I've just started a Literature & Philosophy module for my MA (in English Lit). The course reading list/outline is as follows...

Week 1, Thursday 10th January - Introduction
Introductory discussion
Plato, The Republic, Book 10
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1

Week 2, Thursday 17th January – Walter Benjamin: Language and Memory
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ and ‘The Image of Proust’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2

Week 3, Thursday 24rd January – Walter Benjamin continued
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’ in Selected Writings, Volume 2

Wek 4, Thursday 31st January – Martin Heidegger: Poetry and Being
Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought

Week 5, Thursday 7th February –Heidegger continued
Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For’ and ‘The Thing’ in Poetry, Language, Thought

Week 6, Thursday 14th February
Tutorial Week – No seminar

Week 7, Thursday 21st February – Heidegger continued
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’ in On the Way to Language

Week 8, Thursday 28th February – Maurice Blanchot: Poetry Beyond Being
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire

Week 9, Thursday 7th March – Blanchot continued
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ continued and ‘Literature and the Original Experience’ in The Space of Literature

Week 10, Thursday 14th March – Blanchot continued
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Original Experience’ continued

My question is thus: are there any philosophy overviews you'd recommend to accompany a course of this kind?

this is a great frankfurt school reader to accompany the benjamin sections:
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Theory-Society-A-Reader/dp/0415900417/ref=pd_sim_b_4

great reading list!

Cheers Mordy!

Max: It should be an enjoyable course - the tutor repeatedly stressed how demanding/difficult it will be, which was oddly encouraging after i'd spent hours trying to wrap my head around the Benjamin piece. Plus it's my last ever term as a taught student so I might as well push myself a bit.

simon critchley had a decent if necessarily shallow overview of the basics of heideggers early though in the guardian a couple years ago, run over 5 or 6 columns... its about being and time which is kind of a "different" heidegger than poetry-reading heidegger but might help situate the guy and see 'where hes coming from'

germany, iirc

alt.:

a clearing in being, iirc

Gianni Vattimo definitely deploys later Heidegger to his own specific ends but he is a good gateway to the post Being and Time stuff. Admirably clear and helpful with the context in which Heidegger was working after his stuff on Nietzsche.

Though part of what's fun about Heidegger is his rhetorical insistence on you meeting him entirely on his own terms.

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/video/korsgaard110508

wow, the rhetoric of nussbaum's introduction here is just so gross

Raymond Tallis' "A Conversation with Martin Heidegger" is supposedly a very accessible and good book. I have it but haven't gotten around to it.

This essay by Tallis about time constraints in modern life was my favorite read in 2012:

http://philosophynow.org/issues/90/A_Hasty_Report_From_A_Tearing_Hurry

Thanks for the suggestions gang!

http://www.amazon.com/Derrida-A-Biography-Benoit-Peeters/dp/0745656153/ref=pd_sim_b_1

has anyone read that? i still think Geoffrey Bennington's book on Derrida is still after all this time the best secondary source I've ever read on him. Though i haven't read Rudolph Gasche's The Tain of the Mirror which has a good reputation.

I saw Peeters do a talk about it last year, it sounds interesting but it also seems that it's so actively not an 'intellectual biography' that working out how Derrida-the-person and Derrida-the-thinker relate could be a little tough.

I'm going to predict that within the next few years we'll see the emergence of Derrida scholarship that far surpasses that which has come so far. My impression is that we're at an, um, tipping point where the previous approaches seem irredeemably dated but a sense of Derrida's value beyond those is escalating. (I haven't read The Tain of the Mirror either, though I also saw Gasche speak a while back and he was super disappointing, nothing but a dull old reactionary. Wish I could remember some precise quotes, but he said something about Islam not really existing...)

haha yeah I think Gasche is probably more important for that "dated" approach you mention. Tho I agree "Derrida studies" will soon look much different than in their 70s-80s heyday.

the other day i finally saw the derida book irl, and i definitely want to read it.

i was also at the mit bookstore in kendall square in boston on friday looking at stuff. the author's picture on the back inside flap of zizek's less than nothing is a painting of him riding a horse. some stuff about speculative realism in there too. seventy fucking bucks though -- much cheaper on amazon.

this just came out too, but i'm gonna wait on the pdf: http://openhumanitiespress.org/realist-magic.html

markers I love the MIT Press bookstore, that place is full of attractive books by weirdos about cybernetics. Never bought anything there tho sadly.

by the way, have any of your tackled or tried to tackle laruelle? i tried a little bit like a year and a half ago or so but not very hard. this was the book: http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Difference-Critical-Introduction-Non-philosophy/dp/0826436633/

there's more out in translation now than there was then, but i haven't gone near any of it.

markers I love the MIT Press bookstore, that place is full of attractive books by weirdos about cybernetics. Never bought anything there tho sadly.

― my god i only have 2 useless beyblade (silby)

it's great, but hard to justify buying anything when it's so much cheaper on amazon

Oh for sure but buying things is hardly the point of hanging out in bookstores imo

yeah that's very true -- i don't regret going!

that morton book does look cool even if the argument as summarized in that blurb kinda makes me want to hit my head on my desk a few times. it's exactly the sort of over-reaching and nearly meaningless claim the OOO guys are so fond of. there's a nearly insufferable feeling i am watching a lame magic trick when i read those guys. a heideggarian theatricality that grates.

that aside, i regret that he came to my school just as i was finishing up!

ok i regret my little rant there, ha.

oh yeah just got this from MIT press and cant wait to dig in:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026263032X/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

the more rants against OOO the better imo.

markers if you don't mind waiting a bit Laruelle's pseudo-magnum opus is out in translation in a few months - http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Non-Philosophy-Francois-Laruelle/dp/1441177566/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361737558&sr=1-1&keywords=laruelle+principles . I'm thanked in the translators' introduction! What higher recommendation could there be? The arbitrary ways of translation mean that a bunch of relatively minor texts have been translated while the more major works are still on the way so just diving in with him is difficult. Also difficult is the fact that he's a really really dense and complicated writer. Perhaps a useful place to start would be this collection of essays on him from last year: http://www.amazon.com/Laruelle-Non-Philosophy-Critical-Connections-Mullarkey/dp/0748645349/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361737934&sr=1-1&keywords=laruelle+and+non-philosophy , or maybe the recent collection of his own essays on Urbanomic http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_decisiontoheresy.php

Laruelle sounds fun and I look forward to reading that magnum opus this summer. It almost sound similar to the things I find most interesting in systems theory, peirce, et al.

http://www.zero-books.net/index.php?id=99&p=2828

so what else is coming out this year that looks good? anything that's come out since january counts imo

http://www.amazon.com/Prolegomena-Any-Future-Materialism-Contemporary/dp/0810129124/

sounds good but when i see terms like "transcendental materialism" i always stop and wonder why you couldn't just flip it on its head and call it "materialist transcendentalism"

is there any precident for that in the history of recent western philosophy?

not that that matters, i guess

Adrian J's very good, his book on Zizek basically serves as an outline of his own philosophy (he did his PhD with Z but he very much has his own thing going on, despite the supposed exegetical nature of that book) which I guess is now coming to fruition in this work.

What do you mean with your flipping point, Ryan? (And what do you mean by asking if there's precedent, markers? I'm maybe drunk and just have no sense of a simple point being made here.) I figure transcendental materialism (iirc a term first used in Anti-Oedipus but I suppose kinda left aside for 30+ years) has a fairly clear theoretical basis - it's a materialism which recognises a need to account for transcendental conditions - while materialist transcendentalism would be... I dunno really. A much less necessary channeling of a much more specific principle.