Rolling Philosophy

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.

oh i didn't really have a point! more just talking about the rhetoric of these kind of formulations.

I just wonder if putting "transcendental" in front of "materialism" is sorta the stop-gap gesture to plug the hole of a godelian incompleteness in the theory of "materialism" itself.

...it's almost as if one side of the formulation guarantees the conditions of possibility of the other, i guess is what im trying to say.

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.

in part i think i was thinking of dialectical materialism. it seems like it's always something idealism or something materialism and not the other way around.

what does meillassoux call his shit?

if i ever write something on philosophy again, i'm definitely going to include "what does meillassoux call his shit?" somewhere in it

i believe he's "speculative realism"

now im sorta curious when these seemingly oxymoronic designations first came about.

In an interview with Kronos magazine published in March 2011, Ray Brassier denied that there is any such thing as a 'speculative realist movement' and firmly distanced himself from those who continue to attach themselves to the brandname:

"The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_Realism

but yeah if you were to ask around people would say brassier, harman, hamilton grant, and meillassoux are the four biggies of sr

http://afterxnature.blogspot.com/2012/08/ray-brassier-interviews-with-after_26.html

haha i am outing myself as a curmudgeon here but i sorta agree with Brassier about the internet and philosophy.

from that interview: The challenge of rationalism is to insist on the distinction between appearance and reality, or the sensible and the intelligible, while accounting for the reality of appearances, or the intelligibility of the sensible. This is a problem that goes back to Plato. It’s a question of understanding how every appearance has a kind of reality, but only insofar as it is split from within by what it does not reveal.

really wish these dudes would read Peirce.

isn't he a pragmatist? i don't know anything about him except possibly that

yeah pragmatist but he is perhaps more famous now for inventing semiotics (even slightly prior to saussure, tho his version is very different)--but brassier sorta does a decent job of summing up what his semiotics is designed to do in that bit i quoted.

he sorta invented pragmatism along the way. william james basically got the idea from an early peirce essay.

but he's woefully under-read still and basically totally fucking out there and crazy in a good way.

this sort of sutff is definitely a hole in my knowledge.

Brassier's recent stuff is leaning ever more heavily to Sellars, so he's certainly down with the American pragmatist tradition.

i believe he's "speculative realism"

insofar as Meillassoux has self-described I think it's been as speculative materialism. I'm okay with that style of formulation cuz I think there's something fundamentally true to the impetus behind it, in the sense you say of "...it's almost as if one side of the formulation guarantees the conditions of possibility of the other, i guess is what im trying to say." I would think that transcendental idealism is the first instance of it where there is that oxymoronic dissonance (where a long history of philosophies of difference finally gets some foundational clarity added to it), and I accept that we are all post-Kantians still.

<3 <3 <3 peirce

one of the great american weirdos