Rolling Philosophy

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

his work still relevant today

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc5e263GqY1qa9bmvo1_500.jpg

makes sense to me

important dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce's_law

but yeah the SR stuff I've seen looks to be a hopeless mess of impressions, notes, half-formed connections and fancies.

yeah I think that nails it.

reading PI.

I know Wittgenstein is probably just leading me deep into the weeds here but it's a fun journey.

i've never read anything by him. have you read the tractatus?

PI is a blast, Tractatus a bore. The abridged version (just the major propositions) tells you all you need to know:

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with a sense.
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
6. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/0/1/a/01a3cf5f91211db95ef402b4bd20508b.png. This is the general form of a proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

PENNE

this is now a pasta thread.

tractatus logico-fusillicus

my favorite

new entry on Lacan (by Adrian Johnston) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/ Looks p good, should prove invaluable to the thousands out there who want to know what Lacan's deal is but understandably think 'fuck reading a Lacan'.

want to know what *****'s deal is but understandably think 'fuck reading a *****'.

my approach to philosophy in its entirety.

less good news on the philosophical grapevine, btw, is that our boy Zizek's not doing too well - pulling out of several events recently, apparently on the back of another couple of mild heart attacks.

xp ha, thx for the link i was in that position recently & watched lacan speaks (http://vimeo.com/21031617)... didn't help at all

ya, he's erm not the clearest. His writings are actually a lot easier to digest, and he even has a nice pedagogical explanation for the difficulties of his lectures (from Seminar III):

if I were to try to make myself very easily understood, so that you were completely certain that you followed, then according to my premises concerning interhuman discourse the misunderstanding would be irremediable. On the contrary, given the way I think that I have to approach problems, you always have the possibility of what is said being open to revision, in a way that is made all the easier by the fact that it will fall back on me entirely if you haven’t been following sooner–you can hold me responsible.

how much I buy it, I dunno, but it's interesting.

i've never read anything by him. have you read the tractatus?

― markers, Wednesday, April 3, 2013 7:39 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah, it does seem like a bore, as ledge said. I knew a professor in college who was a late Wittgenstein scholar and thus liked to go on about duck-rabbits, so I'm finally getting around to reading it.