Rolling Philosophy

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.

I really like Kripke's book on the Philosophical Investigations. He appropriates some of its remarks to put together a skeptical argument against meaning. Probably not an argument quietist Wittgenstein would endorse, but in some ways more rewarding than the confusing, elusive voices of the PI.

Lacan's seminars are a blast to read. His Ecrits are the same points just made ten times more obscure.

Anthony Wilden's System and Structure has some great takes on Lacan in regard to the communication theories of Bateson et al. it's a classic that's under-read these days i think.

btw i have picked up the Blumenberg again after a break that couldn't be helped and man oh man it is still great, if exhausting. the long (VERY LONG) chapter on Nicholas of Cusa and one of his interlocutors is downright revelatory.

This mediation between faith and knowledge seems at first to tend, entirely in the framework of the medieval, toward positing faith as absolute; but faith can now equally well stand in the service of knowledge, in that it postulates freedom for playing through new possibilities of knowledge.

The problematic of certainty that characterizes the end of the Middle Ages and that was to make necessary the modern age's attempts (typified by Descartes) at establishing foundations, had become centrally operative here [in Cusan]. Everything seems to be designed to prevent the crisis created by the fundamental situation of learned ignorance from leading to resignation. Hence faith is offered to reason as not the unreasonable demand that is sacrifice itself but rather the disclosure of the possibility of its self-fulfillment.

sorry, last one i promise:

“Transcendence is no longer related to an objective topography, a cosmic ground plan. It appears precisely when man, in the manner of Scholasticism—as though upon the ladder of the hierarchical cosmos—wants to pursue his argumentation to a successful conclusion and in the process has an opportunity to experience the incomprehensibility of the world’s form, the infinity of the finite; transcendence is a mode of negation of definitiveness of theory.”

Oh, I'm reading all this and didn't realize it was recent. I'll leave this here.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/13106496.0001.001/1:5/--realist-magic-objects-ontology-causality?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

The pragamtism/ooo connection has been hashed out a few times. Think Bryant (?) admits ooo's/sr's/sm's accordance with Peirce, to a degree. Then some others drag their heels. Morton says, "I don't know."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/cyprus-crisis-symptom-rotten-eu

has anyone read the unabridged madness and civ, history of madness? the routledge thing?

i've got it on pdf at work, keep forgetting to bring it home or better still print it on the sly

it's funny you say that because i was considering getting a digital version too via the amazon kindle store.

thought this was lol because like isn't this what you'd expect if you work in "anarchist studies"? like at least Critchley is living up to the subject's title

I'd like to hear the other side. Critchley comes off terribly.

Another thing that made blog circulation this month: Why Is So Much Philosophy So Tedious? I like that it names names, calls out some big figures in the field.

yeah I've seen the "tedious" article. As usual I blame the British: the people he calls out are by & large Oxbridge types.

that's a bit of a time honored gripe, is it not? (im a bit of an outside wrt philosophy in academic circles).

the thing about having to publish early and often, and the well-known limitations this imposes on academic thought (making it risk-averse and formulaic, for instance) has been often noted but there doesn't seem to be any way out given the glut of phds.

Critchley comes off terribly in that story and also in every personal anecdote I've ever heard about him, I have v little reason to believe that he isn't a supreme dickhead.

I had thought you were doing a PhD somewhere Ryan, was I wrong? Or have you found yourself doing philosophy in a non-philosophy department?

pretty much the latter. so it's called "critical theory" instead!

aka english lit philosophy

still lollisimo that you'd expect people in anarchist studies to play by the rules

Merdeyeuz this was posted in the "quiddities" ny times thread but it is relevant to your interests:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/opinion/sunday/the-trauma-of-the-pink-shirt.html?_r=0

aka english lit philosophy

haha yeah and even worse is that my true interests are really adjacent to both and thus don't really have a secure departmental home :-/

ugh curse my neverending typos: Merdeyeux

still lollisimo that you'd expect people in anarchist studies to play by the rules

well the idea WAS that these were outsiders looking to grab some post-anarchist cred by swooping in, which sure enough they ended up succeeding at (assuming critchley et al aren't besmirched, since leiter's talking it up and critchley has that nyt job, it might get some play, then again, leiter has a well-published butthurt w/critchley).

chin up, ryan. it could be worse. you could be in a trauma studies department

j are you in the game?

anyone know if someone into anarchist studies wrote about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management not ""the art of getting things done through people"" but something more like "people's art of getting things done together " . deturning their concepts to humanize maximal effectiveness , stuff like that. what if nietzsche was in the audience of a Customer relationship management seminar?

i am a victim of the game, suckered by the game, laid low by the game, clinging desperately to the margins of the game

hate the game + the players

done and DONE

its too bad to hear critchleys a dick, i always liked him even if i never really read any of his real philosophy

i want this

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674724992/

damn, disappointed to hear about critchley. like him a lot.

http://afterxnature.blogspot.ca/2013/04/iain-hamilton-grant-interview-with.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking.html

is dennett even really a philosopher? is that just the name he gets because nobody else wants to claim him?

Hey kantians how do i know the other party wants what i'd want cheers

now we can know what it's like to enjoy xkcd, and feel bad about ourselves:

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/37395600.jpg

(more - http://memegenerator.net/Scumbag-Analytic-Philosopher)

Hey kantians how do i know the other party wants what i'd want cheered

oh that's a good one. someone will be along with a better answer but I imagine for Kant it may have to do with the universality of transcendental subjectivity? (hence why you don't have ethical duties towards, say, animals.) so there's a baseline presumption of an essential commonality? maybe.