Rolling Philosophy

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.

Dennett is def a philosopher

xp ya that's about it I think. I would have to revisit my first and third critiques to remember the details but it comes down to the three faculties of the mind - understanding, imagination, and sensibility - being reciprocally bound up with each other, meaning that our rational understanding of things is constructed from a perceived world as much as the world as we perceive it is constructed by our categorial understanding of it (with imagination doing the complicated work in the middle), and as there's only one world (or is there???) the basic characteristics of human understanding always emerge in the same way and so there's always a foundation for communication.

Dennett is def a philosopher

― Euler, Tuesday, April 30, 2013 5:44 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man, philosophy sucks.

answer the fucking question wordeyeux gah 'philosophers'

didn't bother to read the whole q tbh, that's how we roll.

universality of transcendental subjectivity?

?!

like, you can assume they want what you'd want because their experience of the world is built from the same parameters as yours.

and ppl take this guy srsly

so, given that YOUR experience of the world is necessarily structured by certain universal faculties then that's really the ONLY place from which you could presume an ethics. or something like that. that's sorta the broad Kantian move.

we only keep talking about him so we can amuse ourselves by pronouncing his name properly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWNMtcVxa10

there's a great sidney morgenbesser story about that

the best way that I think we can be 'Kantians' today (and maybe this is just my idiotic reading, I don't know the literature that well) is to think of the passage from Kant through to post-Kantian continental philosophy as one in which the dubious realm of freedom, which has to be assumed for our sureness about the universality of our faculties to hold, is replaced by matter, whatever we take matter to mean. As such the subject is a much more rickety and semi-biological construct but is still something we can think about starting from the genetic terms Kant sets up for thought, neither falling back on any kind of linguistic relativism nor religious dogmatism. I suppose this means a move from transcendental idealism to transcendental materialism, but then I'm just being fashionable.

*and this isn't a huge leap from Kant since the second half of the third critique basically signals the invention of biology as a science

xp do share!

Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn't lit up yet anyway. The cop repeated his injunction. Morgenbesser repeated his observation. After a few such exchanges, the cop saw he was beaten and fell back on the oldest standby of enfeebled authority: "If I let you do it, I'd have to let everyone do it." To this the old professor replied, "Who do you think you are, Kant?" The word "Kant" was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser had to explain the situation at the police station.