Rolling Philosophy

popped a Dennett three hours ago now I'm coming down hard :/

What do people think of Giulio Tononi? I read one of his books and enjoyed it but like a lot of materialist accounts of consciousness it sorta ended with a lot of hand waving.

another guy worth looking at is perhaps Antonio Damasio

Yes, I did read The Feeling Of What Happens but now I've forgotten it all

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/shortcuts/2013/may/22/why-philosophy-students-do-most-drugs

i couldn't possibly comment.

while I'm struggling to sleep I'm going to share a story I remembered earlier today, which I think I read in some '70s book on Whitehead a few years ago though I haven't been able to locate it again* - apparently when he was at Cambridge, so some time in first decade of the 1900s, Whitehead had an academic role that involved selecting books to be translated into English. Among the books that was suggested was Husserl's Logical Investigations, but Whitehead passed it over, knowing only the title and having little to distinguish it from the slew of other books with similar titles at the time. He much later learned about Husserl's work, saw the resonance with what he and his colleagues were doing at that time and beyond, and regretted not ordering the translation, but ultimately I don't think Husserl was translated at all until the '60s. By which time of course the gap between post-Fregeans and post-Husserlians was well-developed and only set to expand further. So we can safely blame Whitehead, polymath, pluralist, and tireless bridger of gaps, for bringing about the break between analytic and continental philosophy.

*so, forgive my misrememberings

wow! that's a really cool story--i had no idea Husserl wasn't translated until the 60s.

a history of philosophy read through the vagaries of available translations would make for a fun read, though i don't imagine anyone's too desperate to set out working on it. e.g. i've heard people suggest that the standard readings of kierkegaard are bizarrely warped because they come filtered through philosophers who were reading french translations of bad german translations of the danish, misunderstandings accumulating everywhere along the way.

looking it up a bit more i see that there were some translations of husserl in the '30s, but most of it went untouched, logical investigations not appearing in english till 1970.

yeah id be very interested in a study like that. spending as i do a lot of time in peirce studies it's really interesting to see the reception of his thought go through stages as more things became available and inevitably filtered through the historical moment it arrives in.

amongst philosophers in the English-speaking world in the first half of the 20th century, though, German proficiency was standard, so I don't think the lack of translation is quite the problem you're suggesting

especially given how tricky Husserl is to translating.

& in the German and Polish-speaking worlds, also critical in the "break", this was def no problem. Carnap & Gödel knew their Husserl.

that's all to say, I don't think the "break" was chiefly a linguistic problem.

cf. http://www.amazon.com/Parting-Ways-Cassirer-Heidegger-ebook/dp/B004XOZ892

yeah i slightly overstate the case for joekz, but these historical contingencies are interesting nevertheless. and there's also something of just having the literature readily available, as in the case of bergson and husserl, who didn't really seem to bother to become aware of each other beyond second hand information until quite late in their lives.

it's still the case in France today that scholars here are frequently ignorant of what scholars are doing in other countries. again, it's not the language: they've that under control. but there's a "village" aspect to French intellectual life, wherein you study the works of contemporaries in your village, communicated largely through conferences but also through writings; & you don't venture outside this. it's what the French call "localisme". in Paris this means that you might not even know about the work being done by someone across town, or even down the street (if you're working in the 5th or 6th). & you don't really *want* to! you certainly don't *need* to in order to get by; for these villages are self-sustaining in terms of publishing, giving conferences...& yes, getting & giving jobs (though the nationalization of job hiring committees has somewhat mitigated that).

my understanding is that this "provinciality" is not new to France; that it was in place in the era you're talking about.

in the face of being wrong (not that I'm wrong wrong but you're quite right that France was a special case for that kind of academic factionalism even before it became the unfortunate standard in philosophy) I'm going to go with default internet protocol and respond with some cats:

http://binarythis.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/judith-butler-explained-with-cats/

so I thought I'd update everyone on my book. It was rejected last summer by the first press I sent it too. I just spend about 5 months doing heavy revisions and streamlining it and basically just improving the flow of it. very surprisingly got my proposal accepted by an even better university press and they even seem pretty enthusiastic about it. I'll send the full manuscript in a few weeks. so cross your fingers for me.

so chances at getting a book published have *slightly* improved but still gotta run the gauntlet of grouchy reviewers.

but I swear the learning curve of this process should be worth another degree at least!

wrote that on my phone so that's my excuse this time for poor grammar and spelling. this time.

cool man, congrats

rah

well done sir

thanks guys. obviously I may still not get this thing off the ground but I thought it would be fun to share the process.

One of the previous two reviewers was totally brutal though. To the point I could only read his response one time and then had to delete it. The other was very encouraging and really helped me.

very nice! good luck!

wtf r u on about husserl fuk u.

sounds like u got some bracketing to do son

ya gonna go for a classic and completely illegitimate "details of this are beyond the scope of this discussion" and move on.

work for another project!

philosophy needs to develop a textual mark like a black box or something that stands for "here is where my understanding of this idea would go if I had any understanding of it, which I don't."

cavell has a whole repertoire of ways to do that

lol.

i do notice that the older and more revered a philosopher you are the more you can get away with "and this part i dont understand but I'm gonna keep going on with this train of thought."

yeah that's methodologically tricky. I don't see it as merely a matter of prestige, but instead chiefly as something you're allowed to do if the phenomenon you're talking about is acknowledged to be really hard & really interesting. if you do good work you end up implicitly defining what you're talking about, through the context you provide.

I decided to be more intellectually honest and I'VE TAKEN THREE HOURS TO WRITE 500 WORDS.

Good thing with my next section I can be more like "here's some shite off the top of my head, you haven't read the stuff I'm talking about so I can say what I want."

intellectual honesty is going to get you nowhere

http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/movies/hannah-arendt-with-barbara-sukowa-and-janet-mcteer.html?hpw

Arendt is a more challenging cinematic portrait. Her outwardly bookish existence challenges the ancient distinction between active and contemplative ways of living, but the work of thinking is notoriously difficult to show. In this case, it looks a lot like smoking, with intervals of typing, pacing or staring at the ceiling from a daybed in the study.

Still, I would not hesitate to describe “Hannah Arendt” as an action movie, though of a more than usually dialectical type. Its climax, in which Arendt defends herself against critics, matches some of the great courtroom scenes in cinema and provides a stirring reminder that the labor of figuring out the world is necessary, difficult and sometimes genuinely heroic.

lol, verite

want: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-History-Cannibalism-Catalin-Avramescu/dp/0691152195

i think that's a book a friend recommended to me, it sounds great

new latour out this month. new patricia churchland too.

someone should buy both of them for me

http://www.amazon.com/Inquiry-into-Modes-Existence-Anthropology/dp/0674724992/
http://www.amazon.com/Touching-Nerve-Self-as-Brain/dp/0393058328/

the new adrian johnston too

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

i've read the first chapter of the latour book, seems interesting and definitely ~important~ when it comes to the development of his thought.

i just got back from the massive deleuze studies conference, all due respect to everyone including myself but if i hear the word 'deterritorialization' once more this summer then i am going to hurt ppl.

i really got to get on the ball with summer reading. i need to order the Laruelle but i was gonna try to read "Being and Event" finally as well. life keeps intruding. I missed my chance at being a medieval contemplative, i guess.

what's churchland's deal. amazon descriptions make me think i wouldn't like her stuff very much.

Pat and Paul Churchland are the originators of eliminative materialism, Paul's original paper is "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes".

The argument I think is that basically if you admit a physicalist theory of the mind-brain, then you have to abandon any idea that folk psychology has any explanatory power, or that it reduces to neuroscience in a consistent way.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Biology-of-Ethics/127789/

incidentally pair-bonding studies of voles are great, prairie voles will start exhibiting pair-bond behavior after about 1/2 an hour of cuddling

thanks! looking forward to reading that

you have to abandon any idea that folk psychology has any explanatory power

Folk psychology has many heuristic and predictive qualities, so this conclusion is overstated. What folk psychology cannot explain are the exact physical workings of a mind-brain, but then no physicalist theory of the mind-brain has ever been rigorous enough to do so, either.

the Churchlands and ppl like James Ladyman are pretty popular in the hardcore scientific / scientistic wing of speculative realism, scientific knowledge not being reducible to the subject-object correlate and such.

this is glib, but I often wonder if "materialism" acts for that crowd much as the "unconscious" did for early psychoanalysis. Its fascinating and ever elusive (ever recursive!) object of inquiry.

yeah, part of the point of the conference I organised recently was supposed to be getting to the root of what we mean by materialism, end result was "dunno m8, let's go to the pub".