Rolling Philosophy

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".

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

Given that I think eliminative materialism is b.s. of a kind barely surpassed, I've always assumed I'd detest her (presumed by me) dogmatic stridency.

Yet she came over surprisingly well in this excellent 1.45 hour podcast interview. I thought it one of the site's best (for me they have ratio of 8:1)

http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/07/18/episode-41-pat-churchland-on-the-neurobiology-of-morality-plus-hume%E2%80%99s-ethics/

end result was "dunno m8, let's go to the pub"

beautiful. I sometimes think this is the most important part of the philosophic tradition going back to Socrates.

also why tend to describe philosophy/theory as fun and humbling and disarming to those not initiated who prob tend to see it as merely pointy headed egomaniacs verbally jousting (which it is as well!)

ime philosophers likely to harbor mars-dwellers who come along to the pub because why that's where the talking will be but who sit there and say 'well i guess i'll just have water if all they have is alcohol and soda'

http://www.tubechop.com/watch/1321418

^^^ amazing

that embarrassed shrug he gives will haunt me forever.

Once in my freshman dorm, I was trying to argue to my friend that time didn't really exist. I didn't really know what I was talking about, I was just kind of intellectually fucking off, and after like 20 minutes of arguing he finally goes "Time is the difference between this (pushes pen across table quickly) and this (pushes pen across the table slowly)," and it was a very "DUST...WIND...DUDE" moment for me.

i found this interesting - leo strauss' reintroduction of maimonidies into contemporary jewish thought:
http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/why-maimonides-matters-kenneth-hart-green-part-i/

has anyone bought the new latour yet? it came out this week i think

modes of existence or whatever

i'm reviewing this latour for local paper:
http://www.amazon.com/Rejoicing-Or-Torments-Religious-Speech/dp/074566007X

send me a link if it goes up on the net too

you'll have to wait till latour

hahaha

i saw the Latour today but it was 31 dollars and i got plenty of crap to read right now. but it's something i hope to read soon.

sigh

i should be so into rorty, but i just cannot make myself weave thru his incessant di(tri)chotomozing

rorty has a kind of "I'm just a caveman" thing going on when he engages with other thinkers (particularly of the european tradition) that drives me nuts.

I was in a bookstore in Williamsburg today and saw two Laruelle books. No "Principles of Non-Philosophy" but they did have "Anti-Badiou" and "Photo-Fiction."

The latter in particular looked pretty interesting. anyone know anything about these two?

i would have just bought them but i've created a rule in which im not allowed to buy a book unless im committed to reading it right then :-/

well that sounds totally ad hoc

i think it'll just eventuate in me "reading" about 50 books at a time.

also amazon has "Principles" now but "usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks" wtf is that.

well, i ordered it so the summer of non-philosophy can finally begin. maybe i'll get lucky and find it somewhere before amazon ships it.

wld be interested to hear what ppl made of the laruelle. i have a copy i have yet to tackle

I will try to update chapter by chapter here (maybe)--it'll prob be impressionistic at best though.

a cursory look makes me think i don't have a good enough understanding of performativity, seems like a key thing for him.

from wikipedia (and who knows how good a source that is for this):

The concept of performativity (taken from speech act theory) is central to the idea of the subject of non-philosophy. Laruelle believes that both philosophy and non-philosophy are performative. However, philosophy merely performatively legitimates the decisional structure which, as already noted, it is unable to fully grasp, in contrast to non-philosophy which collapses the distinction (present in philosophy) between theory and action. In this sense, non-philosophy is radically performative because the theorems deployed in accordance with its method constitute fully-fledged scientific actions. Non-philosophy, then, is conceived as a rigorous and scholarly discipline.

this suggests that it's a revision of Austin's notion of performativity.

it all seems a little squirrelly, but im excited to see what he does with it. i mean, by his own logic (again, as presented by wikipedia) it would seem that non-philosophy "performs" its own decisional structure (it "decides" on non-philosophy as opposed to philosophy, which in systems theory terms suggests that it's observing the distinction between philosophy and its negation in "radical immanence") so im curious how he evades (or embraces) a certain kind of constructivism.

or if it's just a repetition at a further remove of the kind of apophasis you get in later heidegger and derrida...

i wonder as well about debts to pragmatism, certainly a predecessor form of "non-philosophy."

if his point is "i can see what philosophy can't" then that begs the question of what non-philosophy "can't see"--or, even weirder, whether the very thing it can't see is the thing philosophy can see! can non-philosophy actually grasp philosophy or is it stuck in its own performative decision?

this'll be fun.