Rolling Philosophy

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.

The radically performative character of the subject of non-philosophy would be meaningless without the concept of radical immanence. The philosophical doctrine of immanence is generally defined as any philosophical belief or argument which resists transcendent separation between the world and some other principle or force (such as a creator deity). According to Laruelle, the decisional character of philosophy makes immanence impossible for it, as some ungraspable splitting is always taking place within. By contrast, non-philosophy axiomatically deploys immanence as being endlessly conceptualizable by the subject of non-philosophy. This is what Laruelle means by "radical immanence". The actual work of the subject of non-philosophy is to apply its methods to the decisional resistance to radical immanence which is found in philosophy.

is this what William James calls "a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought"??

it sounds like the world

this one

yeah right here

^^^there!

there too

Peirce on "Firstness"

The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation: it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown!

i've always loved "no unity and no parts"

or, to get really hardcore, Eriugena:

For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing other than the apparition of the non-apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible, the intellection of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the beyond-essence, the form of the formless, the measure of the immeasurable, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the place of the placeless, the time of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed, and the other things which are both conceived and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of memory and which escape the blade of the mind.

is this, i wonder, what Laruelle might call non-philosophy, since it demonstrates the decisional performativity of philosophical thought?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/arts/colin-mcginn-philosopher-to-leave-his-post.html

ick

The discussion has been fueled partly by Mr. McGinn’s own blog, where his use of the cryptic language of analytic philosophy in attempts to defend himself seems to have backfired.

lol

Basically he's a reddit MRA bro

It's hard to separate out the schadenfreude from the general ickiness of it all.

re: notions of decision and performativity upthread, I was reading Lacan's "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty" and it seems apropos, particularly the idea of an "assertive logic" as founded on prior exclusion ("apodosis") and hypothesis. Not sure yet why this needs to be tied to a "subjective assertion" yet tho.

also I can imagine the notion of an act which "anticipates its own certainty" is something Zizek must talk about somewhere.