Rolling Philosophy

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.

Basically he's a reddit MRA bro

posted without comment:

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/multimedia/dynamic/00361/STN0403PIC1_361399k.jpg

This paper should be interesting: A New Argument Against Compatibilism

Thinking of beginning what will probably be a long argument with my (experimental psych) supervisor about making my final piece of coursework a seminar in philosophy of mind that will cover perception, singular thought and ontology. The focus would be on three books: Susanna S1egel’s *The Contents of Visual Experience*, Franco1s Recanat1’s *Mental Files*, and Matthew S0teriou’s *The Mind’s Construction*.

might pull the trigger on this: http://www.amazon.com/Inquiry-into-Modes-Existence-Anthropology/dp/0674724992/

look at how cheap it is!

Rec4nat1 is a bro

does any of latour's newer theory stuff demonstrate that he's actually doing any research at all anymore? i get his theory is all about actual research methodologies. but is he actually employing those to study actual things, or just pontificating on them these days?

that's what you do once you're eminent, i thought, you shoot eminent rays out at things in order to unify them under one field of eminence

I've been reading Plato's Parmenides at bedtime this week. I'm loving it, but not sure how wise my timing is. I'm waking up exhausted in the morning, having the spent the night in impossibly convoluted dreams (the One eating itself and so on....)

i was just thinking of reading that. been pondering NEGATION, figured it was time.

epictetus, ench. c. 2:

do not be joyful about any superiority that is not your own. if the horse were to say joyfully, "i am beautiful," one could put up with it. but certainly you, when you say joyfully, "i have a beautiful horse," are joyful about the good of the horse. what, then, is your own? your way of dealing with appearances. so whenever you are in accord with nature in your way of dealing with appearances, then be joyful, since then you are joyful about a good of your own.

i think i'm gonna jump into after finitude again soon. i've been in there before. i might've even finished it at least once? don't have a good memory. but i got the kindle version a little while back and i'm thinking of starting it up.

at some point i should probably read harman's meillassoux book too. esp. for the interview. wonder if they're ever gonna publish the divine inexistence in english.

my goddamn laruelle hasn't even shipped yet. currently reading Martin Jay's "Marxism and Totality" in its stead.

let us know how the laruelle goes.

i should probably see if there's been any good secondary literature on him that's out yet too. although the way in might just be something primary, even if it's in translation and harder going than having it explained clearly to you. if you take the secondary lit first approach it may color -- probably will inevitably color -- your own interpretation, which might not be the way to start out.

there's a lot to read.

might fuck w/ a lil seneca soon too -- "on the shortness of life"

https://twitter.com/AcademeSeinfeld

btw marks, there's a Rocco Gangle introduction to Philosophies of Difference that I understand is quite good. Anthony Paul Smith also did a series of video lectures which I think should still be available somewhere, can't locate them just now but I'll try to find em and get back to you.

maybe not online anywhere actually, can't find anything after this announcement http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/laruelle-e-seminar/ but you could email Anthony about them.

i was thinking i'd get the "Dictionary of Non-Philosophy" as well (which sounds tremendously interesting in and of itself, as a kind of philosophical project) but i've bought way too many books this month. maybe once i've gotten some way into Principles.

xpost thank you! i was in a reading group that was supposed to go through gangle's translation of philosophies of difference, but we gave up on it quickly, like after one meeting or whatever quickly, and i can't remember how much of it i read, but i don't think it was very much. i think gangle teaches at a college pretty close to my house, incidentally.

i think i have that blog in my rss reader, along with some others.

gangle has a really interesting article on peirce, deleuze, and self-organization a la stuart kauffman. i've always been looking for more stuff from him since that sorta thing is exactly what I'm interested in--turns out he's been working on Laruelle!

there's some analytic stuff i'd like to read eventually, like patricia churchland's new one and some jesse prinz

xpost kauffman's been on my radar before. maybe via ray brassier?

that would make sense, i think. i ran into him via luhmann.

one reason peirce is so interesting to me is that you could argue he's a central figure in or originator of three (maybe 4) very different traditions:

1) american semiotics a la thomas sebeok
2) contintental philosophy of both derridean and deleuzean stripes.
3) 20th century analytic philosophy
4) systems theory (originating from cybernetics)

of course when you devote your life to writing volume upon volume of impenetrable and brilliant stuff there's gonna be a lot of strands for people to take hold of and develop (or not).

wait, you think derrida comes out of peirce?

well there's been a lot written on that--but derrida himself says (in a note to Of Grammatology) that Peirce "goes very far in the direction of a deconstruction of the signifier." or something like that.

ah sorry messed up my terms. it's "Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified..."

basically pages 48-50 in Of Grammatology are about Peirce.

ah cool! i don't know much about him

speaking of derrida, have you read the peters bio ryan?

i have not! looks good though.