Rolling Philosophy

look forward to reading that. Mordy have you ever read Harold Bloom's (i know, i know) "Omens of Millennium"?

i haven't -- should i?

oh i doubt it. been too long for me to remember much other than it covering similar ideas in a more speculative sense as bloom is wont to do.

i dunno why i'd want to publicise it cuz i find it all a bit embarrassing but anyway i came home today to find i'd been surprisingly 'published' in an audio-visual journal - http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze-studies/journal/av-17/. guess which one is me. (clue: i'm not alphonso lingis.) (also, i don't know why it starts halfway through my paper. there was more philosophy in there, i promise.)

aw i was all set to watch that but it's kinda too hard to hear what you're saying!

i am legitimately interested in this though, and i hope you'll let us know when it's published in, like, print form.

i just got the proofs back from an article coming out next month--and i was almost too freaked out to look at the "corrections" lest the proofreader somehow implicitly signal their lack of faith in my intelligence. i swear im too fragile a soul for academics sometimes.

i can't believe alphonso lingis reads ilx!!

i'm reading funkenstein. pretty good stuff.

which one?

theology + the scientific imagination

i really wanted to read his stuff on medieval jewish history but i think that's primarily in the perceptions collection?

oh dang that's right up my alley.

theology and the scientific imagination, that is.

that book is dope

thinking of teaching a seminar on Spinoza next term, don't know the work well, kinda psyched!

has anyone read the new latour?

i've decided im going to, but that doesn't count. gotta get through the laruelle first, on which I've stalled.

the anthony paul smith translation?

yep that's the one.

i better start reading

do you think that book is a useful entry point to laurelle or is there a better one?

you'd have to ask someone who's read more of him, but it certainly seems intended as a foundational text for him. he's pretty explicitly laying down the axioms of "non-philosophy." it's not an easy read, but not as hard as like lacan or whatever. he's not a great writer, though.

haha i've experienced a tiny bit. but that sounds somewhat promising

i posted a link to a "debate" between him and derrida upthread that actually strikes me as a good starting place.

will check it out. ty!

also that debate is interesting particulary because derrida's perplexity wrt to the question of just why Laruelle thinks he's doing something that isn't already part of the philosophical tradition at least since nietzsche seems to me to be kinda the key question for Laruelle and his followers.

aw i was all set to watch that but it's kinda too hard to hear what you're saying!

ya they didn't mic it up properly + i'm v quiet anyway + i for some reason develop numerous nervous speech impediments in these situations, so it's tuff. consider it like lacan's deliberate obscurantism as a pedagogical method.

my philosophy life: beginning to think that trying to outline a tangled kant - bergson - husserl - merleau-ponty - deleuze lineage of critique may, surprisingly, be a bit much for half a chapter, and also a bit much for my head to avoid collapsing in on itself.

everything i've ever written has started out as disastrous hubris before i'm able to hone in on a manageable topic for my time/intellect. i've made peace with that as my writing process now.

i picked up laruelle today and i am reminded how often encountering a new (non-)philosophical system can feel like trying to learn a new language. only every third word or so makes sense and then there are flashes of comprehension before losing it again.

in fact one of the things i like about philosophy is that journey from confusion to fluency and all the little "aha!" moments along the way.

Hey Deleuzians! what's the best secondary source out there on D+G (or just D)? Anyone read Brian Massumi's "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia"?

I am reading Deleuze for the first time! but I am reading Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza because I am studying Spinoza. rather than reading secondary lit, why not just read Spinoza and Leibniz? I guess I am reading Deleuze as secondary lit on Spinoza but I think Deleuze is major enough that he's really a primary source in its own right

I am in general thumbs down on secondary lit. to the sources...

wish i could go to this http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/amm

ooh Martin Jay will be there.

ryan, i used to think john rajchman's little book was good.

i reread a bit of 1,000P last year, many years after struggling (w/ thrills) thru lots of deleuze and secondary books on deleuze, and it struck me how poorly so many must have handled D+G's 'systematic' / 'programmatic' ambitions and dialogue w/ the tradition. liability of 1st-gen uptake, i guess. because it's basically a constant in 1,000P (as all of D's historical studies attest).

Deleuze secondary literature is absurdly vast and overwhelmingly quite bad. The trouble with the good stuff is that it's always good as a result of reading one small aspect of Deleuze very strongly rather than trying to provide an inevitably inadequate and neutered overview, so it's hard to recommend one or even a few big secondary texts. Massumi and Delanda are good but their strong directed readings have been taken up by speculative realism etc so much that it can be hard to hear what's distinctive about Deleuze, you get him as one crazy flows n shit materialist among others rather than the much more complicated figure he is.

I read http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deleuze-Philosophy-Together-Vocabulary-Directions/dp/0748645853/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382711876&sr=8-1&keywords=zourabichvili recently which was quite good, I think he downplays the exciting constructivist part of Deleuze a bit but since that's more or less what everybody else is on about anyway it's a good counterpoint to that common understanding.

took a quick peek at latour's 'modes of existence' and laurelle's 'philosophy and non-philosophy' in a real live bookstore.

the latour looks kinda bonkers as a book, but interesting.

the laurelle looks unreadable. also weirdly every book by him from univocal on the shelf was packaged in a little plastic bag. who the hell bags books? that's anti-reader! maybe they are for non-readers.

it's not totally unreadable but i haven't exactly been enthusiastically going back to it. "bad writer" is thrown around way too much at philosophers but he may be the genuine article.

haha, you mean a genuinely bad writer?

it just seemed so charmless. like someone doing really hardcore, mostly technical metaphysics but with an air of arbitrariness about it. not even as if he were a charlatan trying to wow you into accepting something! of course, i didn't read enough to concentrate on what was being said - this was just the surface.

Is passing of Arthur C. Danto of news in the philosophical world or is he viewed as popularizer these days?

the former, not at all the latter

Good.

Listening to bragg podcast on free will this bullshit is bullshit

free will or Melvyn Bragg?

Melvyns ok, free will is obv, detwrminism is nonsense, this type of hypothetical gymnastic wank fallacy is why i avoid philosophy and students and everyone else

it's free will that is self-evidently indefensible, son

i could respond but i wont

you had no choice

Chill, you're both right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

Yeah they touched on that, tbh im not for soft-pedalling on this

there's plenty of threads about this where you can explain how you think uncaused causation is possible