Rolling Philosophy

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

Aint this one of em? It could be the thread where you explain ow causation applies to consciousness

free will in the strong sense you seem to be claiming would involve something - a brain, a soul, the will, call it what you want - that is capable of making us take actions which impact on the physical universe and its laws of cause and effect. but in order for that brain/soul/will to be "free" in this strong sense it would have to be unaffected by any causation itself. if it's affected by causation then it isn't "free" in this strong sense. i think this means it would have to be a non-physical entity. i can't imagine what a non-physical entity capable of affecting physical bodies would be like.

thou speak'st of the Divine!

Ineffable!

*retires to box*

yeah, i'm sure Darragh is arguing for the existence of the metaphysical

nah bruv I meant your final sentence

that's my point!

i think there's a range of "soft" versions of free will that are far more defensible but to quote: "im not for soft-pedalling on this"

well I concur that we are all Reflections of Stimuli, we are Reactions to Information. but then do we have a Choice as to which Information we view & How we choose to Reflect it? and is this Free Will?

explain what this "we" is that sits outside of the process and makes decisions please?

my world-view here is probably closest to "some version of determinism is the case but it absolutely doesn't matter. because of determinism."

the idea of a Self is a violent perversion of the interconnected wholeness of Reality, sure

but then I mean 'we' as the Interconnected Whole, the Carnival of Atoms, whether Rebounding in Brownian Abandon or Deciding to take a Stroll in the Park

ok "we" in a Shiva sense i can get behind

my own Religion & Philosophy, as outlin'd in my Novel, is Asymptotism - there is an unreachable & divine Limit to which all Knowledge, Wisdom & Achievement can Tend with an Infinite Closeness but never Attain - the act of Worship is the Approach itself, the Striving with No Eternal Result. I believe that we as Reflective Organisms are all Ordain'd a supernormal (i.e. non sequitur) Task by dint of our Exposures - these perhaps the Deterministic Element of the Synthesis - but we may choose whether & how to Carry Out that Task - the single act of Will that Defines us

aw do i have to be on lj's side

(so the Task, then, is is the single faint Accession to the Divine we are able to Etch into our fleeting Reality - the Moment of Partial Exaltation)

you okay with this D?