Rolling Philosophy

now thar's a guy who certainly hasn't gotten onto the overproduction bandwagon.

there's the divine inexistence, most of which is unpublished, then after finitude, and a book on mallarme in addition to some articles.

unless i'm wrong and there's something else

that being said, yes, this book does not fall into the category of books described upthread

xp that's right i think. i kinda wonder if he's having trouble finishing things - as i understand it he's been turning down various invitations for conferences, visiting professorships etc for about five years now, on the basis of having dedicated himself to getting the ongoing project done.

New book on Plato for a general audience from Rebecca Goldstein with rave reviews from Hilary Putnam among others.

wary

yeah, the title does not inspire confidence.

Never read anything from her after The Mind-Body Problem. But take Hilary Putnam endorsement seriously.

Just because it's Putnam? Or because he does not give out endorsements lightly?

Both

Just read the synopsis -- sounds interesting. The style in some ways echos Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy", where Sandel toured the book and introduced the subject matter to a lay audience at town hall like meetings across America.

academic luminaries blurb books for the same vain and self-serving reasons that everyone else does, i don't see why putnam should be any different

sometimes you go back to those after finishing the book and get suspicious that the blurber may not have read it!

i am reviewing a book of that sort right now : /

I'll take that into account, thanks. But having taking that into account, I am still left with: who am I more likely to believe, an academic luminary whose work I have enjoyed and appreciated who has navigated gracefully through various thorny labyrinths over decades, or the reflex scepticism of ilxor j., who seems like he might be on to something now and then although I haven't been able to put the effort in yet to find out exactly what.

the fact that you think the question facing you is one of choosing between me and academic luminary hilary putnam does suggest that you could stand to read some plato. i suggest the protagoras.

it shouldn't be too hard to figure out if it's shit or not. pick it up and leaf through it a bit.

markers razor

i feel like i have this weird subconscious system for filtering through books.

probably some mixture of looking at the writer, publisher, excerpts. not sure.

Everyone can do with reading more Plato.

Took a humanities survey course during long ago freshman year nicknamed "From Plato to NATO," isn't that enough?

I have reviewed books that later ended up as blurbs on publisher websites & amazon publisher provided text for books. not sure what I think about that since the publishers don't ask my permission to use my review in ad copy

I am not HP although we've met a couple of times

Were you able to pierce the veil, see through the facade?

Blurbs here: http://www.rebeccagoldstein.com/publications/plato-googleplex-why-philosophy-won%E2%80%99t-go-away

plato was responsible for buzz

Aldrin? Dr. Rendezvous?

google

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_buzz

Euler: I guess we're proud of you?

*bows*

Yeah, yeah

I call Harry Frankfurt

j/k

would it be appropriate to discuss on this thread more broadly "theoretical" stuff that doesn't necessarily fall within "philosophy"? I recently, kind of serendipitously, came across Janet Roitman's "Anti-Crisis." It's a short little thing, and I'm only past the introduction, but it's pretty interesting so far, and she engages with some theorists I am also into (kosselleck, luhmann) in a pretty novel way (so far).

(^I think the answer to this question is yes)

this article on the limits & nature of Philosophy as a discipline seems to share some of my complaints w/ philosophy as I walked away from it, though I think conflating the western philosophical tradition w/ 'urbanity' (I think I know what he means but this is not a clear or neat term) is obv nonsense & there are other things I would pick at. would be v curious what you guys made of it

http://www.berfrois.com/2014/04/what-is-philosophy-still-excluding

I've read Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. It's really interesting, with the imposibility to bear witness about so much of this horror. The short acounts from surviving Muselmänner at the end is one of the best plottwists in a philosophy-book I've read. Not quite Tractatus-level, but still. But I've been wondering a thing: Does anyone know of a good book that discusses these same things, but includes a wider variety of camps? I mean, the Shoah is unique, there were no gaschambers in the Gulags (to start with just one difference) but I do get sorta interested in knowing if there was the equivalent of Muselmänner in those places, and what different historical circumstances does to the ability to witness it afterwards.

Am now reading second volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality. Is good so far.

the big exception to that urbanity thesis is Heidegger, right?

finished "Anti-Crisis." I liked it a lot. neat little book.

about 2/3 of the way through Martin Jay's "Marxism and Totality." it's old (1984), but since I don't know much about the subject (essentially 20th century "Western Marxism") it's been really enlightening and Jay is always smart and lucid. wish there were more books like the type he tends to write.

the two figures that are really standing out for further study so far are Lucien Goldmann and, quite surprisingly to me, Sartre. possibly because both of them seem to have a pretty vexed and complicated relationship to marxism. though i know Sartre turns towards the dialectic later on (haven't gotten that far yet).

trying to look up jean cavailles on amazon I came across this new book that looks awfully interesting:
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=22793

nominally irrationalist tendencies of husserl's thought???

yeah that book should be good, KP's done a lot of interesting stuff, very detailed and scholarly. Tho that tendency resulted in him giving one of the most baffling papers I've ever seen - a very precise look at the internal debates in some branch of '70s and '80s French philosophy that hasn't really had an Anglophone reception and I had no awareness of, it felt like I'd been transported to a parallel universe.

http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2014/05/books-forthcoming-on-speculative-realism.html

following the links on that page led me to some clicking around on amazon and found this forthcoming book on laruelle:
http://www.amazon.com/Laruelle-Posthumanities-Alexander-R-Galloway/dp/0816692130/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=19TWKSAEFZER0FHZ01BR

occasional talk on here about phil + math leads me to post these talks from a conference last year at CUNY on simplicity in mathematics and the arts

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNsCWKeJESOX_wYUVWmtw5A/videos

in markers link the Steven Shaviro book actually looks pretty interesting as well

I've been reading Curtis White's stuff lately(from his Science Delusion) on back, and if you can get past his tone, he has some interesting things to say. He overindulgences on his cranky schtick occasionally

Also, my undergrad philo classes would have been far more comprehensible to me back then if I had replaced "the Self" with "the camera" in everything I read. Talking about what "the camera perceives" is far more quickly graspable for a young film geek.

Is Bouviour's The Second Sex actually would consuming in full, or would a shortened précis do? It's one of those tomes I never got to in my existentialism classes

i feel like a biography about her might be really interesting, though i've never read The Second Sex.