Rolling Philosophy

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.

Edit: "would" -> "worth", thank you phone keyboard/autocorrect

I've only read the 1953 Parshley translation, which makes some abridgements to the French original that the more recent Borde and Malovany-Chevalier translation avoids, but yes, it's really foundational to second-wave feminism, and very much worth reading in full.

really enjoyed this article from Nathan Brown (featured above clapping on OOO):

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9806378/Brown%20-%20Absent%20Blue%20Wax.pdf

there's a lot there that's common to some things I've been trying to do in my own work (though obv in a very different register). at the same time, however, it sorta reminds me that I'm still at a distance from certain philosophical traditions, particularly insofar as I raise an eyebrow when he talks about "the power of the mind to think an idea without a corresponding impression" on the order of a meillassouxian "necessity of contingency." not that I have a problem with philosophy making this claim on it's own behalf, it's more a sense that my own thinking doesn't seek to begin or arrive at that point, which is perhaps to say it isn't philosophical? (for better or worse). if that makes sense.

guys I'm basically asking WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?!

haha "clapping" is way off! mean "crapping." get it right, autocorrect.

i assumed you meant like, licking shots

that's an image!

I wonder if there's been any riposte to brown's takedown. don't have the heart to look it up though.

thoughtful and considered responses to criticism aren't really something OOOers are known for tbh.

that sounds like correlationist talk

there's other nathan brown in here (pdf link): http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf

if takedowns of OOO are your thing I recall that http://www.speculations-journal.org/storage/Noumenons%20New%20Clothes_Pt1_Wolfendale.pdf was a good and long and very detailed one. Me tbh I feel less and less need to engage with that world, though maybe that's more the result of me getting increasingly myopic than any position of merit.

ha, nice title. good read so far.

also can this guy let me in on how to be an "independent researcher"?

unfortunately in his and many other cases i've seen i think that esteemed title really means "has had lots of job applications rejected".

oh haha i guess i am one then!

u've made it bb!

why not treat yourself, make it 'head researcher, the ryan institute'

really that position should be an endowed chair.

finished that piece on OOO merdeyeux posted. some of the endless parsing of harman's system kinda made me glaze over but the conclusion he reaches jives with my sense of it:

Far from challenging the retreat of philosophers from the world of into the bastion of consciousness, he has simply extended the domain of consciousness into the world.

does that just mean 'they are idealists ha ha'?

something like that, I think?

it's funny, judging from the book I just finished it seems that pointing out each other's latent idealism was a major pastime of 20th century marxists.

Those of you interested in metaphysics and mind might want to know that David Armstrong has died. Metaphysics certainly wasn't my speciality, and I'm sure I argued against him in the couple of essays I did that touched on his work, but still an important figure in academic philosophy.

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

this article from Graham Priest is bouncing around twitter: http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/logic-of-buddhist-philosophy/

im intrigued by his new book "One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness." I love that sort of thing (though I am dumb in logic). but the article doesn't really do much to suggest he's adding anything new to the topic. seems either weirdly ignorant of a lot of stuff or just ignoring it to make its own claims to originality.

'precise mathematical sense' for a selected audience is all. i don't think he claims to be original.

oh yes fair enough. i guess i was bristling at the suggest that no one has broached these ideas outside of the buddhists and "modern logic."

"Western philosophy gets it all wrong once again" is a tried trope in some ways, so maybe my complaint is with the marketing department.

tired not tried. i'll learn to type one day.

Giving The Second Sex a go. A prof of mine was critical of both of the above translations. I'm gonna try to muddle through in French.

Priest is doing interesting work but ya. I most often see him brought up by people who make a big thing of how they're not continental or analytic they're just ~philosophers~ man, but seeing analytic philosophers occasionally and coincidentally catching up with continental philosophy of fifty years ago (see also extended mind theory's recapitulation of late phenomenology) while still pretending the latter doesn't exist doesn't quite convince me that we're all working in one big happy intellectual world.

after some non-philosophical reading (but not "non-philosophy" har har) i've started Negative Dialectics. was intimidated by it for quite some time, but it's not bad at all so far. plus it's broken into easily digestible 2-3 page sections, which is always nice since picking it up or deciding to keep reading doesn't feel like a huge commitment.

i've been putting that off for several years since i heard hullot-kentor was working on a replacement translation : /

but picking through 'dialectic' again made me think that maybe whatever problems there are with the old ND wouldn't be too bad

adorno is actually quite good at intros, i think. the intro to ND is pretty boss. the intro to DE is a lot more perspicuous than the first essay. the MM preface is fairly direct. etc.

kind of into this attitude abt elites

http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/avoid-the-elites/

i went to a sizeable state school with a ug-only phil program and i had a similar experience, after that most of my encounters with any aspect of teh elite strata of the discipline have not been very impressive. sometimes it seems to me like a lot of the deep problems with the discipline could really be dealt with better by cultivating an active refusal of elitism

thinking kinda quaker-style, plain speech, familiar pronouns, rejection of worldly authorities, true socratic follow-this-argument-right-now-where-it-takes us

sigh

I was just perusing the faculty at a certain school and noticed almost every single one got their phd from an "elite" school and had the same thought. ban those motherfuckers. I think, if I had gotten into one, I'd have happily gone to an elite school but I cannot imagine a better experience than the one I had.

been thinking about this for a few days

I'm not sure who we're talking about when we talk about elites; I dunno, am I one? ~top 50 dept etc. but from my ~elite boundary~ position the problem I see with philo elites is $$$. people get real paid & it insulates them from prospective faculty and from students, grads and undergrads, who don't have trust funds, who actually live off their stipends, who are going into debt. and this affects how they advise students & prospective faculty on "career" topics. it also affects how open they are to philosophical ideas that don't originate within their elite circles.

but I worry about this for myself as a sorta boundary elite, whose parents didn't even go to college: I am pulled in conflicting directions. like during hiring meetings, these issues play out. I dunno, there's an older generation of philosophers, in their 60s now, who didn't grow up in NYC/LA/SF, didn't grow up coddled in luxury, weren't raised by academics or lawyers or doctors; and I relate to them; but they're now complicit in hiring and promoting a bullshit generation who flaunt their status. ah fuck this is all too vague but I can't say too much here; let's hang out some time and I'll say more.

& yeah I've thought a lot about the phil equivalent of "marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout"

the material side matters for sure but i was thinking more of the elite orientation, even on the part of the materially less- or non-elite. it seems very easy in philosophy to become someone whose primary criteria for excellence, importance, whatever, function more to enhance one's sense of standing in, or at least closer to, an elite than they do to distinguish between actualities that exist independently of philosophy. of course those criteria are pitifully susceptible to capture by professional deformations, the parochial scholarly habitus, contingencies of training etc. too., so that for all one's imagined elite status one might still be applying criteria that are not much more selective than 'is a quinean', 'went to an spep school', 'really understands korsgaard', etc. or even 'has many publications', 'was a student of church's'.

i always think of socrates meeting these people. 'i'm sure that book on eliminative materialism is very interesting but let's talk about what you think, since we're both here.'

or of them grocery shopping.