Rolling Philosophy

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.

yeah then I'm less sure who you're talking about, since maybe you've tried those Socratic convos and they're blown you off b/c you're not "one of them"?

that is more my experience; & my reply is just to do better work than them, which isn't really asking very much in most cases

b/c maybe it's "game players" you're thinking of? like people who are really into rankings, or publishing in the "right" journals?

game players but also sincere players who accept the game at face value maybe, as what it is to be a philosopher for the lowly non-elite?

i dunno, i've got issues.

b/c I dunno there's a ~superstar~ I know who seems to most to just live in the clouds, but it turns out he's really into martial arts movies. he doesn't train in martial arts himself or anything, he's not just another fitness nut (that's another game player orientation of the elite), nah, he's just really into like Bruce Lee. & I think it shows in his writing! not b/c he's just like "Quine's argument here was like the fists of fury" but in what you were saying, plain talk

of course this is a guy with midwestern roots so maybe my main take, as usual, is fuck the coasts

I've got issues too, like I said my parents didn't go to college, they don't think I even have a real job, like come summer they're like, when you are gonna start working again, and it's like .......

^ lol would read two fists of empiricism paper

i guess i just want a bit more regular recognition among philosophers that almost everything they do amounts to nothing outside of philosophy (or even within). and not in like a literature-is-not-made-for-this-world way where they're self-congratulatory about their own uselessness. but a deeper humility that would make them more open to the curious student, the non-academic, the extra-disciplinary scholar. instead they meet people like these with the presumption that they're going to school them (if they're even intelligent enough) on some essential point they've been missing.

(so philosophers like to think that they're always talking to meno, and that meno is an idiot)

I'm probably clueless about the phenomenon that bugs you though b/c I still feel like a philosophical outsider b/c of my training. like when I give a talk someone inevitably comes up to me afterward and says "you spoke so clearly, I could really understand you" and I'm flattered but I'm just talking to make my topic interesting & cogent to me, no hot air b/c I'm easily bored but expect revelation every time a fancy pants opens her mouth; so I do unto others as I would have done unto me. so conferences can be disappointing. and sometimes I think "that's because of your training, you never really learned their game", like obscuring words weren't part of my upbringing b/c I came to philosophy for clarity, I didn't inherit it, I've had to actively pursue it b/c my life rhythm, family background, etc, otherwise would not have be a philosopher. like I have to work at it to fit into the community, and I do so only b/c it can further my own personal ends.

so much navel gazing here, I should just get a blog that nobody would read

"more regular recognition among philosophers that almost everything they do amounts to nothing outside of philosophy (or even within)"

this is hard! academic institutions are always asking you to explain the value of what you're doing, and if you want to keep your job you can't say "it is worthless". can you? & you write job apps and grant apps and fellowship apps & can you just say, "why bother, this doesn't matter"?

myself I think that it does matter but not typically b/c of the "answers" philosophers arrive at but rather because of some second or third order reason, like we are exemplifying some function when we work on those questions, and this function is valuable, but not because of its first order fruits; but rather b/c it structures lives / society in a good way, gives voices to the rocks; embodying thought even infinite thought.

i tend to view analytic and continental philosophers as equally prone to obscurity, i suppose because i partly fault their shared forms of institutionalized behavior as much as i do their particular foibles.

like i dunno, this might be akin to what you mention, once i heard this talk, heavily attended by non-philosophers because of its topic, on the philosophy of time in connection with questions about the big bang, the beginning of time, etc. and it was kind of nnnnnnrrrrrr and over-larded with details and in the end kind of seemed pointless. but i realized that what it was was, there are so many different ways of satisfying the conditions for being a partial ordering, and this guy had taken the list and found attested scientific or philosophical views abt time which fit each one, and then worked up a little deliberative spiel about each. (he said as much during the question period.) he just had avoided saying so because (apparently) it tended to make the paper sound trivial rather than important.

and this was a respected dude.

i guess i just want a bit more regular recognition among philosophers that almost everything they do amounts to nothing outside of philosophy (or even within)

this is perhaps a bitter truth about a lot of academic work in the humanities. sometimes I am reminded of medieval monks patiently translating Aristotle or whatever, toiling in isolation and obscurity. I think in some ways the artificialness of the academic game is a result of that isolation. we're in the last days, im guessing, and maybe that's the prelude to something good happening. maybe some sort of non-academic intellectualism.

haha you are giving the socratic 'makes us more gentle and reasonable' answer to 'why even do this socrates??!'

i do think if external pressures weren't so pervasive and enormous philosophers and other academics could just be honest and give that kind of answer though. shruggie + 'seems civilizing innit?'.

yeah ryan, i often think about this interview answer pierre hadot gave, talking about his path into philosophy, his early career (highly sheltered by religious institutions or their educational affiliates), where he's basically like, yes i needed to understand plotinus better, so i spent twelve years studying plotinus.

like of course there's a lot of rhetoric around how much certain things matter, to make that expenditure worthwhile, and socially worthwhile, but there's also something medievally pointless about it that seems to exempt him from reproach, like, yes, twelve years, i know (wry chuckle)

plotinus is worth 12 years, so is gardening, and refurbishing motorcycles.

but we pay some philosophers more. (we also fete them more, but let's be real about the adulation that matters.)

but we don't pay *most* philosophers more.

the ones we pay more, are the elites. and they are the standard for the rest of us inasmuch as *we* want to be paid more for (what we take to be) the same activities: monkish adoration of texts, concoction of argument, lots of sitting, indoor time, not much heavy lifting, not much noise.

it is a good deal.

so why do we pay those philosophers more? an embarrassing question for the elites. expect dissimulation. I called a hotshot (who I love) out on this once and was told "so that I can direct money well, to the right charities". I was surprised.

(and KEY imo, not much directly being told what to do)

do you think the q. is any more embarrassing for them than it is for most comfy upper-m.c. brain/office workers? since becoming unemployed again i have felt (imagined) a sharpened perception of the shrugginess of my colleagues with secure academic jobs. kind of a reversal: 'here because of the grace of god go i, life is so funny'. none of them, at least, would point to their accomplishments, or maybe only a couple who truly are industrious enough to warrant appealing to personal achievement as evidence of worth. but of course no one is in any hurry to call their condition into question.

I think it's more embarrassing for philosophers b/c of our Socratic and ascetic heritages. & we're surrounded by talk of "social justice" & yet we know how those "scholars" act.

but then am I being prissy?

(right now Kierkegaard is whispering over my shoulder. I am trying to ignore him.)

Never ignore Kierkegaard. He knows what you need.

attn j. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-mathematics/

hey i don't assign YOU homework

Adorno gets a bit Emersonian in ND!

Theory and mental experience need to interact. Theory does not contain answers to everything; it reacts to the world, which is faulty to the core. What would be free from the spell of the world is not under theory's jurisdiction. Mobility is of the essence of consciousness; it is no accidental feature. It means a doubled mode of conduct: an inner one, the immanent process which is the properly dialectical one, and a free, unbound one like a stepping out of dialectics. Yet the two are not merely disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity to dialectics, which as criticism of the system recalls what would be outside the system; and the force that liberates the dialectical movement in cognition is the very same that rebels against the system. Both attitudes of consciousness are linked by criticizing one another, not by compromising.

and schopenhauerian, and hegelian, and kierkegaardian… sometimes the 20th c. anglo neglect of 19th c. philosophy seems positively suicidal

i think i know what you mean, but expand on suicidal? (if you feel like it)

well, that's where a lot of the action was, and our croissant-eating peers in the eurozone were really steeped in it back when russell and moore were storming the gates and making the philosophical world safe for quantifiers and strict implication

ah, thanks.

England hasn't produced a good philosopher since Locke

objection

counterexamples please

AJ Ayer, that's it tbh