Rolling Philosophy

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

& don't give me this Dummett shit

maybe Ryle, don't know his work well enough

not gonna make any claims for utilitarians obv

Mill is such a hack

tempted to argue for Wittgenstein as naturalized lol not really

Scotland has done ok tbh

obv, that's why i double checked you said "England" before i shouted about Hume

is Anscombe English? she's a great obv

i think england can claim wittgenstein through a weird asterisked set of circumstances. essentially only if they're willing to claim him in german, as an austrian nomad, ha.

i wonder about whitehead, i've never read 'process and reality' but it seems pretty musty. and of course not super directly influential for whatever that's worth.

wd've claimed Russell for his logic/maths but he was born in Wales

Whitehead is weirdly influential, even here in France, though when he comes up I tend to back away slowly

In what way is Mill a hack?

yeah whitehead is having a bit of a moment, though ive never read him either. I believe D+G were into him?

Austin, Strawson, Grice, Parfit!

iirc D calls Process and Reality one of the greatest books of modern philosophy. And it is a marvelous and mental and quite exciting speculative construction. Though not one I'd really recommend reading for pleasure. Many of his smaller books, though, like Adventures of Ideas and Science and the Modern World, have a really remarkable combination of theoretical depth & invention and an almost pop-science style readability.

Isabelle Stengers has a book about him I've been eyeing for quite a while.

what about pickering? not philosophery enough? not serious enough?

not britishes enough?

(guess nobody wants to talk about wittgenstein on math, eh? anybody take that element of his work seriously? or does it get ignored by philmath people because ick wittgenstein and then ignored by normal wittgenstein ppl because, hey, math?)

I really want to read that article you linked. that stuff is over my head but I am fascinated by it.

this is probably a good time to ask about good books on the "philosophy of mathematics" for humanities types like myself. I have howard delong's "a profile of mathematical logic" but it's so old I imagine there are many problems with it.

possibly only slightly related, but i've been wanting to read this book for a very long time but it's always crazily expensive: http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Logic-Wittgenstein-Consequences/dp/1138016764/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402350934&sr=8-1&keywords=wittgenstein+formalism

though i see it's a bit cheaper now!

almost 40 dollars for a kindle edition. way to go routledge.