Rolling Philosophy

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.

i resisted posting it on the rolling math thread b/c i didn't want to turn it into a rolling phil of math thread. also that title is impossible to find.

but on that thread it became clear my idea of phil math is too "mathy" for most philosophers, apparently. so my advice in that regard is probably crummy (i.e. i'm partially interested in the _internal_ current of philmath as a way of driving research programmes in math historically, and likewise in the wittgenstein case i'm curious how much his later evolution was conditioned by his _borrowing_ from [or engaging with] that internal tradition).

sclover we should bro down irl & talk about philomath, on here it's like I don't really where to start except to point you to articles by "friends"

ryan have a look at mancosu's philosophy of mathematical practice, the edited book, and look at the intro. also http://books.google.fr/books?id=wYoeAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA318&ots=g8nEndDaaq&lr&pg=PA318#v=onepage&q&f=false that chapter 9

thanks!

sterl, i dunno if a typically unreadable SEP article is the best way to start that convo!

i haven't done much philosophy of mathematics in forever, not even w's (though i've been reading the tractatus more the past couple years, will eventually have to figure out a bit of his agenda there). it's quite easy to get deeply into some things and totally out of touch with everything else.

i think it's pretty well recognized that some borrowing/inspiration occurred. it's standard e.g. to associate w's later attitude toward the a priori in philosophy (and so w/ any place where he talks about the—odd—status of 'grammar') with intuitionism because of his apparent willingness to deny, or not to universally assert, excluded middle.

the wing of things associated with diamond and conant tends to trumpet the importance of RFM for making sense of the status of logic from early to late.

ryan, i've been waiting to get my hands on a copy of that livingston book too, i've read some of his work (maybe some that shows up in the book?) and he really knows what he's doing.

good to know! it's very relevant to my own interests. his other books look good too. i'll probably relent and get it soon.

what makes a SEP article "typically unreadable?" i have either no or weird standards as you can tell.

is there something good to read on w and math in particular you'd recommend?

(he was on my mind because i just read again the story about sraffa and wittgenstein and "what is the logical form of that?" and i was curious about the different notions of wittgenstein's "break" and the intellectual climate surrounding it. probably a good book to be written [probably already has been] about just historicizing that transition in its full intellectual climate and context?)

no, i don't think that book has been written at all. could be wrong. but no point in the transition has a clear enough consensus around it to permit a really good diachronic story, and the evidence available is non-standard and hermeneutically debatable throughout.

there are nachlass (or unpublished/abandoned manuscript/typescript)/official publication divisions in the scholarship as there are in nietzsche scholarship. imo a lot of the use of the middle-period stuff is not very interpretatively sophisticated, tends to come to the material with ideas about what a problem is or what an answer to it (even an answer by W) would look like, both of which would strike people as fraught attitudes if applied directly to the tractatus or investigations (at least now). d. stern's book on 'mind and language' is a respected attempt to track some things going on in the middle period. a recent one which also uses middle-period evidence, probably not of use to you, is kuusela's 'struggle against dogmatism'.

sraffa's influence is especially not well understood. i think it was mostly personal conversations, really. there's a thing i haven't read that refers to sraffa's economics work (i think for the idea of 'intermediate cases' in gradual-model-construction which is prominent in stuff on W's metaphilosophy), but it didn't seem to do so to great effect.

more later, i'll have to do some digging.

thanks j -- that's useful stuff, since i know like zero w. scholarship. (i do see noam zeilberger is fond of quoting w., so at least there's somewhat of a two way street there, in that modern ultrafinitists recognize a kindred spirit. but then nobody takes him seriously [except they all also take him very seriously]). also didn't realize that w. was early to reject "ex falso".

(speaking of which, here's an interesting question -- do philosophers take girard seriously?)

(btw euler would love to hang and pick yr brain on philo but i believe we are in relatively difft parts of the u.s.? next time you come thru ny for sure tho!)

i assume you mean mustard-watch jean-yves and not rené?

jean-yves girard (had to look him up) sounds fascinating but I doubt I have the background to really get far with him.

im not sure if adorno's attacks on heidegger are entirely fair but damn they are really fun to read.

What shows in this ontology is not so much mystical meditation as the distress of a thinking that seeks its otherness and cannot make a move without fearing to lose what it claims. Tendentially, philosophy becomes a ritualistic posture. Yet there is a truth stirring in that posture as well: the truth of philosophy falling silent.

girard is super weird and very fiesty.

if you want to get a taste of his most eclectic just browse appendix a of locus solum: http://iml.univ-mrs.fr/~girard/0.pdf (note: this is nearly half of the work and titled "a pure waste of paper").

his geometry of interaction stuff is potentially philosophically interesting i think, trying to find a notion of time _within_ the procedures of logical deduction directly (http://jb55.com/linear/pdf/Towards%20a%20geometry%20of%20interaction.pdf). [skip to section III for some meatier bits there]

I saw Girard give a talk in philly once where he was just practicing swearing in English

I'll be working in the south of frogland for the next year so I'll probably chill with him at some point. I've done some work that draws on stuff of his

thanks for those girard articles! i will give them a go. i think my patience and enthusiasm for loopy math and logic types far outstrips my ability to comprehend them but i do enjoy trying.

liked this passage from ND:

There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within. This is where the truth and the untruth of Kantian philosophy divide. It is true in destroying the illusion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute; it is untrue in describing this Absolute by a model that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, even if that consciousness were the intellectus archetypus. To demonstrate this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; yet this in turn is untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth with the subject-in-itself--as if the pure concept of the subject were the same as Being.

still really enjoying Negative Dialectics. and it's surprisingly readable--not saying I am understanding everything 100% but that's never the case with anything like this. i like the way it's written: short sections which tend to turn over the same few problems again and again. In the final 3rd of it and wondering a lot about Adorno's relation to figures like Derrida, Lacan (via Zizek). the earlier "dialectic of enlightenment" version of Adorno seems to come up a lot more often than this one does.

Derrida's Cinders on the way (a tiny little thing, apparently, but just published). also gonna give Spinoza Contra Phenomenology a go, since it came in mail (i had forgotten that I ordered it). might be a good way into Deleuze--something I've been trying and failing to start up for a while now.

I've thought for ages that the best way into Deleuze is through his second Spinoza book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. It doesn't make Difference and Repetition less complicated or A Thousand Plateaus less crazy but I think it gives a good outline of the general spirit of his work and the problems it's dealing with.

oh thanks! I have his one on Leibniz but it's basically crazy-talk to me right now. strangely, I made it through "What is Philosophy?" without much of a problem but the capitalism and schizophrenia stuff seems to whoosh over my head.

the Leibniz book is pretty wild. Also suffers from a bad translation (I state authoritatively without having ever looked at the original French). What is Philosophy? is quite conceptually refined, yeah, its apparatus handily comes down to a few relatively simple axioms, and I think Anti-Oedipus can be thought of in a similar way, but then yer intellectual work as a reader is to track how those axioms mutate across the book. With A Thousand Plateaus, really there's no sensible way into it as a whole, so read a plateau here and there, a section (let's say 'Memories of a Spinozist' and 'How to Make Oneself a Body without Organs), a page, even a passage, see where it takes ya.

in the early 00s ATP was a bewildering slog to me, but somehow ten years and a phd made it fairly clear for what it is. basically, once you can appreciate that D+G are putting forward all kinds of solutions to traditional problems it's easier to feel like you can discern a pattern. it's practically systematic! or at least has an inner system kind of defined by the systematicity of all their interlocutors/the problems and questions they're engaged with (or at least the terms of those)

thanks guys. my being a philosophical dilettante is probably the ultimate source of my confusion (and explains why much of the deleuzian stuff in my discipline seems so sloppy). gonna grab D's Spinoza book then give AO a go (again).

i thought that eugene holland's book on AO seemed useful, when i looked at it; he kind of tries to be systematic, work the references to kant and hegel (??? iirc - been a while), the 'first synthesis' 'second synthesis' structure that's in the book, along with helpful context in psychoanalysis. i bet if you've read and understood more freud and marx than me, he would be a breath of fresh air.

yeah that book is good. I think one of the challenges of situating Deleuze-Guattari in a proper philosophical context is that Kant is so absent from their writings (v negative references in AO aside), so that angle is useful.

I say read the Kafka book as an introduction to ATP. Introduces the rhizome and the whole minor/major distinction. After that the first chapter and the large chunk on nomads should be clear sailing.

I taught a course on Spinoza last term & one chief aim was being able to understand Deleuze on Spinoza. it helped a lot! though I still sound like an idiot when trying to explain why I think "expression" is so important & thus am not even gonna try here

i have hardly read anything convincing about expression

this is a safe place!