Rolling Philosophy

Problem with that stuff is it verges on being so unsystematic that you need to be some kind of genius to pull it off, Derrida may be one, a random undergrad is not. Somebody once said of another famous sui generis Frenchman, "When Duchamp did it first, he did it last," might want to say the same about Derrida.

back when personal weblogs were first exploding there was this kid who kept one, popular, and he was in high school or had been in it when he was reading finnegans wake. not that that makes you a supergenius or anything, but i often think of that kid as an example of what an early proclivity for language play and exposure to the 'right' things might lead to.

i bought another graham harman book, but i haven't been reading any philosophy at all

almost done with "Spinoza Contra Phenomenology" and i'll be surprised if it's not one of the better and more satisfying new academic books I'll read this year.
nothing absolutely new or mind-blowing, but it's really clear and well written and peden just seems really confident with the material.

I was in a Barnes & Noble for the first time in a long time today. I was happily surprised to see a (very) small "philosophy" section. not so happy to see that it is about 1/3 books about atheism. also apparently christopher hitchens is a philosopher now.

that is the way it's been for years. occasionally some surprises, depending on the size of the store and the area.

philosophy is the worst

i remember finding an ayn rand biography in the lincoln square barnes and noble a while back

it's interesting in that it seems to break down into atheism, logical puzzles (a few books on paradoxes), "pop culture artifact X and philosophy," and a few figures from the tradition (here they had decent collections of Foucault, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard).

no Alain de Botton etc HOW PHILOSOPHY CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE self-help stuff?

come to think of it, that was a glaring omission. maybe people are wise to it now.

the one in burlington, ma has some dece shit usually

i don't know if anyone can help me here, because i'd imagine this is at least partially location-dependent, but i'll give it a shot: i'm in massachusetts. i would like to make some more friends, on the internet and not, and i'm thinking perhaps i'd go about that, in part, by pursuing some people who are interested in philosophy. right now i talk here and have a few people from college who are interested in this stuff, but there's not much more to it than that. anyway, i'm not in grad school and possibly will never be, who knows, so i'm limited there. what should i do? use twitter? and what could i do not on this fucking machine? i have access to boston. where i'd presume there'd be others who have plans to read this stuff. but i wouldn't want to go to something with lame people; i'd rather hang with ilx-caliber minds, not idiots. thoughts? anything?

yes, there are a lot of great lectures + conferences in the area bc of all the colleges. you should be going to any of them that sound even superficially interesting. that's a good place to meet ppl w/ similar interests. there are many listservs that promote them. here's one: https://lists.brandeis.edu/wws/info/boston-philosophy

maybe search around for reading groups? or even try to start your own. i dunno what this things is http://www.meetup.com/boston-philosophy/messages/boards/ but it looks alright

also you could stand around in coffee shops conspicuously holding dog-marked, heavily annotated zizek books and hope that someone comes up to you

i've never been able to stand to go to a philosophy meetup or a socrates cafe myself, but you might at least give them a try to see if you like the company. there aren't many places to talk philosophy outside academia, and philosophers are unsociable anyway, so there may well be some worthwhile people to talk to at one, others who couldn't find any other outlet. not every college philosophy major goes to grad school, so they've gotta end up somewhere.

Man, this looks like a perfect book: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100209560

Shakespeare lived at a time when England was undergoing the revolution in ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental rites, Reformed theology declared the priesthood of all believers. What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine by another but a long and messy conversation about the conventions of religious life and practice. In this brilliant and strikingly original book, Sarah Beckwith traces the fortunes of this conversation in Shakespeare's theater.

Beckwith focuses on the sacrament of penance, which in the Middle Ages stood as the very basis of Christian community and human relations. With the elimination of this sacrament, the words of penance and repentance—"confess," "forgive," "absolve" —no longer meant (no longer could mean) what they once did. In tracing the changing speech patterns of confession and absolution, both in Shakespeare's work and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture more broadly, Beckwith reveals Shakespeare's profound understanding of the importance of language as the fragile basis of our relations with others. In particular, she shows that the post-tragic plays, especially Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, are explorations of the new regimes and communities of forgiveness. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, Beckwith enables us to see these plays in an entirely new light, skillfully guiding us through some of the deepest questions that Shakespeare poses to his audiences.

Has anyone read it? I'm definitely ordering a copy.

i've read a bit, but not enough to know what i think. she seems quite good, but there's a tendency in the literary studies wing of cavell-related work to just be affirmative where his methods and conclusions don't license it. a lot of those scholars either don't seem to appreciate how his criticism operates, or they just aren't able to replicate its tensions because their modes of writing are not willing to be performative in the required ways. i take it to be a good sign that she has her own framing of a project, though (related to but definitely hardly developed in the relevant work of his).

he blurbs it favorably, but he seems to be fond of books that pay attention to his work. i've read some carefully that i would not bestow the same praise on that he does.

Yeah, that’s interesting. What tensions do you have in mind exactly? Something I think Cavell deliberately does, often maddeningly, is let thoughts speak themselves in an assertive fashion even if he wouldn’t necessarily hold to them in the long run. Which is part of his “performative” practice, I think – trying to show thinking as something living and organic, and which doesn’t simply proceed from premises to conclusions. If you’re a writer responding to Cavell, it must be very easy to take those thoughts for a theoretical apparatus – What Cavell Says – and hence as the authoritative word.

It’s a style of philosophy that constantly draws me back, while in other moods it can be a major turn-off. For one thing, it’s damn hard to write a seminar paper about.

well, some of the principles he relies on are never really articulated explicitly - i'm thinking of the sort of take he has on the audience member's response to the character-and-actor-in-dramatic-situation, vaguely along reception aesthetics / reader-response lines but with kind of a consistent drive toward eliminating any possible intermediaries or metaphysical positings (in a kantian/wittgensteinian spirit) to intervene between the viewer and the character - but when he treats them he seems to sort of regard them as embodying requirements that any complete and serious act of criticism has to discharge. i think the remark in the lear essay on following the time of the play as a kind of spiritual exercise is indicative of the mindset, but the practice is more a matter of the meticulousness with which he tries to get from the initial interpretive puzzles to a reference to the viewer's or character's separateness, or a reference to some kind of fundamental responsibility (so that the reading of a play and the reader's reading of his criticism tend to converge on that point). it makes for a certain ridigity of prose - you have to pick it up all at once to take in what's being said in all its scope and force.

the not-fully-assertive thing makes that a pain, though, because it makes it unclear where the handles are. you have to track places where his investigatively-inflected (questions etc) ways of moving a text forward come to rest long enough to permit stable reformulations.

(actually i think that's at its worst in the last chapter of 'claim', which is why you get so many overwhelmed scholars just half-assing stuff about acknowledgment and skepticism)

i guess another way of putting that would just be to say that his interpretive practice is not unusual in the way it holds the work interpreted in a kind of tension, but since it's often accompanied by kind of a tacit aesthetics for the medium in question, he has a lot more to keep going than your typical literary scholar

is there work on philosophical underpinnings of baysianism and frequentism

i'd look in hacking first

https://827166e3-a-bf4ca052-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/wisc.edu/sober/selected-papers/PS-2002-BayesianismItsScopeAndLimits.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cq_Cd0EgKNNAuiOSBr-Ksgw8YLYH65HBJ8iaB4KBPvbGAOh2qAhFMhgaRZp7fmr5g5tx3lXMtonkqlUYtaEm_lPlIo1M0xC9K8hjpo72B3j4Dgw-kLgoJdxmqUUsYqJfTRBwh86Nhq_OwT-JFMdHGbj2hSmB4UlcBdHakIeVI-lw7rPvVCQjH01u7djCkpNm2fpFrK6vr98R_pwrB0a9AYfLg28-IEflEmhZpETm98twTJwBbqq4-BHfF5yFy-XH6ctbbFg&attredirects=0

So here's my question. I haven't reviewed _enough_ Hacking maybe. But typically that's what I'm interested in -- a more historical "sociology of science" approach that deals with debates as they occurred. I stumbled into a sort of different set of questions (and maybe its all in Hacking et al and I just am being dense) -- the question that baysian poses and frequentism neatly sidesteps is "what do you mean you know you observed something" and "what do you mean you know you know you observed something" and "what do you mean you know something at all" and etc. like you need priors on your priors, etc. but then you make certain specific assumptions and can sort of knock out those higher order priors in the limit case.

so latent in these concerns are a lot of embedded ideas that give rise to a certain philosophy of knowledge. that's the sort of thing i'd like to see explored?

not really topics I've worked on but I know lots who do (I think? if I get you) and : have you looked at Judea Pearl and Andrew Gelman and at Jaynes' textbook (which iirc is free to dl?)

i know of all three, and am somewhat familiar with various works by them. i think of them more as serious statistical practitioners. i guess they have a pretty "overt" latent philosophy in each of them? to triangulate further, i guess i was curious if someone had then gone and taken that sort of discourse and rendered it "pure philosophy" again in some way, or if that even makes sense. like i was discussing this stuff the other day and i had this "oh wait, kant! mumble mumble das Ding" moment, which I sort of wanted to pursue.

heh I am p distrustful / underwhelmed by "pure philosophy" most of the time so I turn to reflective practitioners whenever possible. think a new sep entry on foundations of Baysianism may have recently appeared?

not sure what you're looking for, sterl, since i don't know much about this, but the last few chapters of hacking's textbook pit subj. and obj. probability theorists' solutions to the problem of induction against each other, and charge both of them with evading it rather than solving it. the supplementary materials cited in the bib. are mostly hacking things you've probably seen, but i can dig them up if you'd like. it seems that the textbook presentation probably repeats hacking's older work, with perhaps a different spin, which is the case with his analysis of pascal's wager in the same book.

thanks j, mordy, and merdeyeux for all that information! i'm going to try to do something about this this year, so i'll grab those links

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bu5WA3OCYAAXqJt.jpg

Taylor Swift's BFF rockin' the Badiou tote bag.

is that really what that is? fantastic

it would be really amazing if her next album had references to being and event

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1175-philosophy-for-militants

Long interview with John Searle here that seems pretty interesting from what I've read of it so far: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/an-interview-with-john-searle

I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability.

Huh. I wonder how serious he's being here. Not just any philosopher could have written Shame & Necessity.

i think a lot of his readers probably underrate him because they have an expectation of a degree argumentative / persuasive force that they sense he is somehow approaching but feel he is falling short of. when really he's writing amazing shit for them and it's their own attachment to prejudices, reluctance to expose themselves and their practices to individual scrutiny, etc., that makes them feel that somehow, maybe, vaguely, he could be doing a better job at convincing them even though he's 'quite good'

Just google Derrida/Searle and came up with this: http://www.critical-theory.com/foucault-obscurantism-they-it/

Foucault and Derrida had a personal falling out (over an interpretation of Descartes!) so it makes sense F would want to badmouth D, but I've never bought into the rest of that story. Just doesn't seem to fit w/ Foucault's project and how he actually writes and how he relates to the other major figures of that period.

'i have french friends'

lol

https://twitter.com/everywordisgay/status/503790195180068864

worth clicking on i guarantee

u got it

my copy of that accelerationism book came in

read a bit on the futurists today and it brought accelerationism to mind (not that i know very much about either of those things).

the funny thing about the Foucault/Derrida thing is that while Derrida is often quite difficult, I think he's quite precise and "clear." Foucault is a cloudier thinker in my experience, even if the experience of reading him is easier. I think that's uniquely my experience though--since no one else seems to find him as frequently mystifying as I do.

i've never read him with much thoroughness, a bit of the famous stuff, and more recently some of the later lectures more carefully, and i get the impression that his kinda confident and unbothered pragmatism/materialism/historicism/whatever is in the service of a useful skepticism that he didn't see much value in articulating with greater clarity or definiteness. which seems kind of right, if you're in some sense an ethical thinker writing critically against like, the whole tradition of philosophically- and religiously-inflected moral and social and political thought.

yeah I think you've put your finger on it precisely.

my head is far too foggy at the moment to articulate anything, but without having seriously worked on the topic I've felt that Foucault's major insights from The Order of Things and The Thought of/from the Outside echo through the later work - not really as a foundation but more as an articulation of the historical moment that he's working within, namely being in the confusing midst of the perpetual transition between classicism and modernity. I have a note to myself from a while back where I suggest that in the later works he's trying to construct what in The Order of Things is termed a point of heresy, if anyone can discern what I was on aboot then that would be swell.

where's the passage that talks about that?