Rolling Philosophy

In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections,”

bailed

thats a shame because you missed the end of the sentence

goes to the Strand Bookstore, in downtown Manhattan, to sell off his library of dialectical tomes.

The philosophers, sociologists, and critics in the Frankfurt School orbit, who are often gathered under the broader label of Critical Theory, are, indeed, having a modest resurgence. They are cited in brainy magazines like n+1, The Jacobin, and the latest iteration of The Baffler.

(Kunkel also mentions “The Corrections,” noting that Chip gets his salmon at a shop winkingly named the Nightmare of Consumption.)

i'm still not sure what The Baffler is but i'm always tempted to drop it in the Innocent Smoothies thread

the new yorker house style is so pedantic and shitty, 'iterations of The Baffler'

i just scrolled through and saw "steve jobs," so at least it kinda fits in with the theme of the day

Headlines have an authoritarian bark (“This Map of Planes in the Air Right Now Will Blow Your Mind”). “Most Read” lists at the top of Web sites imply that you should read the same stories everyone else is reading. Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.

Am I stupid or is it possible that this title is referencing the Radiohead song? The actual proverb from which both titles are drawn is a little different. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/50336-everything-in-its-right-place-spinoza-and-life-by-the-light-of-nature/

Anyway, seems neat...I'm more likely to want to read something like this - personal and celebratory - than a scholarly contribution. I don't like how the reviewer breezily associates "letting instead the key come to you by way of understanding informally 'love of God (Nature)'" with "New Age".

just stuffy it seems. would have been a better review if it played this one against almog's book on descartes, which i haven't read really but seems odd but interesting. the references to the spinoza book do make it seem like maybe almog has switched gears since the descartes book (highly reconstructive, analytical)?

Yeah, that Descartes book looks like something I would be interested in. I don't think I've encountered Almog at all except for having photocopied a bunch of Themes from Kaplan, which iirc was either out-of-print at the time or, at any rate, famous for being much too expensive for any student to own.

http://urbanomic.com/pub_oop.php

primary deterrent against reading that: "430pp"

Is he still an "independent researcher"?

who ain't

:-/

What Voltaire said about god should be repeated about this book: if it didn't exist, we would have to invent it.
Slavoj Žižek

He says that like a book isn't an invention.

Is Leiter going to get ousted? His "shit department" remark was definitely an efficient encapsulation of what's ugly about the PGR mentality.

mid-oust now, apparently

not from his job tho right?

haven't seen any indication his job's in trouble, no. quite puzzling this has taken so long really, he's been a repugnant bully who hasn't even tried to conceal it since i've been aware of him.

shocked that a Nietzsche scholar would write intemperately

Need to check this out ASAP: https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Ground-Between/

If I were still on academic track, and assuming ideal conditions, I think this disciplinary intersection is where I would try to work.

i think nietzsche scholars on the whole are very suave and sophisticated writers, when considered as an imitator of nz's rhetorical extremes he just seems like a tasteless boor

you might be interested in veena das's book if you haven't seen it, jmm

This one? http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520247451

Cavell forward, of course. Damn it, I have too many books on my plate as is.

that's the one. as i recall the forward is EXTREMELY favorable, but then he seems to have been pretty posi whenever blurbing/forwarding things for his own influencees in the last howevermany

about 1/3 of the way through Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being. it's good but hoo-boy is it dryly written.

like licking a pile of sand

I have wanted to read that for ages, after Charles Taylor's references to it in Sources of the Self.

it's very interesting on the whole but I confess to skimming over the enormous number of long quotations. this guy quotes like an undergrad trying to pad out a seminar paper.

tbh I probably would care more about the original sources than Lovejoy's text. I remember Taylor quoting bunches of Alexander Pope in his chapter on this stuff; does Lovejoy do that? I came out appreciating Pope a lot more than I had before.

reading some eckart förster so i can go chill w/ a reading groop tmrrw

sometimes kant seems v. v. much worth understanding to me, and then other times i just feel like, it will never be worth the time to muddle through this legalistic jibber-jabber and come out on the other side able only to discuss fine points of kant-interpretation

is there any contemporary english translation of the first critique that makes the A version readable on its own?

förster very much relies on the chronology of the A version / B version and corresponding events in kant's career and the philosophical world more generally, and since i've never tried to read just the A version before i am finding that pluhar's way of cramming both versions into one volume is kind of a pain in the ass.

never looked at the guyer/wood before, and would rather not go back to kemp-smith, if it even makes the A version available somehow.

I'll have to dig out my copy of the Wood, but it sounds like the same deal as the Pluhar. It integrates together the A and B while always marking which one is which, i.e. it'll have the A preface followed by the B preface, and joint A/B sections where possible as opposed to repeated text, if that makes sense. As far as I know, it includes all of both editions.

The Guyer/Wood, I mean.

My writing sample for PhD applications was this painful exegetical paper on how Kant's concepts of autonomy and will (wille vs. wilkur, iirc) evolved across editions and across CPR and CPrR, which looking back I can't imagine how I had patience for.

pluhar tends to present B and footnote A, but since B contains much of A with slight edits he will also footnote the jumps/transitions, so that a sentence will end with a footnote that directs you to jump over two or three B-specific additions until you get to the next A passages. but the A passages mostly retained in B also contain additions/edits on the word/phrase level, which are themselves footnoted to give you the A originals. usable for scholars (luckily I AM ONE) but still not appropriate for natural reading.

xp that sounds very scholarly!!

yeah, the Guyer/Wood edition has everything (and more, e.g. details of notes Kant made on his edition of the A while revising). Like most of the others it favours the B edition for minor edits (though always indicates what they are), but for bigger changes it has both A and B printed separately, which I think makes for slightly easier natural reading.

hopefully they are useful as heidegger's SZ copy notes

no!!

rather, seynsibility calls to us

i look forward to being famous and dead so scholars can see what passages of mine i've annotated with 'fucking stupid' etc.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Test-Case-for-Sexual-/149509/?key=SzglIFZnMyYdYns0ZTxANjsDb3I5ZRohMSdKa3gkblxcGQ

now that all the names are coming out i'm not surprised to find that they don't even get to all the dirt i personally have heard tell of

also

Professors have agreed that if a conversation veers into a potentially offensive topic or someone begins telling an off-color joke, other professors can interrupt with a safe word: "Nixon." So far, says Mr. Cowell, it hasn’t been used.

I want to hear your dirt! I knew a little of it from back channels, and this article is tantalizing but keeps the real grub under wraps alas

yeah bring it! i've been talking a lot about this topic recently and have concluded that the only way to contend with this kind of toxic behaviour is to call it out loudly and repeatedly

yeah I've been surprised at philosophers' reluctance to name names, in this and other cases. I can see why naming names in the media would be a problem, but even person to person it's been hard (for me at least) to get the story. and that's bad b/c in the meantime maybe I send a student to work with a perpetrator.

Hanna's position seems hilarious to me: academic is infested with social conservatives, mostly women, who want to ban senior faculty from fucking grad students polyamory. I wish he'd go full Nietzsche and take on our outdated sexual ethics, or just call us a bunch of prudes, instead of dwelling on procedural issues.

well, i only have secondhand information, from a friend. she hasn't said anything about the recent events but i feel like it's not right that her information not be aired in connection with them.

when she was an undergrad, she attended their summer seminar. she had an affair with one of her teachers, a faculty member there, and (i forget exactly for how long, not extremely) subsequently a long-distance relationship with him, until he just became too toxic a presence to bear (he had a lot of emotional problems, apparently). i was surprised that his name hasn't come up in connection with any of the recent problems. i guess he's just been there in the background, not having any problem with faculty sleeping with students.

i would never send anyone there.

damn. yeah Hanna is the only one I'd heard of there; and I've had a lot of contact with some of their faculty while things have been coming out. they've done quite a job of building a wall of silence.

also I'd like since their faculty seem to want to bail & I don't know who to consider

"like to know" I mean

i'll ilx mail ya