Rolling Philosophy

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

Excellent

thanks j I couldn't reply bc robot

a question for all yous in academia - how do you think you would 'practice' philosophy/how do you think your interest would manifest or be effected if you were not part of academia, had a totally separate day job & were not hanging out w/ philosophy types all the time?

I guess the temptation is to look at your current engagement and to try to subtract the influence of the academy but I'm curious about the motivations underlying why & what people engage with

i was once in academia and am no longer and the answer is a) posting on ilx b) talking to my philo friends from grad school thru gchat/fb msg and c) reading phil literature

To me, a nice thing about reading philosophy totally on my own is that I'm free to change my mind at the drop of a hat about what I want to be learning about. If you're in academia and you're writing a book, and it's going to take you four years to finish, you need to stay invested in something for four years. And for it to have been worth doing, you probably don't want to stop being interested in it straight away once you're done. That's a lot of time to have to care about something, and if it's epistemic modals or whatever, so much the worse.

That also makes me a dilettante though, whereas external pressure to invest prolonged care in something is definitely one of the best ways to achieve deep understanding. I'm not so bothered by this tradeoff, but that's just me.

since a non-academic future is soon to be upon me, I think my answer would be: as a practice of reading.

the thing I'll miss least about academic life is the implicit pressure to always have something to say, some critique to offer, and then of course having something to write. I'm a terrible writer and don't enjoy it very much at all. though this may have something to do with being too vague a thinker.

Right, that too. I hate writing. And 'having something to say' usually means outsmarting someone.

(or else pretending that you have)

i think about how to practice philosophy if not in academia all the time, and actually have been struggling for many years to develop my, i dunno, academic but marginally scholarly, humanistic-in-spirit work and perspective in the direction of actually taking how-to-philosophize-outside-the-academy as a core problem. for me the main, seemingly insuperable difficulties, are a) a need not to engage in a kind of dilettantism or hobbyist distraction from life, as it seems to fall short of… something, various things, that are to be desired in doing philosophy no matter where or who you are, b) the fact that there are real alternatives to the predominant picture given to us by the academy of how philosophy has to be done, but that they're all crushingly monumental/one-off/weird/vague and seem to leave you with the options of either 1) disreputable and probably kind of thoughtless followership or 2) philosophizing anew out of the whole cloth of the tradition, which c) takes you back to the enormous amount of time and freedom required to do so, which apart from the difficulties in obtaining it, is so -isolating- once you have it, and more so once you -use- it. i didn't have all that many intellectual peers and intimates in grad school in the first place, and i have struggled to find some out in the broader world of academia when i don't have a body of publications to help me attract and hold on to them, garner some interest in what i think, get a rep etc., so in a way my experience of the last several years - a mix of unemployment and shaky/limited teaching gigs which has hardly afforded me any extra intellectual stimulation that was more than superficial - has been mostly a continuation of that, AND somewhat underscored how being-outside and being-inside do not seem to be separated by that much. unless you're playing the game, or legitimately find yourself in a real intellectual home, with colleagues, company, friends all able to engage with one another (super rare, i think, esp. at the lower levels), i think the reality is that you just are alone, now, as a philosopher.

and as i've tried to take more seriously questions about what it would mean for people to do philosophy apart from academia, that's what i've focused on more - ways in which philosophy could be done for you, and not necessarily as a scholarly project, but also not necessarily (immediately, as if this were the only alternative) as, let's say, a project of justice, of doing something in the world as a way of making your thinking have to do with life.

i… sort of don't like to write, and i sort of love it and have to write, but i'm not in a good position as a writer in academia. i managed to locate something for myself that -needs- writing, and that could sustain a good many years of writing (when a friend defended his phd, one of his committee members remarked, 'this is fine work, this is the kind of thing you can work on for the next 20 years'), but that's really because it's a gap in… i guess, academic existence, between the way it's done and the ways philosophy -can- be done, and it's a gap that actually requires long-term old-fashioned humanistic thought and actual writing, not article-production, which i am frustrated to say i just have NOT been ready for yet (too green, too stubborn and proud, too attached to the purity of my own ideas etc), and which it has been singularly foolish to expect to be able to nurture gradually in the current disaster that is the academic labor market.

there's a free 'college' in the area, anarchist community kinda project, that runs open courses on anything anyone wants to teach, and i keep thinking of signing up, but i still have kind of a trepidation of finding a gap, in interest, in willingness, between what i want and what students want, when i don't have the institution and the aura of a college teacher to help me along.

i usually miss students more than colleagues, because my colleagues were generally never that much of a help anyway. talking to students, you can actually believe in philosophy.

and i should say, i don't wanna sound dismissive of the acceptance of e.g. dilettantism. what i really would like is to understand non-academic, original, independent philosophizing as its own thing.

i think it probably entails

a) avoidance of the homiletic mode you can get in, say, teaching schools where there are lots of affirmations of values, and posturing about the importance of thinking, but in reality a lot of complacency and moralizing dressed up as refinement

b) avoidance of a continuation of a pick-and-choose model that is acquired all too easily in many undergraduate encounters with philosophy. signs include people who conduct themselves, out in life, primarily by way of defenses of their favorite ideas, and critiques of enemies', through a kind of sensible argumentativeness combined with fealty to e.g. science or heidegger or catholicism or whatever. as if the product of a philosophical education was that now, you are in a position to be a believer, and the fact that, say, all subsequent thought you would have encountered further on down the road should have undermined any security you felt in having initially been attracted to some way of thinking that would be serviceable enough. (so, this is in a way an acknowledgement that something about academia's baked-in, 'academic' skepticism toward the truth of everything, is apt, and many forms of acceptance of the 'results' of philosophy are premature?)

c) a way, somehow, to affirm kinds of projects that are appropriate for the mode and circumstances of philosophizing. because so much philosophy is produced by elites, authorities, and people with the privilege of doing so, there seems to be something in need of pushback in any largely consumptive relation to philosophy. this probably goes w/ ryan's 'practice of reading', which i'm very attracted to as well.

there's a free 'college' in the area, anarchist community kinda project, that runs open courses on anything anyone wants to teach, and i keep thinking of signing up, but i still have kind of a trepidation of finding a gap, in interest, in willingness, between what i want and what students want, when i don't have the institution and the aura of a college teacher to help me along.

i think this could be very rewarding?

re: article-production, an editor informed me that they don't like to publish books if too many chapters have appeared ahead of time--which was surprising to me since i never before considered it a matter of writing something and "saving it for the book."

it could be! probably! most likely! i was kind of seeking to avoid academicism, and so i imagined basing a class on thoreau, but maybe that has made me wary of seeming incredible, because i so am just sitting around talkin about books and tryin to make them more complicated than they seem, instead of like, experimenting on life, adventuring, etc.

and

and as i've tried to take more seriously questions about what it would mean for people to do philosophy apart from academia, that's what i've focused on more - ways in which philosophy could be done for you, and not necessarily as a scholarly project, but also not necessarily (immediately, as if this were the only alternative) as, let's say, a project of justice, of doing something in the world as a way of making your thinking have to do with life.

i did have in mind with the latter, like, lots of applied-ethic-y ways of living philosophically, which i don't so much want to criticize as to defend their taking up all the available space in conceptions of legitimate ways to live philosophically.

but somewhat along the same lines i think of, say, the philosopher who develops a quasi-ethical orientation toward others in general that's modeled on the academic's (tracing back to socrates') own, with a typical manifestation like, 'slow yer roll their fellow citizen, do you really have good reasons for what you believe and say and are doing?'. that's good. but it can also seem to some people to exhaust the space of the possible, outside the academy, because what could be more non-academic than your actually going around, making sure people think more critically, etc? personally i think this is just reasonableness and good citizenship kind of over-dressed in philosophical garb, and i imagine that there is something more proper for non-academic philosophers to be doing (as it were, contemplatively, still leaving the active life to their fellow non-academic citizens).

i was just thinking of the socratic model too--but something about that seems impossible in contemporary discourse. ideologies and belief systems are too well-armored now, to "operationally closed," to really allow "open inquiry" into the "good" or what-have-you.

i do think, however, there is something like an ethics in persisting in strictly *philosophical* forms of communication and modes of discourse, that this, in all its frustrating abstraction and "lonely guy just thinking baout things" aura can itself be, i dunno, worthwhile i guess? insofar as *any* mode of discourse is worthwhile? i dont mean philosophy as an analogue to poetry or something, but philosophy in its own specific practices and NOT something subsumable under aesthetics.

i say this all as what i consider to be an outsider. (my discipline really being the horrid little netherworld of "theory" in literature departments.)

are you thinking of your systems-theorist bro when you say that? uh luhrmann

haha yes a bit! luhmann would probably talk about stuff like "orthogonal relationships" and things like that though.

if I weren't in academia I'd feel less pressured to write, which would be bad for my philosophical thought since I think best when writing. I have lots of half assed ideas that show themselves out as I try to write them up. Like even when I talk them out, I sneak in bullshit that passes bc most listeners aren't Socrates. But I'm my own Socrates when I write. And writing and then publishing get you audiences and then things to point to in conversation. Even writing slides is good for that, or just lecture notes.

But without my job depending on writing I don't know if I'd find the time.

so i was talking with some philosophers, academics or marginal types, about teaching and improvement thereof under the 'guidance' of managerial types, and one of them expressed the idea (critical of hasty adoption of faddish techniques, models for running a course, designing assignments, etc) that the academic administrators should observe a 'first do no harm' rule when it comes to the work of their teachers

and of course teachers should do none as well

that got me thinking, in terms of the standard u.g. philosophy curriculum, what could be considered 'doing harm' in it or the teaching of it

it seems fair to say that many ideas about what should or shouldn't be taught in philosophy have a kind of prophylactic intent - say, the reasoning behind an intense focus on 'learning how to argue' or think logically (as if other disciplines didn't do that). there, a sort of (appearance of?) formal neutrality seems to promise that you'll help the students and certainly not make them worse

likewise with the tendency toward tradition-insularity. if you think adorno is a charlatan you will think it would be irresponsible to let students spend time on him. if you think metaphysics is bunk you might teach the criticisms of it, but you're not going to be inclined to spend a lot of time on its eager advocates, after some crucial point in the development of the field (after so-and-so decisively put you all on the right path, or should have). (i think a bit of this has to do with why it took me years to realize just how widespread and established post-kripke metaphysics had become.)

and likewise with the history of philosophy for all the usual prejudicial reasons. and the way many of those are expressed is interesting - for example in terms of the historical philosophers being 'wrong', or more subtly, in terms of being hampered by their tools, benighted by their times, their logical resources, etc, so that while they may be interesting to toy with for historical purposes, they're certainly not good simpliciter for doing philosophy with.

i know this is a view that gets expressed in a lot of different ways pretty often, but looking at it in these terms, of doing harm, i was kind of surprised to suddenly think that most of what undergraduates are taught in philosophy can be (if doing some violence of misunderstanding to it in the process) thought of as 'wrong'. like, in a way unmatched by any other discipline. i think that applies even to responsibly-chosen curricula (on the above, somewhat partial terms - avoiding those you think are charlatans, inclining toward the prophylactic, etc) even insofar as they teach the 'recent good work', that in some sense you think has the 'best chance' (use of probabilistic terms in judging which philosophical positions have something going for them is v.v. suspicious imo) of 'being right'. for (here's the argument/contention) insofar as they require expertise to understand, and undergraduates will not have it, they can't be provided with an understanding of the material in its correctness. and, complementing that, if we say that, well, they get a basic picture and then if they choose to go on and become professionals, they will come to see how it really works, what's really what - then it sees we are stepping into territory where we have to admit that, on a 'professional' level, there is no agreement about 'rightness' that holds independently of our own training, our tribal affiliations, our being siloed into our specializations, etc., certainly none that can be established in the manner of science (or mathematics). there are philosophers who say 'yes kripke changed everything', and others who say 'fuck that dude', just as there are philosophers who say 'maaaaybe plato is right after all' (whatever that ends up meaning), and philosophers who somehow clinging to their hume aren't bothered by the need to be humean about logical necessity or the existence of mathematical objects or whatever.

so they would have it wrong as undergrads, and they still wouldn't be able to say they had it right, with the help of a professional understanding that purportedly supplants the initially wrong schoolboy version that were given. (a DILEMMA)

i think the continued vitality, maybe kind of a folk vitality (very popular as a pedagogical trick), of a certain kind of thinking helps this situation along. it seems basically religious (in a nietzschean-heideggerian remnants-of-metaphysical/onto-theological-thinking) to me - the kind of thought that says, 'well what if god DOES exist???' and relies on that kind of unestablished possibility as a permanent license for philosophy's work. it's carried over into the way we relate to historical figures and large philosophical positions, and it evidently has something to do with the ways we've thought of truth, knowledge, reality, etc., even in very late versions - so we say 'what if plato WAS right', 'what if empiricism IS right', etc., sort of as ways of alibi-ing our ongoing investigation of the arguments for and against. as it were (to link this observation to the preceding line of thought about rongness in the curriculum) to be able to manage the reality that we spend all our time occupied with things we think of, and treat as, rong.

now it seems that if you're inclined to think predominantly along these lines about rongness and its gradual eradication in history and in the course of one's philosophical education (from noob to successful course-taker to phil major to grad student to prof to world-straddling scholar), you might all the more be inclined to shape your curriculum and your pedagogy in ways that are almost forced into an idea of philosophical education as 'learning how to argue', and other sound-sounding but emptyish notions, out of a wish not to do your students harm.

i think there's a cultural dimension to philosophy (i.e. there IS a culture of philosophy, such a thing as philosophical culture) that obviously would release a lot of the seeming pressure of this line of thinking about rongness, and make it possible not to think of the undergraduate curriculum in particular as being one big rong waste of time for most everyone who encounters it (not aiming on transcending it thru professionalist training), with all kinds of paternalistic noble-lie excuses produced accordingly ('well they won't understand the "groundwork", but it's good for them to be exposed to it', 'well as long as they become more thoughtful and ethical people', 'well if they just become more critical thinkers'). but it seems like a dimension that is… troubled. tolerated uneasily in many cases.

?

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I only teach what I think is interesting. I try to avoid the canard that philosophy has instrumental value (learning to think etc). I teach texts that I think are interesting, and we talk about their ideas. I think of (Western) philosophy as a tradition into which we (Westerns) are all born, and doing philosophy is figuring that tradition out, I guess like psychotherapy of the culture. I'm not interested in who's right or wrong, but I'm interested in influence and transmission, and about underlying "frameworks", the assumptions that go unquestioned in normal (Western) life (so, like, the individualist ideal of the person bequeathed from the early moderns). And as you advance in philosophy, you learn that even our questionings of frameworks are occurring within frameworks, often the same frameworks we're interrogating. I want students to see this, at the first level at least, and to get a hint of how it's happening at the second level. I basically refuse to teach anything that isn't either historical or super technical because I think otherwise you're not developing means of doing this. You're reasoning within frameworks without awareness that doing so is just goofing around. one worry on my way of thinking about things is whether there's ever some "ultimate" framework, but that doesn't trouble me: who knows! why should we care? In teaching students don't press this point: they get a topsy turvy feeling around Kant when they begin to see that the early moderns were playing a game that Kant is beginning to question, while himself being stuck within that game; & we begin to look ahead to Wittgenstein, e.g., who was a master of pulling back the curtain.

"do no wrong" though: I haven't said anything about this yet I don't think, because I don't yet see how what I've said fits into that.

(i am maybe inspired by often thinking that the curriculum DOES harm students, esp. the outside-academia people i imagine they will become, while at the same time i know a lotta philosophers think -i- am harming them by teaching wittgenstein)

(as one still hears, surprisingly often, about teaching kant!)

I try to avoid the canard that philosophy has instrumental value (learning to think etc).

Why do you think that's a canard?

lots of disciplines have a reputation for teaching students to think (latin, talmud, philosophy) so it's maybe just not necessarily of unique relevance to phil?

yeah, and not all ways of doing philosophy are of the same instrumental value, so it's false promotion of its study to rest on this point. besides, I don't think most philosophers have thought a lot about the instrumental value of philosophical instruction (I certainly haven't) so really what we're promoting is the high grades and standardized test scores of philosophy majors, which may have little to do with the nature of philosophical instruction.

also j: how does "the curriculum" harm students? what's THE curriculum? it probably helps that I wasn't a phil undergrad major so I never experienced what you're talking about at my most impressionable ages. (I picked it up as a grad student, but even there, I did so in a piecemeal way that suited my training, meaning that I've next to no exposure to twentieth century philosophy except as logic or history (and not the most interesting history to me for the most part))

it's normal to break out in a cold sweat over the paranoid suspicion that you've fundamentally misunderstood something you've written about, right?

That seems like a normal part of the writing process, especially if you've been trained to anticipate and fend off objections.