Rolling Philosophy

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.

euler, i guess i'm thinking of what i imagine as a 'mainline' (kinda like mainline protestant - a certain coherence, w/o the uniformity of catholicism haha) curriculum that mixes…

-wondrous intro problem tyme (omg a BRANE in a VAT)
-logic, 'the study of good reasoning' but wait let's do some proofs first
-plato the form-monger and repblican and/or aristotle
-standard e+m early modern survey
-kant??
-ethics a la mill, kant, aristotle and 'feminist alternatives???'
-some soft philosophy of art, fun tyme 4 all
-something in the applied ethics / social philosophy family, 'taking a stand on issues'
-maybe phil-sci on a falsification/covering law model/scientific realism (MAYBE ~paradigms~) tip
-fairly analytic or scholastic E+M (or E/M separately) survey, focused on warhorses like personal identity, existence of god, substances and properties; or JTB and testimony, i dunno, throw some ism-ology in there
-one or more of medieval, 19th c around a hegel–nietzsche (or dewey) core, frege-to-quine analytic, or something in the range of heidegger-to-french-generation-of-68

… but more importantly - and i guess i think the harm may come more so from this, but i do think the specific content/shape of the curriculum encourages it - i think of 'the curriculum' as a style of delivering same. i don't know how to say it simply. let's say, just, overly academic, but as if there were no legitimate alternative. whereas math is math; an art education may be academic but in principle art can be done anywhere; the social sciences have all manner of interactions with policy, institutional practices, government, etc which are seen to have their own non-academic insight into things; faux disciplines like business, or serious ones that are sort of trade-y like computer science or engineering, can actually tip the other way, and often sort of regard their academic counterparts as out of touch with the vital currents of practice.

(am i making any sense? i wanted to respond earlier, but i've been kind of out of it for more than a week, so i kind of lost the thread.)

ah right now I see THE CURRICULUM. yeah I've taught THE CURRICULUM twice, and it was ok the first time and sucked the second time. it was ok when I was teaching at my (private) grad institution, and shitty when I was teaching at a public institution in a sketchy state. It was shitty because those students saw through the curriculum, or through me, because I don't care about most of the issues you listed : like if that was philosophy, I wouldn't bother. I mean I've taught philosophy of religion a bunch of times, and rarely address arguments for the existence of God: because there's so many deep assumptions needed for those arguments to have a chance at cogency. same for skepticism: my students don't see it as a problem. so if I were to insist that it is, I'd have to instill in them frameworks to make it possible for them to see that. and that would be doing them harm, because those frameworks are RONG and dangerous.

like there's a not so fine line between installing frameworks in which say standard M&E "matters", and propagandizing for the_west/late capitalism, and I'm not in the business of propagandizing anything like that.

so my intros don't touch any of that. I just teach historical texts. my goal is someday to spend a semester on a single sentence from say Plato. we spend like half a term on the Symposium. it's just very very very slow.

I dunno maybe it's that I've been tt/& now t for so long but I have complete freedom on what I teach in my lower division classes. like in math even at research unis you'll get a list of "here are the chapters in this assigned book you have to teach" even if you're tenured. but in philo it's not at all like that. so I don't touch THE CURRICULUM and I don't have to and...neither do you? I hope?

lol ok given what you do i would have thought you were more of a here's-a-puzzle-about-the-morning-star guy. i do the same thing in my intro course - five authors, Pl Desc Nz Witt and have been ambivalent between sextus or montaigne - and i've said much the same thing in front of those classes probably, especially when they complain about spending so long on one of the readings, 'if we could just read one book all semester i'd be happiest'.

i think you can get yourself a lot of cover for doing whatever you like if you do it as a matter of problem/positions/issues accessed via 'readings' i.e. assignments of journal articles, but it's been my perception that those courses are still highly… curricular in the way i'm thinking. i think not teaching it (or not in its style) comes at a cost. mainly in terms of reputation, how colleagues size you up.

but as to the harm to the students, i like what you say about the framework that make things matter/real. maybe another way to describe the defects of philosophy as against other disciplines is, having no subject matter of its own, and only sometimes being able to get by on formality/platonizing purity alone, it really has to arise out of an engagement with an understanding of the world that is fairly rich, whether a traditional informal understanding of it (like say an average greek citizen would have had) or an advanced thinker's understanding of it. which is why when you look back at philosophy's history you often find its most influential work being done by people who had their fingers in lots of pies, as working intellectuals, or at the very least, who had a fairly sophisticated familiarity with the intellectual culture of the past (more of a heritage thing). and that stuff is like soil for the frameworks of the past. looking back, it can be sort of retroactively appreciated/perceived to be relevant to an understanding of the philosophical work of the time. but in the present, few of us or none of us are that advanced, and even to the extent that we can start students a few generations back, we can only a little bit introduce them to philosophy as something that is responsive to the framework-level or world-level questions that would motivate philosophizing in a way that corresponds to the image they get of the activity from the standard curriculum.

put another way: i have been interested for a while in ways that the use of a first-person authorial/narratorial standpoint in philosophy, from the modern period on, has certain protreptic advantages. and lately while reading moore and kind of boggling that he hadn't been more included in the approach to early analytic i was given as an undergrad (or grad), i found a way to put a different emphasis on that interest. however motivated by deeper framework stuff or more abstruse beliefs about logic and analysis he may have been, he at least presented the discipline in such a way that it appeared to arise out of untutored ordinary-person reflection, and tried to be accountable to what a non-philosopher might say. i think that evinces a certain degree of grounding in 'the thought of our time', at least a de-sophisticated version of it, that is kind of the non-expert analogue to the european scientists of the 19th and 20th c making forays into metaphysics and epistemology as part of their broader activity. and it seems to recur throughout the history of the discipline. even in aristotle, with (despite his method of gathering opinions of the learned) his habit of letting ordinary usage prompt or guide his investigation.

BUT. that STILL takes a certain coherent/refine/holistic feel for the philosophical, say the philosophical in-one's-time, as-we-and-the-world-are-now, that is maybe necessarily (at worst) out of reach of a typical ug philosophy curriculum.

like there's a not so fine line between installing frameworks in which say standard M&E "matters", and propagandizing for the_west/late capitalism

I'm deeply curious about what you mean here.

to j

I think you're right on re. philosophy requiring "engagement with an understanding of the world". I think my main goal in teaching lower division courses is to get this engagement going. when I taught intros in the great plains I focused on religion b/c it's something all of them had engaged with: it's in the soil there. I need to find something in the soil to start with, because philosophy starts by digging into that dirt, and then eventually, digging into the shovel.

supporters of the CURRICULUM make a couple of mistakes. firstly, they suppose that their working problems are part of the soil for their students. secondly, they think they found a good, maybe *the* good, shovel.

the former is a failure because it makes for boring classes for lots of students.

the latter is genuine harm to students. it misrepresents what philosophy can do for us. philosophy isn't "system building": look how much time modern philosophers spent on "method". but look at particular what system their shovel is building (& this is to JRN's question too). it's no coincidence that modern philosophy is developed alongside modern capitalism: both rely on a conception of instrumental reason that enables modern science via the "mechanistic turn". this permits/encourages us to think of persons, as mere collections of particles, as pieces in a system, whose needs/desires can be computed and optimized. in the classroom I say that the second meditation is the start of the road to Auschwitz.

now it is true that I am a techy person but that's because you can only dig into tools if you understand them from the inside out.

'something i know as my body, no different than a corpse'

exactly

i was a split techy/not person when i came to philosophy, and i guess over the long haul some of my grievances w/ it have pertained to the same initial failure to really meet the image i had brought to it, of a discipline where the claims of both sides could be aired, or encompassed. which i think might bear on the understanding of the world, or at least being at the right level to do so. i was surely limited in lots of ways when i came to philosophy, but i had enough of a mixed background, at a useful depth via-a-vis the academic configuration of ahem human knowledge, that it could approximate as 'an understanding of the world' that was not just the boring non-understanding philosophy (or all college) students start with, nor the boring moral-religious one that can often be appealed to in lieu of an alternative, nor just the quine-is-so-fascinating-to-me quant-nerd orientation that is still such a boon to philosophy in the student population.

to that end, maybe a reason a lot of my grievances relate to analytic/continental splits, or the theory-humanities/philosophy split, or the exclusion/suppression of aesthetics within philosophy, but still tend to coalesce around curricular questions, is that i feel like philosophy managed somewhat to take up a modern understanding of the world insofar as that understanding is scientific (in the 19thc-and-after science sense, concretely so, rather than the 'all modern science since bacon is a pox' sense), but hardly a modern understanding of the world of the arts, ~because of~ the ways we've decided philosophy can and can't be taught to undergraduates. like we just can't count on them to get enough of it, to have a substantial enough bed of soil.

yeah. when I started teaching intro "my way" I would bring poems or show pieces of visual art in class, and they'd have no context for responding to it. like we read through (parts of) Alexander Pope's "Essay On Man", and it just sank. or I'd show them a Dürer, and the same. & that's not even to begin to grapple with 20th century art. like the students could have driven to KC where there's a good and free! art museum but none of them had ever been or had any plans to go. is there any soil there?

last fall I told an undergrad class that acquaintance with art was a prerequisite for working their way into elite circles, b/c (ime) convos among elites turn to the visual arts, and opera, quite a lot. so if you want to be one of the elite (and the undergrads at my present american job do; in the plains they did not), you have to become acquainted with the arts. & this wasn't even to think about it, but just to have experienced it. & I think that was a revelation to my students, like they should do so because it might have ca$h value. and then I felt kinda shitty for selling out the arts like that. but I guess I have enough faith in art that however they might be moved to be moved by it, it's ok.

i think there is! that's why i mentioned a theory/philosophy split, because i think it has sort of diverted a lot of intellectual resources and attention and prestige away from philosophy, and also discouraged philosophy from spending time on the arts of the past 125 years. probably both an aptitude/affinity for science and for art are elite characteristics in college-aged students (by which i mean rare, requiring cultivation/talent, etc), but i think there are plenty of young people there to be… seedbeds.

i mean one of the first people i met on my college dorms was a wagner buff. the next one was an anarchist who loved fugazi. my friends and i started a reading group where we read mishima, ellison, camus, pynchon. i think it's just a matter of being institutionally/disciplinarily receptive to who's out there.

i mean part of the problem with the conservative tendency of analytic phil is that it means when students come in enthusiastic about music, they get teachers who are all, o would u like to read hanslick and nelson goodman and peter kivy??!

"Aren't you curious to know what kind of ontological things musical works are?"

The SEP article on philosophy of music is such a letdown. You'd think music would be such an innately generative philosophical topic, but instead you get a bunch of "puzzles" imported from other areas of philosophy:

Music is perhaps the art that presents the most philosophical puzzles. Unlike painting, its works often have multiple instances, none of which can be identified with the work itself. Thus, the question of what exactly the work is is initially more puzzling than the same question about works of painting, which appear (at least initially) to be simple physical objects. Unlike much literature, the instances of a work are performances, which offer interpretations of the work, yet the work can also be interpreted independently of any performance, and performances themselves can be interpreted. This talk of ‘interpretation’ points to the fact that we find music an art steeped with meaning, and yet, unlike drama, pure instrumental music has no obvious semantic content. This quickly raises the question of why we should find music so valuable. Central to many philosophers' thinking on these subjects has been music's apparent ability to express emotions while remaining an abstract art in some sense.

O MULTIPLE INSTANCES U SAY?!!! SIGN ME UP

see there's that fusty conservatism again, like in some sense yes 'bitches brew' is a 'work' or a 'composition' (maybe no?) or a 'musical structure' but if you're writing about the ontology of music and the existence of decades of recordings does not give you pause when you open your mouth to say 'the instances of a work are performances, which offer interpretations of the work', you are letting your professional deformation have the mic when you should be thinking about the actual world

'actually ted gracyk'

that's not enough

no doubt 98% of analytic philosophy of music is everything that's bad about analytic philosophy amplified to deafening levels

an undergrad interested in philosophy of music asked me where she should go to grad school, and I was like, uhhhhhhhhhhh. she's now at the cathedral of learning where at least she'll get a terrific education, but I doubt the philo music stuff will get much play in her work.

also I wasn't questioning whether thinking about art is soil for philosophy, but rather, whether *my undergrads* thinking about art is. for some of them, maybe, but by and large it's not something they've engaged enough with to have much to explore.

actually I have worked sex/love/family stuff into my intros as a replacement for religion over the years b/c tbh my students haven't really engaged with religion either. but sex...

oh, that's what i meant to address. and from experience i do think art-thought is… inchoate in them generally. only a small few will have been really intensely involved in art anyway (but… high school drama, music, literary club, poetry slam, amateur youtube production, whatever). but i think there's more of a receptivity and familiarity with any kind of arts post-1900 among students (more popular ones, sure) than the current configuration of philosophy as it tends to manifest in 'the curriculum' is really prepared to exploit (pedagogically). we're better, say, at attracting scientifically precocious students into the discipline than we are at attracting artistically precocious ones.

(but they ARE there)

you're right; in most of my jobs majors have been about half science-y types and about half stoners who tend to be into art/music/lit. in neither group though do they really know why they're taking philosophy except some preconceptions they've had from culture at large, like they've come to think that they're the kinds of people who just ~think that way~. which yeah, has a disconnect with m&e as we practice it today in analytic depth since the "curriculum" takes for granted problems that aren't those students have been thinking about. like fuck skepticism forever. & even the science-y types aren't moved by the phil science concerns of "the curriculum".

or I dunno maybe it's just that I don't care at all "what there is"

& yes we are better at attracting as you say "scientifically precocious students" than "artistically precocious ones". and "the curriculum" is blameworthy here. but the curriculum is responding to other currents. I remember in high school being totally disappointed when all the kids I looked up to, for their literacy, for their artistic savvy, ended up in college either majoring in sciences or burning out. & now they're all lawyers. & today's philo faculty are shaped by that current too. & it *was* sorta easy to fit "the curriculum" into that current, explaining it to prestigious folks. even while undergrads kinda just want to talk about Nietzsche.

ah fuck I'm just saying dumb stuff here, I know you're tapping into something very deep here, that there's a way of doing philosophy, and topics for philosophy, that are left out of the curriculum, and the reasons for that are deep, and I'm doing a shitty job of saying "say more, I feel you and I have been working against that but I can't put it into words as well as you can"

ha 'think that way'… i.e. 'the clear way' (or the goofy stoner one)

i actually have been working a LOT on skepticism the past several years not because i ~~care about it~~ but because it seems inextricable from my other concerns and kind of like i need to understand it as an intellectual structure given my interests in the history of philosophy. and it's super frustrating because i can't really buy it! i have a sense of how there is something to it that is as a rule misinterpreted. but that only gets you so far and then you have to spend time talking about 'what there is' when it's like, who the fuck cares what there is, it's all right here. which is why i mentioned 'onto-theological' whatsit way back - while i do think there might be some naturally-raised questions about truth that end up being expressed in terms of 'what there is', it often seems like worries about realism are just badly interrogated remnants of doctrines of god's existence, the snowflakeness of the soul, etc, and i just wanna be all, stop wasting my life on that junk, go to seminary if you want to be an antiquarian

i think nietzsche is a great example. and those undergrads are surely in the right to think they could be talking about nietzsche in a philosophy program. but we're so pathetic that we don't have the first clue, as a corporate body / disciplinary formation, how to talk about him at that level without making a mess of it, or prejudicing the treatment from the start with some kind of expectation that we can find in him a competitor to moral realism or whatever. like, there's this impressive book by graham parkes that studies nietzsche's thought about the soul (drives / self / etc) systematically via a study of the structure of his imagery / metaphors / vocabulary. seems like an actual scholarly contribution that could affect study of nietzsche on a lower level if taken more seriously at the higher level. but as a discipline we're unable to incorporate it (haha a v. nietzschean problem). or, similarly, we know nietzsche 'writes aphorisms' but we sort of fecklessly don't bother to try to engage in some serious study of the aphoristic tradition in order to deal with a dude who seems like maybe super influential and whatever his vices way more of an original philosopher than most of us will ever be. seems like if we tried, we might have more success attracting and keeping within the fold the kind of goofy kids who come to college wanting to talk about books.

I don't know anything about Nietzsche scholarship; I've had some colleagues who study him but as a metaethicist so their work is probably constrained by typical analytic concerns. with him as with most figures I just read the primary texts myself, and I teach the same way.

your points about his aphoristic style is interested too; same attention could be given to Pascal's Pensées, about which there is pathetically little written in English; & yet in France he's up there with Descartes as one of the main figures of the tradition.

& I really don't care about skepticism & would be very annoyed if something I cared about turned out to be related. "overcoming epistemology" a pretty key article for me.

yeah pippin's little nietzsche book recently used the interesting tactic of framing nz as wishing to steer for various reasons between montaigne (plausible and interesting), larochefoucauld (obv), and pascal (the surprising one). but it was not something he dwelled on, frustratingly, since we don't really talk about ANY of those three.

haha but like what philosophy from 1800 to 1950 is not related to skepticism

well I don't think much about perception or really about anything empirical which seems to be where skepticism lurks in that era

it's no coincidence that modern philosophy is developed alongside modern capitalism: both rely on a conception of instrumental reason that enables modern science via the "mechanistic turn". this permits/encourages us to think of persons, as mere collections of particles, as pieces in a system, whose needs/desires can be computed and optimized. in the classroom I say that the second meditation is the start of the road to Auschwitz.

I'm more confused than before. Descartes repudiates the idea that persons are mere collections of particles, so how does he get us on the road to thinking of them that way? And how does that view of people license genocide without like a million extra premises coming from elsewhere?

Descartes endorses the view that bodies are mere collections of particles, though; and though "I" am not my body, my body is still pretty important to "I" (particularly if you don't accept that there's an life for your mind once separated from your body). So mind-body dualism legitimizes thinking of bodies as disposable. I never said this "licenses" genocide, but rather that it opens up new ways of reasoning about bodies instrumentally ; and that's where the road of Auschwitz begins.

i haven't studied this but actually didn't descartes think there was one material thing [i.e. substance] (which is, like, complicated and appears in complicated ways)?

(at least, there's a scholarly tradition that says so)

(and i suppose there's some jury-rigged way to make that compatible with bodies being composed of particles etc, there always is)

yeah tbh I don't want to have to make that distinction & get into talk of modes etc; it's enough to say that the materiality of body for D permits a type of reasoning about bodies that is new, and one whose consequences I, at any rate, lament.

Surely mind-body dualism doesn't begin with Descartes. It had already been around in the Christian tradition alone for centuries by his time.

And I'm still convinced that dualism had anything to do with the Holocaust. How does one get from the belief that mind and body are substantially separate to the view that mass extermination is a morally urgent project? Again, it seems like the intermediate premises there would be doing all the important ideological work. Particularly since people have been dehumanizing and killing one another on large scales for longer than mind-body dualism as a worked-out philosophical position has been around, using whatever justifications are at hand.

Plus, if you're worried about a worldview which says that people are material beings whose preferences can be computed etc., I'd assume you'd have an even bigger problem with the sort of non-dualistic materialism that's been mainstream for a long time now. So what way of thinking about mind and body wouldn't set us on the path to genocide, on your view? Could it all have been avoided if Spinoza had really caught on? Or Berkeley?

re. Cartesian dualism, no. D invents a new anthropology, in particular a new view of the soul, as what "we" are. you can find glimmers of such a first-person pt of view in Augustine, but no more. Thomas is, as you'd expect, an adherent of Aristotelian hylomorphism.

the dehumanizing of the Nazis is unlike any earlier dehumanizing, because of the way the Nazis *reasoned* through it. I'm talking about their focus on efficiency, e.g.

re. materialism. no, you could hold some type of hylomorphism and then the instrumentalization of reason about persons that I'm talking about post-Descartes wouldn't be available. I mean yes this is very hard to imagine because most of us take the Cartesian turn for granted, we learned it when we started breathing, and we don't step out of our shoes very well. maybe a civilization without that turn is nearly inconceivable for us, given our natural conceptual frameworks. but we can try.