Rolling Philosophy

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.

I'm trying hard to puzzle through your overall view here. But I'm still getting hung up on the transition from Cartesian dualism, which posits that human beings are essentially immaterial thinking things, to a view of "persons as mere collections of particles, as pieces in a system, whose needs/desires can be computed and optimized". I would think that, if anything, conceiving of people as essentially beyond the reach of inquiry into the physical world would prevent thinking of them as collections of particles whose needs and desires can be computed. Those two views strike me as being in direct contradiction.

(If anything, hylomorphism seems MORE conducive to a view of people as collections of particles whose needs and desires can be computed, since on that view there's no part of a person which is not instantiated materially--right?)

When I raised basically this question earlier, you wrote:

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.

But these two sentences strike as being in real tension with one another. Either Carteisan dualism says that the body is still pretty important to "I", or it "legitimizes thinking of bodies as disposable". I don't see how it can do both at once.

And while I don't know a lot about Christian theology, I was under the impression that the soul is traditionally thought of, across a wide variety of major denominations for many centuries up to the present day, as immaterial, an essential part of a person, and the thing that is judged after death and that carries on to the afterlife. And moreover, that the body is both a relatively temporary vessel and a source of sinful urges. Now THAT sounds like a view which might legitimize treating bodies as disposable--after all, it's your soul that gets to be with God for eternity. (I'm sure Christian theologians don't actually endorse that view of human bodies, but neither does Descartes.) It's also a much older and vastly more influential view than anything Descartes came up with, and has a much more plausible claim to being the source of a prevalent 20th (or 21st) century Western worldview.

re. what you're saying about Christian theology, I'm disputing your impression. for instance, the view that the body is a "relatively temporary vessel" is quite modern. the ancient & medieval Christian doctrines maintain the resurrection of the *body* ; *that* is the unit that will be judged and will be saved or condemned.

next:
I wrote
"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."

& you replied

"But these two sentences strike as being in real tension with one another. Either Carteisan dualism says that the body is still pretty important to "I", or it "legitimizes thinking of bodies as disposable". I don't see how it can do both at once."

On the view your body is just a sack of bones inhabited temporarily by your "I", your soul: the question is, what is the *value* of that temporary time? It's obviously of some value! But how much value, given that the soul will perdure eternally, given that all true goods are soul goods? If the answer is, not *that* much value, then it's open to the Cartesian dualist to reason about soul-body fusions as disposable. What's really valuable about this fusion can't be hurt by physical means. So you can reason about these fusions as mere bodies.

philosophers on this thread, when you see something like this (http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/11/taylor-swifts-platonism.html) how does it make you feel about your profession

Euler--

How modern is the Christian view soul I'm talking about? Post-1641?

It seems like your position on the Descartes thing has shifted a bit. At first you saddled him with some responsibility for a view of "persons as mere collections of particles" etc., but now that I've pointed out how at odds that is with the Cartesian notion of the person, it seems like you're saying that Descartes made possible a view of bodies as disposable, precisely because the person is identified with the immaterial soul, and not the collection of particles to which it's temporarily bound. I hope you can see how this was confusing.

The place you're at with it now does make more sense to me. The question remains, though--what happened between Descartes and the 1930s that allows us to connect him to the Holocaust? Because I don't think the Nazis justified what they did on the grounds that, after all, they were only destroying Jewish bodies, not Jewish souls. Seems like their moral pathology had less to do with a philosophical position on the connection between mind/soul and body and more to do with thinking of Jewish people (and others) as subhuman in the first place. So there's still this big blank to be filled in.

to s.clover:

http://www.ryanseacrest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Taylor-Swift-14.gif

to JRN: yeah, thanks for helping me think through this. the view of the soul you're talking about is fully realized in the seventeenth century. was it present earlier? yes, here and there, as people try to puzzle through doctrines and anthropologies. but it becomes widespread in the seventeenth century, & D is giving prominent voice to it.

re. the road to the Holocaust, yes, there are other pieces. but again, I don't think that's what's novel about the Holocaust is mere genocide; as you pointed out earlier, that's been around for centuries. what's new is how the Nazis reasoned about their killing; that's to say, their means of dehumanizing was new. & their reasoning, in which they instrumentalized their victims' lives, has roots in the Cartesian turn. much is missing from that! I'm not saying D invented Nazi fascism. but Nazi fascism is one unfolding of "the modern turn" that should not appear, in retrospect, unintelligible from within Western conceptual frameworks.

I feel like what I'm saying here is really kinda rote so push back!

I'm reading Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures. He has these occasional polemics on philosophy that I really like.

The concepts used here, ethos and world view, are vague and imprecise; they are a kind of prototheory, forerunners, it is to be hoped, of a more adequate analytical framework. But even with them, anthropologists are beginning to develop an approach to the study of values which can clarify rather than obscure the essential processes involved in the normative regulation of behavior. One almost certain result of such an empirically oriented, theoretically sophisticated, symbol-stressing approach to the study of values is the decline of analyses which attempt to describe moral, aesthetic, and other normative activities in terms of theories based not on the observation of such activities but on logical considerations alone. Like bees who fly despite theories of aeronautics which deny them the right to do so, probably the overwhelming majority of mankind are continually drawing normative conclusions from factual premises (and factual conclusions from normative premises, for the relation between ethos and world view is circular) despite refined, and in their own terms impeccable, reflections by professional philosophers on the "naturalistic fallacy." An approach to a theory of value which looks toward the behavior of actual people in actual societies living in terms of actual cultures for both its stimulus and its validation will turn us away from abstract and rather scholastic arguments in which a limited number of classical positions are stated again and again with little that is new to recommend them, to a process of ever-increasing insight into both what values are and how they work. Once this enterprise in the scientific analysis of values is well launched, the philosophical discussions of ethics are likely to take on more point. The process is not that of replacing moral philosophy by descriptive ethics, but of providing moral philosophy with an empirical base and a conceptual framework which is somewhat advanced over that available to Aristotle, Spinoza, or G. E. Moore. The role of such a special science as anthropology in the analysis of values is not to replace philosophical investigation, but to make it relevant.

That's from 1957, and I only have a fuzzy impression of what value theory at that time looked like. I assume a lot of modern-day value theorists would be on-board, or at least pay lip service to the need for naturalistic grounding, albeit maybe crediting psychology rather than anthropology as a more reliable empirical base.

i picked up Alexander Galloway's new book on Laurelle. hoping i'll get more out of it than the 2/3rds of Principles of Non-Philosophy that I read so i can make up my mind if L is worth my time/effort or not.

also reading Brian Massumi's "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia" as a kind of warm-up to (finally!) reading "Anti-Oedipus."

In my limited experience, I have never really found anything useful in Laruelle (though I've only read some of his essays, not his books), but his followers are so devoted I feel like there must be something there, while at the same time I find his prose so extraordinarily tortuous and opaque (and I say this as someone who finds a fair amount of writing in continental philosophy to be weirdly seductive) that it's hard for me to summon the will to persist. I'd be interested to see if the Galloway book is enlightening. I like Massumi's User's Guide but I think it might be more relevant to A Thousand Plateaus (the User's Guide started out as the long preface to the translation of ATP that Massumi prepared as a dissertation at Yale, iirc).

yeah as I was saying unthread L is a uniquely bad writer, I think. Derrida's pointed questions to him (also upthread) struck me as pretty otm. There's also something to be said for the exhaustion of philosophy in the continental tradition (hence the need for non-philosophy) being itself close to exhaustion.

Yeah, Derrida's objections seem pretty decisive. That dialogue slipped by me, so thanks for bringing it up.

Laruelle kind of sounds like a parody of continental philosophy; philosophy reduced entirely to self-reflection.

I thought this was a useful discussion of the ambiguities of the later Foucault's relationship to neoliberal thought and policy: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/

reminds me that I was bemused this past summer when a professor running a seminar I attended casually referred to Foucault as "a man of the Right."

that piece is interesting but strikes me as WRONG idk

i mean im out of my depth or w/e but isnt that just 'why are we letting race/gender/criminality/sexuality take precedence over class' part 109343239234

post colonial studies wd like a word w/ you etc

I had a similar reservation--although I think the discussion of Foucault's intervention as one shifting the focus of his analysis from the proletariat to groups excluded from wage labor makes sense as a descriptive claim, Zamora's claim that after Foucault, "dominations are more and more theorized and thought outside of questions of exploitation" is debatable--most intersectional analyses worth the name will look at the ways immiseration and exploitation interact with other modes of domination. I also think the Birth of Biopolitics lectures have a more ambiguous stance on neoliberalism than Zamora suggests here. At the very least, Foucault's claim that under neoliberalism the market is posited as the arbiter of truth, eclipsing conceptions of politics as a practice related to justice, can be used more polemically than Foucault perhaps intended it to be (as in Wendy Brown's recent lectures on neoliberalism). I'd expect Zamora's reading of the late Foucault to be more nuanced in his actual book, anyway.

not to derail the conversation, but as far as Foucault distancing himself from the existing left, was reading this interview where he dismisses polemic as a form: foucault.info/foucault/interview.html

he almost seems to be trolling in his complete refusal to admit that polemic might have legitimate uses

a polemic against polemic is p brill

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/beyond-the-welfare-state/ this response to the zamora interview is quite good

Thanks, Merdeyeux; that's the most useful response I've seen so far.

http://theroughground.blogspot.ca/2014/12/what-is-dissertation.html

This is fun. I never did a PhD, but I can relate. Trying to write about Wittgenstein, when Wittgenstein himself is challenging the form and function of philosophical writing, was weird and hard.

i wish you could tell my search committees that

tremendously niche comparison that came to mind today - wwe nxt's adrian neville and p3te w0lfendale

Does anyone here have recommendations on the topic of civil disobedience (beyond Thoreau or Rawls, which I've read)? Been eyeing Kimberley Brownlee's Conscience and Conviction, for example..,,

http://homevideo.icarusfilms.com/new2005/ist.html

^ Have any of you seen this?

I put up a thread on ILF: Philosophy on Film

I saw The Ister a few years ago, so my memory of it is a little hazy. I recall it as being more staid formally than I'd expected and sort of unremarkable in its take on Heidegger's relation to fascism (I'd love to see what someone like Chris Marker or Agnes Varda could have done with the same material), but it's worth watching if you're interested in Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin. The highlights for me were probably the segments with Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe.

I've enjoyed Holderlin's poetry v much this year and was reminded of Heidegger's lectures in a conversation last night. Love to read those but I don't fancy my chances although I can go with a kind of flow.

Alexander Kluge would've been perfect to make any doc out of this material.

Yeah, you're otm about Kluge, and I've been meaning to read those lectures at some point in my life. Heidegger's comments on Hölderlin in his essays on poetry are definitely seductive, although the underlying narrative of the history of being that Heidegger's reading presupposes is politically repellent in a lot of obvious ways. I'm more receptive to Adorno's attempt at a counter-reading, "Parataxis," although I really haven't spent enough time reading Hölderlin intensively.

i tried to see that but i had just broken up with my girlfriend and she came to the one showing there was in town because she thought i would be there, so i left not long after like the first 20 minutes of river-meandering footage

after that i figured i would just let it be