Rolling Philosophy

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

Philosophy Matters ‏@PhilosophyMttrs Dec 20

JUST WHAT OUR PROFESSION NEEDS : woody allen's new film is about a philosophy professor seducing a student ... http://buff.ly/1sHjm9j

lol srsly

This is what happens when you wish for philosophy on film.

The Ister wasn't that good but worth a watch. The film was filmed sorta boringly - especially when footage from Syberberg was cut into this.

Ha anyone see this? http://letterboxd.com/film/nietzsche-and-the-nazis/

As in the scenes lifted from Syberberg's Hitler.. showed this up as fairly inferior in comparison.

Can anyone recommend any good secondary literature on Holderlin's "On Judgment and Being"?

I'm out of my depth there, but maybe Dieter Heinrich's chapter "Holderlin on Judgment and Being: A Study in the History of the Origins of Idealism" in his essay collection The Course of Remembrance might be one place to start?

thanks for the rec -- that definitely helped quite a bit. I'm curious what else is out there as well -- its a very intriguing piece of work.

what does teh rolling philosophy thread think of carles' 'nothing matters'

feels derivative but ive only just started

An old prof of mine wrote this: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/what-alabamas-roy-moore-gets-right/?_r=0&pagewanted=all

I feel like the ontology of institutions being suggested here is a little simplistic, the idea that marriage_2 is simply a different institution from marriage_1. For one thing, the question "Is this the same institution or a new one?" seems perspective-relative. From our perspective, same-sex marriage may appear to be such a sharp break in the history of marriage that it has to be a new institution. But if a society that had no concept of marriage at all (pretend that they have accordingly different views of gender, family, and other concepts neighbouring on marriage) were to be taught about our institution(s) of marriage, same-sex marriage might not look like a significant change, or at least, not such a significant change as to offset everything that the two forms of marriage have in common.

I'm also not sure that "discarding the old institution," as opposed to modifying it, accurately describes what we want to do in introducing same-sex marriage - but I don't know, maybe we're deceived about what we want, or maybe this is just theoretical talk and doesn't need to impinge on anyone's everyday political consciousness.

hehe I know Brian

he's wrong that we can't change definitions at will though

I think what actually bugs me about this argument is the way it brushes over what might be the significance of our decision to use an old word in a new circumstance:

In our time, the word “marriage” is now undergoing a reference change. This is happening because of us, not the courts: we are making a social decision to apply an old word to a new institution. And why not? After all, it’s a better word than “schmarriage.”

Is he saying that it's basically arbitrary whether society decides to call the new institution marriage? That seems to deny something about the force that this word has for us. The fact that we continue to want to use the old word might be evidence that we haven't in fact transcended the old institution.

yeah it's not the word, but the concept expressed by that word, that matters. we can choose at any time to point the word "marriage" to a different concept. that's a weighty repointing, no doubt, but nothing more than repointing. the dynamics of such repointing are where the action is.

i see that Cambridge has finally published new translations of Hegel, but no Phenomenology yet:

http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/philosophy/philosophy-texts/series/cambridge-hegel-translations

I suppose there's no reason i can't start with The Science of Logic anyhow...

"...The Science of Logic is a very provocative and interesting book, inspiring thinking in directions not thought before."
--George Lăzăroiu, PhD, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, New York, Analysis and Metaphysics

hmm, yes...quite provocative.

who now

i have never heard of that institute before, but it's funny to think of some think-tank type coming across Hegel and thinking "well, this is pretty provocative and interesting!"