Rolling Philosophy

reading some eckart förster so i can go chill w/ a reading groop tmrrw - j. five months ago.

I presume this was "the 25 years of philosophy." what did you think? can someone with only a broad understanding of Kant/Hegel get something out of this book or is it just for specialists?

it's not for specialists - aims at a pretty high-level historical retelling that's meant to be revisionary for many readers - but some parts are a bit rough going, e.g. the fichte chapters

just doing the first hegel chapter tonite for our next meeting

im often overcome by this feeling that i dont know kant/hegel *well enough* and while im all for primary texts i wanted to find a good secondary text to dip my toes in the water.

this one has a very specific purpose, sometimes boringly so

but it is relevant to your german idealist interests?

but will not seem to go too deep at many points, as it's more concerned about lining up the basics in the exactly right way

re kant e.g. i think you will feel that you already know what F is telling you, he's just moving it around

i suppose i could stop being a wimp and dig out my old undergraduate copy of the first critique.

i reread a good chunk of it w/ the first part of F, it was good. he leans heavily on the A/B history, so i tried to read only the A version (which all existing translations make a pain in the ass btw).

yeah my cambridge edition combined them in some complicated scheme.

i search "kant hegel" on amazon and came across this: http://www.amazon.com/Logic-Limits-Philosophy-Kant-Hegel/dp/1137521740/

looks interesting!

surprised to find that the dictionary def of 'inwardness' is

inwardness |ˈinwərdnəs|
noun
preoccupation with one's inner self; concern with spiritual or philosophical matters rather than externalities.

i don't know why i never attached that reflexive self-concerned-with- aspect to it before, given ol kierkegaard and all, must have just always imagined it to be a fuzzy inner-life noun, what a sad cartesian i must be

i am probably going to read some, perhaps even a lot, of kant this year. should i just stick w/ the cambridge editions of whatever books i decide to read? are they generally the best english translations available, or am i going to have to cherry pick between different translators/series/whatever if i want the best possible english translation of each book? (maybe i should just stick with this serious for every book anyway, even if each volume isn’t the best)

preoccupation with one's inner self; concern with spiritual or philosophical matters rather than externalities.

this is interesting. particularly insofar as the first part comes to be the opposite of the second part. James writes a lot about "inwardness" but his idea of it is perhaps a little too squirrelly to fit well into that definition--inwardness less as a subject and more feeling qua feeling, immediacy, and a concern for spirituality against the dogma of religion or "philosophical matters."

i would be interested in the answer to markers question as well. was just gonna go with my old cambridge editions.

i read An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought a month or so ago, and ever since i've been pondering similar ideas, the decline or collapse of the subject concurrent with what you could call an "externalization" of theory/philosophy, even to the point of explicitly expunging consciousness.

re kant, i think sticking with the cambridge editions is a safe bet, though i think the scholarship has been good enough for long enough now that there aren't really any egregiously bad translations widely available, and there are arguments to be made for the other translations (e.g. readability versus scholarly depth and precision) but none of them very decisive

i say pick the least heavy to carry

if you're talking about the blue Cambridge editons edited by Guyer and Wood, then yeah, those are the best English translations right now, from the best current manuscript copies. I don't know older Cambridge editions; the only other recent English standard is Kemp Smith, and that's considered out of date at this point.

my biggest problem with the cambridge edition of the first critique is that weird giant forehead painting of him they use for the cover. i wish he was cooler looking. like maybe a righteous mustache a la nietzsche.

that's like wishing descartes books would use the fakey hero portrait of him rather than the (accurate) skeezy uncle portrait

http://api.ning.com/files/ojSCGs3jvX0HdP7fskLRFSgVQEt9Tsbmw7QklU8gUEcTr8exS-ucOUkbyEkkCB6gagWROC6TbBZtKBg*g6nfL5zmLlSFUG1L/descarteslookingfly.png

thing is, i think the particular painting of kant at issue is the hero portrait!

I like this one.

http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/assets/aa_image/700/9/a/b/2/9ab27cf5251c3b2fccaf0a6bbde81e636239fb7e.jpg

hero = forehead full of distinctions

My favorite image of Kant to date:

https://thinkingthroughimages.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/dg-1.jpg

https://thinkingthroughimages.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/dg-2.jpg

[My apologies for the size of the images there.]

I love the following letter of Pell about the time he hung out with Descartes in Amsterdam:

Last Thirsday Des Cartes came into our Auditory and heard me reade, though when I had done he excused it, saying yt if his guide had known my chamber so well as my publike houre and place, he would rather have come thither to me: he went with me to my lodging, where we had long discourse of Mathematicall matters, though I sought not so much to speake myselfe as to give him occasion to speake.

they hung out at a bar but the big D said he'd rather go to his "lodging" and have "long discourse". then they shared a joint.

thanks, m. & euler. i will probably go with them.

I started reading the textbook Semantics in Generative Grammar on the weekend. I want to get back into phil of language. I've studied a lot of standard stuff (disproportionate amounts of Davidson) but feel like I don't know enough about linguistics and internalist semantics. This book is fun although so far it's been suspending philosophical questions to concentrate on setting out the rules of the game of formal semantics.

has anyone been reading anything interesting lately? anything new out there worth checking out? (in either straight up philosophy or "theory and criticism") I've been seeing McKenzie Wark's "Molecular Red" popping up a lot, but for some reason i decided to read his book on the situationist's--"The Beach Beneath the Streets"--instead since it seemed like a somewhat breezy break from my self-appointed task to work through all of Jameson's stuff.

I have to say it put me off of reading "Molecular Red"--it's flimsy, i thought, and filled with the worst sort of thing that some contemporary theorists do that drives me nuts: string together cool-sounding ideas and present them as if no one has ever had these thoughts before, and pretend that what you're saying proposes is, if not a break itself, then the possibility of a break with all that has gone before. i think this sort of thing gets publishers to throw book contracts at you but damn is it ever tedious.

maybe im just grumpy...

yeah i think that kind of approach has been wark's thing for a long time now. though i do know people who like him, and his review of laruelle's introduction to non-marxism makes it sound interesting (http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/04/laruelle1/#.VUJRaflVhBc), so maybe i too am grumpy.

i am sitting on galloway's book on laruelle, dont know why. it fills me with dread when i look at it.

myself i'm reading nothing but thesis shit atm but i hear that toscano and kinkle's cartographies of the absolute is good

i still hold out hope of one day actually getting what laruelle is doing (and the wark review hints towards that in a way i hadn't really felt before), but maybe now six years after first hearing someone speak about him it's a lost cause

cartographies of the absolute looks great! in line with my jameson obsessions at the moment...

i'm reading quine.

working on a project on modernism in philosophy and trying to figure out an angle to take on him.

that's a very interesting topic. looking forward to anything that comes of it!

from the Wark review: "The Real is heterogeneous to thought and yet determines it"---like, is this really a "new" or original thought? what am i missing.

I try to read nothing new, which makes me a slow referee

xp yeah my experience with laruelle is still largely not being able to distinguish what he's doing from what others have done, punctuated with the occasional microscopic glimpse of what it is that's exciting in there. i think that review points towards something interesting about philosophy not merely being external to but actually detrimental to other practices articulating themselves (which itself i think is at least implied by others, guattari's asignifying semiotics coming immediately to mind), though i'm not sure (and maybe this is a barrier to my understanding) to what extent laruelle manages to be anything but just another philosopher doing philosophy

that's all them motherfuckers

i ordered cartographies of the absolute along with bruce clarke's neocybernetics and narrative, which i really should have read by now--he's one of a handful of guys working in the same general area that i consider myself to be in (to the extent someone like me can be said to be a part of anything in that world).

I'm waiting for this to arrive: http://www.amazon.ca/Dreamland-Humanists-Warburg-Cassirer-Panofsky/dp/022606168X

It looks potentially cool. I don't know much about this milieu. I've only really read about Cassirer in Michael Friedman's Parting of the Ways.

j, how do you define modernism in philosophy? Just by association with corresponding artistic movements, it seems like it could cover an extremely wide swath of stuff, from Kierkegaard to Vienna Circle. It also makes me think of Cavell, who sometimes seems to be claiming Wittgenstein as a kind of modernist philosopher, though there too I'm not sure I could say exactly what he means.

yes that is why i am working on it

i am looking for a sensible translation of 'exhaustion of conventions' modernism in the arts/criticism into philosophy that is done in terms of philosophy's own conventions and preserves its autonomy; but which does suppose that superficially modernist texts (style, fragmentary structure, proliferating personas or unconventional voicing techniques, etc) express a properly philosophical modernism that would be distinct from whatever other candidates i could find that are nevertheless fairly conventional in form (like, i dunno, james, bergson? that's something i need to think about more, but i feel it would mean reading lots of things i don't want to read, and that would also make it harder to make my point, ha)

sadly on my model kierkegaard fits it quite well, but i don't have time to read a shitload of kierkegaard. been mostly centering on the interwar period, a bit before and the decade or two after. (so, marking out cavell's own milieu, basically)

(basically, i want to claim that they're modernist in the one way because they're modernist in the other way)

if you're taking in Quine are you talking about logic as a modernism too? there's been some work on that but you probably aren't gonna want to read it either; but imo it's key to making sense of Quine (inasmuch as that's worth doing, which I gather you're deciding if it is)

well ol W is in there too so i may have to. definitely very close to all my concerns. for other reasons i was thinking more of quine as a potential contrasting case, working in the same region but for whatever reasons not concerned with the problems that would make one come out as a modernist.

cavell occasionally contrasts modernists with 'modernizers' (w/o saying much ever abt what that might entail), seems like quine might slot well under there

'welp don't need THIS anymore… let's get a new onea THESE… set you right up here'

yeah I don't know Cavell at all...well I heard a talk on him last week, on something about Walden, but that's really all I know (& I didn't really follow it)

but there are formalist turns in logic and mathematics at the turn of the 20th century & some of the people behind those turns are conscious of modernist movements in the arts as they push mathematics further. Quine is coming after all this but not by long. but imo his take on the analytic/synthetic "distinction" makes more sense in the context of those changes (& thus ditto for Word and Object).

I remember this being interesting, though I don't recall much about the specifics: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1343765?uid=3739448&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21106254733681

It may have been this article in which I recall reading something about the links between utopian goals in architecture (through, for instance, transparency in the design of government buildings) and the kind of transparency sought by ideal language philosophers.

apropos of nothing, just remembered that I first learned about pre-Socratics from this gentleman.

yeah jmm i haven't logged in to read that yet (mighta downloaded it once) but there's an old line on wittgenstein like that, ideal-language-philosophy aside, from janik and toulmin that associates W with the rest of his viennese milieu, including architectural modernists like loos - wouldn't be surprised if it popped up in later pages. janik and toulmin argue it in terms of problems of expressibility/honesty/clarity across the intellectual disciplines in light of the oppressive state of imperial culture and politics of the time.

read an unconvincing but useful book on quine recently that did make a good case for locating him as the apotheosis of the early analytics' project. but really he'd just be a convenience for me, got a fairly systematic 'work' that's in the right ballpark, nominally accommodates some relationship between everyday life / ordinary language and philosophy, and has just enough weird style going on to make the hermeneutically-minded suspicious. kinda wanna get away from reading russell and carnap and schlick and whoever over and over again.

heidegger and adorno and ge moore are also in this project, i should say

so it is taking a decidedly oblique approach to the history