Rolling Philosophy

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

if you're talking to me about russell etc lemme make it clear I didn't have those bores guys in mind, was thinking more Poincaré and Hausdorff and Gödel though maybe those are a bit early for you. but I'm sure you've got enough reading already in your queue, I'm just bored with nearly everything written about Quine like, ever. kinda feel like in 100 years Quine'll be as central to making sense of things as, I dunno, Natorp or Milhaud

but I've been writing about Malebranche so who am I to talk

haha fair enough. i think for my other concerns there is probably reason to mark a cutoff after that earlier stage. probably the justification for it would relate to the differences between a scientific stance toward the issues and an independent-person stance toward them; the people i have in mind have just enough 'social' in their thought to make the latter a thing. but it does seem that part of the larger reasons for the grouping i have in mind being possible, is that they have related attitudes (quine being the outlier useful for that reason) toward the hegemony of the scientific worldview. and there's a cognate possibility i'm not considering, but that i would expect to see flourishing in the scientific thought/philosophy from the 1850s up til WW1 (not that i'm too familiar with it), connected with the figure of the heroic scientist. just possibly.

i read quine early in my education (my first u.g. analytic survey v.a.p. must have been big on him) and figured i didn't have any interest in doing anything like it, and it had become so old had by that time that it really didn't play a prominent role in my program. but going back to him i did feel like he represented an invisible hand or dark body that would have clarified a lot that was on the agenda, pedagogically, if my program had just gone and started treating the 1900-1960s history properly, as history, with quine a useful part of the story of 'now'.

the s.e.p.'s bit on quine's place in history is hilariously useless.

another way to put it is that my project is really about making sense of my own history, and quine happens to be the representative in it of 'that stuff'

would like to know what you'd make of Bourbaki

very little, for some reason they never figured into much i encountered as an ug or grad student when i was studying philosophy of math. though they certainly seem to be working in the proper spirit to have been right up in the stuff i did do.

do you happen to know what the arguments are for + against poincare's claim that newton's first law is a convention and not an empirical law?

À bas Euclide ! Mort aux triangles !

Which Quine are you actually reading? Can't speak to his Place In Philosophy, but Quiddities is a lot of fun. Library has a copy of his autobiography, which is gödelodawful, based on a brief flip-through.

Speaking of Kurt G

word+object

j. i think we may have even discussed this book before but this may interest you if you don't already know it: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1138016764/

i haven't read it but i've been eyeing it for a long time!

i think we might have - in the meantime it's finally come out in paperback, nearly getting affordable. i've never seen it because of the cost but i've heard livingston talk, i thought he was good.

ok j I was asking what you would make of Bourbaki now, after having come to see things as you do after yr philosophical life. I ask b/c you've clearly been trained analytically but with eyes on other ways of thinking as well. & thought their explicit modernism might be of interest to you, maybe as a bridge between the concealments of Quine & the no nonsense of the more au courant mathematicians (Bourbaki saw themselves as radicals & a radical isn't really au courant by definition). anyway The Architecture of Mathematics is a good example of what I have in mind.

haha im just sayin, there's a lot to read that i'm completely ignorant about!! so i dunno. i'll look at this.

how much of an open secret was it that 'n.b.' was a pseudonym for a group?

and do you know why they had a mandatory age of retirement from the group?

Dieudonné regularly and spectacularly threatened to resign unless topics were treated in their logical order, and after a while others played on this for a joke. Godement's wife wanted to see Dieudonné announcing his resignation, and so on one occasion while she was there Schwartz deliberately brought up again the question of permuting the order in which measure theory and topological vector spaces were to be handled, to precipitate a guaranteed crisis.

odd to read that right after v. woolf talking about 'spiritualist' (not 'materialist') writers

well not THAT

in France Bourbaki's being a collective was well-known, though the membership was in flux. I don't know about retirement age; just about new blood maybe? I don't think there were texts coming out for enough years for a retirement age to matter.

& yeah I don't know that this is worth your time now but I don't know that it's not, just wanted to observe that Quine was a weird dude who underplayed his roots or maybe even didn't think much about the tradition in which he was rooted, and accordingly spoke ill of it, as analytic philosophers in the Anglo-American world are wont to do. & if you wanted to look at those roots then Bourbaki is a more aware source; though not interested in the empirical world, they are interested in word and object, or for them, word and structure. which is what Quine ends up with too, in a manner of speaking at least.

(don't have anything to contribute atm but just want to say, j., your project sounds v interesting)

(thx drash)

i have to read still but i'm not sure where i see the modernism. but as an analytical category it's at least as terrible as every other historical/quasi-historical period term, and there are a lot of no-questions instances of modernism in various arts that don't match the characterizations that fit my preferred examples (think beckett, schoenberg, blank canvases and monochromes). frankly i still don't know how best to deal with those, mainly for the reasons you're (euler) suggesting, that there are fine instances of philosophical modernism that don't issue in the same kind of aporias-of-tradition what-next-ness that a wittgenstein or an adorno can seem to. one needn't reduce modernism in the arts to that by any means, but it does seem to be one of the more useful ways of reducing away a bunch of issues that retrospectively look more local / technical (like about the status of particular norms of representation, particular requirements of plot or narration, whatever), to get at a defining difference. when you look retrospectively at advances in philosophy that were friendly to modern logic, a lot of them start to seem like very late stages of cartesian-derived E+M. even when you throw in a separate strand of 19th c. research in semantics. which is maybe why 'two dogmas' could make the waves it did; no matter what else had changed in the meantime, even for philosophers with up-to-date logical tools and even for empiricists who might've been thought to give less of a shit how well they could ground distinctions between 'empirical' and 'non-empirical' - the basic tradition was largely the same through the transformations.

i like how candid quine is about not thinking about his tradition. what does an empiricist care!!!

"the basic tradition" : you mean Anglo-American tradition, I gather. it stayed the same because they were all conservative bores! Quine's as close to a radical as you can get, not least for eschewing argumentation in favor of polemic in that tradition.

in other words: better you than me.

In other news, did not know Serge Lang was Bourbaki until this weekend.

Nor Laurent Schwartz.

we are all bourbaki

euler admittedly i have a very anglo-german view of 'the tradition', and of most traditions. reading nietzsche is generally as close as i usually come to encountering the french, haha.

Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous tous sommes bourbaki.

Ok re France but too bad! Though I find most Anglophone philosophers are rather ignorant of French traditions and French philosophers are not entirely unhappy with that

i blame my ancestors

also the french, for not doing enough to seize the world stage w/ their thorts after 1800 and before 1940s

this sounds like a really cool project. my intuitive way of linking philosophy and modernism is indeed through french ppl and the "think beckett, schoenberg, blank canvases and monochromes" area of things, so it's intriguing to see it being articulated through what feels like another world entirely

it's interesting how various kinds of formalism seem to be returning to prominence. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10392.html is just the latest of a small deluge of books i've seen in the area that i'll hopefully be reading once i can permit myself to be influenced by new ideas again