Rolling Philosophy

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

so here is an interesting question, to me at least -- at what historic point did "mathematicians, generally" cease to be interested in things involving logic/foundations.

Maybe its just a bad historical lens, but these things seemed to be things that people considered as part of the concerns of math through Hilbert's time. Was it really Godel at which point people just sort of collectively decided "well, that was fun and all but it really has nothing to do with studying differential forms on manifolds"? To the point where its not even really taught at an undergrad level? Or was it with forcing and the independence of the continuum hypothesis that set theory then spun out into its own weird specialized field of superinfinities and forcing variations?

did people consider them part of their concerns before, i dunno, the late 19th c?

working mathematicians in my u.g. department definitely regarded foundations work as utterly irrelevant to their areas (and in fact they had an undergrad logic course whose text included computability but they tended to save it for a fuller graduate-sequence-logic revisitation of same).

in brief
a) foundations as logic : never a big concern for mathematicians generally, even in the age of Hilbert and Gödel.

b) foundations as "how to organize and define well" : of steady interest.

so like the post-euler and -gauss mathematicians as abstract algebra developed being like, hey guyz… what are we even doing here exactly

yeah though algebra (modern and otherwise) was only ever a tool for doing number theory and geometry, so you can think of those mathematicians doing algebra as doing foundations: finding good, MODERN ways to organize

Thinking about getting this somewhat pricey but really attractive-looking Alan Turing collection but maybe I had better run it by Euler first.

Too late.

so along with foundations as logic and foundations as organization there's also "foundations as the theory of foundational structures" i.e. set theory and my question is about that too, i guess -- to what extent that has/hasn't been considered a sideline question as well, unrelated to "what mathematicians set out to do" except tangentially.

when you say that set theory is a "foundational structure", though, what sense of foundational do you have in mind? sets can be used to model various things, like groups and functions and varieties and categories etc. these models are themselves mathematical structures and one can theorize about them. but the facts we've gleaned in this theorizing about sets have not had much bearing on our theorizing about the things being modeled, groups and varieties etc.

why haven't these facts had much bearing on regular mathematics? it's an odd question, really, a kind of counterfactual. one way to think about it is by analogy with other modeling. say we have a physical model of a skyscraper, a physical model made of wood. we can study the physics of wood, for instance, but it doesn't seem obvious that this should have anything to do with the skyscraper that we modeled.

started galloway's laruelle book. i am actually sort of enjoying it! reading for "pleasure" so not exactly striving for total comprehension, but i feel like i am "getting" it more or less. i dont think laruelle's project is particularly groundbreaking or even worth pursuing (at least so far) but his idiosyncrasy makes me curious and there's an inherent value to that insofar as it brings a lot of other philosophical trends into relief, i think. im withholding judgment, but there's something off about his insistence on taking philosophy as ab object of thought (rather than doing philosophy) when his key terms seem taken wholesale from philosophy. at the same time there's something interesting about him because there's a really unfashionable resistance to any kind of reflexivity which makes his thought radically un-philosophical in that sense. like, providing the "conditions of possibility for non-philosophy" doesn't even seem to be on the radar! im tempted to call it some kind of avant garde language game, which you can decide to engage in or not, but there's no really philosophically compelling reasons to do so.

but as to how his thought offers anything better or different from, say, a sociological description philosophy as a social system, or a description of philosophy from the point of view of pragmatism (maybe the original "non-philosophy"), i dont think it does so far.

also galloway has led me to this book, which looks really interesting, though i dont know anything about the author: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0826464610/

Post-Continental Philosophy outlines the shift in Continental thought over the last 20 years through the work of four central figures: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and François Laruelle. Though they follow seemingly different methodologies and agendas, each insists on the need for a return to the category of immanence if philosophy is to have any future at all. Rejecting both the German phenomenological tradition of transcendence (of the Ego, Being, Consciousness, Alterity, or Flesh), as well as the French Structuralist valorisation of Language, they instead take the immanent categories of biology (Deleuze), mathematics (Badiou), affectivity (Henry), and axiomatic science (Laruelle) as focal points for a renewal of thought. Consequently, Continental philosophy is taken in a new direction that engages science and nature with a refreshingly critical and non-reductive approach to life, set-theory, embodiment, and knowledge. However, each of these new philosophies of immanence still regards what the other is doing as transcendent representation, raising the question of what this return to immanence really means. John Mullarkey's analysis provides a startling answer. By teasing out their internal differences, he discovers that the only thing that can be said of immanence without falling back into transcendent representation seems not to be a saying at all but a 'showing', a depiction through lines. Because each of these philosophies also places a special value on the diagram, the common ground of immanence is that occupied by the philosophical diagram rather than the word. The heavily illustrated final chapter of the book literally outlines how a mode of philosophical discourse might proceed when using diagrams to think immanence.

the laruelle book was a worthwhile read. the first part of his project--call it the "critical" part--is quite convincing (though i think you can get it from other, and more familiar, places). the second part--the non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy part--is much less so, especially insofar as it seems to be based on a notion of "withdrawing" from the philosophical decision. not sure how this avoids a kind of reversible notion of decision, however, which would seem to undercut his point (rather than an irreversible one in which the decision is already made). but his meditations on identity are just weird enough to be interesting and i think i will continue to check out more of his stuff, particularly the marxism book (though this now seems to be from an earlier part of his development). in sum there's a kind of familiar fear of impurity at work in his thought, or to be even more vague maybe a fear of being "seen" or observed in the act of observing or making the decisional "cut" that makes observing possible in the first place.