Rolling Philosophy

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.

has anyone read this benjamin bio?
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674051866/

xxp yeah post-continental philosophy is a quite interesting book, it's a bit disappointing that jm never went further with his theory of diagrams, which is really only tentatively sketched in that book. he along with ray brassier were among the first people to be writing about laruelle in english and that's now very much his thing, for better or worse. he has a new book coming out in a few months - https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/all-thoughts-are-equal/

looks good! series editor for both that book and the galloway book was my dissertation chair. lots of good books in that series (of course i say that).

given my interest in peirce and george spencer-brown im *very* interested in what his graphs/diagrams look like.

a sneak preview 4 u

http://i.imgur.com/I9ottge.jpg

though there aren't many of his own, it's mostly reproductions of other people's

btw what do you think of chatelet? i saw a talk on him recently that was v interesting and featured this impressive diagram:

https://commonsensecollective.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/the-process-of-formalisation.jpg?w=650

ooh nice. i think im gonna have to read that post-continental book asap.

are you talking about gilles chatelet? i only literally just heard of him the other day. To Live and Think Like Pigs? that's a pretty cool diagram!

"the pulp of the sensible" <<<<>>>>"the wild heart of mathematics."

that's the chatelet yeah. i think that diagram is from (or derived from) his figuring space: philosophy, mathematics and physics

i don't know anything about philosophy but my favourite hyper-nerdy economics blog has a post about an economics paper written by peirce (!), whose name i recognized from lurking this thread

https://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/note-on-the-theory-of-the-economy-of-research-c-s-peirce-1879/

peirce pops up in the weirdest places! i am not a terribly intelligent person so thinking/writing about any philosopher is hard for me, but peirce is a special case because he was something of a genius in fields that i cannot hope to ever even scratch the surface of.

i'll stop cluttering up the thread with laruelle stuff after this post, but here's a review of the galloway book by John Ó Maoilearca that's a pretty good summary.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/galloways-non-digital-introduction-to-laruelle

one last thought is that the laruellean description of philosophy is incredibly reductive and eurocentric (actually, maybe even franco-centric) to the extent that any claim to "non-standard philosophy" (claims that often boil down to a repeated assurance that this is *not* philosophy, honest!) strike me as re-discovering the wheel. we have plenty of discourses that are not beholden to philosophy or its "sufficiency"--why adopt this one and not another? it's less non-philosophy than an attempt at super-philosophy, that is, modern philosophy through and through, always surpassing and outbidding. (this is incidentally why i think Merdeyeux's intuition that the marxism stuff is most interesting is true because it takes non-philosophy as a particular way of reading philosophy!)

read steven shaviro's "three essays on accelerationism," which was sorta ok but nothing special, but it did make me think this accelerationism stuff is pretty stupid (shaviro is agnostic on it).

does that mean you can tell us what it is now

it is what you think it is, pretty much! let's hurry up and get to the collapse of capitalism, already.

oh i thought they were like some singularity people

human enhancement, that ish

oh yes that does come up as well. i guess in a broader sense it's about taking the effects of modernity (however you want to describe it) and trying your damnedest to encourage those developments in the hopes of an exit from modernity. (modernity being my own term here). "the only way out is through" is shaviro's general description.

so yeah the singularity types fit in as well--rather than hold on to some notion of the human you simply embrace the cyborg you're becoming.

what else is hot shit these days in the philosophy/theory world? let's say im interested in the "contemporary" theoretical scene.

was actually gonna pick up shaviro's other recent book on OOO, but boy i really hate that stuff. feel like his position as a relative outsider will make it palatable.

amazon has really been pushing bernard stiegler, wendy brown, and brian massumi on me. (the massumi i think because he mentions luhmann in passing and im always searching for new books that mention him, haha).

If you're interested, j., #ACCELERATE anthology does a decent job of tracing out the main lines of development in accelerationist thought and its most important precursors, and its table of contents and introduction are available online: http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_accelerate.php. I'm still fairly skeptical of the accelerationist project: given the history of the left since Reagan and Thatcher, I'm not sure the old proposal for "heightening the contradictions" of capitalist modernity is necessarily that useful for socialist or communist organizing.

Benjamin Noys is also worth reading on the topic, I think: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/crash-and-burn-debating-accelerationism/

...or, at least, everything rests on what "heightening the contradictions" means in practice, and the accelerationist version seems bound to an aesthetics of technological novelty in a way that fails to open up new possibilities for the left.

yeah that's just the thing--it's hard to distinguish it from previous "avant garde" positions, really. that's aside from the very dubious assertion that the disequilibrium of a capitalist modernity implies some sort of equilibrium on other side--or if not equilibrium then some pure alternative. i feel like the whole irony of it is that they don't want to get their hands dirty and stake a position that may, in some respect, prop up capital: "if i gotta participate, then im gonna participate so hard the whole things collapses." i think, on the contrary, most measures are half-measures, at best.

nina power's critique of accelerationism nails it imo http://fillip.ca/content/decapitalism-left-scarcity-and-the-state

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/a-marxist-heresy also good (tho you need a subscription)

great links, thanks!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8650728-being-and-time

i've been using goodreads lately again, mostly to see how it works with my kindle. it's interesting to read the community reviews of a book like 'being and time'. i noticed that an eminently qualified friend who does crazy continental formalistic post-badiou metalogic/physics prudently demurred from reviewing it despite loving it, which is maybe the way it is with scholars. so what you get is hundreds of fairly frank non-expert encapsulations and reader-responses that highlight reception issues (difficulty duh) and rely on the most salient takeaways and the readiest secondary-source helpmeets, and aren't ashamed to take a stab at articulating why the book is supposed to be of actual, like, human interest.

i dunno, it kind of feels like overhearing what students could make of things years after school, when the teacher's not in the room to bring out the worst in them / serve his or her suppressive function

some are idiosyncratic

the dynamic of the book is very musical, it seemed to me. drone-like. as if the loooong sounds are repeated and repeated again, creating a texture which changes your "mood" - your "attunement" - making you able to see how a new "ground" is disclosed.

that said, one must appreciate the application of husserlian technique to the ancient rhetoric. that's cool. however: the greasiness of H-bomb opening the entire thing here with the disingenuous lament that 'OH NOS no one ever thought of the problem of Being before me, but got confused by examining mere beings!!1" is kinda gross insofar as every asshole opens with the complaint that no one ever pays attention to what i think is important. (we note that it is a standard refrain in ayn rand's writings, and leads us to diagnose a severe dunning-kruger complex, in addition to the stirnerian proto-fascistic self-oriented kvetching.)

haha those are both great.

B&T maybe a unique case because it's at once a pretty abstruse and technical book and something a philosophical layman will have heard of and be interested in reading. i bet anti-oedipus and being and nothingness have pretty interesting reviews as well.

yes i was planning on trawling thru the thousand plateaus reviews next, expecting to find a bit more enthusiastic partisanship

lol i just did that

anyone have any recommendations for a really good secondary texts on foucault? one that focused on the "later" foucault in particular (biopolitics) would be most appreciated, but all are good.

well, anglo nerds usually reach for the dreyfus and rabinow volume, not sure what its status is nowadays among hedz

i've read and been impressed by arnold davidson's book on sexuality, which majorly features foucault (though iirc more of the clinicalization period stuff than you may want, than on the lectures, tho i can't remember for sure and davidson has been all over the english reception of the lectures anyway)

maybe johanna oksala's foucault, politics, and violence? i haven't read it but i often hear her work mentioned when that period of foucault is being discussed

thanks guys. I will check those out.

the only one i could think of myself was jeffrey nealon's "foucault beyond foucault."

Did you ever read Deleuze's Foucault? It's unsurprisingly dense but consistently weird and provocative. Also, this may be tertiary reading, but Wendy Brown's new book, Undoing the Demos, takes Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics lectures as her starting point for her analysis of neoliberalism. (I haven't read it yet, but the chapters I've heard delivered as lectures were promising.) I've also heard good things about Lynne Huffer's Mad About Foucault, which is supposed to try to rethink Foucault's relation to queer theory on the basis of his early work in his History of Madness.

*Mad for Foucault, that is

ooh those are some good ones! thanks

Oh, and it's a little repetitive from one chapter to the next, and more a text using Foucault than a text on Foucault, but I found Dean Spade's Normal Life useful in drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality to think about the limits of rights-centered approaches to trans politics.

ok just one more: any good secondary texts on agamben?