Rolling Philosophy

Forgot to say 'hauntologie' is also a term from Derrida.

trust me it would be

Busy modernists often hire ghostmodernists to serve as uncredited coauthor.

Anyone seen this thing? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379028/

Apparently there's a scene in it of Cavell, Danto, and Morgenbesser playing in a meadow while arguing about the external world.

there was some talk a ways back about deleuze and expression, of which i was reminded when i picked up this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Search-Image-Thought-Philosophical-Expressionism/dp/0816678030/

not sure when i'll have time to read it (my quest to understand deleuze remains a faltering yet ongoing project), but thought it may be of interest to the thread.

in other news i order Hans Blumenberg's gigantic "Work on Myth" and im really excited to read it. "Legitimacy of the Modern Age" is probably on my short list of favorite books by this point.

work on work on myth

about 2/3 of way through "the universe of things" and it's very readable and interesting, though i think it's managed to turn me off to OOO and whitehead.

has anyone read Lee Braver's "A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism"? I think im gonna try to skim through it next.

skimmed a bit

read some of his heidegger/wittgenstein book too, seemed worth reading through (just haven't had a good time to yet)

i think he's doing good stuff

Anyone seen this thing? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379028🔗/

Apparently there's a scene in it of Cavell, Danto, and Morgenbesser playing in a meadow while arguing about the external world.

Basically what philosophers did in the sixties.

Yeah, yeah

[Jpsartre.jpeg]
Yé-yé

Yeah, yeah

Morgenbesser

the introduction to "A Thing of This World" is kind of a perfect little summary of philosophy from Kant to Heidegger. looking forward to the rest. he seems like a clear-headed type.

Braver quotes Hilary Putnam to the effect of it being impossible to find a philosopher before Kant who is not a metaphysical realist. i had never considered this but it's interesting, especially since it recasts the period between Descartes and Kant as one of transition from the medieval to the modern, rather than Descartes as the first modern.

yeah i think there's been a lot of interesting work lately questioning just how well the idea of descartes as the first modern holds, e.g. alain de libera's stuff about when the modern subject actually appears (short answer: either significantly before descartes or significantly after descartes).

just looked up De Libera and his stuff looks awesome but i can't read french because i suck. (i can more or less make out the titles of his books though.)

my biggest regret so far in life is that if i was gonna make the catastrophic decision to go to grad school i should have gone for intellectual history.

but Kant was a metaphysical realist!

For a minute I thought instead of "Kant" you typed "Karl."

the entry on 'subject' from dictionary of untranslatables that de libera wrote with etienne balibar and barbara cassin is a good introduction to his deal - http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/files_mf/rp138_article1_vocabularyofeuropeanphilosophiespart1.pdf

that looks awesome--thanks!

Isn't Berkeley an anti-realist?

it's being used in a specialized sense so Berkeley would still count as a realist: since ideas are all there is, we are definitely up to knowing what they are. if there was a sliding scale I imagine he might be more of a realist than Descartes, who at least entertains the possibility of skepticism!

well

Berkeley is not a materialist but he is a theist so he does have positive metaphysical acceptances too

Euler do you mean Kant is a metaphysical realist because of the proof of an external world or for some other reason?

well there is that

but I had in mind his commitment to noumena

and in the Prolegomena:

There are things given to us as objects of our senses existing outside us, yet we know nothing of them as they may be in themselves, but are acquainted only with their appearances, i.e. with the representations that they produce in us because they affect our senses. Accordingly, I by all means avow that there are bodies outside us, i.e. things which, though completely unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves, we know through the representations which their influence on our sensibility provides for us, and to which we give the name of a body—which word therefore merely signifies the appearance of this object that is unknown to us but is nonetheless real. Can this be called idealism? It is the very opposite of it.

cool--thanks!

I mean it's a controversial point & my view is owed to my graduate training where my teacher was/is a defender of this line but there are texts like this, what can you say

the de libera / étienne balibar / barbara cassin article linked above is really good & helpful to me! it seems to me a very characteristic example of good contemporary French philosophy : highly dependent upon readings of historical texts, not surprising since the three authors are historians of philosophy. if it's armchair philosophy then it's an armchair in a bibliothèque rather than in some office.

^agreed, good article & relevant to my interests
much of the medieval stuff was new to me
was familiar with balibar’s fondness for the subject(ed) ‘pun’ from his essay in this book
http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1266915545l/1871607.jpg
it’s somewhat idiosyncratic yet i think productive way to frame genealogy of the term

my own bias feels omission of hellenistic (esp stoic) philosophy, imo pivotal to story of the subject
but that may be due to project’s genealogical focus on ‘words’ rather than ‘concepts’

zat a review of a book from our boy ryan i see today??? looks like

big ups

haha yes. thanks. it's kind of an odd review but nice to be noticed!

I'm still working my way through the lee braver book and I really admire it. it's quite exhaustive and looks like it must have been a ton of work but it offers some of the best readings of Heidegger I've read.

this is 'thing' or the later one?

a thing of this world. going slow but all I got left is the derrida chapter.

got this announcement for this year's Spinoza seminar at Paris 8 & thought it a quite instructive text on the essence of French philosophy: ongoing engagement with historical texts. (well, it's my translation.) I was thinking more about the text that someone here posted on the subject, and how all three of the authors of that text are historians of philosophy, but in France that's more or less a prerequisite for doing contemporary philosophy. & how different that is from much of the Anglo-American world. anyway I like this description (though I probably won't attend the seminar).

"The figure of Spinoza has been presented from the start of the creation of the university (Paris 8). Spinoza was for Delouse "the Christ of the philosophers". Badiou, in some recent interviews, says that he is ever drawing closer to a Spinozian vision of the subjectification and of the affects of joy, of which he takes account in the material of the third volume of Being and Event. The confrontation of theses of Foucault and of Spinoza is now better and better understood. The reflection of Rancière on democratic "setbacks", or the analyses of Lyotard (for example in Why Philosophize?) cross, intersect, discuss the theses of Spinoza."

ah haha thanks autocorrect, Delouse is Deleuze of course. and really it should be "the figure of Spinoza has been present from the start...". blah.

haha ^ it me

inventing the future can fuck right off and stop taking up 2/3 of my social media feeds

just read Sloterdijk's "Terror From the Air" and was impressed with it in some respects. It's very "high concept" (have no idea if that analogy works in philosophy but maybe you get my meaning anyway) and something about it feels very of the moment, particularly with regard to current events around ideas like "safe spaces" and the more or less background hum of racism etc. which is becoming more and more the focal point of what Sloterdijk would call the "explicative" process which he sees as central to modernity: that is, making the implicit conditions of things explicit.

Euler, do you work on Spinoza?

I finally got brave/foolhardy and wrote an essay on Francis Bacon and Spinoza for a forthcoming edited collection, kind of terrifying to make claims about Spinoza in print, but I ran my reading by my colleague Y1tshak M3lam3d first.

I taught a grad seminar on Spinoza but I'm not presently working on him. What's the collection on?

it's an "affect theory and early modernity" collection, trying to connect contemporary writing in affect theory and new materialism with its renaissance precursors / alternatives etc. mostly literature folks I know from the lit crit / shakespeare mafia, but I'm super excited because Susan Jam3s is writing the afterword

sounds rad! Learning Spinoza has been my uncoding of a lot of discourses

Do lit people think about Alexander Pope anymore? there are intersections there wrt to "great chain of being" and Spinozist immanence

from Terror From the Air. not sure I can unpack all this but he does seem to be putting his finger on something:

When everything is latently able to be contaminated and poisoned, when everything is potentially deceptive and suspect, neither totality nor the possibility of being a Whole can any longer be inferred from external circumstances. No longer can integrity be thought of as something that is obtained through devotion to the benevolent surroundings, but instead only as the individual effort of an organism's concern with demarcating itself out from its environment. This paves the way for a new motif of thought without which the modern economy of ideas would be inchoate: namely, the idea according to which life insists less in its being-there, by its participation in the whole, but instead by its stabilization through self-closure and the selective refusal of participation. To describe this as the fundamental thought for a post-metaphysical or differently-metaphysical civilization is not saying too little. Its psychosocial trace manifests itself in the shock of naturalism, a shock whereby the culture that sheds biological light on itself learns to pass from a fantasmatic ethics of universal, peaceful coexistence to an ethics of the antagonistic protection of the interests of finite unities...

vmic topic but i think other ppl might find this interesting:
http://schlemielintheory.com/2015/11/24/jews-1931-wittgensteins-marginalia-on-jews-jewishness-and-reproductive-jewish-thought/

I’ve read some philosophy this year.

I read pretty much all of Graham Harman’s books. I’m currently in the middle of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. Last Meillassoux book (in translation) coming in today. Haven’t touched Grant yet but I plan on doing so.

I read that Inventing the Future book from Verso.

I’ve read some Žižek.

Verso is doing a sale thing right now btw: http://www.versobooks.com

I already bought The Ticklish Subject and might get (at least) Less Than Nothing too.

a great Verso book is Giovanni Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century"--i learned a lot from that book.