Rolling Philosophy

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.

what did you learn

i picked it up because of a fredric jameson shout out so i was simply curious about getting some background for what jameson is up to, but essentially the whole narrative about the development of world capitalism was all new to me. id have to go back and look at it to speak in any more detail, but i just found it an engaging read about a difficult (for me) topic.

nice. the two things i've read in that strain of leftist global political economy people are leo panitch & sam gindin "the making of global capitalism" (who position themselves against hardt & negri who i haven't read in emphasizing the deliberate making and not the inevitability of global capitalism) and robert brenner's essays, who is great imo. don't know much about arrighi but david harvey namedrops him multiple times in a blog post entertainingly smackdowned by brad delong (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/department-of-huh-in-praise-of-neoclassical-economics-department.html). i feel like hobsbaum is the one i most urgently need to read. also a lot of these dudes have been brought into mainstream economics through acemoglu & robinson, who i really like and wish they would engage with more but they still seem to have a chip on their shoulder about economists

yeah i am not competent to take sides in economics and economic history debates but it's extremely interesting to me.

arrighi quotes extensively from fernand braudel so it's possible a lot of the stuff that i found so interesting come from him as well.

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2408-90-off-all-ebooks-until-january-1st

arrighi has lots of original work i think that is conceptually influenced by braudel but unique to him -- i view it essentially as a political-economic history of the rise of capitalism that shifts the discussion away from the period of revolutions and the geographic centers of france and britain to the earlier first wave of industrial development, which grew up in the spaces opened up by the reformation, but in the midst of feudalism. i'd really like to find the time to reread it, especially in conjunction with anderson's lineages of the absolutist state.

anyway i dug this thread up to share this

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/philosophy-is-a-bunch-of-empty-ideas-interview-with-peter-unger.html

even though i think that people will just say "why would you share that nonsense"?

Read that a while ago, he is otm.

don't know anything about the author, but since he's at NYU I guess he makes a lot of money. I agree with him, and it's one of a bunch of reasons I left the USA. imo nothing worthwhile has been done in analytic philosophy since 1931.

tbh I've never read lewis, and I've only read two articles by kripke (one of them the truth one, so I guess it's famous, the other was a curiosity in a volume that I'd agree to write a review of).

over here in cheese land I taught a grad seminar last term on practical knowledge & we read a celebrated recent paper by a couple of famous anglo-american philosophers, who work at oxford and yale respectively, and I was shocked at how superficial it was. & this paper has generated a lot of literature, articles + books. & it's absolutely useless. I was/am totally shocked. the article can be condensed into a tweet, with justice. & these people are at the "top" of the anglo-american game.

What article was that?

thanks for that Unger link. definetely strikes the chord (semantic externalism for example..)

i just followed an analytical philosophy course, and even the text book (which mostly sang the praise of its own topic, obviously) seemed to conclude that analytical philosophy basically reached a dead end a long, long time ago. For example I always feel like analytical language philosophy is just on his way to re-inventing this beautiful thing called... natural language.

was an article on know how, should be clear enough?

Is it the 2001 Jason Stanley/Timothy Williamson paper? Blink once for yes, twice for no.

oui

sounds kinda cool. reminds me of polanyian 'tacit knowledge'

polanyi is cool, this is garbage

Can you actually condense the paper into 140 characters? That would save me having to read 35 pages.

Neither did Wittgenstein. He kept scribbling away! What stopped him from doing that was terminal cancer. Only cancer had that desired effect. But it also had some other undesired effects — namely, ending his life. (Laughter)

ah that sense of humour for which we philosophers are so well-known

by linguistic analogies, X knows how to F if and only if for some way w, X knows that X can F in way w, and X entertains w under a practical mode of presentation

That sounds like it excludes prereflective/un-self-conscious know-how. I might know how to do something just in the sense that I do it all the time, without ever thinking about the way I do it.

by linguistic analogies, X knows how to F if and only if for some way w, X knows that X can F in way w, and X entertains w under a practical mode of presentation

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, February 15, 2016 10:32 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this made me think of this classic paper http://www.dklevine.com/archive/refs4512.pdf