Rolling Philosophy

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

they say that propositional knowledge doesn't demand explicit awareness of the content of that proposition, to handle that sort of objection

I have limited standing to disagree with Euler on this, but I have found myself again and again being won over by contemporary papers in analytic philosophy. Haven't read the paper you're reducing to a tweet, Euler, but I find that reading this kind of work opens my mind to the fact that I use natural language very unreflectively and it seems inherently worthwhile to think carefully about what I mean when I say things. Even if the conclusion is that any account of what I mean is badly lacking!

I mean, maybe you mean "that line of work is important and worthwhile but the papers you're reading are helplessly and obsessively relitigating ground that was already settled in 1931," which is totally possible and I wouldn't know.

no I don't mean the second thing, by 1931 I mean Gödel. reflection on natural language usage seems to me a very low payoff kind of activity in comparison with THE MEANING OF LIFE and I can't abide its lack of ambition. like Gödel was considering can every problem be solved? & nowadays it's like "but does there necessarily exist an object that is a fusion of a wolf and a dirty sock". I mean ok but what's the payoff?

lol

reflection on natural language usage seems to me a very low payoff kind of activity in comparison with THE MEANING OF LIFE and I can't abide its lack of ambition.

Wow, our values could not be more different in this respect. I think of reflection on THE MEANING OF LIFE as an activity for teenagers and David Brooks. While when I think about what it would mean to get to the bottom of what I mean when I talk, I lean forward on my chair, I jump on the balls of my feet, I feel like at last something is happening

& this is the difference between philosophers & mathematicians!

(I'm married to one, you can imagine our dinner discussions. my son is like "what is the nature of time? is it a loop or a spiral or a long line" & I scratch my beard, preparing an answer & my wife is like "it's time for dessert!")

I've been looking for an excuse to post this lecture here; he gets hilariously vehement talking about Aumann and common knowledge theorists (towards the end) and some parallel work in philosophy. http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/05/michael-thompson-you-and-i/

where Unger and I find common ground is that we both dig Tim Maudlin

yes, he's one of the good ones.

while it may be fun to spend lots of time beating up on the worst tendencies of anglo-american philosophy it's not exactly edifying, but i can't help but boggle at things like this - http://www.philosophersmag.com/index.php/tpm-mag-articles/11-essays/113-applied-philosophy-out-of-the-closet so preoccupied with philosophy's disciplinary boundaries that there's not even a hint of a mention of e.g. 40 years of queer theory

he works at Wayne State, which has been a stronghold of analytic anglo-american philosophy since at least the 1960s. and ignorance of theory is a trophy for many anglo-american philo depts. that's in part a function of inter-university politics: english departments tend to proclaim themselves "the" humanities, and because of the lingering desire to offer composition classes have the # of students to back themselves up. so they drain resources, and philo departments have to do something to get resources for themselves. you might say "oh but can't we all be interdisciplinary" but in practice, given the organization of these universities, that would entail less power (for hiring, for fellowships for students, etc) for those faculty, interdisciplinary or not, housed in philo departments. in brief: it has to do with resources being distributed according to disciplinary boundaries within universities.

everybody should be like me and work their way into obscure interdisciplinary niches that render them unemployable imo

^pretty much my strategy

Could an argument of any sort be entirely justified on empirical grounds? It seems clear on reflection that the answer to this question is "no." Any purely empirical ingredient can, after all, always be formulated as an additional empirical premise. When all such premises have been explicitly formulated, either the intended conclusion will be explicitly included among them or it will not. In the former case, no argument or inference is necessary, while in the latter case, the needed inference clearly goes beyond what can be derived entirely from experience. Thus we see that the repudiation of all a priori justification is apparently tantamount to the repudiation of argument or reasoning generally, thus amounting in effect to intellectual suicide.

from In Defence of Pure Reason

Hilary Putnam died? I only just heard today.

Yeah, too bad. I've read a few of his papers and The Threefold Cord, and I saw him lecture once, but I feel like I don't have a sense of most of his work. I might check out Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life.

Was mentioned on the rolling obit thread.