Rolling Philosophy

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.

Time for new screenname.

(not philosophy but i thought we had a versobooks thread but apparently not and i was remembering some threads getting bumped when they have sales & stuff and this is one) their aaron swartz book is a free download today http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2575-psst-downloading-isn-t-stealing-for-today

er, apparently not in North America

A couple of colleagues have decided to have just a bit of fun with "Badiou studies", e.g.

"To sum up, non-gender cannot but only be thought of, by a radical philosophical gesture, as a supplement of this philosophy itself. As such a supplement, non gender hasto be where philosophy is not meant to be, even when it shows instead of saying(according to the well known Wittgensteinian distinction) or, shows through its non saying that this situation is a non situation, or, in Badiousian words, that we have the situation of a condition that is a non condition."

The full article is here, and their report on their prank is here.

It's just a couple of days out now, so I don't know what the reaction's been so far.

Philosophy is now Sokal-ing itself?

philosophy's not just one thing, if the work being parodied is even philosophy as all. as my colleagues explain in the article I linked (my translation):

Alongside the "hardcore" of higher education and research---the "academy", to put it quickly---that's to say the university and the research establishments (CNRS, INSERM, INRA, etc.), it is necessary to recognize a median zone, that includes the publication, the organization of seminars or conferences that are extra-/para-/crypto-academic, not delivering any degree (for example, the Collège International de Philosophie, certain regular open seminars held by some learned institutions, diverse unofficial centers or institutes of philosophy, the Universités populaires, etc.). If the power of Badiou in the hardcore is every limited (as evidenced by the low proportion of his doctoral students who have obtained faculty positions in philosophy in France), his power in the median zone is massive (innumerable publications of books per year, appearances in theaters and on tv). This explains without doubt his media omnipresence: Badiou is a "good customer".

extra-/para-/crypto-academic

they say this like it's a bad thing?

no, not necessarily. their thesis is that this particular crypto-academic structure has failed, and their evidence for this this thesis is their prank

ah i see

been chatting with a senior colleague a lot about "theory" in our discipline (literature) and how often it resembles a futures market...but my impression is that Badiou's moment has already passed in the american academy. but who knows, there are still actual live hegelians around.

my impression of badiou (all secondhand) is as a kind of second-rate althusser but with added maths?

I'd only heard of him through ILX until a year or so ago, so I don't know anything about him. this is true for me for a lot of the stuff talked about on this thread too! but now I see why: I'm part of the "hardcore" and so don't get exposed to this "median zone" except through non-academic sources.

(although he was chair of philosophy at the ENS!)

i know someone, a serious fellow himself, who takes badiou seriously

and actually i heard tell of a younger person from my own program, very much a mainline high church logician type, who also had an interest in OOP and probably all this other junk, so who knows where such people will land us in 10-20 years of redrawing connections and boundaries

Does Eagleton really rate him as highly as it says in one of those links?

Is Ignatius of Loyola really that amazing?

from my days as a c++ programmer I admit that something called object-oriented philosophy could be interesting, but as it's been practiced until now, I'd just like to read on it that's relatively low on specialist jargon.

As a pure dilettante I read Ian Bogost's "Alien Phenomenology" recently and found it accessible and fun.

http://retractionwatch.com/2016/04/07/philosophy-journal-spoofed-retracts-hoax-article/

Given our stance as a journal that aims to dispel the celebrity fetishism surrounding Badiou (in our journal ethos), we of course support the intentions of the authors. However, unlike significant work done to challenge Badiou’s thought philosophically (some of which is published in our journal), we regret that the authors chose such a dated method of attack. In an age when the pressures on independent Open Access publishing include underfunding and time-pressured staff, Sokal-style exposés become easier to perpetrate even as their philosophical payoff becomes less and less. The experimental nature of the issue in question made it particularly vulnerable to such an assault, which seems designed less to ‘undermine the foundations on which the ontology of the Master rests’ (whatever that means) than to use Badiou’s name to promote the authors’ own careers.

They're the ones who fell for the dated method of attack. Is it dated if it keeps working?

i'm inclined to agree that this has much more to do with the various understandable and less understandable inadequacies of peer review than it does with work on badiou per se, but nevertheless that's not a very good defence

(whatever that means)

oh now that the cows have fled the barn they're all skeptical of meaningless jargon

feel like all these people would benefit from reading our thread on academic jargon.

i feel like object-oriented ontology is the philosophy version of when my 3rd grade teacher told us to write a story from the perspective of a paperclip.

more or less

Like, geometry?

Overheard some friends talk biology based philosophy lately. So many metaphors. Rhizomatic, fermentation, stratification. And somehow they all end up describing capitalism.