Rolling Philosophy

'Is' and 'being' are imperfect descriptors, but...

this is ontology, not a form of logic that has to obey laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction (for which i say sure, but we need to devise higher level logics...not talk about "weirdness")

It seems way too generous to talk about 'logic' with this kind of thing to me.

yeah, the pictures are not on trial here

I'm not a philosopher, and when I read philosophy it's mostly continental, or semiotically based, or linguistics. But to me there's a thin border between problems of logic and problems of language. And that upthread seems to be problems of language. There are so many problems with the word 'is', which is why Heidegger/Wittgenstein writes about 'does' or Deleuze writes of 'becoming'. But the problems with the word only doubles if trying to define the things not captured by the descriptions of what things 'are', as being things that they 'otherwise are'.

imho

more like that a paperclip has the same relationship to disclosedness/hidden-ness (ie, that it's both) that we'd normally reserve for something like a human subject. an object more or less always holds something back in its phenomenal manifestations, a kind of reservoir of potentiality.

"Perhaps the answer lies in the thought which now comes to my mind; namely, the wax was not after all the sweetness of the honey, or the fragrance of the flowers, or the whiteness, or the shape, or the sound, but was rather a body which presented itself to me in these various forms a little while ago, but which now exhibits different ones."

ha!

if you want a vaguely sympathetic overview of the whole scene, Steven Shaviro's "The Universe of Things" was a good read, if I remember correctly. (Thought in an aside he gets Niklas Luhmann totally wrong--as does the philosopher he's talking about--and it bothered me so much I hold a slight grudge against the book--but that's literally one sentence.) One thing about shaviro book is that it makes the more recent stuff that quentin meillassoux is up to sound genuinely strange, and not the "aren't I cute" way of some of these guys.

i can't read futures markets that well--but OOO is presently in that broad dissemination stage where it seems like every grad student on the planet is squeezing every last drop out of it. something else will be along shortly.

it's funny b/c quentin m is now my colleague, I could just go "down the hall" and talk to him about this
(except we don't get offices b/c lol Paris)

ha, recent meillassoux is definitely very strange though i'm not sure to what extent it's a merit. my reaction to reading some of his post-after finitude stuff is largely "uhhh...". definitely preferable to the quarks + the united nations + slime molds, oh my! school of things though.

Has anyone checked out this Paul Guyer history of aesthetics? I probably don't need it, even with a price reduction, but I'm curious. 1752 pages!

http://www.amazon.com/History-Modern-Aesthetics-Set/dp/1107643228/

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/labour-members-left-baffled-after-8008287?_utm_source=1-2-2

intended to bring about radical expression

fuckin artists

fuckin students

so there is a conference coming up here organized by a friend that includes among a few others the following speakers
Alain Badiou
Etienne Balibar
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

you guys who are into this stuff: does this promise to be a good time and/or a bunch of bullshit?
kinda open to either really but june is really busy

Balibar is the one i'd be most excited to see out of that list.

a lot of times this just boils down to how good they are at giving talks. i've sat through my last 20 minute paper reading.

yeah that's kinda what I was asking, I don't have any experience of this crowd. guess the talks will be in English?

Balibar and Spivak's talks should be interesting, I think: I don't necessarily enjoy Spivak's prose style, but she's generally politically shrewd.

fwiw the theme will be "contemporary attempts to deconstruct/reconstruct the universal"

from the conference publicity: the numerous undertakings of deconstruction have too often led to the abandonment of all positive reflection on the universal as such, when it wasn't leading to facile forms of relativism. And this, even though the discursive practices of these different disciplines (sociology, literature, philosophy) saw the strong persistence of the same categories that they intended to question. From this has come a palpable tension between the critical rejection of the universal in theoretical planning and its precritical usage in practice.

i would be interested in that topic.

yeah it sounds interesting! one of the organizers is like me a philosopher of math so our questions are in the background here: for on the one hand one says that math concerns the universal but on the other hand we have lots of ethnographic data on math practice now and we see a plurality of practices. how are these to be resolved? this meeting notes that in practice no one really tries to resolve this: we presuppose old-fashioned categories like "objects", "objectivity" etc in trying to theorize about diverse practices; no wonder we end up thinking math is "universal" in an old fashioned sense! and yet: math *seems* to be universal in the following sense: lots of varied practices that end up being...communicable? translatable? As Frege opens the Grundlagen: "Yet if everyone had to understand by this name [`the number one'] whatever he pleased, then the same proposition about one would mean different things for different people,---such propositions would have no common content." The notion of "content", it seems to me, has been problematized like "the universal": one communicates "the same thing" in many ways.

anyway this is what I am & have always been working on so maybe I should go to this conference

on the one hand one says that math concerns the universal but on the other hand we have lots of ethnographic data on math practice now and we see a plurality of practices.

do you have a link on something i can read about this?

for a quick idea of what I mean, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3347383/Amazon-tribe-has-no-words-for-different-numbers.html

cool

got anything academic? like a survey paper?

ever seen this experiment? mice see numbers increasing from left to right http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/534.full

imo badiou will probably be irritating, the other three are worth seeing. balibar is perhaps the most avuncular man in philosophy

maybe you will get some reprise of the badiou-balibar encounter where badiou said "you're a reformist!" and balibar said "you're a theologian!" (both are kinda right imo)

I saw a potentially interesting article about different cultural manifestations of numeracy recently, let's see if I can remember where it was.

Ah yes. An article in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. "Numeracy," by Eleanor Robson, p. 983.

hey ryan

or anybody else, but i figure you'd know

is there a recognized strain in philosophy somewhere analogous to 'the gothic' in literature?

i wish i did know because that's a very good question. maybe Fichte? (though I have not read him...)

It looks like Schelling may have been one of the first to write about the uncanny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny#German_idealism

hey philosophers, would anyone recommend something good on john dewey (especially his aesthetics) as I make another effort to get the hang of him?

im not sure if it directly addresses the aesthetics or not, but john patrick diggins' "the promise of pragmatism" has a really good chapter on dewey.

so what are you guys/gals reading these days?

I just finished Blumenberg's "Laughter of the Thracian Woman." His "metaphorology" remains obscure to me but it was a reasonably pleasurably read because it was short and had some moments of real insight. I'm also (slowly) continuing to work on Weber, but also trying to read *around* him in useful ways. Next up is Schmitt's "Political Theology," which will only be my second Schmitt after "The Concept of the Political."

oh, and i also recently finished Gil Anidjar's "Blood: A Critique of Christianity." More "theory" than philosophy perhaps. It was a compelling (and very difficult and VERY indulgent) read, and one i find myself thinking a lot about over a week after finishing it.

I don't think it counts but I read Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized this week. Keep intending to go back to Schmitt and Strauss. Maybe next.

I'm reading Emerson, along with the books on him by Lawrence Buell and Cavell.

I tried Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace but wasn't able to work up much interest in the problems. Maybe another time. I do like his style.

Buell's Emerson, to be precise. I guess he has a number of books on Emerson.

Emerson! nice. somehow in my dissertation research i managed to miss Buell's stuff. how is it?

i thought it was kind of pop/light, although buell is tops so i wouldn't exclude the possibility that there was more in it than i realized at the time i read it

actually i've been reading some of the same cavell book jmm is probably reading, for a project. his work in that period can get pretty exasperating. death by over-refinement.

i've been reading kierkegaard, who i don't think i like as much as i ever thought i would. it seems i fundamentally distrust him.

Yeah, the Buell is quite easygoing and factual, like an intro essay. It was published by Harvard for the bicentennial of Emerson's birth, so there's a prestige aspect to it too. I'm enjoying it fine. There's lots I don't know about Emerson.

It's sort of the opposite of Cavell, who I always enjoy but who pushes the text in ways that can feel strained. He doesn't want to say anything mundane.

a good middle ground might be Sharon Cameron. i believe her two major Emerson essays are collected in "Impersonality" (also a very good book in general).

yes. i am very impressed by her book on thoreau's journal.

if you've got some time, jmm, you might find richardson's emerson bio just as useful - it's extremely readable for its length.

Reading a bunch of stuff, but I just bought a wee GE Moore book on ethics.

Right, the Richardson is the one Buell mentions as consisting of a hundred vignettes. That sounds cool.

Emerson is making me want to explore Nietzsche again. I've barely read him since undergrad. Cavell's essay on the two of them is interesting, and I liked this lecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wbcszqoDPs

to me the E-N connection is a weird one, there's evidence that it is there, and reading the middle-period works you get the feeling it is somewhere, but then you can hardly ever find a place where it could clearly be asserted to exist