Rolling Philosophy

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

Mikics (the guy in that video) wrote a whole book on the Emerson/Nietzsche connection. i read it early on in my graduate career (he came to give a talk across town at my school) so i can't remember much about it. I happened to take both a seminar in Nietzsche and one in Emerson in the same semester--so it was all very synchronous, though I agree that the connections feels like its there it's hard to put your finger on it. i think they both address, in their idiosyncratic ways, something like a response to the loss of Truth in terms of affirming it.

affirming the loss that is. but i'd never claim that for Emerson something like Meaning is threatened (if anything Meaning is overdetermined) while the absence of Meaning feels central to Nietzsche?

kind of a hairline distinction between going on here between Truth and Meaning, so excuse my rambling!

here's the Mikics book, which from the title doesn't necessarily take the approach i would find most interesting about either thinker:
http://www.amazon.com/Romance-Individualism-Emerson-Nietzsche-Continental/dp/0821414968/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1464462902&sr=8-5&keywords=david+mikics

I can see why Nietzsche would love Emerson as a writer, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Nietzsche was self-consciously styling himself after Emerson to some degree. I see them both wanting their writing to be energetic and cheerful as well as ironic and mercurial. And they both emphasize self-assertion as a response to some kind of loss or lack (meaning, hope, community, happiness). I don’t like the term ‘individualism’ so much, at least as applied to Emerson. Self-reliance is a leap of faith in which you allow yourself the hope of being better than you are, which is also the hope for a better and more just world for everyone. I don’t think it’s a doctrine of selfishness. I do have a certain image of Nietzsche in which he’s saying something similar in his own way, but that may be too soft and democratic a reading of Nietzsche.

anyone know anything about Raymond Ruyer?

http://www.amazon.com/Neofinalism-Posthumanities-Raymond-Ruyer/dp/081669205X

not really but i recall this article on him being fairly interesting - http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia15/parrhesia15_grosz.pdf

The Philosopher is an iconoclastic account of what philosophy has been over the longue durée. It makes sense to talk about the long-term when it comes to philosophy because unlike most departments in the modern university philosophical activity seems to have a niche in every society in recorded history, and therefore it has perhaps more in common with age-old professions like war, storytelling, and sex-work than with the other humanities and sciences. Philosophy is so primitive and socially basic that its domestication in the university can seem a dubious proposition or a laughable reduction. But it’s also a credentialed and systematized modern discipline: that’s not a mere fantasy of professionalization. Thus Smith concludes that “philosophy,” over the long history of the word and the concept, has meant several distinct (albeit closely related) professions or kinds of activity: there is no single definition of philosophy or the philosopher that can account for its history or present variety. The Philosopher offers a typology of these kinds: the philosopher as curiosa, sage, gadfly, ascetic, mandarin, and courtier.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/socrates-of-amazonia/

curiosa, sage, gadfly, ascetic, mandarin, and courtier.

poll

i've never eaten curiosa

when i was in secondary all the punks took the graphic design class to print artwork and opinions on t-shirts

i am reminded of one in particular:

a philosopher first beats you
then they beat each other
then he beats himself

[insert line art of hand grasping a gangrenous penis]

http://i.imgur.com/8xp73YK.jpg

lol

https://66.media.tumblr.com/f990ed18391f1a45ca65c3ccb8a66676/tumblr_o63iprkEXO1umdmzqo1_1280.jpg

poll http://www.thebestschools.org/features/most-influential-living-philosophers/

i was about to badmouth that list until my favorite professor i had as an undergrad popped up! (john j. mcdermott--in fact one of his classes on American Philosophy led directly to me choosing the dissertation topic that I did.)

only person on that list that i havent read that i'd like to read is Graham Priest.

lol how did tim morton get onto that list

clearly gettier should be at the top

Quitting while he was ahead, Gettier has since published nothing.

also I guess they are under the impression that Stanley Cavell is dead

he's never had the influence of a tim morton

Fodor is the most conspicuous omission I can think of. Williamson?