Rolling Philosophy

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?

since they counted Nancy I presume continentals are allowed, so perhaps Sloterdijk? Agamben surely.

oh and Meillassoux

I like the total lack of methodology in the ranking. They just go with what they know is true!

No Zizek either.

he is the only living philosopher high school students have ever told me they read, which is influence some of these dorks can only dream of

Yeah. They should just remove 'continental' philosophers if they aren't gonna treat their influence properly, for the lack of Zizek, Sloterdijk, Agamben, Honneth or, heck, Massumi makes the list pretty dumb.

Reading through the list, how on earth does someone like William Lane Craig make it? As they tell it, his biggest claim to fame is repeating a nonsensical medieval islamic theory about God. Wtf?

Is Ned Block on that list?

Not that he should be. He is just the only philosopher I ever met in person, apart from one or two whose classes I may have sat in long ago.

No Block

I kinda like Craig (ducks)

You think Hilary Putnam and Arthur C. Danto would have made it if they were still around? And what about Critchley? *ducks*

wait, that's what David Chalmers looks like? o_O

clearly gettier should be at the top

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

― j., Tuesday, August 23, 2016 7:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

#goals

feel like i would get more out of the list if i cared more - or at all - about philosophy of mind

last fall I had a beer with a person on this list without knowing who he was (he had come to my talk and joined the group going out to the pub afterward). it's only with this list, seeing his picture, that I realize who he was (it was at Oxford & he's not on the staff there, was just visiting for the year acc. to his cv). I didn't realize he was that """"influential""""", he may have influenced me to have a second beer though so that counts for something

i think chalmers has had a haircut recently, sad to ditch a classic look but the influential ppl of the world gotta keep innovating

oxfordian stranger

he had good questions, but didn't seem chummy with the others present, so I was confused. I knew his name was Peter, that's all.

interesting to note that 8% of the world's most influential philosophers are named peter. having been in a department that was 1/3 peters i find this entirely plausible

one of the Peters was at my grad institution and I never talked to him bc lol metaphysics but I did attend a job talk he was at where he (and Plantinga, who I'm surprised isn't on a list of this sort) absolutely owned the job candidate with a series of questions. it was like watching someone be operated upon while conscious, a methodical shredding of the candidate's competency.

the guy got hired somewhere else & is now full prof at an ok place where he has a colleague who's on this list, kinda in the same religious-y metaphysics-y world

I met Dennett a couple times. I didn't take any of his classes, which were all phil of mind which just wasn't my area. I saw him debate Dinesh D'Souza once and that was hilarious, the only one of those '00s 'new atheism' debates I got to see live.

I took a class with only one of these guys, who was booked as a "teach a grad seminar once a year but it'll only meet half the term (for 3 hrs at a time) so you can mostly avoid our horrible midwestern town and its hellish winter that lasts 3/4 of the year". big shot in phil mind which we didn't really have.

list is pretty east-coast USA centric, one reason it's so blah

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/05/the-dream-of-enlightenment-by-anthony-gottlieb

anyone read the previous book?