Rolling Philosophy

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr89osbXYAEcxlC.jpg

got a Jigglypuff trapped in his bathroom eh?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/professors-receive-packets-of-poop?utm_term=.fryb5ZVkv#.hn9enmpl0

“Then I thought, ‘Oh shit,’” Haslanger said. “‘This is shit. I’m one of the other people who got the shit!’”

sry, qn unrelated to philosophers mailing each other poop

Hey can any of you (thinkin maybe Euler?) recommend me a good book that surveys `fun' results of Analytic Philosophy? stuff like grue bleen paradox, Tarski definitions of truth, and whatever other delights and curiosities the field has to offer? I find it very pleasurable, in a way similar to a good riddle, to read about this stuff. i know 'rigorous' math so doesn't have to be pitched at a low level but still something fun to jump in and read w/o background

I don't really know "results-based" analytic philosophy very well. Maybe A Brief History of the Paradox by Roy Sorensen would be fun?

On the philomath side, you might enjoy Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction to the World of Proofs and Pictures by James Robert Brown.

Also Why Prove It Again? by John Dawson is fun, though not really a philosophy book. ("full disclosure" etc. though)

https://www.routledge.com/Paradoxes-from-A-to-Z-3rd-Edition/Clark/p/book/9780415538572 this could be okay too.

maybe it's me speaking from my ivory tower (of unemployment) but i feel philosophy isn't well served by its popularisers, there's gotta be someone out there ready and willing to do this stuff better than the n1gel w@rburtons and jul1an b@gginis of the world

Thx :)

I haven't read it, but What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy by Gary Gutting might have some of what you're looking for.

yes i have also not really read that, but that is explicitly the argumentative burden he takes up, to show that philosophers really have accomplished something (contra rorty iirc)

i have one similar to those mentioned, 'this sentence is false', which is a survey of paradoxes from the precincts of analytic philosophy. seems meant to be 'fun', seems more fun than sorensen, unsure on who is more fun ~in reality~ tho.

flopson, i wonder if you would be interested in a book like 'wandering significance', it's enormous and certainly not pitched to be a fun survey type book, but it has a critical agenda that causes it to spend a lot of attention on long-standing dogmas and 'results' of analytic philosophy, while also having a lot to say about the more science-historical side of knowledge-discovery that iirc would appeal to you? and dude writes in a very prosy way, so trying hard to communicate not just to insiders.

yeah i'm also not one for the standard approach to popularization. even though the book that got me started on this terrible journey was a history of philosophy illustrated comic book style. i think this approach can be fun since it tends to emphasis philosophers as personalities a la nietzsche.

yeah i'm also not one for the standard approach to popularization. even though the book that got me started on this terrible journey was a history of philosophy illustrated comic book style. i think this approach can be fun since it tends to emphasis philosophers as personalities a la nietzsche.

― ryan

is that action philosophers!? fred van lente is cool.

love this, from an Amazon review for 'This Sentence is False':

This work (224 pages) is fun and yet hits you at the deepest level as it gives you charlie horses on your the brain

sounds like just the kind of `thrill' i'm seeking atm. Sleeping Beauty paradox definitely seems like my shit. that bigger Mark Wilson book looks pretty bonkers and sweet, too, (looks like the kind of thing I would read while stoned in bed at night and have blow my mind lol). thx, j.!

and yeah definitely into 'the more science-historical side of knowledge-discovery'! one day I will post to ilx my Economic Theory of Scientific Revolutions hehe

I started wondering about this because I was reading the lecture notes of this decision theorist Itzhak Gilboa, the first hundred pages of which is a casual and highly speculative discussion of some of the big Philosophical Questions of Social Science: Free Will, model selection, definition of probability and theories of inference. and it kind of struck me that, not only are these questions super important to practicing social scientists, but also that they very pleasurable to think about, and, even though they seem like un-answerable 'taking the piss', often have pretty satisfying answers (or clarifying restatements) if you just formalize it up a bit (kind of what Gutting's book seems to be arguing)

is that action philosophers!? fred van lente is cool.

no sadly it was some corny thing clearly meant to be used as a freshman textbook, but it blew my mind!

beyond that i think my introduction to philosophy was through reading a half dozen of the "very short introduction" series and then, almost by accident, simon critchley's "very little, almost nothing" (which i still admire quite a bit).

my intro to philosophy was Thus Spake Zarathustra and i decided i wanted to read it because of this album cover http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0001/679/MI0001679782.jpg?partner=allrovi.com in which Michael des Barres is reading Beyond Good and Evil which sent 14 year-old me on a journey of "who is this Nietzsche guy he sounds intersting?"

sorta interesting interview with eugene thacker: http://www.full-stop.net/2016/10/26/interviews/blair-bainbridge/eugene-thacker/

Anybody have any recs for philosophy podcasts? I already listen to the Partially Examined Life and Philosophy Bites. I can't remember if I've asked this elsewhere or not

are those 2 good?

I like them. Partially Exmined Life is hosted by another former student of my philosophy professor and even had him on for two eps to talk about his New Work project.

New Books in Philosophy is really good.

http://newbooksnetwork.com/category/politics-society/philosophy/

i wish people would update this thread with what they are currently reading/interested in. i would do it more often but i'm always sorta tangential to proper philosophy.

oh but i did start sloterdijk's "you must change your life." not bad so far, though i'm not entirely sure what his point is yet. also reading "the cruelty of depression" by a lacanian psychoanalyist and finding it really interesting (though, again, not exactly philosophy).

I read Frederick C. Beiser's Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing a little while ago. That was good. It seemed to me to be grappling with Kant's Critique of Judgment, and to a lesser extent Nietzsche, by way of a historical argument that neither of them fully appreciated the 18th century rationalists they opposed. The chapters on Winckelmann, Mendelssohn, and Lessing were most interesting to me. I bought a copy of Lessing's Laocoon but haven't started it yet.

I read a few chapters of part III of Parfit's Reasons and Persons but seem to have gotten side-tracked. I mainly feel like reading art history or aesthetics right now.

I've also been flipping through History of Beauty, edited by Umberto Eco. It collects pictures and philosophical and literary excerpts, with short chapter intros by Eco. It's interesting to see what he puts next to what.

I like this picture by Jean Delville of Plato's Academy. Philosophers have really let themselves go.

http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/images/stories/autumn_13/articles/lesh-01.jpg

I've lurked this thread for a while, so will come out with some recommendations to try and unawkwardly join in...I've found lots of good audio recordings of individual lectures or seminars (www.backdoorbroadcasting.net is one place hosting them) that are floating around online. Another podcast, if you're interested in theory, is https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/ by a few young(ish) professors (grad students?) which I occasionally listen to. That being said, some eps are better than others - the hosts can get a bit annoying sometimes.

There seems to be a dearth of ones that aim beyond an introductory level, unfortunately. I like what I've heard of the Partially Examined Life, but feel like I need to dig a bit deeper into their archives to find a few episodes or topics I'd be more engaged with.

After much delay, I've been reading Jean-Luc Nancy of late (Being Singular Plural, The Inoperative Community) along with Blanchot, as well as a few essays by Stanley Cavell from his "Must We Mean What We Say" collection. Before that I'd read JM Bernstein's "Adorno" earlier this year, which is an imaginative, synthetic reconstruction of his ethical thought which has definitely changed the way I'd thought about Adorno.

i reread that last year with some friends, about ten years past my first read. it struck me as a really shoddy book (i'm surprised at how little i noticed, the first time through), clearly long-suffering and forcibly shipped off to the press somehow, and then not given the editorial oversight it required, but for sure i've been carrying around some of its ideas for ages.

Also, somewhat unrelated to philosophy, but perhaps of interest nonetheless - I recently came across this new app, Audm, which offers audio recordings of recent articles/longform journalism from places like the New York and London Reviews of Books, ProPublica, and other places. It's a monthly (paid) subscription service - I'm trying out their free trial. So far, I've found it a nice accompaniment to cooking dinner and am optimistic about it improving my commute (jeez, I sound like an ad from a podcast, don't I?).

The Adorno book? Yes, I agree - it definitely would have benefitted greatly from a more thorough copyedit or two. From what I recall from the preface/acknowledgments, you're right, it was written over the course of many years (it reads that way) and does have the feeling that it was either hurriedly completed or unfinished (or yanked out of his hands/forcibly shipped off).

I think its biggest upshot, for me at least, was putting Adorno into a more explicit dialogue with a lot of other philosophical or theoretical currents that he's not normally associated with - e.g., Weber and later 20th century "analytic" philosophy (for lack of a better word).

yes, that one. i suppose on rereading i thought that the difficulties and defects made the payoff of 'analytic-continental dialogue' seem less valuable. or less likely to be realized in the first place—who is there who would be in a position to work through that all, and willing to do so despite the book's problems? not too many readers of korsgaard or mcdowell or whoever, i think.

i really wished he would have done more reading, despite his declared wish to steer clear of it. small bits like the discussion of matisse seemed more convincing than anything else, and things like the sociological/historical framing in terms of hobbes seemed like they could have been a lot more useful, if freed from his constant massaging of the dialectical positioning of his argument.

Reading off & on E Ray Canterbery's _A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science_, which has a nice bit of cheek in running down the history of the thinking. Found the book from a mention in Michael Goodwin's Econocomix

Another book I read this summer which crosses art criticism and philosophy was Picasso and Truth by T. J. Clark. It's a bit strange - he uses Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals in analyzing Picasso's move away from cubism, arguing that Picasso's view of objects is similar to logical atomism and that his project involves a confrontation with pictorial truth. It's the second Clark book I've read and I liked The Sight of Death (on Poussin) a lot more.

I'm reading / writing a review of Gilles Dowek's Computation, Proof, Machine: Mathematics Enters A New Age and it's a good read on where things are re. the "foundations of mathematics" in 2016, from the perspective of a contemporary researcher in automated proof. Because he's French the book is also well-grounded historically, so you get a nice overview of the computational turn in proof from antiquity into the 20th century. The discussions of Church's thesis are sharp and original, relating it to applications of mathematics to the natural sciences (you can see I'm puzzling out my review here). But it's totally a book for a popular audience (it won a big writing award here in France, and the English translation is excellent also).

that sounds nice, Euler

This is neat audio:

http://www.openculture.com/2011/04/walter_kaufmanns_lectures.html

A series of three lectures by Walter Kaufmann recorded in 1960. Talks on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre all in regards to existentialism.

Kaufmann was the dude who re-translated Nietzsche after the war, wrote a biography and the Viking Portable book, and mentored my professor, Frithjof Bergmann.

So I enjoy actually hearing the guy's actual lectures. His German accent and mien of philosopher professor belies the jokes he includes in his delivery.

I really like Kaufmann's last book, Man's Lot. It was the only philosophy book I had on the bookshelf growing up, so probably the first I ever looked at.

i keep thinking that the current neoliberal hellscape is gonna lead to a revival of mid-century existentialism (at least outside the academy) but it never happens.

does anyone know anything about this book/guy?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1474404170/

I distinctly remember reading an interesting article by him while doing research on peirce but i seem to have lost it. it seems to follow through on an interesting chapter in that "post-continental philosophy" book by john mullarky.

i keep thinking that the current neoliberal hellscape is gonna lead to a revival of mid-century existentialism (at least outside the academy) but it never happens

Prof Bergmann's been working on that bit for a while, fusing stuff learnt from teaching existentialism and trying to redefine "work" in the modern world and its fucked-up job system. Here he is talking about it on a podcast in 2013.

thanks for posting that! very interested in this sort of thing right now.

dunno that much about gangle but the few articles i've read by him (i think on deleuze and badiou) have been v good, in that pseudo-analytic technical and rigorous way that a lot of post-speculative realist continental stuff is tending towards these days. i think indeed like jm he was one of the early anglophone people engaging with laruelle, though like some of the others in that category (e.g. ray brassier) he may have gotten his fill and moved on somewhat

Re: the current neoliberal hellscape - imo, one of the better contemporary updates of early 20th century critical theory has been Lauren Berlant's "Cruel Optimism" (<a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism<;/a>), which offers one of the better developments of that line of thought in relationship to the present. In particular, she writes well on things like precarious work, the (further) dwindling of a public sphere, neoliberal ideologies of individuality and "the good life" (and the lived experiences of their failure), among other things.

I would even say her work has a family resemblance to whatever a revived-existentialism would look like today (albeit one that exists in a very different vocabulary and without some of the core presuppositions of mid-20th century existential thought - esp. around the Subject). There are also some good interviews and audio recordings of her online. http://thecriticallede.com/079-interview-with-lauren-berlant-author-of-cruel-optimism/

Also, outside of the academy, I fear that so far most revived existential impulses have been overwhelmingly incorporated by a booming self-help industry and "pop philosophers" like Alain de Botton, no? Though it is kind of curious now that I think about it, that there hasn't been a philosophical accompaniment outside the academy contemporaneous with Bernie Sanders over the past year or two, especially as so many people have become if not overtly politicized, at least historically aware for the first time of other possibilities outside of the neoliberal status quo.

oh wow thank you for posting that! i need to read it pronto. been reading The Protestant Ethic yet again and i am
immensely curious about the roots/development of this line of thinking. kind of a "how did we get here?" questioning:

i really shouldn't post from my phone

Nice - coincidentally on the Weber note, there's also this: https://www.versobooks.com/books/259-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism - which I haven't read (just flipped through here and there), but I'd come across many strong and interesting reviews of it. It's formally a work of sociological analysis - to digress a bit further from philosophy for the moment - but it seems in line with that kind of "how did we get here" question.

Not having read it, I can't say whether or not it's aged well since its publication in the 90s (w/ all the changes over the last 20 or so years) or if it applies as well outside of a French context (both authors are from France, one studied under Pierre Bourdieu), but thought I'd mention it..

oh that looks excellent too. one of my overarching goals is to place weber (not just the PE but his larger project) in the development of a theory of value--both back to nietzsche/marx (and maybe as far back as the gnostic christianity of which calvinism is arguably the second instance) and forward to the likes of gotthard gunther and niklas luhmann.

Related to earlier Žižek thing:

https://mobile.twitter.com/AliceAvizandum/status/794260478742720513

the dicks lesbian – ‏@AliceAvizandum

I love Zizek, he keeps alive the Ancient Greek tradition that a philosopher is an annoying dick with a beard who's wrong about everything
12:30 PM - 3 Nov 2016

the dicks lesbian – ‏@AliceAvizandum

I want to go even further and crowdfund him a barrel to live in like Diogenes
12:32 PM - 3 Nov 2016

the dicks lesbian – ‏@AliceAvizandum

ANCIENT GREEKS: [doing stuff, building temples, whatever]
A PHILOSOPHER: hey guys everything's made of rocks, wind, the sea or on fire
12:33 PM - 3 Nov 2016

Speaking of Frithjof Bergmann, here he is talking on YT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=017HaATnIpQ

(takes a bit to get going)

Idly searching for a take on the 2016 election from Hegel's understanding it turns out that "Hegelian dialectic" is some rightwing bugaboo because Marx used it, I guess? And so it is tainted forevermore and can be now slung at the Other?

http://www.propaganda.news/2016-03-28-obamas-hegelian-dialectic.html

This some weird convoluted bullshit that sounds almost exactly like Andy Schlafly at Conservapedia being dogmatically opposed to Einstein's Relativity(Special or General), apparently since the word relativity is the same as "moral relativity" which is haram. Really.

there's also the whole 'cultural marxism' thing where the frankfurt school somehow takes the place of more standard illuminati figures as the biggest sociopolitical movers and shakers of the last 100 years. evidently dialectics are dangerous business if you're a good honest conservative conspiracy theorist