Rolling Philosophy

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

not coincidentally i got my adorno off the shelf today…

About as accurate a descriptor as "hipster"

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

don't think we need to dig too deep to figure out how this one happened tho

http://www.scalawagmagazine.org/articles/the-usual-writing-is-no-longer-enough

The problem, put crudely, is that resisting authoritarianism requires un-authoritarian modes of acting, speaking, and thinking. You don’t learn that in school. It doesn’t read like The New Yorker.

That’s a very basic, writing-before-breakfast way to state the problem. For its inadequacy, though, I think it is important that thinkers and writers recast this problem for themselves, and sit with it in terms that correspond to their own lives. Folks who resist real oppression on a daily bases offer sharper, more articulate, and more experienced ways— genius ways— of negotiating the problem. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid languages in La Frontera, Theodor Adorno’s “damaged” fragments in Minima Moralia, the way Angela Davis, in speaking, holds her listeners as accountable for fiercely active thinking as she holds herself, instead of telling them what to do. I think of poets and videographers and other artists who present their analyses obliquely, or on a slant. I think of the local organizers and activists I know who, instead of declaring “We all have work to do now!” have been, for the last few days, simply doing the grand and intimate work there were already doing: sharing resources, supporting people in need, thinking about how to disconnect safety from surveillance, getting the word out about that upcoming event. Holding space. Listening to listeners. Kicking the legs out from under heroes and grandstanders.

everything's coming up adorno!!!!

good, substantive interview with Brassier:
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/nihil-unbound/

i tried a few episodes of partially examined life and i'm not a huge fan. very simplified and very general conversation about the most obvious ideas in the works. does anyone have something they can recommend that's maybe a little more... idk incisive?

you gotta go to the source for that my man

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Oo6-H8MgL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

anyone reading anything interesting? I'm thinking about taking this out from the library (ugh, prohibitively expensive academic presses). On Heidegger's influence in post-war France. http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807614

_Veblen in Plain English_ has been interesting and very readable

http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2009/02/veblen-in-plain-english.html?m=1

i tried a few episodes of partially examined life and i'm not a huge fan. very simplified and very general conversation about the most obvious ideas in the works. does anyone have something they can recommend that's maybe a little more... idk incisive?

What about the UnMute Podcast?

http://www.unmutepodcast.co/

i'll check it out. it's not philosophy but i'm digging Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast atm.

hey btw thx to j. for recommending Gary Gutting 'What Philosophers Know' I was delighted to read about Gettier counterexamples, exactly the kind of puzzle/result I was looking for

That was me, and you're welcome. A lot of people dismiss the Gettier stuff but I think it's fun and worthwhile.

If your appetite for that stuff isn't sated yet, you might like "On the Gettier Problem Problem" by William Lycan, which was originally for some edited volume or other and is now on his website.

(Another popular sneer of the period was, ‘Why don’t you go publish a little note in Analysis?’)

Wouldn't that just burn you up

That was me, and you're welcome. A lot of people dismiss the Gettier stuff but I think it's fun and worthwhile.

― JRN, Wednesday, December 7, 2016 11:40 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry!! got my j.'s mixed up!

it is certainly FUN

it might be FUN---not sure but I'll be teaching it again in my grad seminar on epistemology this spring---but it leads to FUN in a hamster wheel when you read some little note in Analysis on it where the author gives a counterexample to a condition on knowledge added by another author, then adds her own new condition...which is then itself refuted in another little note in Analysis a few months later.

indeed! beautiful passage in the Gutting expressing just that:

The increasing complexity of fourth-condition proposals and their apparently inevitable vulnerability to counterexamples have left little reason to think that trying to solve the Gettier problem by adding further conditions will ever move beyond the rococo futility in which it has been immersed for so long.

i love that, "rococo futility"

the `fun` part of it, to me, and which suggested some meta- negative result that maybe no one has proved yet(?) was how the extra conditions keep popping up new counterexamples until you over-strengthen and then the original Gettier counterexample is back to being knowledge

I only skimmed the beginning and end of the Lycan piece, but this popped out as interesting.

This sort of dialect difference is less rare than one might think. It can lurk unsuspected for decades or whole lifetimes, because it is slight and the sort of hypothetical case that would bring it out is unusual. Here is an example from my own experience. Sartre bemoans the fact that we have no simple expression for the following situation:

A believes that not-p, but for selfish reasons wants B to believe that p. In a persuasive manner, A tells B that p: ‘p, B; trust me, old friend, would I ever lie to you?’ Now in fact, A is mistaken, and it is true that p. A has tried to lie to B, and A’s character is that of a liar. But what A said was true, so it cannot be called a lie.

On many occasions I have mentioned this in my undergraduate classes, and every time, about 40% of the students balk at Sartre’s judgment, and say they have no difficulty in calling A a liar. When I protest that a lie cannot be true, they say, ‘Sure it can’; all that matters to them is the intent to deceive. On the basis of induction, I predict that 40% of my readers will likewise have rejected Sartre’s complaint.

There is no substantive issue here. Neither I nor the 40% are right to the exclusion of the other. It is simply a dialect difference -- one that I did not discover until I was in my 40s.[22]

It's like the "true lie" scenario comes up so seldom in practice that there's no pressure on the concept to determinately include or exclude it.

There's an appeal to objectivity in that argument that feels dishonest to me

Posted on the Twitter thread, but this is the best philosophy joke I've encountered this week and best twitter handle in quite some time:

https://mobile.twitter.com/hegelfan1

http://www.logicmatters.net/2016/12/30/the-material-conditional-and-the-logic-textbooks-2/

RIP Parfit

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/tibetan-monks-found-chanting-text-oxford-philosopher/

I informed Derek Parfit of this when I returned; he seemed pleased.

been reading Michel Henry's "I Am the Truth" for research purposes and it's really...something.

not terribly well versed in phenomenology but the early chapters are kind of a tour de force.

I'd seen references to Henry before and been curious when I'd been more interested in more theologically inflected phenomenology (of which I'm also not especially well versed). What is it about the book/first chapters that you're finding so striking?

On a somewhat related note (at least inasmuch as he's explicitly critical of the religious "return" in contemporary continental philosophy), I found an inexpensive copy of Meillasoux's After Finitude at a used book store and decided to pick it up. It's my first foray into speculative realism (materialism?/whatever one wants to call it) and I'm still reading it, so will withhold any substantive comments until I finish reading and get my bearings. I've seen there's been some discussion upthread, so am curious what anyone still checking here/posting has made of it.

One thing I'm wondering, at first blush, is how his thinking (or at least critique of the philosophical tradition) differs from Derrida, for example? Would he be a 'correlationist' in his terms? I've read he's influenced by Badiou so can infer something of an answer (or at least guess at what's to come in the book), but that has been confusing me a bit...

the Henry presents a really compelling account of Christianity that's of particular interest to me because it runs counter to what I think of the Weberian "disenchantment" thesis of Christianity. and the first few chapters, I'm thinking in particular perhaps of "The Truth of the World," present a really coherent account of a Heideggerian "disclosedness" account of truth. There's a really interesting bit later on about how Heidegger's account of Being more or less remains too "Greek" (and thus ontological) in implicit contrast to the true phenomenological essence of Christianity. as a whole the book gets rather repetitive (which can help because the core concepts are necessarily slippery) but it has some really great stuff if you find this topic interesting.

I picked this book up because Jean Luc Nancy recounts in a footnote to his "Dis-enclosure" how Henry approached him after a lecture and told him he was totally wrong about Christianity.