Rolling Philosophy

A Secular Age has the breadth and depth that I expected, but I didn't expect that it would be as relevant for my own concerns as it is. and yeah I think i've discovered about a half dozen other books through it. I think the way Talyor uses Victor Turner's "The Ritual Process" is especially cool and interesting and something that is now bouncing around obsessively in my own mind.

Has anybody checked out any of the Squashed Philosophers summaries? The idea looks good, I'm wondering about the execution.

http://sqapo.com/index.htm

Oh, neat, an Austin lecture. Strange that it took so long to surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXo0YNZ3WsE

strange that it took so long for any to surface, or this one in particular?

This one in particular, I guess. It just got uploaded to Youtube yesterday. Given that a recording of an Austin lecture existed, I was curious where it had been sitting all these years. But looking around, it appears that a tape of the recording has been in the British Library for a long time. http://allbutthedissertation.blogspot.ca/2005/11/listening-to-jl-austins-1959.html

ryan I'm glad A Secular Age is interesting you! the book is kind of a mess, too much repetition, but it's so big that some readers probably need that. for me Part V, and in particular the two Dilemmas chapters, are the richest parts, as in 10 years later I'm still trying to follow them through. it'll probably take 30 more years to even begin doing that.

Badiou's book on St Paul is a bit odd, but interesting and provocative. It was the first thing of his I'd read a while ago and I found it to be a good introduction to his system (for lack of a better word), or at least I found the story of Paul allows him to clearly and attractively illustrate it through the historical account of Paul.

That said, he does submit it to the machinery of his philosophical method and, in doing so, kind of recasts Marx/Lenin into the Jesus/Paul relationship which, yeah, well there are some issues there. I guess it can be productively placed within the line of misprision/deliberate mis- or re-interpretation that runs through so much of 20th century French philosophy/theory.

I still do want to get around to A Secular Age sometime...

Took a break from "A Secular Age" (finished part 1) to read Peter Berger's "The Sacred Canopy." I liked it quite a bit--especially the chapters on alienation and legitimation--in that way you appreciate a book that helps you find tune your disagreements with it. Might have to read his new-ish book on religious pluralism.

Has anyone read Sloterdijk's "In the Shadow of Mount Sinai"?

Just finishing up Martin Jay's latest book, Reason After Its Eclipse, which I quite enjoyed. It's a brief review of how reason has been theorized, with a longer excursus on the Frankfurt School (his book, referencing Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason), before surveying the second and third generation Frankfurt School attempts to move beyond it. Essentially, the last half of the book is on Habermas, providing a nice reconstruction of his oeuvre (which was more varied than I had thought) as well as a nice survey of recent critical engagements with it.

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5488.htm

It was also based on a series of lectures he gave, which I believe are on Youtube (I can post links if anyone is at all interested...)

I definitely need to read that.

i'd be interested in the lectures. i heard him lecture at cardozo years ago on the topic of benjamin + adorno.

So i've recently read Nancy's "Adoration," Sloterdijk's "In the Shadow of Mount Sinai," and, uh, Freud's "Moses and Monotheism." And part 3 of "A Secular Age." Now working on Weber's "Sociology of Religion" but I also got Badiou's book on Paul as well as one by Jacob Taubes called "The Political Theology of Paul" and im hoping the Schmitt call back in the title is intended. I should probably check out Sloterdijk's "God's Zeal" at some point.

are you out of work

how can you tell???

(to be fair almost everything but the Weber in that post is very short)

lol sorry i thought i remembered you were but i was half kidding

(says a man teaching one course and sitting by a pile of books)

no worries!

suckers, i am both out of work and failing to get very much reading done B-)

haha, somehow I feel this thread has found its inevitable conclusion

Yes, a fitting thread subtitle, too...

Here's the link to the first Martin Jay lecture - it was multipart (over the course of a few days), and the subsequent lectures should show up either in an automatic playlist or in the suggested videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQQErjiX2SU

Searle, huh?

http://dailynous.com/2017/03/23/sexual-harassment-assault-retaliation-lawsuit-john-searle/

color me unsurprised

Haven't been following

What exactly is unsurprising about that?

I enjoyed those lectures. Just saying. I do find habermas interesting - though I'll need to read it to get a better sense of it.

xp i guess he's got a rep as a lech, hexy

critical theory, tl:dr: america sucks capitalism is bad wahhhh.

flag post button still works then

You're flagging a post because you disagree with the opinion? Brilliant.

i wasn't aware of searle having a rep, but it's unsurprising to me insofar as i've come across v few philosophy departments* that don't have a largely unspoken history of sexual misconduct being swept under the rug.

*and i'm sure philosophy is far from unique here, but maybe the problem is compounded by the special authority that esteemed philosophers seem to exude

The John SARL Center for Social Ontology

What exactly is unsurprising about that?

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Friday, March 24, 2017 12:54 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just getting to the point where I assume all venerable male Anglo-American philosophers are sexual predators is all. Sexual predation also correlates strongly with someone who'd write a snarky polemic against campus activists 40 years before it was cool.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7oM_C8VQAAmKC_.jpg

a stand-up fellow all round

isn't another problem with philosophy that we're supposed to be "radical" and so "non-standard" "relationships" should be more acceptable to us?
I mean I've known people in "the life" where this has been their line, even though in the end they're just up to the same tawdry bullshit you find in human life generally, e.g. cheating on partners, partner swapping, alcoholism, domestic abuse, sleeping with students, etc.

are you saying that the problem is that this rumored radical freethinkerism provides cover for our unexceptional shittiness

yes!

euler and j v v otm

couldn't agree more with unexceptional shittiness

i'm only familiar with searle's scholarly/academic work and only now realizing he was/is a scumbag outside of that

Thinking about engaging with Cavell in a more substantive way. Has anyone read The Claim of Reason? I'm hoping to start it later in the Spring and am curious what others on the board may think of it.

yes, i've read it quite intensively.

if you're envisioning a productive scholarly engagement, then you should realize that his work will do you no favors. aside from limited engagements in some of the 'must we mean?' essays and in 'claim', he rarely positions himself in response to specific scholarly debates as opposed to broad intellectual tendencies for which he provides his own idiosyncratic construals. that difficulty becomes especially relevant in 'claim' because his idea of skepticism there (already fluctuating and pretty elusive) gets taken up in the talks/essays of the 80s (whose format is collectively a big pain in the ass) to be further developed in terms of romanticism and American transcendentalism. so just where you are led to think it would help to read on (and read backwards into the essays), reading on proves to multiply the difficulties, while not being something you can do without. and for all his constant self-references, he never really returns to 'claim' to deal directly with its problems in the relatively academic/systematic form in which it had problematized them. what secondary literature there is mostly follows him in this respect, drawing freely from the different periods in order to grasp at making whatever points it can (at about the scope one typically finds in edited collections and invited conferences, i.e., speaking to the interests of partisans who wish to see the work developed somehow, rather than to outsiders in ways sufficient to achieve argumentative independence from the original work), so that there's a dearth of really incisive engagements with the project of 'claim' itself.

Ah, thanks for the response, though I was kind of hoping for the opposite answer :( although I am following the whims of personal curiosity as opposed to a need for any kind of productive scholarly engagement.

It is the idiosyncratic construals that intrigue me, though I guess knowing that, I should have expected them to not be expressed in a conventional way (as far as a philosopher's long body of work can conform to convention).

I'm still hoping to read it, though maybe I should read a few more essays of his before (I've only really read a couple from Must We Mean.

i think that personal curiosity would probably be the best reason to read him, and if you find you can get along with his style, it will be sufficient for quite a while.

i don't think reading the essays would help much, unless you're just looking for a lower-cost buy-in.

I read most of it for a grad seminar on Cavell. It's a fascinating book, for sure, but I haven't much gone back to it since. It was edited together out of material written over a number of years. Some of it is based on his dissertation; other parts feel like a philosophical diary. It's a great test of how far you're able to dig his approach.

I'm trying to recall the readings for that seminar. I think we read:

G. E. Moore - A Defense of Common Sense
J. L. Austin - A Plea for Excuses
Stanley Cavell - Must We Mean What We Say? (essay)
Kant - Critique of Judgment - Introduction and Analytic of the Beautiful
Cavell - Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy
Cavell - The Claim of Reason, pt. 3
Emerson - Self-Reliance
Ibsen - The Doll’s House
Cavell - Pursuits of Happiness, ch. 1, 2, 4, 7
Cavell - Disowning Tears, ch. 5

Films: The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, The Awful Truth, Stella Dallas

Cavell came in for the last session when we talked about Stella Dallas. It was a cool class.

*Contesting Tears

Cool, yeah I was looking to read him and had (incorrectly, it seems?) assumed that the Claim of Reason was his most representative book. From it, I'm most interested in the second half (the parts on tragedy, morality) but perhaps there are better starting points among his other books or essays?

To be honest, I'm not very familiar with him (which is one of the reasons I'm interested in reading more), so any other suggestions would be welcome!

jmm was it just the part on moral philosophy that was assigned from 'claim', or are you misremembering (since that would kinda be the least representative part of that book)?

federico, 'claim' is, uh, let's see, the most central book to the remainder of this work but because of the shape of that remainder there are various ways in which it's not representative, and maybe nothing can be.

if you're interested in part 4 then you should expect it to have really very little to do with tragedy or aesthetics, although if you're interested in the epistemology underlying scenes of recognition in drama (that's not how he puts it but i think it fairly covers the many pages that are not directly concerned with drama), you will find a lot in it. the 'lear' essay and then perhaps the beckett essay are the logical pre-reading for that part, and 'knowing and acknowledging' if you're keen on seeing his background for the concept of acknowledgement (not that it makes it perfectly clear what he means by it later in 'claim'). there are certain ways in which the OLP essays (first couple in MWM) might add some perspective on his aims in part 4, but mostly he's off on his own by that point. part 1 of claim includes a preliminary look at other-minds skepticism that is taken up again in part 4, and all of part 2 is given to articulating the external-world skepticism that he frequently recalls as a model in part 4, but part 4 is not so dependent on those that you couldn't read it as is. (i did that with some friends once, and aside from the inherent difficulties cavell's writing posed for them, for the first 30 pages or so negotiating the reading of wittgenstein layered on top of everything else was actually more of an impediment to understanding for them.)

sometimes i think the thoreau book is the single best thing he ever wrote. if you're interested in moral perfectionism as it pertains to tragedy/drama/film then i suspect 'cities of words', which is a mature and poised statement made with pedagogical intent, would serve you much better than any of the talks from the 80s (but maybe not better than 'pursuits', which i've never read all the way through).

I don't know Cavell at all but he's very popular with my Parisian colleagues, like, maybe the only American philosopher people care about

that seems weird

I mean people read assorted m&e crap but no American but Cavell gets "hero" status

do you have any sense for how much of it is due to his translator, s. laugier, who studied under him and has been plonking away at the francophone cavell industry?

We may have read something else in Claim of Reason, but I know that part 3 was emphasized. We read it along with Rawls's "Two Concepts of Rules", which is taken up in that section. It's hard to recall exactly what was assigned versus what I read on my own. Maybe that section was the easiest one to teach.