Rolling Philosophy

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.

I heard a discussion with Laugier on France Culture where the premise was like: "Everyone knows that American philosophy is boring as fuck, but have you heard of Stanley Cavell?"

hah she's my colleague and yes is a big reason for Cavell's reach. she & her hubby have good American connections too (he's been visiting prof at the U of C)

how many greeks teach in "euro"pean "philosophy" departments? 'aristo'tle and his macedonian phillipian alexandrian 'aristo'cracy prevail or at least 'aristo'phanes clouds and satirizes still :)

Thanks for the heads-up j. Maybe I'll try at some of the essays before committing to Claim.

I do have to admit that part of the reason I'm curious is for Laugier/France Culture's reasons jmm cites above... :( (w/ the obvious qualification that "American Philosophy" itself is a pretty unhelpful generalization. I haven't read enough from the "American" philosophical tradition as its implied in the remark, though I will say I don't find Rorty or Dewey boring AF (disagree with them as I do...) and I'd like to read more.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOtd_f0X0AEtQVT.jpg

happy world philosophy day

I just finished Timothy Morton, Humankind, which was a trip and a half. I keep struggling to summarize it to people, I probably can't succeed.

so if I were going to "read Plato" which Plato should I read, do I just like jump into trying to read Republic cover to cover or is there a better place to start

let's say also I'm particularly interested in Plato's ethics/the Idea of the Good and not just in it for whatever the most entertaining instances of Socrates owning randos on the street is

But that IS his idea of the Good!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/platos-ethics-9780195086454?cc=us&lang=en&

sweet thx

The Republic is a really fun read. I would just jump in.

I think Meno is a pretty great first read, not so long and the owning is exquisite

rip moishe postone :(

Has anyone read Grand Hotel Abyss?

Just finished Fredric Jameson's book on Adorno, Late Marxism, which was excellent. I never regret reading anything by Jameson.

I want to know more about Bernard Stiegler and other "philosophy of technology" folks worth reading. Or considering reading.

(…a month late but)

Has anyone read Grand Hotel Abyss?

Read about a third of it. Slightly better than you'd expect from a book written by a waste Guardian journalist, but only slightly. Quite reductionist, bad at ideas, no depth of reading. Jogs along well enough, and the oddity of it is quite likeable - a broadly friendly, very journalistic view of the Frankfurt School.

Is the title meant to be a play on the film Grand Budapest Hotel?

It's from Lukács:

A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’

Maybe I'll stick to Martin Jay's book then.

I want to know more about Bernard Stiegler and other "philosophy of technology" folks worth reading. Or considering reading.

I am not especially well-read in this department so I hope others will chime in. But I found Stiegler's Technics and Time pretty inscrutable (with a few moments of clarity). I may not have been reading it very closely though.

Gilbert Simondon comes up a lot in this area (I haven't read him). And of course Heidegger.

I remember really liking David Wills' "Prosthesis"

i haven't read any of don ihde's stuff on technology but he seems fairly respectable, i've got a book of his on the voice that i consider worth reading someday

Before delving into Stiegler (and I do believe Technics and Time is the best starting point), I suggest watching The Ister, a philosohical documentary on Hölderlin's Danube that features several interviews with Stiegler himself (among others: Jean-Luc Nancy is also in it). He summarises his main points without devolving into what some might call insufferable jargon, so it should give you a good sense of whether to explore further or not.

I really liked The Ister (drawn to it bcz of mh love for the poem).

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/books/review/irad-kimhi-thinking-and-being.html

Anyone going to read this? I remember hearing murmurings about this guy from students at Chicago, roughly in this same tone, but I'm not sure to what extent it's a romanticized personality thing. Also not sure 'genius or folly' is a good starting point for philosophy.

$40 for 166 pages?

THAT is threatening

I'm on the psych side of this project and the people are sound - good to work for on the whole. Anyone wanna do the philosophy of mind/metaphysics for 9 months to a year?... (Warwick, UK). Here's the ad.

Interesting that the project covers scientific understanding, but is there nothing from literature?

No, that hasn't come up and isn't mentioned in the grant. Are you thinking of literature as an influence on our everyday (putatively) A-theoretic understanding of time, or as evidence of it, or both? This project is my first brush with philosophy, so please forgive naive questions!

for instance georges poulet, studies in human time: https://archive.org/details/studiesinhumanti00poul

Thanks j.!

Are you thinking of literature as an influence on our everyday (putatively) A-theoretic understanding of time

As someone who has has had very few brushes with philosophy, all in a non-academic way. My scattershot understanding of time (or time as a question) comes from it being discussed in novels. Often via the novelist's reading in philosophy and the way they are processing it. There was a period where I was groaning whenever it comes up (I like it but usually feels a bit tacked on) (Kinda why I like Perec's Species of Spaces so much, although I haven't read that in years)

I know what you mean about the tacked-on feeling. The project is too narrow to accommodate literature directly, but j's link suggests I ought to be looking more widely for inspiration over the ways in which people might conceive of time.