Rolling Philosophy

Anyone on this board reading Reza Negarestani's "Intelligence and Spirit" ?

https://www.urbanomic.com/book/intelligence-and-spirit/

ryan should totally be reading that

Yikes

huh that looks interesting! I just ordered it, lol. don't know anything about negarestani though.

I’ve made friends with dome critical theory/philo grad students who talk about Deleuze all the time. learned about the plane of immanence last night. still not totally clear on the concept

you and me both buddy

re: philosophy of tech, i'm a dilettante when it comes to philsophy but i took a philosophy of technology class anyway and this was the main text: https://books.google.com/books/about/Technology_and_Values.html?id=BgYc9_ldWFYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false

i enjoyed it even if it was often beyond my pay grade

currently making my way through the new translation of The Phenomenology of Spirit for the first time. I gotta say, this book is wild.

Also, I don't know anything about Brandom but I'm looking forward to reading this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674976819/

Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers.

In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.

A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses―judgments of what ought to be―were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes―subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.

According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

oh is that all we gotta do

Handing out Hegel to all the world, like LSD in the water supply.

what has happened to nina power exactly? is she a pagan terf crypto-fascist now? she's been hanging out with justin murphy. this is a point-by-point denunciation of a video I have not yet watched https://write.as/7v8fbjq9ekoaxl3z.md. what would k-punk say?!

Why is it so hard for these people to veer Euro new age without revelling in the underlying fash? It doesn't have to be, although you'd be forgiven for not buying that.

nina "white" power

Speaking truth to power.

one of these years (probably not this one) I'm gonna go through a Hegel phase, and I'll probably end up more obnoxious than ever. I did go to Jena last summer.

Hegel-Hegel or Hegel-Kojève?

I want it raw

ODB's 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya' is ripe for a Hegelian take.

as someone who knows nina a bit and knows lots of people who know her better i can say i have no idea how she's ended up in this horrible place

White privilege is a helluva drug

This is a good piece on Cavell - sympathetic and critical.

https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/must-we-mean-what-we-say-on-the-life-and-thought-of-stanley-cavell

Wow

Anyone reading/read Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures? I’m enjoying it - it’s very good.

wait, how did i only just find out that colin mcginn's legal defence was "in a sense there is nothing that is not a hand job" ?

A young Adorno expresses his distaste for the academy in a letter to Kracauer (29.5.1931): "I don’t want to produce scholarship or a worldview, but something...which embitters people who basically only ever want to enquire into the meaning of existence using Aristotle or Hegel."

— Adam Baltner (@schaumahaltmal) December 5, 2019

Speaking of Adorno, do any of you have any opinions on Raymond Geuss?

i geuss not

i like him, even so much of what i've read of his has that uh i dunno how to describe it that clever oxbridge impatience to it - at least he turns it against his own social circle which is sweet. still have never really read his long-ago book on critical theory. it seems lately he's in one of those late-career periods that philosophers go through when they're hitting a big ~publish all~ button, which is fine.

his casually thrown off book of essays on historical philosophers 'changing the subject' is very good, with some differences of taste it actually feels like a representation of ~my~ history of philosophy for once.

and i really like his little book - reprinting lectures i think? - on public goods & private goods.

Does anyone know of a good reference (preferably an article) that neatly summarizes the Heidegger-and-Nazism debate? I'm writing an essay where I have to allude to this but since it's not really central to what I'm talking about I would like to avoid wading into a huge pile of literature.

scruton: dead

pic.twitter.com/uH8W5RAlW2

— where are the pobblebonks of yesteryear (@AmneMachin) January 21, 2020

:D

Doug struggling with Kant. I feel you buddy pic.twitter.com/Nf2yvucyPP

— Graham (@onalifeglug) May 30, 2020

Good obituary:

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/bernard-stiegler-in-memoriam/

Reportedly a suicide, in reaction to an unnamed chronic illness (echoes of Deleuze).

Thanks pom, good piece

Seconded, thanks for posting that. Very sad this is how he went.

I did not know of him, but thanks for posting this.

Here he is in the 2004 documentary film The Ister, which is how I got wind of him in the first place:

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

The entire thing is very much worth watching btw.

I was aware of him but that obituary definitely inspires me to read him

Vol. 1 of Technics and Time is the watershed, even though it may not be the most approachable starting point (that distinction goes to Acting Out, which incidentally overdetermines the theatrical undertones of Passer à l'acte, but such are the vagaries of translation). His treaties on 'symbolic misery' are also quite thought-provoking, albeit shot through with the typically French assumption that high brow culture needs to be democratized because it is 'superior'. I am less taken with his later works, which frantically aspire towards a Theory of Everything of technocapitalist oppression – a laudable aim yet one that requires a bit more caution than he exhibits.

Totalization always feels like a daft game tbh but I understand the lure, totally

sounds like the later stuff is more up my alley then as i'm a total whore for technocapitalist oppression theorizing

Don’t get me wrong, his ‘late period’ is a treasure trove as well. He tackles the topic with more depth and aplomb than e.g. Baudrillard imo.

His daughter, Barbara Stiegler, is also a noted philosopher and based on what little I know of her work she is also drawn to the same kinds of themes, e.g. adaptability as neoliberal imperative.

Yes, she teaches in Bordeaux I think. I knew her name but not his.

the obit is really good. i just ordered "The Neganthropocene (Critical Climate Chaos)" because amazon says it will arrive before i go on a no-internet camping trip over the weekend. it looks fun.

Haven't read that one. Do report (if you feel like it, of course)!