Rolling Philosophy

Mordy writes:

We don't really have a rolling philosophy thread (maybe we should)

I agree.

Exciting times! Do any of you read Robert Hanson? More libertarian-econ than straight philosophy, but one of my fave academia-related bloggers.
http://overcomingbias.com/

as of right now, I have less than ten pages left of Dominic Fox's Cold World

woops, here's a direct link: http://www.o-books.com/book/detail/349/Cold-World

oh man dominic fox is the "let's be depressed, that'll show em" bro rite?

Actually, hm, let's move conversation over here so that this thread gets a boost and Zizek doesn't get unrelated convo. You're clearly WAY more rigorous about delineating disciplinary spaces than I am. Like I'm happy calling Marx a philosopher instead of a political economist. Or Butler a philosopher instead of a Gender Studies Critical Theorist.

yeah im kind of an a-hole that way

Anyway, I got a few philosophy-related books recently. "Living in the End Times," by Zizek (lol, that could've gone in the other thread), "Extra Lives," by Tom Bissell, which is a bit of culture theory (on video games), phenomenology of art, and other stuff, and "Closing the Global Achievement Gap," by Tony Wagner, which is more concerned with pedagogy than theory, but feels relevant (especially when it touches on issues of the academy -- like what the purpose of the University is/should be.)

i am so goddamn out of touch w/philosphy these days, i am a bad philo grad. it bugs me, because i think ive lost a lot of what i already knew just through not engaging with it, kind of a tough discipline if you dont stay on top of it.

feel the exact same way^^ studied a bit a couple of years back but after doing other stuff since i feel stupid yet again

this ish is my day job so I don't really want to get into it hot & heavy here but I'll bookmark this thread & maybe I can play some ball occasionally. I know nothing about the people you're talking about here; don't really consider crit theory "philosophy" (I'm an analytic philosopher; worse, a logician) so gonna stay out of talk of that for sure.

shd probably call this thread "notes towards a rolling conceptualizations & frameworks thread"

well, crit theory can mean continental philosophy, obv not analytic philosophy tho.

yeah part of my problem was i came for the philosophy and stayed for the formal logic.

"real" "philosophy" is basically boring math, imo

"crit theory" is like getting stoned w/ french dudes

no doubt; it's just that on ILX the philosophers people talk about are invariably people I've never read or even really heard of, and yet I do this shit for a living---which either means my side of philo needs to get the word out more or else I'm just too provincial. tbf analytic philosophy can be a pain in the ass to get into & it tends to be kinda "deflating" rather than ~mystical~ or ~political~ (those aren't necessary bad things of course) so I think analytic philosophy isn't as entrancing to your typical inquisitive person.

also it's funny b/c I spend lots of time in France, and my colleagues here are always amused at what Americans think of French philosophy (the reality afaict is that French philosophers take history way more seriously than your typical American or English philosopher)---on the other hand Bernard-Henri Lévi is on tv all the time here so maybe Americans do have the right idea.

i think its less that analytic doesnt get the word out and more that people tend to get into ILX via the music side of the board which leans heavily on criticism steeped in continental philosophy! whereas WHAT CAN YOUR FASCIST MATH-THOUGHT TEACH ME ABOUT MUSIC, MAN

analytic/continental divide is boring -- there's good stuff on both sides

robin hanson, man, that dude...

implacably insane, in a good way

"analytic philosophy can be a pain in the ass to get into & it tends to be kinda "deflating" rather than ~mystical~ or ~political~ "

whoa this sounds like such a drag

Did analytic philosophy at university and critical theory at MA level, so I have time for both sides of the discipline. Moving more towards literary theory these days, though, so I'm interested in hearing the logicians' debate on this thread.

logic rules & I'm supposed to write something on it for a "general audience" later this year & when I do I may bounce it off ILX b/c tbh I could use feedback on it from non-specialists...gonna be a few months though.

analytic/continental divide is boring -- there's good stuff on both sides

― ksh, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 7:22 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark

h8 this approach to... everything really

kinda like

http://cdn.videogum.com/files/2010/05/church.jpg

imo

lol buddhism?

nah like judeo-christio-buddho-hindu-islamo-shinto-donkey-wheelism, aka 'the best bits of everything'

LOST

I just meant the circled thing isn't donkey wheelism, it's buddhism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmacakra

oh hah i hadnt even looked at the image, i was just having a kneejerk response to all those words in a row

they are not reborn in lost i think

i thought that was why the nope

cos its like, pan-religiousy in a fucking marshmallowy meaningless way.

is the point

philosophy

man

ho shit. i thought the donkey-wheel was just meta.

n e ways, plaxico otm

yeah, interdisciplinary work is so fruitless

even if you don't consider analytic and continental philosophy to be two separate disciplines—maybe they are, and maybe they aren't—saying that you need to take sides doesn't really make much sense. not saying you can just take random aspects of the two and mash them together, but if you notice a place where the two lines up, you certainly can link them together and work from there

seems like u r def. the man to do that good look

btw, lol that ILX Philosophy thread started discussing Lost less than 50 posts in

Ugh, maybe I won't be looking forward to this thread as I had initially thought. Fucking assholes coming out of the woodwork already.

I don't believe that analytic and continental disciplines can ever be reduced into each other, and nor should they, but to suggest that they cannot both be appreciated is the most disgusting savagery.

I don't think those people are assholes.

Analyze the disgusting savage archetype?

I'm just going to treat this as the rolling talk about academics thread, fuck distinctions imo

anyway, picked up history of sexuality part I, it's actually my first full on foucault book instead of a few scattered essays and excerpts here and there. have only read the prologue but excited

not wanting to put you off or anything, but dunno if history of sexuality is the best place to start w/ foucault - i think it's one of his most esoteric and least satisfying bks, tbh. for me, discipline and punish was a really gd intro to his thought and style - works as a piece of theory and as (obv contentious) history

i am so goddamn out of touch w/philosphy these days, i am a bad philo grad. it bugs me, because i think ive lost a lot of what i already knew just through not engaging with it, kind of a tough discipline if you dont stay on top of it.

― ULTRAMAN dat ho (jjjusten), Wednesday, June 16, 2010 1:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^^ I double majored and am working in the field of my other major so yeah, I'm stupid again so to speak. Hopefully this thread will bring back that loving feeling of my brain turning inside out.

i found history of sexuality I quite satisfying and not as hard to get through as d&p

i read this really good book called the fountanhead once

wat was it about?

how awesome awesome people are

i think it was about rape and architecture, kinda like Discipline & Punish, only longer.

yeah i woulda said history of sexuality was totally perfect intro to foucault, kinda feel like its both the most developed and clearest version of many of his tropes etc.

the Foucault lecture courses that have been coming out in english translation over the past few years are also great -- I find the lecture format really easy to follow (not that Foucault's other books are particularly offensive in this regard; just sayin'), and there's a lot of great stuff in there

lately my reading has been directed more toward early-20th century european philosophy (phenomenology, Diltheyan hermeneutics, various neo-Kantianisms) in an effort to get a better grasp on the origins of the main postwar intellectual (and some political) movements. and maybe to finally understand Heidegger, but I'm not holding my breath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSdHoNJu5fU

ha, was just about to post that. It's funny because it's true.

I'm currently doing my Masters dissertation in (continental) philosophy, fuck it all I say I'll just get a cosy office job. Altho my reading at this very moment is fun, Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music.

really makes me want to read hegel and hausel to understand late heidegger to understand derrida (kinda thought socrates was supposed to be the key to derrida though)

That clip is amazing. Also -- loved the Attali. A lot of my undergrad thesis was devoted to him.

xpost oh yeah I'm also hoping that, after reading some Husserl, I'll be able to (and still want to, heh) read Derrida's early stuff on him and maybe get a better understanding of JD's whole project

husserl is awesome but the phenomenological aspects of derrida are crazy confusing to me

I saw this thread title and initially thought it would be about best approaches to throwing the D20 in a role playing game.

man that clip is my h8ed approach to... everything really. "You can't understand x without y, z, or q". You could say that in any academic discipline, or any non-academic discipline. Fuck it. Secondary texts ftw.

btw another mostly lapsed MA here, although I keep up my subscription to The Philospher's Magazine.

plax what's yr favorite husserl? I'm reading crisis of the european sciences right now but that's obv. a very late and not very representative work so I'm wonderin' what I should check out next.

i read the cartesian meditations recently enough and its a pretty sweet intro.

the Foucault lecture courses that have been coming out in english translation over the past few years are also great -- I find the lecture format really easy to follow (not that Foucault's other books are particularly offensive in this regard; just sayin'), and there's a lot of great stuff in there

― INSUFFICIENT FUN (bernard snowy), Thursday, June 17, 2010 5:48 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

YES--birth of biopolitics is GREAT i think, not to mention the clearest/'easiest' of any foucault book ive read too.

really makes me want to read hegel and hausel to understand late heidegger to understand derrida (kinda thought socrates was supposed to be the key to derrida though)

― plax (ico), Thursday, June 17, 2010 6:03 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i thought levinas was the key to derrida

i dont even know who that is

smdh

i will never understand derrida

fu omg

lol jk

lithuanian jew, student of husserl (and heidegger i believe?), key concepts 'the other' 'ethics as first philosophy' 'face-to-face' 'alterity'

derrida has two long essays about him--'violence and metaphysics' and a published (extended?) version of the eulogy he gave at levinas funeral

the key to derrida fyi is smokin pot and reading poetry

I don't think levinas was a student of heidegger (maybe yr thinkin' of marcuse?), but yeah, he was (I believe) the first french translator of husserl, and in general had a big influence on the french reception of phenomenology

xpost halfway there; which poetry should I be readin'?

Rilke, maybe?

well holderlin obv

rimbaud dude

bob dylan

mallarme

shel silverstein

paul celan

nicki minaj

paul celan for sure.

I heard a lecture on Derrida + Celan last weekend.

celan was the poet derrida wrote most about from what i can tell.

this (therefore) will not have been a thread

the best introduction to Derrida is the documentary Derrida — his waffle-preparing technique is the key to his entire philosophy project

or, "philosophical" project

i am gonna look into these foucault lectures because they sound right up my alley but that means i will probably not read them for another 4 years because that's what i do :(

first book of Derrida's lectures was published last year too

I thought jakobson and the structuralists was the key to derridas but I come from a lit theory background

by the way any philosophy book is improved 1000% if you imagine zizek reading it to you in his voice

i sometimes make lectury gestures when i am reading philosophy bc i am explning it to myself

I'm philosophy

xpost yeah me too! (not in public tho, I don't have the stones fer that)

zizek's voice is great, and I have sometimes imitated it (in my head or aloud) while reading his stuff, but never thought of using it for other things. heh.

i think when i read derrida i imagine it in Dennis Hopper's voice

50 Philosophy Blogs!

http://onlinechristiancolleges.net/50-philosophy-blogs-to-help-you-find-the-meaning-of-life/

only two from that list I recognize/read sometimes are Larval Subjects and Object-Oriented Philosophy. but I still don't understand their whole "speculative realism" steeze.

there's a speculative realism collection on its way, you can learn soon! Although really I don't think it's much of anything at all, beyond very broad sweeps like being a strain of continental thought that takes science more seriously and tries to put together more positive projects after years of deconstructive negativity and such.

I'm pretty sure Levinas studied under Heidegger, making the whole nazism and turn away from Heidegger all the more dramatic.

just got Quentin Meillasoux's After Finitude from Amazon -- anyone read it?

YES!

it's excellent!

I'll need to read it many more times before I really understand it, but the stuff about the ancestral is so good

cool thread! current readings:
Deleuze - The Logic of Sense
Foucault - The Order of Things
Selected Writings of Nicholas of Cusa
and as always reading and re-reading Peirce for my dissertation.

anyone here into radical constructivism or second order cybernetics? (Heinz von Foerster, Spencer-Brown, Humberto Maturana, Niklas Luhmann, Francisco Varela, etc etc) Not philosophy proper but in truth i think it sheds a lot of light in that direction.

don't recognize most of those names... I'm curious about Luhmann (only know about him thru Habermas), but haven't read any yet -- I get the impression that his work would dovetail with Latour, who I quite like, but maybe I'm way off-base. also interested in cybernetics, but I feel like I need to really bone up on math before I can get anything out of it.

Yeah Latour is certainly close to those guys, as is Michel Serres.

looking at After Finitude on amazon, looks pretty cool, gonna pick it up.

Thinking about buying Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville's Discovery of America, anyone heard anything good about it? (Yes, probably more of a history than poly phi, but I've wanted to read something Tocqueville related for awhile.)

God, I was grumpy the other day. To make it up, here is a neat comic done by my mate, called Being & Tim. It is mostly philosophy dork jokes, and thus is very funny.

A++ emil.y, your friend's comics are great

looking at After Finitude on amazon, looks pretty cool, gonna pick it up.

― ryan, Sunday, June 20, 2010 6:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

sorry, that exclamation point was maybe a bit much

If you guys wanna start a reading group I'll pick it up and participate when I get home.

been meaning to read it myself (really gotta work out what this big deal with correlationism lately is all about), so I would get involved with this.

would totally be into a reading group, need to kick myself off ILX more often

Bertrand Russell once referred to Kant as the greatest catastrophe in the history of philosophy, C.D. Broad commented that this position surely belonged to Hegel. Russell and Broad were wrong, because this title undoubtedly belongs to Martin Heidegger. Some years ago, Anthony Quinton spoke of Heidegger's 'pondrous and rubbishy woolgathering.' Until fairly recently, Heidegger was not taken seriously by philosophers in Great Britain and the United States. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. One goal of the present study is to stem this ride of unreason.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/manipulating_kids_for_the_shove_KPImNCo2nHfU6zOOeNVhqK/0

"RELIGION," a sheet from English class, handed out to eighth-graders, is provocatively titled. The typewritten paper presents some 20 quotes that can be described as anti-God, coming from philosophers from Kierkegaard to Schopenhauer. Even a "Yiddish proverb."

...

"Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake," wrote Pascal.
I'm not entirely sure of the meaning of that quote, contained on the handout. But at a time when kids need religion, family and strong schools more than ever, this kind of lesson is best left alone.

pff, Kierkegaard would totally be down with doing stupid shit in the name of God, they should be all over him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/7863036/Plato-ancient-Greek-philosophers-secret-music-code-cracked-by-British-scientists.html

hate hate hate shit like that

ugggggggggghhhhhh

quick somebody shoot dan brown before he has a chance to write a book about it

i mean i love the idea of umberto eco-style secret messages and shit but being all "i cracked platos code" its like... no buddy you didnt

millions of people have 'cracked plato's code' over and over and over by like... reading plato and discussing him

"i bring shocking news - plato was a fan of math"

lol @

Some experts say Plato is the greatest of all the Greek philosophers and together with Socrates, his mentor, and Aristotle, a student, founded modern Western culture and science.

not b/c I'm objected per se but to write that kind of crap e.g. "founded modern Western culture" it's like no you fuckhead culture isn't something one person can "found"

and then:

“It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unravelling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.”

I'm guessing the journo wrote that line b/c the "but basically I cracked the code" is not the sort of thing a Plato scholar would say...I think/hope? although in grad school I started a course with a Plato scholar who in the first week started going on about the golden ratio & was like "the key to Plato...is this equation!" and since I also do math I was totally embarrassed at the ludicrousness of this and dropped the course pronto.

yeah i really hope the journalist is embellishing the quote there

there is no "hidden philosophy of plato" unless it is "hidden" because you are "illiterate"

fyi I have encoded a secret code into all my ilx posts

if you take the time and effort to unlock the code ... you will be richly rewarded

I disagree with the idea that Socrates was strictly executed for "heresy" as well tbh

wow I didn't realise who this 'plato scholar' was but I met him earlier in the week on non-cryptographic business. he didn't seem like a guy who was about to drop one of the most revelatory jpegs in the history of philosophy:

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/48209000/jpg/_48209148_platocode_platobust.jpg

but then it wouldn't be v platonic of me to go by appearances. if yr curious, the much talked-up 'hidden meanings'/spurious correlations can be found here. nice to see he's worked the monochord into his theory, but I think harry smith employed it for better anti-platonic purposes 50 years previous.

fwiw im open to the idea of some weird musical pattern in plato

not down with cracking the code tho

ugh they were talking about this jerk and his theory on NPR during my drive home, maybe i should have punched the dashboard rhythymically according to his code for better enlightenment

http://www.source101.org/images/HFTNPD65.gif

i don't really understand what the guy is saying tbrr

Dr Kennedy discovered that some key phrases, themes and words occurred during regular intervals throughout, which matched the spacing in the 12 note scale.

hmmmmmmm

He argued that Plato did not use the code for pleasure, but instead for his own safety after his teacher was executed for heresy.

does he say what the secret message is?

xp
yeah, I'm not greek enough to subscribe to clear distinction between content and form, but I think calling identification of extra structural features in plato "finding hidden meanings" is nonsense. he seems like a nice guy.

idg how the interval between words 'matches' the spacing of the 12-note scale, though im pretty dumm

the lengths of speeches, the position of speeches within the
dialogues, the location of significant turns in the arguments, and the
absolute lengths of the dialogues all provide evidence for an underly-
ing stichometric organisation and, in particular, for the importance of a
twelve-part structure.

his points, when they are non-ridiculous and not about the golden ratio, are about the structure mirroring the content w/ forms that are maybe pythagorean. not sure how he's going to turn this into a best-selling book, esp if the jpeg upthread is anything to go by.

Anyone who reads Plato seriously knows that there's a lot of form/content games going on in the dialogues. So while I'm open to there being some musical connection with this, calling it a "secret code" is silly.

"The code supposedly hides Plato's dangerous idea, that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, not according to the whims of Zeus. But the celebration of mathematics is in plain view throughout the dialogues."

good takedown here, titled "Wanna crack the Plato code? Read Plato":

http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2010/06/30/Plato-code

i decided i would read history of sexuality vol. 1 again, and maybe someday i'll get to vol. 2

vol. 2 is a little nuts iirc

the hidden musical messages in vol 2 are better

needs more reverb imo

but just the right amount of flange

1 is so classic but 2 is confusing but worth it

xp bravo

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

hello science welcome to the 21st century

lolz. Finally the obscure ideas of a little-known fella called Nietzsche are gaining some momentum.

what y'all reading at the moment? I've momentarily given up on my Francophone and Francophile bros to read Peter Kivy's Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience - very clever, precise, and thorough, but a bit on the dull side. Reasonably successful at avoiding that typical analytic philosophy of music thing of only being applicable to classical and early romantic music (even though that's pretty much all he's talking about), though, so there are flashes of excitement in there.

omg the title of that piece

i sorta love those kind of trend pieces--helps when i try to convince students that philosophy is cutting edge.

what y'all reading at the moment?

I still really want to read "After Finitude," but currently planning to use precious reading time on the new translation of Isabelle Stengers' "Cosmopolitics" and very excited about it.

ah yes that looks interesting. Someone had better translate her Penser avec Whitehead soon or I'll be forced to finally learn French.

cosmopolitics looks interesting. I'm now reading marshall mcluhan's understanding media which is an unexpected&has a huge explanatory power which surprised me. among the many strands he ties together is stuff on language&maths not dissimilar to the maxticle, but historicised & treating the phonetic alphabet/finger-counting &c. as technologies w/ concomitant effects on 'ratios between the senses' & broader socio-economic patterns. full of artfully deployed amazing facts and I'd strongly recommend to anyone remotely interested despite not being philosophy.

oh i want to read that. def on my long list of classics to read.

he does what I'd hoped phenomenology might do in terms of tying/blurring thought&practice/inner&outer, BUT he does it as a way of making sense of societal change, and in turn uses his understanding of that macro-level of technological change&media to make sense of how people engage/perceive/act in&think about the world. love the guy & find his explanations of why things&ppl necessarily developed as they did really convincing. lots of stuff on electric lighting, the phonetic alphabet, villages&roads, and zero. written w/ unusual sense of style and restraint&slow to digest because of that but so worth it.

what is the meaning of life?

http://bananafishmagazine.com/Book%20Images/Man%27s%20Search.jpg

(Just read that for the first time last week, btw.)

thanks that cleared it up for me

np

search for Meaning = belief in teleology imo

mcluhan is really great, I need to pick up that rerelease of understanding media

not necessarily xp

like all overmen i create my own meaning

i fashion it out of the skulls of my enemies

currently reading Susan Buck-Morss's book on the Arcades Project, along with a random smattering of Benjamin (just finished the Baudelaire essay); want to add Adorno's book on Kierkegaard to the mix at some point, too. sometimes I think I could spend the rest of my life reading early-20th-century eurobros on mid-19th-century eurobros.

the Susan Buck-Morss book is great, tho her whole reading of dialectic images is kinda unpopular (lol inside-benjamin academic baseball)

what don't people like about it?/what is the 'right way' to read dialectical images? (funny question)

soft silly music is meaningful magical, iirc

deeeeeep

xp as far i remember it, it's an argument over whether it's an actual image or not -- buck-morss says it is and i think basically everyone else says it isn't

Robin Hanson always rocking it: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/brave-position-club.html

lot of discussion of moral realism, meta-ethics, on the blogs at the mo, mostly sparked by Sam Harris' TED talk. I think I'm a knee-jerk moral realist, but feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew about the subject, struggling to deal with even the basics.

Harris:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html

today's reading:
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2077
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/its-a-contingent-fact-that-we-care/

we are against any current philosophy that is not based in principles from evolutionary or cognitive science.

feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew about the subject, struggling to deal with even the basics.

I've been reading Structural Anthropology and I ran across a passage that's a little cryptic for me and was hoping one of you guys could contextualize it for me (google has already failed me):

These attitudes, far from automatically reflecting the nomenclature, often appear as secondary elaborations, which serve to resolve the contradictions and overcome the deficiencies inherent in the terminological system. This synthetic character is strikingly apparent among the Wik Munkan of Australia. In this group, joking privileges sanction a contradiction between the kinship relations which link two unmarried men and the theoretical relationship which must be assumed to exist between them in order to account for their later marriages to two women who do not stand themselves in the corresponding relationship.

Basically up until here he has argued that there is a terminological kinship (the linguistic level of kinship like father/mother/etc) and an attitude kinship (how one acts towards their father, for example). He is now showing that something the attitude kinships actually resolve tensions in the terminological kinship (showing that they are two distinct system of kinship), and is using the Win Munkan as an example. However, outside knowing who wrote about the Wik Munkan (Ursula McConnel), I don't know enough about them to understand how the 'joking privileges' between two unmarried men resolve the problems of the terminological relationship between them and their later marriages -- how does this all work, basically?

just looked up the article mentioned in the endnote on jstpr and it is a+

the wik munkan word for penis is, apparently, 'kuntj'; the word for clitoris, meanwhile, 'po'o ka', lit. 'vagina nose'.

anyway the bit about special kinship relations is written rather unclearly and i'm not sure i understand it the same way as l-s! As far as I can work out, exchanging slightly ritualised obscenities in public is encouraged between distant relations, while taboo increases with closeness of relation. So you have different 'joking privileges' with different relations or people who are in the position of a relation while not being related to you.

e.g. you're meant to not exchange many obscene remarks with your mother's elder brother (and you're not meant to talk to her younger bro at all). But if there's a 'crooked' (intergenerational?) marriage, so that your older maternal uncle's wife and your wife are in a different generational/kinship relation, you and the older man enter into a different type of joking relationship in which a great deal of licence is expected. The original kinship relation is superseded by the later one.

so the joking relationship, which is the attitude 'stylized, prescribed and sanctioned by taboos or privileges and expressed through a fixed ritual', is the more flexible relationship, the one that changes to reflect changes in people's circumstances, and the one that has more of a relevance to their everyday.

also, the wik munkan word for 'labia minora' translates to 'vagina ears'.

Thank c sharp -- the article is really excellent but like you noticed, even reading the article it's not so clear exactly how Levi-Strauss' point is functioning here. But your answer makes sense (even if it's still pretty vague -- I'd love to know exactly how these relationships work, and what exactly is the contradiction being sanctioned? that they have competing kinship relationships? why is that more of a terminological problem but not an attitude problem? couldn't terminology be something like, "the brother of my mother who is also my wife's uncle" or whatever?).

in our culture doesn't it often seem the other way around, that the terminal kinship smooths over the attitude kinship? for example, you have a difficult relationship with your mother, but "she's my mom." it could go both ways. am I misunderstanding?

c sharp was just giving an example -- it seems like there are very close relationships that are vulgar. Primarily the non-vulgar relationships are an older person who you need to show respect to. But a sibling is probably an opportunity for some good vulgarity.

we are against any current philosophy that is not based in principles from evolutionary or cognitive science.

― rage for the machine (banaka), Friday, 27 August 2010 02:00 (4 days ago)

levi-strauss makes me feel like any philosophy not based in principles of structural linguistics is worthless

relevant:

IAN BUCHANAN: [...] Do you still think myth criticism has a place or can be reinvented in a way that would be useful today?

FREDRIC JAMESON: This is a very tricky question. Benjamin asked himself this question in his Arcades Project and was attentive to the critiques of the Frankfurt School who were maybe more alert than he was at that point to the affinities of myth criticism with Jungianism and even a kind of fascist affirmation in it of the archaic impulses that fascism and nazism tried to resurrect. Clearly a myth criticism which takes that route is unacceptable. I would myself also want to say that sociobiology is a kind of positivist version of this same effort in that it attempts to link very complex modern societies back to the simplest of biological urges and thereby to simplify social reality in a way which is also mythic, although it certainly doesn't look much like Jungianism. The Marxist perspective on this is of course that these very archaic societies were also societies without power and without money: whether one would call all of them forms of primitive communism is much more complicated since of course some of them had caste systems and an aristocracy and all the rest of it. But it seems to me that the greatness of Levi-Strauss was to reopen a powerful path back to the social realities of those archaic societies and to all kinds of social relationships which we have lost in the modern industrial capitalist world. It is not so much a matter of recreating those things as it as a tapping of a properly utopian energy that's present in those older societies and that one can find in primitive myths. The point is not to re-mythologize our present, but to use this moment of the distant human past (as with other modes of production in the past) as a way of understanding what we've lost historically and as a charge of utopian energy on which we can draw.

(partic. the part about sociobiology, although I left the levi-strauss stuff in just 4 u mordy)

so would anyone be up for that casual Meillassoux reading group? Would be nice to keep my head in the game in as many directions as possible once I hand in my dissertation on Thursday. (I can quietly provide a PDF if desired.)

(bump)

yeah, I'd be down -- I ended up giving up after the first couple chapters, but I think I'm ready to take another shot at it.

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1583

I'm pretty sympathetic to the Wittgensteinian notion that "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language", but this guy takes it too far. He seems to think that just because

ACK

... he seems to think that if a problem is expressed in terms that don't chime with natural language usage, then the problem, and the whole research programme behind it, are *necessarily* meaningless.

Surely to wonder what the sonar sensory experience of a bat is like, and if it is anything like vision, or anything like hearing, or something completely different, is perfectly simple, and understandable, and legitimate - regardless even of whether or not one is committed to the idea of qualia.

I see Dennett is mentioned in that article but really the dude needs to engage with what Dennett says rather than just bollocksing on and ignoring it.

I've never seriously engaged with Dennett meself. I'm a big qualia fan so I really should find out how he thinks he can explain them away.

Just argues that everything can be explained by biological process iirc. Agree.

Aye well. That's the leap I struggle with. Biological processes, or anything material, to conscious experience. I know this potentially makes me sound like some kind of horrendous dualist or epiphenomenalist. But could you find out what a bat's sonar sensory experience is *like*, just by inspecting the biological process?

The desire to find out what an experience is like, and the experience of feeling that likeness, seem totally explainable via brain function to me. I think the argument against is the harder case at this point in history.

Like, why add on an extra layer of mystery above and beyond the observable?

my experience is an observable!

What is it that's doing the observing?

Just argues that everything can be explained by biological process iirc. Agree.

Explain to who, though? To language using creatures who ineliminably see a world in intentional terms, or to unimaginable creatures who *know* it's biological process all the way down?

I mean how do they *know*?

Explain to human beings thinking about being human beings. Intentionality really has nothing to do with it, this feels like basic Occam's Razor stuff to me.

Dualism is such a busted flush.

Lucky you, so...

To say that *I think* my experience can be explained in terms of biological process - by which i take you to mean law- governed, predictable? - seems a performative contradiction to me. There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

xp

I don't think there is an I in the sense you mean. A theoretically predictable law also leaves room for tremendous difficulty of prediction, maybe up to the point where prediction is only a theoretical possibility rather than a practical one.

There can be no 'I' thinking this, if what the 'I' thinks is the case.

Explain to human beings thinking about being human beings

Any human beings? Could you 'explain' vision, in terms of biological processess, to a blind person?

... yes?

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation. I also couldn't give a paraplegic the experience of playing Dance Dance Revolution, but I could still tell him how the game works.

GCSE Biology iirc

I'm down with Davidson here - monism, but dual-aspect, or some such. Perhaps engaging in philosophical thought when I have to leave the house in one minute is not a good idea.

Why can't it be thinking this as part of a biological process?

May it can be, maybe it is in some ultimately real way, but it can't 'think' this, if 'thinking' means what it thinks it means.

'Maybe it can be'

I mean no obviously I couldn't give a blind person the experience of vision through any kind of explanation

well y'know to me that seems like a pretty big explanatory failure.

I begin to feel like this is almost a religious position - in the sense that those on one side just *feel*, intuitively and strongly, that there is something that the scientific picture leaves out, and those who seem to feel that there is nothing in need of explanation.

No there is plenty in need of explanation, it's more a case of believing that it's explicable vs believing in magic.

Obligatory douchey dichotomy there, soz.

well y'know to me that seems like a pretty big explanatory failure.

I'm very skeptical about the capacity of language to explain any phenomenology, let alone a phenomenology of vision

i'm kind of being facetious

Expressibility thru language feels like a red herring here tho, since nobody's claiming that language = the totality of brain function I don't think.

I think phenomenology is basically outwith the capacity of explanation, it is something that can only be understood through experience. This may or may not be controversial.

Actually i think bernard's DDR paraplegic was interesting. Is that a simple and mundane example of something non-phenomenological that cannot be 'explained'? Or is it phenomenological at its core?

I think it's telling that all of us who can see "understand" the experience of sight phenomenologically (even if we aren't conscious of it) and very few of us could explain scientifically the processes of light and the biological basis of seeing. Even a complete full case of the latter doesn't give the former (and, obv, vice-versa too).

Telling what? How do you go from the uniqueness of phenomena to separating them from an aspect of brain function?

I guess I also don't see what the basis is for putting such extreme burdens of explanation on a biological theory of consciousness that, as far as I know, would posit the inseparability of mental 'experience' and (for lack of a better word right now) behavior. Like, it is one thing to aggregate a number of empirical behaviors into one common phenomenon called 'sight'; it is another thing to posit that there is some 'experience' of sight which is shared by all people who have engaged in those behaviors; and it is still a third thing to insist that any explanation for the phenomenon of sight must also be able to make the 'experience' of sight accessible to people who have never engaged in any of the behaviors.

also I would maybe want to dispute this
all of us who can see "understand" the experience of sight phenomenologically (even if we aren't conscious of it)
on the basis of optical illusions, that internet video with the basketball-passing people, etc -- what we "understand" is how to utilize our eyes in many of the most common situations to achieve a desired end result, like reading a word or tracking an object.

I guess I'm not really sure what we're arguing about anymore (or are we arguing at all?). It seems to me like a mechanistic explanation of various phenomena will never fully account for the full phenomena. For instance, I'm not sure that science* (*I don't really know what this word means here either, but I imagine we're using some loose Enlightenment distinction) can explain why when I look at something sad its affect is transmitted and I experience sadness too. It can maybe point out the spike in a particular chemical in my brain, but it can't locate the genesis of that chemical outside my internal processes. When someone says something mean to me and my feelings get hurt, science can't trace that affectual spike through the air. To bernard snowy, tho, I'd definitely agree with his second option (that there is some 'experience' of sight which is shared by all people who have engaged in those behaviors) and I'm more skeptical about language's ability to transmit that experience whatsoever. I just worry tho that giving everything a mechanistic explanation is a way of ignoring parts of the phenomena that we know are real but that can't necessarily be measured.

never fully account for the full phenomenon*

"y sad things make u sad" seems like a unproblematic candidate for scientific explanation to me. mirror neurons, intention as representation, something evolution something, blah de blah. For me at least, I think it's purely the non-material, phenomenological quality of experience, which is not captured by current scientific thinking.

Here's where we reach the problem of what 'science' is. If it's just accurately predicting various phenomena, then yes, it can probably be used to explain something like transmission of affect. But if it's more determining mechanistic functionality (particularly rooted in physics/biology) then I think transmission of affect will always be a challenge to explain. But you could also say that we understand some non-material quality specifically through a (also Enlightenment) study of things like sociology, social psychology, and even continental philosophy that deals with phenomenology -- like what puts Husserl outside the science discussion (esp since science's pedigree runs through philosophy).

really the problem we're all dancing around here is internal time-consciousness

guess I need to read Sein und Zeit after all...

this guy hacker is oddly enough not ending up too far from deleuze and guattari in his definition of philosophy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yi7m9IqsAU

video mustve literally just got removed b/c I watched it a few minutes ago and now its gone

yeah, that is weird

it was the excerpt from the crying game

oh yeah, forgot that part

my eternal love to the term 'hypokeimenon'.

what y'all reading at the moment? i just started iain hamilton grant's on an artificial earth: philosophies of nature after schelling, although i haven't read enough to say more than 'seems pretty cool'. i don't know shit about german idealism, so this is step one (or maybe like one point five) in my movement towards being hip to the current academic trends.

dunno about anyone else but i'd still be interested in an ilxor philosophy reading group. hm? although my interest in doing after finitude has waned, in large part because of reading what i think is his most recent (or most recently translated) article, on immanence, and wondering why he's such a crazyman. albeit a provocative one.

Anyone have thoughts about Alasdair MacIntyre and whether After Virture is worth reading? I loved Short History of Morality.

(braces)

mdx — I've seen that book before, although it was just called Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (assuming they're the same one — continuum press?) — couldn't make much of what I glanced at tho.

I'm not really reading any 'pure philosophy' at the moment (Derrida maybe the closest thing?) — mostly history-of-philosophy type stuff (just started on Martin Jay's book abt the Frankfurt School, which looks to be grebt, and I'm not sure why I put it off for long), + uh, various forms of 'theory'

ya, same book. not entirely sure what it's 'about' yet myself, but i've heard grant big-upped many times and he'll be speaking at a conference here next year, so i'm putting my faith in it.

Cool cool.

What's the, uh... occasion? context? something like that. of your reading him? Like, the philosophical background from which you are approaching him... or something.

xp,

Re MacIntyre - I have to teach AV at the moment to a bunch of trainee teachers who are being forced against their will to learn a bit of philosophy: they hate it, I hate it.

His basic argument is 'back to Aristotle' slightly via Hegel: What's Wrong With Modernity is individualism and the turning of us into atomised rule followers rather virtue- laden and valuing members of 'deep' communities, with high levels of commitment to defined and explicit ideas of the good. A bit dated in its attack on existentialism, and profoundly pessimistic in its prognosis for our future. Pompous with it.

my eternal love to the term 'hypokeimenon'

Gotta catch 'em all!

EXACKLY.

xps to Bernard - I mostly work on Deleuze and Grant himself is a Deleuze scholar (and he admits that the book views everything through a bit of a Deleuze-Guattari lens), so it seems like a good route into engaging with German Idealism beyond just passive interest. Also I've been nepotistically offered an open invitation to speak at the conference Grant will be at ( http://www.humanitiescentral.com/21st-century-idealism/ ), which I probably won't take up because I doubt I'll develop the appropriate confidence with the idealism in the time available, but I'll benefit from working towards it anyway.

I'm a big fan of MacIntyre fwiw. I know him also, fwiw.

"After Virtue" is great and well worth your time imho, it has a really amazing final turn to the contemporary and his local readings are sometimes rather startling (Jane Austen?)

I just read Reza Negarestani's "Cyclonopedia (Complicity with Anonymous Materials)" and it's a kerr-azy work of, ahem, "theory-fiction" that is a mashup of Deleuze and Lovecraft. It's not philosophy but it's not fiction either, a truly odd and original book from someone associated with the speculative realist turn but up to something else (a speculative surrealist?)

About to read Ray Brassier's 'Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction', will report back when done with that

ooh tell us more about the negarestani!! i was minorly obsessed with that guy when i was in my grim fascination phase with the hyperstition blog. which has since gone dark. his writing more than the others was seriously impenetrable and bizarre

nb i have zero philosophical training and don't read it at all, this was basically a weird internet hobby trying to figure it out

the book is incredibly dense at times, to the point of sounding like crazy repetitions of theoretical jargon swirled together, at other times it's a very strongly indebted to Lovecraft "story"/summary of the lost writings of a fictional academic historian of Persia whose theories about demons, oil, the Middle East as a sentient entity, the pressure dynamics of holes, calligraphy etc. are all coughed up in a delirious manner. There's a frame romance story that is not really dealt with much after the first thirty pages, it gets better and better as you just tunnel through it. It's definitely worth looking at if you like Deleuze and/or Lovecraft and/or the idea of those things turned into bouillon-cube-dense-prose stew.

ha yeah that sounds like his blog posts.

is he an iranian dissident of some kind? where does he teach/live?

i never really 'figured out' nick land either, but that dude seemed like a bigger dickhead

I interlibraryloaned that Negarestani book last year after coming across a stray reference to it on some blog (probably one of the speculative realism dudes)... it was uh weird as fuck

(I didn't finish it. don't even remember how far I got, in retrospect. but I do remember sitting in the window of my favorite pizza place eating+reading it!)

non-dissertation reading right now is Jameson's "Late Marxism" and Baudrillard "Ecstasy of Communication"

i am interested in the Negarestani book too! mainly because Amazon keeps pimping it to me.

mississipi gadamer

to wong foucault thanks for everything julie neurath

witt gen stein's money

While we're on the topic of philosophical puns, I'm writing an essay on the AIDS crisis, including a short part on the systemic exclusion/abjection of the (primarily gay) population of AIDS sufferers from the broader 'general population' thereby designating them as dispensable, 'bare life', unable to be mourned etc. I'm thinking about calling that section "Homo, Sacer"

I can't tell if that's witty or really tasteless?

idk, but i assume you're not inventing AIDs abjection on your own right? a lot of the heavy critical lifting has already been done on that issue (excuse me if you obv are)

No, it's a background component/context for an art history essay.

looooooooooooooooooool but yah that might be pushing it

really enjoying this, esp. the juicy lil intros to the context of each essay (plus he talks about Alphonso Lingis!)

http://anthem.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/harman_speculative_realism.jpg

I can't really stomach harman's style :-/

Why is it that the modern conception of literature begins with one of the worst writers of the philosophical tradition? Such is the paradoxical question that lies at the heart of Jean-Luc Nancy’s highly original and now-classic study of the role of language in the critical philosophy of Kant.

idk about the 'modern conception of literature'?

kant wuz a decent writer before he went mad w/ the critiques 2.

tryna see how kant is responsible in any way for 'the modern conception of lit'

initiated phenomenological notion of world as formed by perception of it, innit.

(say'n that as a bit o bullshittin, but now that i've typed it something from that direction sounds plausible.)

insofar as he changed the modern conception of just about everything, yeah

did kant write about 'literature'?

Kant's a terrific writer, get out of town.

yeah i thought so too

i've spoken to german people who prefer to read the critiques in english because they're so incomprehensible in german. maybe they're just dumb.

haven't read the book but I would assume nancy traces the lineage thru post-kantian aesthetic views of german romantics (a la The Literary Absolute, which I have read, and quite enjoyed)

philosophy/theory book blurbs are about 90% gibberish i find. i have books i know and love and have read multiple times and i couldnt even tell you what the back blurb was going on about.

a relevant passage from the translator's intro to said book:

What The Literary Absolute demonstrates is first of all that the concept of literature arises as a response to the problems posed by Kant's critical enterprise. While discussions of the conceptual genealogy of the Jena romantics often concentrate on Fichte's concept of the I and the beginnings of speculative dialectics, this study situates their texts more generally, and perhaps more pertinently, with respect to the "crisis" that arises in the aftermath of Kant. To condense the argument of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the problem of presentation that concerns us here, the presentation of philosophy and the subject of philosophy (of what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy refer to as the "system-subject"), is opened up by Kant. Kant bequeaths this crisis of presentation to his successors by effectively depriving the subject of its being-subject, i.e., of its adequate presentation of itself to itself, reducing the subject to little more than the logically necessary, purely regulatory idea of the unity of its representations. This crisis of presentation provides an initial context for the development of idealism and romanticism alike: "One must set out from this problematic of the subject unpresentable to itself and from this eradication of all substantialism in order to understand what romanticism will receive, not as a bequest but as its 'own' most difficult and perhaps insoluble question" ( 30 ). Idealism and Jena romanticism represent divergent yet intersecting responses to this crisis, responses that cannot be distinguished as simply philosophical on the one hand, and literary on the other. The imbrication of their responses is in fact already suggested by the two manners in which Kant third Critique had earlier begun to sketch out a potential resolution of the problems of the subject. The Critique of Judgment points toward a form of auto-presentation in reflective judgment, i.e., in the subject's synthetic function; at the same time, it suggests that a (simply regulatory) presentation of the subject occurs by means of the Beautiful in works of art, in the formative power of nature, and in history and culture, or the Bildung of humanity.

thanks snowy, that makes more sense

"A terrific writer" is about the last thing I'd think about Kant. "A terrific thinker", sure, but all the translations I've read are pretty awful.

My Kant teacher in grad school went out of his way to point out passages in the First Critique in which Kant was "vivid" with language, noting that "look, Kant isn't as dry or opaque as everyone says, he can use metaphors!" or some such. I found the attempt to liven Kant up endearing.

where do I start if I want to learn more about the concept about 'the other' or 'othering'

i suppose you start with hegel

levinas and lacan are probably your 20th century bros here, though their ideas of the other arent the same iirc

ugh lacan, avoid lacan

i suppose postcolonibros would be helpful here too

postbrolonial studies

^^ someone write this paper please

I kinda skipped over hegel in uni tbrr, supposed it's time to get into him again

lacan + maybe buber (who isn't as good, but easier read), levinas too. for postcolonbros i'd recommend achebe, said (def), um abjection theory should deal with this too

also feministbros

kristeva

sara ahmed has some really interesting (pretty contemporary) stuff about othering + particularly wrt hate and affect

*takes notes*

thanks postbrolonials

if u wanna take the feminist route which i am p much biased towards i would recommend a course of debeauvoir irigaray and wittig def. but then france+chicks is kindof how i roll w/ these things (recently found out irigaray is belgian tho!)

feministbros seems kindof the wrong way of phrasing that i think

irigaray's speculum of the other woman is my jam. it got her thrown out of lacan's school. hardcore.

lacan is such bullshit

not saying it's true here but 90% of the time someone tells me that lacan is bullshit it turns out they have almost no experience (or comprehension) of his work. they just think that because they don't understand it it is stupid

side note: did the band Aa get their name from lacan?

psychbronalysis

nah i just think that psychoanalysis is bs, fuck the subconscious

Lacan was a bro.

i'm a reasonable fan of lacan, but happy to label him bullshitter supreme. unlike yer derridas and yer deleuzes i think there's genuinely no reason for him to write in the dumb way he does.

After giving a talk at Berkeley once a guy accosted me at tea afterwards & would not shut up about Lacan, even though my talk was on logic. I'm pretty sure that what this guy was saying was bullshit, but I guess I'm not sure that he was getting Lacan right.

another music side note: have always wondered whether Smashing Pumpkins "Zero" was Lacan inspired.

i will say that lots of Lacan fans tend to be very passionate + outspoken in academia and generally aren't as smart as Lacan

(all this in my experience in academia, obv, ymmv, etc etc)

is that because when you challenge them they point to lacan and then it is hard to refute lacan

i mean more bc they talk about lacan-this and lacan-that and when pressed a lot of their ideas break down. (i've seen this at conferences where questions reduce the presenter to just repeating, 'you'll have to look in lacan to understand' in some form over and over)

i will say a lot of my lacan comes second hand via griselda pollock and other feminist art historians but it tends to be the point at which its difficult for me to take seriously what they're saying anymore. like theres this chapter in vision and difference where she does this lacanian analysis of rossetti's paintings and its just a bit like "oh ok thats the phallus is it? right ok" (she is otherwise awesome, i just wish ppl could use marx instead of lacan bc eg. spivak is a way more credible writer for me bc of this and only this)

some dude who picked me up hitchhiking once got into a mad argument w/ me about this and i resolved to read society and its discontents but i uh havent

civ + discontents. this is btw why i love Walter Benjamin (and Adorno) so much. Marx + some psychoanalysis. it's hot shit.

i like benjamin bc he is mystical

benjamin is my bro

mystical benjamin is the scholem connection

I like Benjamin but I find him TOO HARD a lot of the time because of his mystical shizz. Like, I can totally follow Agamben saying much the same thing but Benjamin makes my head hurt.

gershom brolem

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=2246786&boardid=77&threadid=81522

the brolitical unconscious is levels for a 'modern conception of literature'

Lacan isn't bullshit

re: the other: as somebody said, it starts with Levinas on the one hand and Kojeve's existential-marxist interpretation of the master-slave dialectic on the other (lol). and Kojeve begat Sartre and Lacan, who begat Fanon and a bunch of feminist theory, with probably some stuff I'm missing somewhere in there

what's the thread nakh linked? i'm still not on 77

reading lots of/about Heidegger these days

bro-ing-toward-death

the thread nakh linked to is about l0u1s jagg3r and the post he linked to is a gif of a book about gershom scholem

right

come join snowy! let thee not be the other of 77

gershy schol kinda looked like a 'bro' when he was young, anyway

xp I tend to forget that it exists! but nah, I'm cool — I guess I just lack "a taste for the secret"

http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=2631

huh, very sneaky Dr. Land

I suppose this is the best place to ask: does anyone have any recommendations for a overview of 20th century philosophy? (mainly continental, mainly french) Not afraid of depth, but what I'm really looking for is something with a lot of breadth which actually attempts some kind of all-encompassing view of intellectual history during the 20th century.

the course I took in college used the critical tradition, as compiled by david richter, which was just important excerpts from a lot of big important philosophy texts, w/ some introduction and interpretation

pretty good imo

ryan, gary gutting's history of 20c. french (CUP) is good. there's a recent book 'french theory' (u. minn press) that might fill out that story on the tail end and more from the american/anglo humanities side. also a recent biography of deleuze and guattari, 'd+g: intersecting lives'.

Try - A History of Structuralism by Francois Dosse

Quick question - I'm being lazy as I just want to check something that'll only affect a couple of paragraphs, but if I want to talk about Marx, Kant and instrumentality am I right in thinking Theses on Feuerbach should be my starting point?

thanks! all of those look really good, actually.

Quick question - I'm being lazy as I just want to check something that'll only affect a couple of paragraphs, but if I want to talk about Marx, Kant and instrumentality am I right in thinking Theses on Feuerbach should be my starting point?

― emil.y, Saturday, February 19, 2011 4:40 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

where does Kant talk abt (something akin to) instrumentality? not familiar enough.

lately I'm tryna get into the third Kritik — the whole question of 'taste' as public use of reason, etc etc. it's fun.

One of the proposed formulations of the categorical imperative is to not use others purely as means and not ends, so in other words not to give primacy to their instrumentality above their being-in-themselves. So I'm tying that to Marx in the sense of a type of alienation stemming from the separation of these modes of being, and indeed a nullification of the latter, but am in need of some references to back me up, rather than half-remembered bits and pieces. The central thing of what I'm writing about is literary, though, hence not wanting to spend days trawling through everything for the sake of only a small part of my piece. Shouldn't be so lazy, I know.

ah ok i gotcha now

practical reason is my big blind spot... i mostly jump on the bandwagon in the post-kantian years when everyone's getting all romantic and speculative, and I have no idea how any of those dudes took the 2nd critique

y'all reading any new stuff you can recommend?

Derek Parfit - On What Matters is the most important philosophy book in a decade probably
Pippin has a new book on Nietzsche that's pretty awesome - but I'm a Pippin-stan
I haven't read it yet but Boyarin has a new book that's getting good reviews -- The Jewish Gospels, I think. Not out till next year tho.

first book's on my long list of things to read. thanks for reminding me about it!

is this the pippin? http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo8697282.html

yep!

looks p good :D

nick land has a blog!

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/detail/292/time-preference

that gives you the flavor. austrian economics, "civilizational" despair. another right-winger...

good post

woah, thanks for the link

markers, if u figure out how to rss just his posts, let me know.

finally managed to read some of the "speculative realism" stuff, namely Tool-Being. I honestly thought it was pretty good, despite some reservations (don't ask me to defend that statement in detail though). I wonder what a better understanding on Harman's part of American philosophy (Peirce and James) would add to his philosophy, because it seems like his understanding of pragmatism is a little thin.

i haven't looked too hard, but i don't see an obvious way to tbh

xpost

anyone read this yet?

http://o-books.com/books/in-the-dust-of-this-planet

The blurb makes the author sound like an aspiring Oscar Wildean.

I can vouch for Eugene Thacker's previous work. This new one looks like a lot of fun too.

awesome. i want to read after life at some point too

thanks for bringing my attention to this! just about to turn in my dissertation and i think it will be my first read with my new freedom.

i think i'm going to read that yale university press gadamer biography next -- i got it for under ten bucks at the mit press bookstore over two years ago

(i should go back there eventually and check out the discount section again)

I like gadamer

so just started In the Dust of This Planet and it's even more interesting than I anticipated because I think one of the things he's trying to gesture towards is an idea of a kind of nihilistic or negative mysticism, an experience of the "nothingness" beyond the limits of thought/philosophy. not for nothing does it open with epigraphs from Schopenhauer and The Cloud of Unknowning. There's basically no quicker way to get my attention than that kind of juxtaposition!

also some mentions of Nishitani towards the end, i see. Ok i should actually read this now..

"What an earlier era would have described through the language of darkness mysticism or negative theology, our contemporary era thinks of in terms of supernatural horror."

This actually strikes me as an interesting claim because the traditional religions have seemed to push out mystical or antinomian ideas for the sake of an enforced fundamentalism.

and non-traditional, new agey type religions aren't so much concerned with an unknowable God so much as the revelation of personality or self.

ok so he's now talking about Keiji Haino!

i think i'll end up reading this at some point

just preordered the huge zizek book that's coming out in april

is that the promised opus on Hegel?

I finished the Thacker book, it was good. It was short and more suggestive than sustained and argued, but if you enjoy those themes (as mentioned above) it's pretty interesting.

yes yes! look!: http://www.amazon.com/Less-Than-Nothing-Dialectical-Materialism/dp/1844678970/

yeah, from something you said upthread it sounds like it'll be my kind of book

ok, may have to read this. reading group?

Yeah, I'd be up for that. I expect it won't be an easy read- the little Hegel I've read is heavy stuff.

yeah, this'll probably be more like Zizek's Parallax View than Living in the End Times, re: complexity

There are some posts about the book at http://ernstbloch.wordpress.com/, including a table of contents.

not a huge Zizek guy, but it sounds good! i still think Hegel is very fertile ground.

the first post on that blog touches on all manner of things that interest me, but what i usually get from sources like from George Spencer-Brown or Peirce or Niklas Luhmann. very cool.

i'd be up for an ilx hegel reading group

the dialectic requires markers to be down for it

kinda looks like "finally, zizek's hegel book" really means "finally, zizek's most thorough unfolding of his own thought". but yeah could be interesting. i understand that he had an editor for the first time in many years for this one, so it shouldn't be stricken with the chronic laziness that's characterised a lot of his recent work.

incidentally, i'm in the middle of marking a big pile of essays on hegel right now. it's kinda fun.

I'd be up for both a new-Zizek or Hegel ilx reading group, hell yeah!

what if the group took place in an infinite loop? :P

Haha, fair play, I'd be down with that too

http://onwhatmatters.tumblr.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Coordination-Interpretation-Daniel-Klein/dp/019979412X

43 bucks

i kno :(

if i wanted to read all of nietzsche's books in translation, in order, which translator should i go with? are kaufmann's translations the ones to read?

from what i remember kaufmann and hollingdale are the two big ones. dont know if one is preferred. kaufman has a reputation for being a little looser, but more readable.

the one exception is that i read this genealogy of morality (translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen) and thought it was great. but i dont think they translated any other nietzsche.

http://www.amazon.com/Genealogy-Morality-Friedrich-Wilhelm-Nietzsche/dp/0872202836

im reading strikethrough banging my head against strikethrough sturggling w/kant atm

I don't think there is any other way to read kant tbh

i think the general consensus is that Kaufmann's are to Nietzsche what Constance Garnett is to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. ie, questionable accuracy but by far the most famous and readable translation.

yo kant is clarity incarnate. if you're confused it's bc your brain is all twisted up from life + shit.

I remember going through Being and Time painstakingly, almost line by line, with a notepad trying to put things in my own terms. those were some long afternoons in the library.

@markers - fwiw kaufmann and hollingdale are the ones i have as well. this guy agrees with max on the clark/swensen

man I don't know anybody who still reads the constance garnett translations! but kaufmann is still widely used afaict

i was at a dissertation defense a few weeks ago where one of the professors went on quite vociferously about how crappy the new translations were (the married couple) and how much better Garnett was. but she is probably a minority opinion.

I'm not a terribly big fan of the married couple

theyre translations are really good imo

I can't remember who I contraristan for above them though, I'll have to check my contraristan log, I've definitely expressed this opinion elsewhere on ILX

i think the Garnett translations are almost their own thing at this point, with their own cultural relevance, given when they came out and the number of writers who first encountered D and T in that form.

i do this all the time but i also really cannot recommend this book enough as a secondary

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-New-Nietzsche-David-Allison/dp/0847689794

Pre-ordered the Zizek too. Up for reading group.

count me in on that

just got Simon Critchley's new one in the mail: http://www.amazon.com/Faith-Faithless-Experiments-Political-Theology/dp/1844677370/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328075101&sr=8-1

and speaking of Critchley and Zizek, here's essay response to Zizek by Critchley on politics and violence. I found it interesting and it articulates some of my reservations about Zizek:

http://nakedpunch.com/articles/39Violent

way too long but my two initial thoughts:
1. i think he misunderstands zizek's "ultraviolence" which could easily be the violence he describes (and for many activists, even the smallest suggestion of violence becomes this revolutionary historic moment, ie Occupy Wall St)
2. kinda feels like a secret defense of obama + the doctrine of marginal gradual change tbh

i don't think i can read the whole thing tho. i bailed out after his reading of Benjamin and i realized that despite stating his case four or five times already i still had 3/4ths of the article to go

I think 2 is the gist of Zizek's disagreement with Critchley. I am in broad disagreement with Critchely. I think. I do know Zizek's rhetoric bothers me, and i also don't really think Marxism/Leninism is really the only game in town as far as thinking outside Capitalism goes.

oops. I am in broad AGREEMENT with Critchely, i meant to say.

(especially since you'd think Zizek would be the first to admit that kind of rhetoric doesn't really escape from the domain of Capitalism anyway. he's got nostalgia for an "outside" that's not really accessible anymore. then again i'll shut up since im dumb about political philosophy.)

yo kant is clarity incarnate. if you're confused it's bc your brain is all twisted up from life + shit.

...

x-post: hence Critchley's point that Z is basically advocating doing nothing...

i don't think Z is advocating doing nothing bc i think he's not an advocate. who said that the role of philosopher is to advocate for political revolutionary? i think he's making an observation tho about the kinds of violence that actually shift hegemonies, and even if Critchley wants to encourage ppl to revolt now and even in minor ways (with the hope that they make gradual shifts), I don't think Zizek is totally off-base to suggest that's itself an apology for the hegemony

advocate for the* political revolutionary

maybe he discusses it further down but where are all these non-ultra-violent revolutions that are seriously challenging capitalism? i don't see them.

yeah i see what you're saying. that's the crux of the problem isn't it? it wouldn't really be hard to turn that whole argument against Z as well (ie, that what he's doing is an "apology" for hegemony. hence Critchley's quote of Lacan telling the Leninists, "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master.")

but Critchley definitely steps in it when he shifts to being an advocate (even if one for "infinite" demands)...and perhaps what's at stake is a (philosophical) defense of that act.

and that's why his demands have to be "infinite" (or effectively without content).

Though perhaps it'd be fun to read Z as basically posing exactly the "infinite demand" that Critchley wants, just in the form of a nostalgic Leninist mode.

new spivak apparently

http://www.amazon.com/Aesthetic-Education-Era-Globalization/dp/0674051831

ryan, did you finish the critchley book? worth reading?

markers: I thought there was some value in it, and the parts about mysticism were really interesting to me, but overall I'm kinda left wondering why he felt he needed to stage his argument in the way he did, and perhaps his sense of the organizing power of religion is more a holdover from theocratic politics than something that belongs to religion per se. Anyway, I liked it and learned stuff, though I'm not sure it leads anywhere.

I mean "your conflating religion with politics" at once a dumb criticism since thats the argument of the book! But at the same time I think he fails to articulate what the secular meaning of "sacralization" in contemporary politics could be. He wants a positive form of religious feeling that leads to spontaneous political organization where I only see negative theology.

oooh that spivak looks really interesting. was just thinkin about schiller again the other day!

ya i've been reading schiller lately, SHE'S ONTO US.

nick land goes in for the post-austrian paleo-reactionary scene

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1880/the-dark-enlightenment-part-1

against democracy! (in a strange coincidence i just brought up "mencius moldbug" yesterday)

this line is particularly glib, considering the blistering pro-rumsfeld/cheney line he took on the old hyperstition blog. he condemns, in a slew of other things, "reckless evangelical ‘wars for democracy’

nobody? jeez, should have gone to the right-wingery thread

nick land goes there

yo nakh let's shmooze about bh

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1901/the-dark-enlightenment-part-2
http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1920/the-dark-enlightenment-part-3

just now reading critchley's "infinitely demanding" really digging it

At the heart of a radical politics there has to be what I
call a meta-political ethical moment that provides the motivational
force or propulsion into political action. If ethics without politics is
empty, then politics without ethics is blind. Taking my cue from a
heterodox reading of Levinas, I claim that this meta-political
moment is anarchic, where ethics is the disturbance of the political
status quo. Ethics is anarchic meta-politics, it is the continual
questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from
above. On this view, politics is the creation of interstitial distance
within the state, the invention of new political subjectivities.
Politics, I argue, cannot be confined to the activity of government
that maintains order, pacification and security while constantly
aiming at consensus. On the contrary, politics is the manifestation
of dissensus, the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity that calls
into question the authority and legitimacy of the state . It is in
relation to such a multiplicity that we may begin to restore some
dignity to the dreadfully devalued discourse of democracy.

Taking my cue from a heterodox reading of Levinas, I could really go for some fried chicken right now.

lol

that's quite nice tho, I am never sure if I'd get on w/ critchley

finally defended yesterday. now I can read what I want to! think im gonna fill in my two biggest blind spots (relatively speaking): Lacan and Deleuze.

ogmor: I've read a lot of critchley and im still not sure if i get on with him. but his Very Little, Almost Nothing is really lovely and moving and smart.

hey congrats!

thanks man! huge relief. i now have one official life accomplishment i can point to.

hurrah, ryan

well done

Thanks guys!

good work! what was your thesis on?

essentially reading American Pragmatism through systems theory and "second-order" cybernetics. Hopefully I'm able to argue that's not as strange a combination as it sounds!

That sounds like a really cool topic. Systems theory and cybernetics are pretty interesting fields of thought ... like if philosophy actually dealt with the real world.

oh, cool! I know someone working on Peirce and erm computation theory and things like that?, it sounds like a really interesting connection even if I don't quite know enough about either side to see exactly what's going on with it.

That sounds pretty amazing. Feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in Peirce (and lots of new stuff by him still seeing the light of day). I was frequently astonished by his simultaneous total weirdness and prescience.

It was actually a really fun topic for me and I certainly learned a lot writing it. Got to second base with a press so far but we'll see how that goes. In any case I feel lucky. How many people get to read this stuff, let alone write about it?

keep us updated on the press status, would purchase said book.

Will do. That's very kind!

pretty good critchley interview on his new work on love & otherwise

http://www.full-stop.net/2012/04/02/interviews/tyler-malone/simon-critchley/

Tree of Life I couldn’t even get to the position of wanting to like it. It seems to feed that Emersonian, American desire for authenticity, which just fills me with nausea. I’ll go with Lars von Trier and Melancholia. Nature is Satan’s church.

That's kinda funny (also surprising given Critchley's admiration for Stanley Cavell--he should know Emerson better than that). Almost get the sense Critchley finds himself in a weird position, with some vestigial loyalty to some euro-skeptic-hermeneutics-of-suspicion way of thought that seems at odds with the "religious" turn of his work. I'd argue Emerson represents a more rigorous turn away from that stuff than Critchley's own recent work.

on another topic: has anyone read Brian Massumi's "A User's Guide to Capitalism Schizophrena"?

http://www.amazon.com/Users-Guide-Capitalism-Schizophrenia-Deviations/dp/0262631431/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_T1?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3A7S5CTE1D9AK&colid=336N6EL0R3GGA

Capitalism AND Schizophrenia obviously.

no, though it sounds extraordinarily useful

curious about yr reading of emerson ryan! that bit of the interview made me laugh.

didnt malick study under cavell?

y, they know each other

What's implicitly at issue, I think, is Cavell's readings of Emerson under the rubric of post-Kantian skepticism. (Emerson as a disappointed Romantic, if you will. See in particular "Experience"--which is absolutely extraordinary and one of the best things written by anyone ever.) So Emerson's big project becomes about "mourning the loss of the world" and that sort of thing. I think there's a better take on Emerson that can do without bringing in the bogeyman of skepticism, but Cavell's readings are pretty indispensable.

And Critchley has written about this! Which is why the idea of "Emersonian authenticity" must be an intentional straw-man version of Emerson.

idk as a nonphilosophe i just read it as a halfassed skein on 'lol americans and their residual calvinism'

yes def that too!

please let this be as hilarious to someone else here as it is to me

So even with two stage review, journal editors are tempted to publish papers with weak methods but positive results. And why not – unless important customers insisted, why would a journal handicap itself by committing itself to not publish such papers, which bring more fame and prestige to the journal.

Journal customers include universities who tenure professors who publish in prestigious journals, and grant givers who prefer grantees who publish similarly. But why should these customers handicap themselves – they also win by affiliating with those who publish papers with weak methods but positive results.

I’ve suggested that academia functions primarily to credential people as impressive and interesting in certain ways, so outsiders, like students and patron, can gain prestige by affiliating with them. If so, and if those who publish weak-method positive-results are in fact more impressive and interesting than those who publish stronger-method negative-results, there is little prospect to get rid of this publication bias.

What is possible is to augment publications with betting market prices estimating the chance each result will be upheld by future research. This would let readers get unbiased estimates on the reliability of research results. Alas, it seems there is no customer willing to pay extra to get such reliability estimates. Most everyone involved in the process mainly cares about signals of impressiveness; few care much about which research results are actually true.

i'll cut directly to the best part: "What is possible is to augment publications with betting market prices estimating the chance each result will be upheld by future research. This would let readers get unbiased estimates on the reliability of research results. Alas, it seems there is no customer willing to pay extra to get such reliability estimates. Most everyone involved in the process mainly cares about signals of impressiveness; few care much about which research results are actually true."

I struggled for a while to think of a point of reference through which to relate Badiou's philosophy. I hope that you will not think I take lightly the topic of dubstep to which I adapt Badiou's theory of the subject and event in music. What I intend to present is precisely an attack on ironic appreciation of art as much as the key terms and rationale behind Badiou's works.

lolz

http://pastebin.com/tfHN2Ah5

thread for random crit theory bloggers discussing pop music

has anyone picked up the Zizek yet? it's a monster. i was looking at it at the bookstore but can't really justify spending 60 dollars on it. hopefully it'll start to turn up cheap somewhere soon.

I'm watching a newish Cavell Q&A:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9z-LyUuDes

I got to meet him a few years ago. Nice old man.

the new Zizek has turned up 'cheap' 'somewhere' already, if you can be bothered figuring out how to convert from a .mobi file...

ROLLING HARDMAN THREAD 2009

ha, hardmannery was not my intention, it's just that verso are the kind of marxists who really object to poor students eating into their profit margins for the sake of learning things for free.

inadvertent hardmannery is the best

but yeah it's cool how the amount of ebooks available via transpecuniary methods has exploded in the last couple years, ppl finally bothered to use their scanners huh

i've been pleasantly surprised to discover how much radical philosophy is available in formats that need to be converted

oh wait it's probably ppl just downloading the ebooks from amazon &c and then converting them isn't it

still all

-of hegel and kant and spinoza is on gutenberg and that never got me to read it

i think most of it is still scans, disproportionate anger can be redirected from publishers who want to stay in business to the idiots who don't ocr their pdfs for easy searchability.

actually i think a lot of it is now pre-publication pdfs straight from somewhere in the editing/publication process.

yeah i've seen both in the last few months

while trial downloading books to evaluate the current state of book piracy, obviously

"The Pete Townshend Defence"

talkin bout deterritorialization

The most interesting part of the Cavell thing is a discussion starting at 1:16:00 of "tact, morality, and the everyday" - interesting because I don't think "tact" elsewhere arises as a topic in Cavell's books, though it could easily have been made to.

the new Zizek has turned up 'cheap' 'somewhere' already, if you can be bothered figuring out how to convert from a .mobi file...

that's true of cours, but i want the BOOK.

I only got halfway thru the Cavell thing but it was enjoyable, will finish later--some of the questions reminded me why i tend to avoid those kinds of things, however.

found this for freebies online. heard good things about it:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Radical-Enlightenment-Solomon-Maimon/dp/0804751366

Not really sure what other thread to mention this in, so--I'm reading "The Coming Insurrection," it's alternately constructively provocative and bullshit.

oh man, i remember reading that. it's kinda ridiculous

anyone UK-based should take advantage of an Amazon error and pre-order the collection 'Laruelle and Non-philosophy' for just £4.99: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Laruelle-Non-philosophy-Critical-Connections-Mullarkey/dp/0748645349/ref=zg_bs_276315_1 currently at #83 in the amazon.co.uk sales ranks, we can get it to #1!

lol

pretty sure there are legal get outs maybe amazon will be a mensch and 'low it

nonlaruelle

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OD10wcOkTpU/Tgna0f9iSRI/AAAAAAAAAgM/8lxd_wHfsIk/s1600/05001Ag.jpg

I am sorry if anyone is annoyed if i continue to bring up stuff that isn't strictly "philosophy" but has anyone read any Anthony Wilden? I've just started "System and Structure" (1980 edition) and find it pretty amazing in its interweaving of Bateson, Lacan, and Marx.

here's his wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Wilden

http://80000hours.org/blog/46-how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher

hmmm this is why ethics isn't very interesting to me

Studies show professors of ethics don't behave any more ethically than other people.
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/EthSelfRep.htm

I think it would be great if philosophy were more practical, but aside from kicking aside any religious figure ever trying to talk about ethics on current affairs shows or ethics committees (whatever they are) i don't know how it would be possible.

http://www.philosophyetc.net/2012/07/syllabus-idea-making-difference.html

Haha, who would think that profs of ethics *would* behave any more ethically? I mean, maybe I'm tainted from being taught ethics by an amoralist, but man, the point is to question ethics, not to suddenly turn into a good Samaritan. Or maybe I'm just far too interested in meta-ethics.

Also, I'm not sure that that study can possibly be sound. I mean, how do you measure the morality of charitable donation? There are very compelling reasons to believe that (at least a large proportion of) charity is morally reprehensible in itself.

Real amoralists are probably few and far between though, I think the mainstream position even among moral skeptics or error theorists (including me) is that we still can & should treat each other decently.

xp reprehensible's a pretty strong word! study's just a bit of fun let's be cool, anyway.

I think the mainstream position even among moral skeptics or error theorists (including me) is that we still can & should treat each other decently

i think even being vague&superficial to the point of meaninglessness like this is more likely to spark debate than build consensus

i think you mistook my casual remark for a detailed moral argument.

it was a class on analytic ethics that comprehensively turned me to the dark side of continental mentalism. Dire debate after dire debate on consequentialism vs deontology wrt particular situations felt like a huge exercise in skirting the actual question of ethics, so in my dissatisfaction with the entire field I instead turned to the super concrete world of um thinking about the excessive infinite ethical relation to the other and such.

the point is to question ethics

yeah, this i think and from that link imo the most interesting questions are

How should we act under empirical uncertainty – in particular should we follow expected utility even when it comes to tiny probabilities of huge amounts of value? (Relevant to extinction risk)

All other things being equal, should we prioritise the prevention of wrongs over the alleviation of naturally caused suffering? (Relevant to abortion, animal suffering)

Given that we aren’t ever going to be certain in answers to the above questions, how should we take into account uncertainty about these moral issues in our decision-making? (Relevant to: global poverty, abortion, animal suffering, extinction risk)

first we must start with the face to face encounter

There are very compelling reasons to believe that (at least a large proportion of) charity is morally reprehensible in itself.

reasons such as

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/08/no-theory-x-in-shining-armour.html

well, that sounds compelling to me

If I have to accept something, I accept the repugnant conclusion.

How about accepting that all theories are inadequate? I recently discovered Bernard Williams who "believes that ethical thinking cannot be systematised without intolerable distortions and losses, because to systematise is, inevitably, to streamline our ethical thinking in a reductionist style"

Suppose for example that I, an officer of a wrecked ship, take the hard decision to actively prevent further castaways from climbing onto my already dangerously overcrowded lifeboat. Afterwards, I am tormented when I remember how I smashed the spare oar repeatedly over the heads and hands of desperate, drowning people. Yet what I did certainly brought it about that as many people as possible were saved from the shipwreck, so that a utilitarian would say that I brought about the best consequences, and anyone might agree that I found the only practicable way of avoiding a dramatically worse outcome. Moreover, as a Kantian might point out, there was nothing unfair or malicious about what I did in using the minimum force necessary to repel further boarders: my aim, since I could not save every life, was to save those who by no choice of mine just happened to be in the lifeboat already; this was an aim that I properly had, given my role as a ship's officer; and it was absolutely not my intention to kill or (perhaps) even to injure anyone.

So what will typical advocates of the morality system have to say to me afterwards about my dreadful sense of regret? If they are—as perhaps they had better not be—totally consistent and totally honest with me, what they will have to say is simply “Don't give it a second thought; you did what morality required, so your deep anguish about it is irrational.” And that, surely, cannot be the right thing for anyone to say. My anguish is not irrational but entirely justified. Moreover, it is justified simply as an ex post facto response to what I did: it does not for instance depend for its propriety upon the suggestion—a characteristic one, for many modern moral theorists—that there is prospective value for the future in my being the kind of person who will have such reactions.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/

lol utilitarians

BUZZZZZZZ snark penalty, deducted 0.5 utils.

i'm going to allow it

otm

I like the snappy way I put it, in an argument with a utilitarianbro some time ago: "the ethical field does not permit of closure"

god, utilitarian bros

1) does anyone know if there's a "preferred" version of Hegel's Phenomenology? the top results on amazon all seem pretty old. im surprised there's not some new-ish edition with a sexy cover that will make me look cool when i read it.

2) i have been craving a big and ambitious intellectual history, confined mostly to western philosophy. any favorites? the bigger and more general the better. wacky overreaching thesis = still better.

Uh, so, what you're looking for... is a history of Western Philosophy?

if it's something a little more than a "survey" then sure!