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.

'Perversely' because he doesn't tackle time in a systematic fashion, not for any other reason. If anything, I prefer Blanchot.

Thanks everyone, these suggestions look promising.

Euler, the project specifically sets out to address A- B- debates, but I may understand them better when I've done at least some cursory exploration of other traditions.

j., there likely won't be time (ho ho) to engage properly with Ratcliffe's project, but I've just downloaded a full text from his research gate page, again in the hope of just gaining some perspective. Our project has a developmental angle, so we're spending a lot of time devising tasks for kids.

Regarding "Philosophy of Technology" this is coming out soon from a good series and looks like fun:

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/elements-of-a-philosophy-of-technology

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)!