Rolling Philosophy

like that quoted remark about the idol of "theory"--like how dare someone be interested in theory for its own sake. what's the real "idol" in that scenario?

I actually found the one time seeing Butler to be a tad over-simplistic. Kind of disappointing; still interesting.

welp i can tell from that headline and subheader that this is not an article i have any need to read. butler's recent thing w/ malabou on master-slave is really good. ('be my body for me', i think it's called.)

i suspect we could start a history of the philosophical charge of obfuscation somewhere around scholasticism but no wai am i going to be the one to construct that history.

I haven't read a lot of Butler either, but I'm halfway through Giving an Account of Oneself, and find it quite beautiful. She's trying to delineate an ethics whereby the self recognizes its own opacity to itself, and accordingly "allows" this to the other. This is ethics post-Lacan, I suppose. Aside from the substance of the argument, which I'm still digesting, I'm really struck by the tone -quiet, measured- and the way she engages (many) other thinkers -carefully, lovingly even, and without any great blaring of polemical trumpets. As a read, I find her edifying, in a very old fashioned sense.

so i got a copy of Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age--it's really tremendous (if a little dry) kinda throwing my thoughts in all kind of different interesting directions. It reminds me a lot (and is probably a big influence on) what I like so much about Niklas Luhmann's stuff (and whose Theory of Society was just published tho it makes Blumenberg seem downright excitable).

There is a chapter about 1/3 of the way thru where Blumenberg claims that modernity represents the "second overcoming of Gnosticism" that is totally mindblowing and worth reading all on its own.

Now I'm gonna copy/paste what I took to be the major thesis of the book as a whole since I typed this out for something I'm working on. It's basically about Blumenberg taking issue with Karl Lowith's "secularization thesis" about the modern age:

The only reason why “secularization” could ever have become so plausible as a mode of explanation of historical processes is that supposedly secularized ideas can in fact mostly be traced back to an identity in the historical process. Of course this identity, according to the thesis advocated here, is not one of contents but one of functions. It is in fact possible for totally heterogeneous contents to take on identical functions in specific positions in the system of man’s interpretation of the world and of himself. In our history this system has been decisively determined by Christian theology, and specifically, above all, in the direction of its expansion. Theology created new “positions” in the framework of the statements about the world and man that are possible and are expected, “positions” that cannot simply be “set aside” again or left unoccupied in the interest of theoretical economy.

i don't know if you use your ilx mail account but i sent u mail

received!

I thought this description of the "origin of time" in Neoplatonism so to be so cool i had to post it somewhere:

In the description of the origin of time from the self-alienation of eternity, also, the guiding idea is still the ancient contrast typology of the bustling inquisitiveness that forgets its own business. But here an attempt at motivation does after all show through clearly: The reposeful presence of eternity is perceived as a reservation, awakening the vaque idea of a possible greater possession, which seems graspable by the bold venture of self-appropriation (idiosis). Thus the repose of possession gave rise to motion, in which eternity 'temporalized' itself. The world arises from eternity's venturing forth into time as a result of a restless passion for the incommensurate, a passion that, as it were, produces its own objects and in its enjoyment of them goes outside itself. If this mysterious unrest in the essential self-sufficiency of the eternal is the origin of the hypostatic surplus, as which the cosmos is now conceived--and thus defined, in terms of its origin alone, as the object of an equally mysterious recollection of the truth of its origin, by which the degenerate being is awakened to itself and brought back.

Reminds me, as of course it would, of Peirce's remark: “The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.”

Ok what does that even mean. What would it take for it to be true, or to be false?

that's basically book XI of Augustine's Confessions, right? It's v beautiful.

As far as proof or disproof goes I don't think it can really operate on that level, it's more a transcendental argument about how we can experience living time at all. Thinking time as a mere moment by moment progression (Aristotelian time, basically?) seems impossible to reconcile with how we understand the world and ourselves, so if you're a Neoplatonist / Christian you do that by trying to work out how our everyday can be generated from some distant transcendent foundation. (The entire history of the philosophy of time has probably come down to grappling with this Neoplatonist formulation.)

what does "trying to work out" mean if there is no notion of proof or disproof? ok maybe i don't have the appetite right here right now to question this whole mysticism project and y'know if it makes you happy... but whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent imo.

boooo ur no fun. But I don't think it's necessarily an utterly ineffable mystical enterprise. Cuz we can and have criticised and built upon this kind of split between lived time and eternal time, or something like experiential time vs time-as-time - we can criticise Augustine because he's working on Christian presuppositions, or we can be chumps and criticise everyone who's ever written philosophy because they're presupposing a bourgeois individualist subject, or whatever. But even insofar as it's clear that we're not making it up and there's something real that we're engaging with, beyond the specific formulations that we have, defining our actual criteria for truth still seems to evade us in some sense. But then I kinda think that the entire enterprise of philosophy comes down to working out our criteria for truth, so the Wittgensteinian hand-waviness is v unappealing to me.

It also ended up becoming unappealing to Wittgenstein himself, so you're in good company... I really don't get when people quote the Tractatus like that, when even it's author figured out it was rubbish (and then wrote the most important work of philosophy afterwards)

Hey I'm all about the PI, I don't think it contradicts that particular nugget.

I'm not sure what the quoted passage is saying either, but I can follow what Merdeyeux is writing. Maybe this passage, from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, is helpful too?

The coherence of space has to mean the coherence of time too. Earlier, as we have discussed elsewhere, time was understood as complex. As well as secular time, the time of ordinary “temporal” existence, in which things happen one after another in an even rhythm, there were higher times, modes of eternity. There was what I have called Platonic eternity, the ever unchanging realm of essences, of which the ever- flowing ectypes were pale images. There was the eternity of God, where he stands contemporary with the whole flow of history, the time of nunc stans. And there was also the time of origins, a higher time of original founding events, which we can periodically re-approach at certain high moments.

As this last phrase suggests, the understanding of time saw these higher modes as woven into secular time, interfering with the simple coherent order of secular time- place. Two events very far apart in secular time might nevertheless be close because one of them approaches the time of origins. This Easter Vigil, for instance, brings us back into the vicinity of the original Easter, closer than last year’s summer day— although that was closer in terms of secular time alone. The original Passover in Egypt, and the last supper, are brought into close proximity by typology, although they are aeons apart in secular time. And so on.

I think this is just a game people play, where they pretend that their intuitions are in any way a useful guide to things utterly beyond human experience, that the concepts they are discussing are in any way meaningful. I ask again, what are the truth criteria for there being a "platonic eternity" as distinct from an "eternity of god" as distinct from "a time of origins"?

I'm not sure the games I prefer to play (around consciousness, free will) are any more meaningful. Certainly there is enough disagreement about definitions that an outsider might wonder if there is really anything fundamental being discussed, or if it is just confusion over concepts we cannot ultimately hope to grasp. But I have fun playing the games.

three concepts of eternity that can be spelled out fairly satisfactorily: I'm not gonna go through each of them with you (fuck you pay me), but I don't think they're just words that run together in a merely poetic way (not so sure about the first quoted bit btw).

"concepts they are discussing are in any way meaningful": well I guess if you want a "verificationist criterion of meaning" then maybe not but I think you're just closing yourself off to aspects of experience that most people are aware of, if only dimly, and would like to understand

As I read PI, Wittgenstein cuts the connection between language and 'truth'. You can speak of anything, as long as you and your speaking partner think it makes sense. And while it might not be 'truthful', it might have another function (social or whatever) so you should in any case not keep silent.

But it's not like I think the quotes are that interesting, and I don't understand them either. I've read enough to figure out I'm probably Einsteinian/Bergsonian/Proustian or something when it comes to 'time' but far from enough to actually understand what that means... Yay college.

yes but we all think we're doing more than just playing a social game here. and i do struggle with non verificationist accounts, 'tis true (i have verified it).

verificationists should think about math more often

(well, so should everyone, it's a thorn in the side of empiricists everywhere, thank goodness)

while terms like "eternity" and the like are not now in fashion, i dont think that the neoplatonic concept of the origin of time i quoted above is really that far from the concepts like "order from chaos" or "becoming" in the physics of Ilya Prigogine or our understanding of self-organizing systems and how they relate to an "environment" to which they are blind. (hence the "eternal" as a label for what lies past or beyond the mechanisms of time).

there's another bit in the book, i cant remember who it was now but it was someone writing around 300AD, who essentially sums up Russell's paradox in regard to the same questions.

it's one thing to say these guys are mystagogues, and perhaps they are. but they were also incredibly sophisticated.

so if you're objection is "well we're deigning to talk about something that we can't really talk about"...well part of what's amazing about that bit i quoted (imo) is that it's about the essential movement of why our thinking is drawn past what we can "talk about."

agreed re Prigogine etc - as a line of philosophical thought it probably starts with Kant trying to work out what's going on in the sensible-supersensible relation via that mysterious middle ground that is the organism.

What do you mean re math, Euler? What's the current state of play in the fundamentals of philosophy of mathematics? (Utterly naive stance here assumes it to be stuck in a conventionalist-realist forever, but I'm sure the work going on there would be useful across the divide in helping us contend with the patent absurdity of yer Badious and yer Meillassouxs taking maths as an almost unquestionable philosophical axiom.)

conventional / realism are things for old people to believe in. before you retire to those "big" views, we have a lot of ground clearing to do, ground clearing the empiricists occluded in their rush to "prove" their dogmas. right now thus the main work in in understanding what's going on in mathematical practice. how is it that the Greeks studied the same text, Euclid's, that the medieval Arabs did, that we do: how could the content of that text be so ~flexible~ so as to accommodate those radically different cultures & mathematical practices? but it is! & so we have to understand those practices, & what they sought, & what we seek, & why, & fit it together in new ways. & leave the "big" views about ~ontology~ for the old.

Euler, I'm sure you get asked this all the time, but is there a good book for a mathematical layman that gives a good sense of the philosophy of mathematics in the past century or so? I'm basically willing to do some work in terms of trying to understand, but I'm also pretty stupid.

I have Howard Delongs "A Profile of Mathematical Logic" which I've been meaning to start forever.

the last century was pretty bad! well, up until 1931 things were pretty interesting, but then the logical positivists got involved, & things got boring. we're still recovering from this.

you & others of a continental ilk might find the this article interesting; it's written by a practicing mathematicians (friend of mine) in the recent staggeringly-great Princeton Companion to Mathematics. actually just reading some articles from that book would be a great way into the philosophy of mathematics as it ought to be done: which is, with our minds to the data. otherwise we are just serving some "big" agenda, such a boring thing to be doing in 2012.

I'm teaching a pretty historical philomath class next term, Kant to 1931 for the first half, out of primary sources obviously, then to topics in the philosophy of geometry since that's what I care about the most at present

just printed that out so i wont forget to read it. thanks!

that article was really cool. still digesting it of course, but it struck me as a very interesting examination of what you might call mathematical communication consists of. anyway, good stuff.

yes, mathematical communication is "a thing" now, in fact spending the afternoon refereeing an article on it! good times

This might be a stupid question/one that's been answered before, but I've just started a Literature & Philosophy module for my MA (in English Lit). The course reading list/outline is as follows...

Week 1, Thursday 10th January - Introduction
Introductory discussion
Plato, The Republic, Book 10
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1

Week 2, Thursday 17th January – Walter Benjamin: Language and Memory
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ and ‘The Image of Proust’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2

Week 3, Thursday 24rd January – Walter Benjamin continued
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’ in Selected Writings, Volume 2

Wek 4, Thursday 31st January – Martin Heidegger: Poetry and Being
Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought

Week 5, Thursday 7th February –Heidegger continued
Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For’ and ‘The Thing’ in Poetry, Language, Thought

Week 6, Thursday 14th February
Tutorial Week – No seminar

Week 7, Thursday 21st February – Heidegger continued
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’ in On the Way to Language

Week 8, Thursday 28th February – Maurice Blanchot: Poetry Beyond Being
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire

Week 9, Thursday 7th March – Blanchot continued
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ continued and ‘Literature and the Original Experience’ in The Space of Literature

Week 10, Thursday 14th March – Blanchot continued
Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Original Experience’ continued

My question is thus: are there any philosophy overviews you'd recommend to accompany a course of this kind?

this is a great frankfurt school reader to accompany the benjamin sections:
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Theory-Society-A-Reader/dp/0415900417/ref=pd_sim_b_4

great reading list!

Cheers Mordy!

Max: It should be an enjoyable course - the tutor repeatedly stressed how demanding/difficult it will be, which was oddly encouraging after i'd spent hours trying to wrap my head around the Benjamin piece. Plus it's my last ever term as a taught student so I might as well push myself a bit.

simon critchley had a decent if necessarily shallow overview of the basics of heideggers early though in the guardian a couple years ago, run over 5 or 6 columns... its about being and time which is kind of a "different" heidegger than poetry-reading heidegger but might help situate the guy and see 'where hes coming from'

germany, iirc

alt.:

a clearing in being, iirc

Gianni Vattimo definitely deploys later Heidegger to his own specific ends but he is a good gateway to the post Being and Time stuff. Admirably clear and helpful with the context in which Heidegger was working after his stuff on Nietzsche.

Though part of what's fun about Heidegger is his rhetorical insistence on you meeting him entirely on his own terms.

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/video/korsgaard110508

wow, the rhetoric of nussbaum's introduction here is just so gross

Raymond Tallis' "A Conversation with Martin Heidegger" is supposedly a very accessible and good book. I have it but haven't gotten around to it.

This essay by Tallis about time constraints in modern life was my favorite read in 2012:

http://philosophynow.org/issues/90/A_Hasty_Report_From_A_Tearing_Hurry

Thanks for the suggestions gang!

http://www.amazon.com/Derrida-A-Biography-Benoit-Peeters/dp/0745656153/ref=pd_sim_b_1

has anyone read that? i still think Geoffrey Bennington's book on Derrida is still after all this time the best secondary source I've ever read on him. Though i haven't read Rudolph Gasche's The Tain of the Mirror which has a good reputation.

I saw Peeters do a talk about it last year, it sounds interesting but it also seems that it's so actively not an 'intellectual biography' that working out how Derrida-the-person and Derrida-the-thinker relate could be a little tough.

I'm going to predict that within the next few years we'll see the emergence of Derrida scholarship that far surpasses that which has come so far. My impression is that we're at an, um, tipping point where the previous approaches seem irredeemably dated but a sense of Derrida's value beyond those is escalating. (I haven't read The Tain of the Mirror either, though I also saw Gasche speak a while back and he was super disappointing, nothing but a dull old reactionary. Wish I could remember some precise quotes, but he said something about Islam not really existing...)

haha yeah I think Gasche is probably more important for that "dated" approach you mention. Tho I agree "Derrida studies" will soon look much different than in their 70s-80s heyday.

the other day i finally saw the derida book irl, and i definitely want to read it.

i was also at the mit bookstore in kendall square in boston on friday looking at stuff. the author's picture on the back inside flap of zizek's less than nothing is a painting of him riding a horse. some stuff about speculative realism in there too. seventy fucking bucks though -- much cheaper on amazon.

this just came out too, but i'm gonna wait on the pdf: http://openhumanitiespress.org/realist-magic.html

markers I love the MIT Press bookstore, that place is full of attractive books by weirdos about cybernetics. Never bought anything there tho sadly.

by the way, have any of your tackled or tried to tackle laruelle? i tried a little bit like a year and a half ago or so but not very hard. this was the book: http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Difference-Critical-Introduction-Non-philosophy/dp/0826436633/

there's more out in translation now than there was then, but i haven't gone near any of it.