Rolling Philosophy

was thinking about this "non-philosophy" after lecturing on Descartes this morning. so I get what people mean when they talk about "non-mathematical reasoning", because math involves numbers & figures and so reasoning that doesn't involve those is plausibly non-mathematical. this rides on there being a straightforward enough characterization of the mathematical. (never mind the ~quality~ of that characterization.) so what's a straightforward characterization of philosophical reasoning? I'm perfectly happy merely gesturing at the tradition and saying "when we reason *that way*, we're reasoning philosophically"; indeed I'd favor such a characterization for mathematical reasoning also. but what's it to be the negation of a gesture? surely not just "everything outside that tradition"? or is this just a repudiation of the whole tradition of western philosophy, of the sort that only makes sense when you know the whole tradition of western philosophy (the way e.g. French students do)?

he does explicitly talk about "non Euclidean" geometry but I don't know how to trace that analogy further.

nothing so far strikes me as outside the philosophical tradition, but I'm not very far in.

he says there's three terms (suspiciously Peircean ones):

1- the Real or One ("indivisible identity")
2- "a term = X" which is "not immanent"
3- "Transcendental Identity"; a "clone of the One" which X "extracts" from the "Real"

why do the Real and the One seem to slip around so much? why have both terms and seemingly use them interchangeably if they mean the same thing? something important seems at stake in this...

does anyone care about this? worried about clogging up the thread.

yeah when someone says "transcendental" I immediate think he's talking Kantian, so that maybe the identity in question is unknowable by us, though we can argue that it exists.

yeah I think if you take him seriously (and I'm not even sure that being taken seriously can be a necessary claim of his thought) then you have to admit that whatever it is he is trying to do is under constant threat from philosophy--it's gonna risk being subsumed by its totalizing impulse. and I guess that's what motivates his talk of "democracy."

i've not read Laruelle but i am v. interested of reading people's experiences here. my first instinct from these posts is that he's claiming his own transcendental isn't transcendetal but maybe that's not fair. i'm smdh every time i read a quote that looks like moral realism tho

my yom kippur reading this year:
http://www.amazon.com/Judaism-Despite-Christianity-Correspondence-Rosenstock-Huessy/dp/0226728013/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/16/us-russia-kant-shooting-idUSBRE98F0DI20130916

I recently realised that I neither understand or want to understand Philosophy. While this means that I wasted my university career (well, no more than any other phil major, amirite?) it does perhaps mean that I can safely visit Russia.

http://i.imgur.com/BlUoCne.jpg

diogenes was the realest

DEFACE THE COINAGE

the sleeping in a big ceramic pot part sounds cozy

'plug'??

influence of Sasanian Zoroastrian thought on the Talmud:
http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/an-interview-with-dr-shai-secunda-about-the-iranian-talmud/

pretty brilliant stuff

While these textual intersections are interesting, usually when the public learns about people like me working on the Bavli’s Iranian context, they want to hear about sexy, direct, and unassailable evidence of Zoroastrian influence on halakha or core theological concepts. The truth is rarely that simple, but awareness of the Iranian context does help us appreciate the protracted development of certain, sometimes central Jewish institutions. I discuss at length some talmudic beliefs about hell in the book. My friend Yishai Kiel has suggested, in a Festschrift in honor of Yaakov Elman, that the Bavli’s insistence on wearing a ‘tallit qatan’ even when one would not otherwise be obligated to do so may have been influenced by the similar Zoroastrian requirement to tie the kustig- a ritual belt. These are nice explanations that account for some of the Bavli’s novel beliefs and requirements, although the mechanics about how this sort of influence might have operated needs to be worked out.

i like that he starts w/ relatively firm loanwords and then extrapolates to more ambiguous influences. it seems like a good moment for this type of scholarship too since jewish-persian drama is still playing out.

look forward to reading that. Mordy have you ever read Harold Bloom's (i know, i know) "Omens of Millennium"?

i haven't -- should i?

oh i doubt it. been too long for me to remember much other than it covering similar ideas in a more speculative sense as bloom is wont to do.

i dunno why i'd want to publicise it cuz i find it all a bit embarrassing but anyway i came home today to find i'd been surprisingly 'published' in an audio-visual journal - http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze-studies/journal/av-17/. guess which one is me. (clue: i'm not alphonso lingis.) (also, i don't know why it starts halfway through my paper. there was more philosophy in there, i promise.)

aw i was all set to watch that but it's kinda too hard to hear what you're saying!

i am legitimately interested in this though, and i hope you'll let us know when it's published in, like, print form.

i just got the proofs back from an article coming out next month--and i was almost too freaked out to look at the "corrections" lest the proofreader somehow implicitly signal their lack of faith in my intelligence. i swear im too fragile a soul for academics sometimes.

i can't believe alphonso lingis reads ilx!!

i'm reading funkenstein. pretty good stuff.

which one?

theology + the scientific imagination

i really wanted to read his stuff on medieval jewish history but i think that's primarily in the perceptions collection?

oh dang that's right up my alley.

theology and the scientific imagination, that is.

that book is dope

thinking of teaching a seminar on Spinoza next term, don't know the work well, kinda psyched!

has anyone read the new latour?

i've decided im going to, but that doesn't count. gotta get through the laruelle first, on which I've stalled.

the anthony paul smith translation?

yep that's the one.

i better start reading

do you think that book is a useful entry point to laurelle or is there a better one?

you'd have to ask someone who's read more of him, but it certainly seems intended as a foundational text for him. he's pretty explicitly laying down the axioms of "non-philosophy." it's not an easy read, but not as hard as like lacan or whatever. he's not a great writer, though.

haha i've experienced a tiny bit. but that sounds somewhat promising

i posted a link to a "debate" between him and derrida upthread that actually strikes me as a good starting place.

will check it out. ty!

also that debate is interesting particulary because derrida's perplexity wrt to the question of just why Laruelle thinks he's doing something that isn't already part of the philosophical tradition at least since nietzsche seems to me to be kinda the key question for Laruelle and his followers.

aw i was all set to watch that but it's kinda too hard to hear what you're saying!

ya they didn't mic it up properly + i'm v quiet anyway + i for some reason develop numerous nervous speech impediments in these situations, so it's tuff. consider it like lacan's deliberate obscurantism as a pedagogical method.

my philosophy life: beginning to think that trying to outline a tangled kant - bergson - husserl - merleau-ponty - deleuze lineage of critique may, surprisingly, be a bit much for half a chapter, and also a bit much for my head to avoid collapsing in on itself.

everything i've ever written has started out as disastrous hubris before i'm able to hone in on a manageable topic for my time/intellect. i've made peace with that as my writing process now.

i picked up laruelle today and i am reminded how often encountering a new (non-)philosophical system can feel like trying to learn a new language. only every third word or so makes sense and then there are flashes of comprehension before losing it again.

in fact one of the things i like about philosophy is that journey from confusion to fluency and all the little "aha!" moments along the way.

Hey Deleuzians! what's the best secondary source out there on D+G (or just D)? Anyone read Brian Massumi's "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia"?

I am reading Deleuze for the first time! but I am reading Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza because I am studying Spinoza. rather than reading secondary lit, why not just read Spinoza and Leibniz? I guess I am reading Deleuze as secondary lit on Spinoza but I think Deleuze is major enough that he's really a primary source in its own right

I am in general thumbs down on secondary lit. to the sources...

wish i could go to this http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/amm

ooh Martin Jay will be there.