Jon Cogburn's Blog

Todd May is my hero

And not merely for developing the theory of post-structuralist anarchism.

Please read his open letter to the rest of us HERE.

Related petition HERE.

The point at which I have joined the loyal opposition

Well, I am officially a member of SPEP now.

It's something I frankly should have done years ago, and my own particular obligation to sign THIS PETITION gave me the final push.

Finally, I know that there's a meme loose in the land that SPEP isn't really pluralist enough. O.K. Assume that's true, then whose fault is that? There are a lot of us analytical philosophers now who are interested in things like Phenomenology, German Idealism, Existentialism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, the Parisian 68ers, etc. We meet each other at APA presentations on these things and increasingly have a great time mingling with SPEP members who are also there.

Well, I think it's time for us analytical pluralists to take the next step, to put up or shut up.

We can't complain about SPEP being this or that or the other if we're a priori unwilling to join. In particular to the extent that SPEP isn't pluralist enough, it just seems to me that this is largely the fault of those of us interested in what a lot of SPEP scholars write about but who have not ourselves joined.

It can't be said enough that SPEP isn't this monolithic force hell bent on seperatism. It's just an organization with people interested in stuff that has been traditionally underrepresented in American philosophy departments. Note that first, if they were this monolithic thing bent on no dialogue with others there wouldn't be so much cool stuff at APAs that I noted earlier. This is the result of a lot of work by SPEP members engaged in dialogue with non-SPEP members. Second, (a) friends of mine in SPEP have encouraged me (and nearly all my publications are in analytical metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of logic) to join for three years now, (b) read the actual mission statement on their web page, and (c) the last conference had all sorts of cool papers overlapping analytic and continental philosophy. Alva Noe spoke there, for example.

[Addendum: I should have posted this originally. The SPEP website is a pleasure to use, and joining is really easy. Just go HERE.]

One of my favorite novelists criticizes one of my favorite philosophers

R. Scott Baker defending a friend of his from a negative review by Graham Harman.

I do want to tell Baker that one of my other favorite novelists (Bruce Sterling) is a big fan of Harman's work. In any case, Baker's long list of heuristic travails that beset the all too human is quite funnhy in context and certainly worth the price of admission. Joe Bob says check it out.

[Update- Guerilla Derridean David Roden (of the Open University's Mind, Meaning and Rationality Research Group), defends Metzinger from one of Harman's criticisms HERE. I'm going to go read Harman's article now.]