Jon Cogburn's Blog

enowning on me on Harman

In reference to THIS POST enowning writes (HERE (go to the one at wed. Feb. 22)):

I have a few comments. I find the use of collective nouns, like "orthodox Heideggerians", to be useless unless their membership can be ascertained, like "all Fords" or the IEEE. Otherwise, the collective's membership usually dwindles towards zero upon inspection. I've come across Harman's focus on B&T's phenomenology of tools, and I have not read all of Harman's books, but the two I've read recently, Quadruple Object and Heidegger Explained, have a broader perspective on Heidegger's work. And what could be offensive about neo-Aristotelian views to orthodox Heideggerians? In the broad scheme of philosophy, Heidegger can be most easily understood as a series of footnotes to Aristotle.

Fair enough about the collective noun, so I should probably explain.

I've been reading Harman's Towards Speculative Realism. At the beginning of the first and fourth essay he notes that the papers were not accepted at SPEP or at the Heidegger Circle.

If you've read enough of the Heidegger papers presented at SPEP or the Heidegger Circle, and have an open mind, then it is pretty mind-blowing that these two papers were rejected. In the post in question (again, HERE) I just meant to be adducing a hypothesis concerning why they were rejected. That's all I meant to put forward, and I think the substantive claim is still true. Harman's assertion that Division 1 of Being and Time already contains an account of being, one that Heidegger simply reiterated over and over again before, after, and during his supposed turn, undercuts vast presuppositional swaths of work on Heidegger, probably over half of the papers presented at SPEP or the Heidegger Circle. For example, in Tool Being and one of the rejected essays Harman argues at great length that Heidegger actually has no real theory of time, that the relevant discussion is just a redundant reiteration of the tool/broken tool analysis. 

As for enowinging's second point, I am aware of Harman's wonderful take on the fourfold. I think it's not only right as a clarification of Heidegger exegesis, but also a fundamental advance in ontology. Nothing I wrote in the original post was intended to undermine that.

Finally, the point about "a series of footnotes to Aristotle". . . well, that's the Bernasconi take. But there's a confusion here. What is neo-Aristotelian about Harman's work  (a new version of Aristotlean substance) is not what Bernasconi takes to be neo-Aristotelain about Heidegger's work (stemming from the Nichomachean Ethics). I assume that enowning means the Bernasconi point, but this is something about which we both should have been clearer.

Rosenbaum on Billy Joel

I missed THIS ESSAY when it came out a few years ago.

While I tend to have respect for anyone who can write catchy melodies as Joel can, Rosenbaum is really on to something with this:

I think I've identified the qualities in B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

Then Rosenbaum goes through hit after hit illustrating the thesis.

A couple of observations:

1. Graham Harman has written about the "sneer from nowhere" that ironic Gen ex hipsters perfected pre-internet and that came to characterize an awful lot of the early blogosphere. I think Rosenbaum's "unearned contempt" is pretty much the same thing.
2. Academic philosophers give in to unearned contempt much more than people in other fields. For some reason, we feel justified saying nasty things about thinkers and movements we don't know very much about. This is probably worst with analytic and continentals who view the distinction in Baby Boomer culture war terms (not to say only Baby Boomers do this). I think this comes from a kind of anxiety in philosophy that if other people are right about certain things, then your life work might be worthless. I mean, you can't get started on a project unless you presuppose an awful lot. But if those presuppositions are kicked out, then there's no point to what you've been doing. 
3. Incidentally, I think this bit about presuppositions is why orthodox Heideggerians don't make time for Harman. What is overwhelmingly offensive to them is not Harman's critique of correlationism, nor his neo-Aristotelian views, but rather his claim that most of Heidegger's work is just a repetitious restatement of of the tool/broken tool dichotomy. If Harman is correct about this (and he gives arguments, e.g. the discussion of time in Tool Being) then thousands and thousands of books and articles by orthodox Heideggerians might end up being beside the point. This kind of thing is pretty terrifying if you are on the receiving end of it.

Anyhow, the Billy Joel article is really interesting. Joe Bob says check it out.

Harman and the issue of an infinite intellect

One of Graham Harman's commitments that is most difficult for many people to accept is the view that there are no perfect recipes.

It's one thing to say that the chair and a description of the chair are two different things. But Harman holds that any description of the chair will leave something out. So even God could not have a cookbook that would allow him to produce the chair such that she can predict all of the chair's possible interactions, and the properties that emerge as a result, with everything else.

There are two connected ways to take this, both of which I think Harman endorses: (1) as a claim about metaphysical emergence, where there is always the potential for genuinely novel, genuinely surprising (even to God) properties called forward when the chair interacts with other things, and (2) a claim about the limits of representation.

I'm very interested in the extent to which these two claims mutually re-inforce one another.

Mark Silcox and I have a paper in American Philosophical Quarterly that I think is relevant to further working out (1) (or at least working out a Harmanian, perhaps to be contrasted with Deleuzian, theory of emergence).

But (2) itself is a little bit delicate. Again, could an infinite representation (shades of Maimon and Hegel here) of the chair allow one to predict all of its possible interactions with other elements (by "interactions" I don't just mean movement through space, but all of the properties that emerge as a result too)? For Harman, such a representation would just be another identical universe! So it would not in fact be a representation.

Another way to put the objection, not involving a mirror universe, might be to say that the "infinite representation" would be nothing like actual human languages, with recursive syntaxes. I mean there would be no computer program to determine whether something was a sentence of the language. But then the "representation" would be so transcendent that it would at the very least be as weird as the paired universe.

I lean towards this view, and it in fact follows from my piece with Silcox, but it is one that scientistic philosophers would lean against. They would say that the representation might be in some sense infinite, but in the kind of way computers can generate infinities through recursion.

I don't know of a knock down argument against the scientistic philosopher here. On the other hand, I can't think of one plausible reason to believe it, and naturalism's bad track record with respect to mathematics, the advent of matter, normativity, and run of the mill emergent phenomena such as colors, makes me deeply skeptical here too. I mean, I do not think that the null hypothesis should be that Harman is wrong. Rather, I think one can (and I intend to, actually) argue that the burden of proof is on Harman's opponents here.

Some preliminary thoughts on Meillassoux's theology

I think I might be teaching the first graduate seminar on Graham Harman in the United States. At least two of my students are applying for this awesome summer institute at Bonn on the new ontology (teachers including Hagglund, Brassier, Harman, Grant, and Zizek!) and as part of a class on Derrida with my colleague Francois Raffoul they should get a chance to work through some of Hagglund's work.*

We've started the semester with a huge dollop of Meillassoux and Harman on Meillassoux (many notes thus far are HERE, this week I'm going to include more stuff on Harman on Meillassoux). Two Springs from now I'm scheduled to teach a class on Meillassoux and Graham Priest which will be awesome, awesome, awesome and which Insha'Allah might form the genesis of some collaborative work with Levi Bryant (at the very least it will form the genesis of some solo work on Bryant, which would also be awesome).

One of the things we've read this semester is Meillassoux's "Spectral Dilemma" essay and Harman's exegesis of parts of Meillassoux's second (currently unpublished) magnum opus L'Inexistence Divine. Strangely, I was able to lead a discussion of some of the material in the article in the current adult sunday school class I'm doing on the Meaning of Jesus.

So I think today, February 12, 2012 might be the first time Meillassoux has been taught in an adult sunday school class (notes on that class HERE; Meillassoux is mentioned multiple times in different contexts).

I do not think my teaching bits of Meillassoux today will be the last time that conscientious Christians will struggle with his ideas in churches though, for a couple of reasons.

more development of Meillassoux's argument in modal logic, plus a possible dialtheist problem

I've had a couple of fantastic discussions with Levi Bryant about Graham Priest's connection to a slew of continental philosophers that Priest doesn't even mention in Beyond the Limits of Thought, and a bunch of weird things are popping out with respect to my current reading of Meillassoux.

The most important connection is that Meillassoux several times makes the kind of argument Priest diagnoses and logically regiments, where it is shown that just articulating a limit (Closure) forces that very limit to be contradicted (Transcendence). Given my teaching rotation, I should be able to teach a class on Meillassoux and Priest two Spring semesters from now, and the course notes for that class might be the genesis of something collaborative with Bryant (Insha'allah).

Weirdly, in Chapter 3 of After Finitude. Meillassoux does have two discussions of the possibility of true contradictions, first in arguing that a contradictory being can't exist, since it would have all properties it would nto be contingent in the way Meillassoux has argued that objects are, and second in admitting that his argument uses ex falso quodlibet, something not valid in paraconsistent logics. It's pretty clear Meillassoux hadn't read Priest at the time he wrote After Finitude, because much of Priest's work can be read as picking up the challenge Meillassoux lays down in his discussion of paraconsistency.

Tonight I initially thought that I could prove that Meillassoux actually may need it to be the case that truths that escape the correlationist circle are all true contradictions, but as I dug deeper into the modalities, I actually came up with even more formal logic derivations of Meillassoux's key arguments. At the end of this post though, I do show how actual dialetheist worries arise, but then raise a couple of issues concernin whether the resulting form of dialetheism may not be a problem for Meillassoux.

In THIS POST I showed that Harman's interpretation of a central Meillassouxian argument was provable in modal logic.

The key lemma is that Verificationism (Strong Correlationism), the position that all truths are knowable (P --> <>KP), entails that if it is impossible to know that something is impossible, then that fact is possible (~<>K~<>R --> <>R). This latter statement forms the core of Harman's reconstruction of Meillassoux's argument to absolutize facticity.

Updated post on Chapter 1 of Meillassoux's After Finitude, with what I take to be the master argument against correlationism

After lecturing on the material today, I realized that I hadn't really clarified how the chapter presents a sustained argument (with some fascinating tangents). So I rewrote the lecture and edited the earlier post that is HERE. There's lots of cool stuff there, including some of Harman's criticisms. The biggest thing is that I take Meillassoux's master argument against correlationism to actually be the following.

1. Let A be the sentence, ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ A seems to undermine the correlationist claim that being and thought cannot be separated, as scientists are thinking of truth-making events existing in the absence of any thinkers.

2. The correlationist can say that the sentence is always false, in the manner of contemporary creationists, but they understandably don’t want to do this.

3. Instead, they typically give an account of such scientific statements being part of a “founded mode” defined over something more originary involving human practices and perceptions. In this manner, they actually double the meaning of the sentence. The error is thinking the sentence is true and originary, but understood as founded it can be true.

4. So according to this strategy, A is true for the scientists, or more broadly for us, but not true from an external, absolute “God’s eye” perspective that does not involve human thinkability. So we must distinguish A^us versus A^absolute. A^us is true, while A^absolute is false or meaningless.

5. The claim that A^us  is true and A^absolute is false or meaningless directly contradicts the scientist's own understanding of the meaning of A! When the correlationist says A^us  is true, the assertion gives rise to a Euthyphro dilemma. (5.1) A^us  asserts the following: “Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans” correlates with a set of verification procedures followed by scientists that lead them to assert A. (5.2) Scientists hold that this is the case for the following reason: The set of verification procedures followed by scientists leads them to assert A because event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.

6. The correlationist could outright deny 5.2, but this would be to lapse into Idealism, holding that scientists’ verification procedures caused reality to be the way it is.

7. Or the correlationist could just refuse to assert 5.2, perhaps because it is meaningless, or perhaps out of some kind of Wittgensteinian quietism, but this again leads to a contradiction of what the scientist means.

8. In any case, the claim that A^absolute is false or meaningless contradicts Finitude. Saying anything about A^absolute requires claiming knowledge about an absolute, which the correlationist claims we cannot have.

Again, full details (in addition to an overview of the other great things in the chapter as well as a discussion of some really nice related points and criticisms by Harman) are HERE.

Chapter 1 of Meillassoux's After Finitude (with some reflections on Harman's reflections)

Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism is not too complicated, but covers a lot of deep philosophical material. Here I will present the structure of the argument first, and then do some textual exegesis to support that as well as discuss some of Harman’s criticisms of this chapter.

Remember that we earlier defined “correlationism” in this manner:

(1) Verificationism- We cannot coherently think of reality as unthought (from the British empiricists originally, though Berkeley actually argued for it). Note that this arguably entails that if P is true, then it is possible for someone to know that P is true, but that in itself it places no restriction upon who is doing the knowing, it maybe could be "knowable by an infinite mind." Arguments concerning Finitude are typically what force the verificationism to be knowable by something human-like.

(2) Embodiment/Embeddedness-We cannot coherently think of humans without thinking of them as embedded in a reality ( Schopenhauer and then later Heidegger developing Kant's claim that concepts without intuitions are empty, Schopenhauer with respect to the body and Heidegger with respect to a reality experienced as in some sense pre-existing, modal (involving possibilities), and valuative).

(3) Finitude- We cannot coherently think of self-subsistent totalities/absolutes (from Kant’s dialectic, which is often taken to entail that we can therefore only think of finite totalities in relation to us; Graham Priest has a different analysis of these kinds of arguments, one that makes him in the speculative realist who rejects both Finitude and Verificationism, but who like Meillassoux argues from this by radicalizing correlationism).

Here is the first part of Meillassoux’s argument, from (2.2 (pp. 13-15)).

1. Let A be the sentence, ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ A seems to undermine the correlationist claim that being and thought cannot be separated, as scientists are thinking of truth making events existing in the absence of any thinkers.

2. The correlationist can say that the sentence is always false, in the manner of contemporary creationists, but they understandably don’t want to do this.

3. Instead, they typically give an account of such scientific statements being part of a “founded mode” defined over something more originary involving human practices and perceptions. In this manner, they actually double the meaning of the sentence. The error is thinking the sentence is true and originary, but understood as founded it can be true.

(modal logical) Meditations on the Meillassoux versus Harman

Yesterday I provided a preliminary formulation of a key lemma in Meillassoux's argument that correlationism absolutizes. I'd wanted to do this in a full natural deduction form today, but my thinking got both ahead and behind the argument. Let me get behind the argument first.

I. Correlationism, and the contrast between Meillassoux and Harman

From the position of an analytic philosopher (and I pray that this is not too distorting), Meillassoux's correlationism is best presented in terms of the following three positions.

(1) Verificationism- We cannot coherently think of reality as unthought (from the British empiricists originally, though Berkeley actually argued for it). Note that this arguably entails that if P is true, then it is possible for someone to know that P is true, but that in itself it places no restriction upon who is doing the knowing, it could be "knowable by an infinite mind." Only arguments concerning finitude force the verificationism to be knowable by something human-like.

(2) Embodiment/Embeddedness-We cannot coherently think of humans without thinking of them as embedded in a reality ( Schopenhauer and then later Heidegger developing Kant's claim that concepts without intuitions are empty, Schopenhauer with respect to the body and Heidegger with respect to a reality experienced as in some sense pre-existing, modal (involving possibilities), and valuative).

(3) Finitude- We cannot coherently think of self-subsistent totalities/absolutes (from Kant’s dialectic, but Graham Priest has discovered the true nature of this argument).

Before I go any further I must make absolutely clear the contrast between Harman and Meillassoux. Harman rejects (1) the Verificationism and maintains (3) the Finitude (if I could write an aria I'd write one in praise of this insight!) by radically externalizing the manner in which Finitude is expressed by Heidegger. Meillassoux rejects (3) the Finitude while keeping the (1) Verificationism. This is in some sense the titanic strugle at the heart of Speculative Realism.

II. Meilllassoux Needs (some form of) Verificationism

As I briefly (much more is needed exegetically) argued yesterday, the way Meillassoux gets to his rejection of Finitude actually uses Verificationism as a premise.

III. Meillassoux Rejects Verificationism

Here is a big problem. As far as I can make out, Meillassoux's argument that correlationism need not entail Berkeleyan Idealism is inconsistent with the very Verificationism he uses. Meillassoux's worry is that correlationism renders the thing in itself unthinkable/unconceivable, but then we might think that it is impossible, which is the position of Berkeleyan idealism.

So Meillassoux argues, persuasively to me (and this actually has powerful resonances with Lovecraft that are in common to all of the first generation Speculative Realists, and many of the second generation ones such as myself), that unthinkability does not entail impossibility.

But I'm not sure he can argue this. First, notice that Meillassoux is arguing against a strawman. To stop Berkeleyan Idealism, he must argue against the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity. For the Berkeleyan Idealist need only be committed to the claim that it is false that things in themselves exist, not that it is impossible that they do so. But the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity is much harder to argue against than the proposition that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. In fact, it is not a proposition that I think Meillassoux can argue against (though Harman and myself, following him, can).

No Verificationist of the sort we've been considering can argue against the calim that unthinkability entails falsity! For surely unthinkability entails unknowability. But this claim, plus Verificationism, is provably inconsistent with the claim that unthinkability does not entail falsity! Let me explain the formalism before giving the proof.

One of Meillassoux's key arguments is formulizable in modal logic (and valid)

[Note: (1) Meillassoux's argument to contingency is further developed in modal logic HERE, with some dialetheist worries thrown in. (2) A clearer explanation of the difference between Meillassoux and Harman is HERE, including a distinct worry.]

Reading page 26 of Graham Harman's Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, and just put the key argument (of which Harman writes, "This apparently hair splitting point point is actually the key to Meillassoux's entire system, and is worthy of closer attention") in modal logic. If I have not fudged too much by putting things in terms of a knowledge predicate, it definitely works. And in a very weak modal logic to boot, I think classical K but in the next few days I will put it in natural deduction to check. 

Basically there is a simple proof from P --> <>KP (if P, then it is possible to know that P, to which the correlationist is arguably committed) to Meillassoux's conclusion ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible). Contraposing the correlationist claim gives you ~<>KP --> ~P. But then substitute in ~Q for P and you get ~<>K~Q --> ~~Q, which via classical logic entails ~<>K~Q --> Q (if it's not possible to know that something is false, then it is true). Now substitute in <>R for Q, and you get ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible).

That's it. I'll do a proper natural deduction proof (without the substitutions) in the next few days, in part because I want to find out if I had to use classical negation rules above (if I was a better logician I would know this without having to formalize it; but full formalization sometimes yields unexpected interesting things so I don't mind).

The reason this is so mind-blowing is that so much does follow from the incredibly simple point, once you think about it in a way informed by knowledge of German Idealism, as Harman and Meillassoux do. More on that soon. I have to get clearer on how this fits with Meillassoux's other key argument in this context that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. This is how Meillassoux rejects Berkeleyan Idealism while still being a Verificationist (correlationist). But then the Verificationism entails ~<>K~<>R --> <>R, and then some other commitments entail that there are a lot of Rs for which the scheme applies.

It's the fact that for the correlationist the antecedent is maintained for lots of philosophically Rs that entails much of the weird and fascinating aspects of Meillassoux's philosophy (let R equal "humans will survive their death" or "things in themselves exist"), which is why I'm going to get clearer on that next. As far as I'm getting it now, the reason we can't know so many things is from Kantian Dialectic type Finitude arguments (the Verificationism follows from Berkeleyan type arguments).

Interestingly, Meillassoux, like Graham Priest, ends up exploding the Finitude arguments while staying with the Verificationism, and Harman (to some extent like a certain period John McDowell) keeps the Finitude but jettisons the Verificationism. I should note that by saying this I'm not reducing any thinker to any other thinker or just understanding the continental philosophers as shadows of the analytic ones (a horrible, horrible tendency of a lot of analytic "pluralists"). I'm learning all sorts of new things from Meillassoux and Harman, and there are essential respects in which the two differ from the analytic analogues (among other things, Harman is not hobbled by McDowell's quiteism, and this makes a humongous difference).

It's really cool stuff. Any logician readers will have intuited interesting issues involving Fitch's Paradox as well. I have a couple of lines on that (one from Tennant, one from reflection on Moore's Paradox) that I want to try out on Meillassoux this semester.

syllabus to class on Graham Harman

My syllabus to PHIL 4952 Topics in Metaphysics for this Spring Semester at LSU is on-line HERE.

This is going to be an absolute blast, and also help substantially with the Speculative Realism book that I'm writing now.

Speculative Realism is neither continental nor analytic in the deeper substantive sense

Characteristically nice post about the analytic-continental divide from Graham Harman HERE.

Whenever Harman posts on this issue I find myself agreeing with everything he says. With Harman I think it is much more healthy than not that there are different traditions, and that they remain different

In place of thinking the division should disappear, I would instead make the following claims: (1) an a priori unwillingness from members of one tradition to learn from members of other traditions is problematic, (2) almost equally problematic are people from one camp who are only open to people from the other tradition to the extent that those people articulate views that seem to support those of the supposed pluralist's,* and (3) whatever you think about the different styles, the thinkers covered by continental philosophers should be taught in analytic programs (especially German Idealism and 19th Century more broadly, but also the things Leiter derides).

I should note in passing that one of the things I like about Speculative Realism is that its main practitioners do not embody any of the above vices. Analytic and Continental describe first and foremost training regimes for academic philosophers. But at a certain point you should put on your big boy pants just try to do philosophy, which requires following the muse wherever she wants to take you.

Avoidance of the above vices is not accidental, since Speculative Realists reject two substantive positions at the heart of the most significant continental and analytic philosophers, positions that started with the Positivists and Heidegger, and that rise up zombie-like over and over and over again.

This becomes crystal clear if one realizes that the divide between analytic and continental philosophers is much less philosophically important than a couple of other deeper divisions (1) between anti-metaphysical thinkers and at least anti-anti-metaphysical thinkers,** and (2) between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Weirdly, analytical philosophy's founding sin was combining naturalism and anti-metaphysics and continental philosophy's founding sin was combining non-naturalism and anti-metaphyiscs! But naturalism is false (see Michael Ruse HERE) and anti-metaphysics is incoherent (read the early critics of Kant or Graham Priest for that matter!).

In analytical philosophy anti-metaphysics is where naturalism goes to, if not die, continue some kind of a zombie-like existence. This goes all the way from Marburg School Neo-Kantianism to Robert Brandom, currently holding the office of the last positivist (after Bergmann then Quine and then Rorty before him). Brandom-type Pittsburgh Hegelianiasm, for all of its manifest virtues, almost constitutively returns to the kind of view that Heidegger derides in his very first (emergency war) lectures, of the universe as some valueless hunk with humans (in the guise of social practice) guilding and staining it. This is properly neo-Kantian, not Hegelian, as is the quietistic anti-metaphysics*** that obscures the basic move.

But, on the contrary, in continental philosophy anti-metaphysics comes from the Heideggerian view that science itself is a founded mode over something anti-metaphysics phenomenology reveals to be more originary. So while analytic naturalism leads to anti-metaphysics (because one must deride as meaningless questions that the natural sciences cannot answer), continental anti-metaphysics leads to anti-naturalism.

One is actually tempted to join the two above observations to make the following sort of argument. Analytic philosophy shows that naturalism refutes metaphysics. Continental philosophy shows that the refutation of metaphysics refutes naturalism. Therefore naturalism refutes naturalism.

In any case, I raise my flag with anti-naturalist anti-anti-metaphysicians. We're a tiny minority in both analytic and continental philosophy. With the possible exception of a non-trivial set of Christian apologists (usually working in a dialectical setting horribly tainted by either fideism or its opposition, IMHO), analytical philosophers who are not anti-metaphysicians are almost all naturalists (argument above notwithstanding)! And, with the notable exceptions of the Speculative Realists, Deleuzians, and some other heroic figures, continental philosophy by and large continues to chug along wearing the same old phenomenological straightjacket, with its attendent quietism and other forms of recycled neo-Kantianism. Note that this is perversely a straightjacket that any proper reader of the German Idealists would have thrown off long ago. Well with Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Priest's readings of this tradition,as well as Graham Harman's indefeteagable labor, at least some of us have begun to wiggle our way out of the damned thing.****

[Notes:

*It's very hard not to fall into this trap, perhaps impossible. Some strategies for an analytic philosopher who wants to be a "pluralist": (1) You must, must, must avoid the temptation to use your continental friends to give yourself a patina depth by simply adding a footnote when one of those continental friends tells you that someone you've never read has an idea kind of like yours, (2) You must go to talks about thinkers you don't like and be vigilently open to the idea that informed people of good will disagree with you about your assessment, (3) As much as possible, maintain an active reading life that has nothing to do with whatever current project on which you are working; this helps in all sorts of ways.

**The distinction between anti-metaphysics and anti-anti-metaphysics should not be confused with the distinction between anti-realists and anti-anti-realists. John McDowell is both an anti-metaphysician and an anti-anti-realist. See the next note.

***John McDowell is, like most continental philosophers, actually anti-metaphysical and non-naturalist. Brandom claims to be non-naturalist, but he really is not, at least in the important sense that the early Heidegger adumbrated. This is the entire reason, I think, that Crispin Wright famously put John McDowell down as not really being an analytic philosopher, but (as far as I know) has never said anything remotely similar about fellow Pittsburgh Hegelian Robert Brandom.

****Just because nothing above makes this sufficiently clear- I think Heidegger is one of the most important five philosophers in history and also that Brandom is easily in the top five of living philosophers.]

David Auerbach on Derrida

I don't know how I missed THIS PIECE a few months ago. Discovering it now is a cool synchronicity, given Harman's nice (and definitive) recent post on "Derridean realism." Key point, that remains absolutely devastating:

But Derrida has cheated. He’s gone from an atomic relation of sign to sign and assumed that because a single signification is bereft of meaning, the entire system must be. This is a negative claim–that no meaning is possible–and he’s achieved it by narrowing the gap on both sides. First, he’s abandoned consideration of the holistic view in which a system of significations could have a meaning which is not contained in isolation in any single signification. (This is basically Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism“: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”) Second, he’s insisted that a particular type of meaning, Husserl’s, is the only one possible, so any problem with Husserl’s admittedly naive theory extends to language in general.

So Derrida silently assumes logical atomism and a naive theory of reference, then posits that position as one side of a dichotomy and his endless deferral of meaning as the other, with no middle ground.

Anyhow, Joe Bob says to check out the whole post.*

It's a real honor to have been linked to by Auerbach, a TLS (!) critic of enviable analytical and literary powers.

[Notes:

*In the spirit of fairness, please also get a copy of Samual Wheeler's excellent Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy and Martin Hagglund's equally good Radical Atheism. I love both these books, but still think that Auerbach is correct, and moreover that the problem he isolates is even more pressing with Derrida's later (and I think ethically monstrous) Schmidt inspired political writings.**

**Another caveat- All this being said, I think there is something importantly correct and deep about Derrida's view of the necessary impossible, and the manner in which this ties in to negative theology as visualized by important philosophers like Caputo. People like Wheeler, Hagglund, and Caputo (and Rorty too for that matter) just make it impossible for me to whole heartedly jump on an anti-Derrida bandwagon.]

Harman on Marder

In much the same way that Newt Gingrich is a dumb person's idea of a smart person, Michael Marder is an a-literate's* idea of a good writer.

Nearly every paragraph of his book (ostensibly on Derrida and realism) combines a sickening amount of pretentious faux** literary tropes that one associates with derivative continental philosophy: (1) crapulent amounts of paint by numbers Heideggerian chiasmus, (2) pseudo-Nietzschean (and morally problematic!) "loftiness" of tone throughout, (3) jarringly inappropriate adjectives that are evidence of laziness, not creativity, (4) unintentional ambiguity caused by overlong, badly structured sentences, and of course (5) entirely gratuitous and in fact painfully unenlightening Derridean use of parentheses.

[Note that Marder is in good company here; Quine is a litrary Gingrich too, though in his case it stems from an entirely different set of overused high school tropes. . .]

In any case, Harman says about everything that needs to be said about Marderism HERE.

I started this post trying to cut and paste key bits of Harman's, but found out I was just including the whole thing. I also found out that I don't have anything to add.***

Joe Bob says check it out.

[Notes:

*A-literate = one who can read but does not.

**I should not have to say this, but here goes. OF COURSE there is nothing wrong with philosophy veering into literature. What's wrong is when it veers into BAD LITERATURE, almost always when people try to ape what should be sui generis writers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Derrida. Marder and everyone like him never read the bit where Zarathrustra said he'd only accept a disciple who would betray him, or Derrida's repeated attempts to more politely say the same thing (whenever the great man noted that deconstructionism was not a technique he was as politely as possible trying to encourage people not to ape his style; obviously he failed). This being the case, also see above parenthetical about Quine, who clearly (a) never read any literature after high school, and (b) had somehow still wanted to be a writer of fiction, albeit one who doesn't read fiction.**** Thus the embarrassing amount of contrived alliteration, etc. One wishes one could build a time machine and bribe his his high school English teacher not to have praised him for that kind of thing.

***Except for the above somewhat peurile rant about style. I have no idea why this morning I feel the need to carry on in this manner. It's not indicative of a big soul. It's just not. . . I really want to encourage people to just read Harman's nice piece instead. But there's a performative contradiction in encouraging this in what will clearly***** be the penultimate footnote. . . Shoot.  By contrast with the above, what's really superb about Harman's post is that he actually shows how the bad style is a necessary part of the bad philosophy. It's an interesting point in its own right, and is actually part of what one would predict from the correctness Harman's own thinking about the inextricability of scheme from content as they apply to the act of writing.

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.]

 

some background on Harman and Speculative Realism (and cool new book series) [click link for full post]

Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.

via www.newappsblog.com

Graham Harman bears witness (click link for full post)

Graham Harman is a wonderful philosopher, with an astonishing conceptual inventiveness, a powerful drive to expression, and marvelously witty prose. But at the moment he is one of the many bearing witness to the many, many, brave heroes of the Battle of Tahrir Square and indeed the entire Egyptian Revolution. 

via www.newappsblog.com

provocative post by Morton on Goedel

Morton's post is HERE [Update: fascinating response to Morton by Levi Bryant HERE. And response by Morton HERE. One thing that's become clear from Morton and Levi is that Hofstadter's notion of a "strange loop" is ripe for Harmanization (the process whereby a philosophical property taken to hold either in subjects or between subjects and objects is shown to actually hold first and foremost either of objects or between objects and objects).]

Mark Silcox and I actually have a couple of dogs in that fight (did I just stretch the metaphor to breaking?) and I'll try to respond later. Morton's appropriation of Hoffstadter's Goedel is really interesting.

In four publications (see enumerated list below) Mark and I try to build an account of emergence out of limitation results in computability theory (the most important one for speculative realism issues is the one forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly).  I tend to think of the Object Oriented Ontology thesis of withdrawal in terms of this. Substance is the dispositional realm that allows non-modal properties to be presented (almost wrote "present-ed," Augh!) by objects to other objects (this may be more Levi Bryant than Graham Harman). Mark and I have argued that what is distinctive of emergent properties is that they are not algorithmically specifiable from a set of subvenient properties. When put together with some of the central OOO theses, this means that the way the non-dispositional "objectively present" properties emerge out of a deeper dispositional realm on two or more objects interacting is in some manner distinctively non-algorithmic.

Anyhow, Mark and I use Goedel type arguments in defending and clarifying this (and in me and Jason Megill's article we try to show that such arguments have wider scope than anti-Lucas/Penrose types have admitted). When you put Mark, me, and Megill's appropriation of Goedel together with Graham and Levi's central insights you might get argumentative support for something like what Morton is proposing. This is a really important issue for me.

I am NOT saying, "oh me and my friends have already thought of this." We haven't. What Morton is proposing is new and involves the Hofstadter focus on the way Godelization gets you a kind of self-reference. This is really important. I'm just excited about it because it might provide one of the key links between stuff I've been doing and stuff I'm just starting to do (the other link is quite obviously Ian Bogost, which Mark and I are going to do an on-line reading group on in the next year, and I might teach a class on after I do the Harman class in Spring, and Galen Strawson class in Fall).

I'm going to think about this for a couple of days and then post something else.

Anyhow, here are references for the papers I mentioned with links to abstracts. Again, if anyone is interested in any of these e-mail me at joncogburn at yahoo dot com. I'm a week behind in e-mail, but I will write you back!

1. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, "The Emergence of Emergence: Computability and Ontology." American Philosophical Quarterly, (forthcoming). [ABSTRACT]
2. Jon Cogburn and Jason Megill, "Are Turing Machines Platonists? Intuitionism and the Computational Theory of Mind," Minds and Machines, (forthcoming) [ABSTRACT]
3. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Philosophy Through Video Games, Routledge (2009) [ABSTRACT]
4. Mark Silcox and Jon Cogburn, "Computability Theory and Literary Competence," The British Journal of Aesthetics, 46.5, (2006), pp. 369-386. [ABSTRACT]
5. Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, "Computing Machinery and Emergence," Minds and Machines, 15.1 (2005), pp. 73-89. [ABSTRACT]

another gem from Harman (with supporting song by Black Flag)

From HERE.

Apparently this needs to be repeated… Otherness is not enough.

The fact that some philosophers are interested in the “other” of all representation and accessibility does not make them object-oriented thinkers avant la lettre.

If you say “Derrida/Adorno/Heidegger/etc. already knew that there was something escaping presence,” this is true, but it isn’t the point. (Or rather, it’s only half the point. It’s a perfectly good start.)

The question is: why do humans have to be on the scene to be haunted by these negative traces of otherness? Sorry, but this is just plain old Kantianism, however craftily varied.

The “otherness” we were talking about earlier today is not just some cryptic underbelly of human experience. It’s the fact that relationality between any two entities stumbles over the incommensurability between reality and representation. The stone in its own right can never be the stone as encountered by another stone. It has nothing to do with specifically human finitude, but is a paradox built into the difference between object and relation.

So no, you don’t get to say: “Derrida doesn’t reduce the world to a text, because he cares about the other of the text.” The question is: what the hell are texts doing in a basic ontological proposition to begin with? They don’t belong there any more than cotton balls or meteors do.

Harman concludes a follow up post ("Calarco loses his cool")  with,

I think what’s happening, to be perfectly frank, is that we have a number of people who overinvested in Derrida when his stock price was at its peak and are starting to become angry that he’s no longer Mr. Chic in continental philosophy. Hence they are retroactively projecting later discoveries into his work that simply aren’t there. When people wildly overplay their hands by saying that a rather surprising claim is “obvious” and that it’s “ridiculous” to think otherwise, then you have to suspect that shouts are being utilized to cover up the absence of arguments.

And it includes another gem from William James I'm embarrassed that I hadn't known about.

You all know William James on the three phases of reception of a new theory:

1. It’s ridiculous.

2. It’s obvious and therefore trivial.

3. We thought of it first!

Here Calarco brings OOO to Stage 3, and I thank him for it.

Anyhow, read the whole thing! It (withthe addendum in the subsequent post) is one of the most devastating short pieces of philosophical rhetoric (I don't mean that pejoratively!) I've seen in the blogosphere. [And also see this coda by Levi Bryant HERE which has some really fantastic meditations on the proper kind of charity appropriate to productive philosophical conversation].

I would also be remiss not to note the following, which is one of the few Black Flag songs co-written by bassist Kira Roessler (in addition to having the ten and a half, Kira is one of the true goddesses of rock and roll- she also wrote songs for Minutemen and Firehose and her own band with Mike Watts Dos). Anyhow, the fellows Flag were all over this before Graham Harman. Weirdly, when Black Flag talk about the other in this song, it doesn't bother me as a ghastly abuse of the definite article. If I thought all the philosophers who did this were ripping off the song, I'd be a lot more charitable to the affectation.

Fascinating Harman interview

It's HERE. As usual, simultaneously deep and entertaining. One of many lovely and provocative quotes:

The “linguistic turn” in philosophy, which I always detested, was just another way of cementing the privilege of the human-world couple in philosophy. Worse yet, it felt so proud of itself for making a big improvement: “no more lucid Cartesian subject witnessing everything directly. The philosophy of consciousness must be replaced by the philosophy of language.” Big deal. It was still the same old privilege granted to the human-world duality, with interactions between inanimate things left to the natural sciences. In this way, the universal mission of philosophy was voluntarily abandoned, and philosophy became a besieged human fortress with heralds on the walls crying out: “Now hear me, Science! Hear ye, oh hear ye! Do as you please with the world out there! But you will never explain what happens inside this human fortress!” But now the dark hordes of cognitive science have approached the fortress and are launching stones deep inside the wall. It was a stupid strategy for philosophy all along, never a workable one. There is nothing uniquely special about human reality that would make it immune from scientific explanation. The real problem is that the natural sciences never even do the job on inanimate matter. They give us plenty of practical know-how for calculating and modelling the workings of the inanimate sphere, but only at the cost of abandoning any metaphysical knowledge about these things, and at the more tangible cost of telling us nothing about larger-scale entities found in the human sphere: nations, armies, traditions, songs. They can only encompass these things in the manner of reducing or eliminating them— by turning the human mind into physical pulp governed by physical laws. Well, the mind is pulp in one sense, but in another sense it is an object of a very different sort, just as neutrons are.

Another thing I'm really fascinated about is Harman's projected book on Lovecraft:

But the work never stops. I also have two further contracts for books to be written in 2011. The first is Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, which will deal with a small number of H.P. Lovecraft’s greatest stories. Mallarmé and Hölderlin used to be the literary figures of choice in continental philosophy, but it feels to me like Lovecraft has become the new central literary referent in our circles. It was stunning to realize, for instance, that all four of the original speculative realists were Lovecraft fans, all of us having discovered him independently.

I feel exactly the same way about Lovecraft's import.

Noel Carroll's discussion of Lovecraft in The Philospohy of Horror is pretty good but short, since he focuses more on movies and since the Lovecraftian theory of horror is just one that Carroll contrasts his own with. I've written a paper about some of this, but it just scratches the surface of what's there. I think Harman's book will open up a really interesting broader literature.

affection type problems concerning modality?

It's weird to me how easily the Jacobi and Schultze's noumenal affection problem can generalize.

With Jacobi and Schultze it only concerned applying the category of causality to the thing in itself. Transcendental idealism both prohibits doing this and seems to necessitate it.

But you get a similar problem with causality and the understanding. Kant over and over again uses "imposition talk" (see Bennett's Kant's Analytic, section 38 for a plethora of examples) concerning how the understanding imposes categories on phenomena. But this is really weird, and yields another affection type argument. By transcendental idealism causality is just a relation between phenomena. But if the mind is imposing causality then something like a causal relation must exist between the mind and the phenomena. Since the mind is part of the noumena, we could call this the noumenal imposition argument, exactly analog to the noumenal affection argument (I'm sure Kant actually has more to say about this because it is so close to the way he wants to reconcile free will and determinism; which on some readings do involve a non-temporal kind of causality that determines whole deterministic causal sequences from outside of time).

Likewise, there is an analogous (and to me more interesting) problem about possibility itself. Can  we really make sense of critical philosophy as the transcendental inquiry into conditions of possibility when at the end of the day possibility is nothing more than something imposed by the understanding on phenomena? I think for Kant you get the same kind of issue as the affection and imposition arguments here. [There's also an analogous Priest type argument that John Divers talks about in his fantastic book Possible Worlds.]

Note that all three problems illustrate the Russell Paradox type inconsistent mix of what Graham Priest calls Transcencence and Enclosure. 

With possibility the problem arises for Heidegger too. Next semester I'm going to reread the stuff about possibility (if I remember right, he calls it "founded possibility" or something like that) in Being in Time and explore the extent to which that model of possibility is consistent with his own characterization of what he's doing as a transcendental project.

I'm really interested to study the history of the noumenal affection problem and see the extent to which the original players glommed onto an imposition problem and an analogous problem about modality. I don't think it's an accident that Schopenhauer was Schultze's student and that he has such a rich theory of modality. One of my projects the next four years is to read Schopenhauer the way Harman reads Heidegger, and then apply that to analytic debates about modality. Unfortunately this is going to take a few years of just getting up to speed on background. The stuff with Kant and the affection problem is just laying the groundwork for my next richer engagement with Schopenhauer. I'm starting teaching our early modern this spring, then in spring 2012 I'll teach our Kant and then spring 2013 our 19th Century class on Schopenhauer.

I know that the big project may sound flaky, but it's already in large part yielded a cowritten paper on vagueness that Frankie Worrell and I are presenting at the next Easter APA. I mean, Frankie and I got the idea from working through some Schopenhauer. So I have some evidence that the big project will yield all sorts of cool stuff along the way.

great post at Levi Bryant's place

Really thought provoking post circling around the varied relationships between metaphysics and ethics HERE. I've posted my first thoughts in the discussion thread.

[Post by Bogost responding to the same thing that Levi is responding to HERE, with some characteristically great quips, e.g.

I've written about this before (in the Turtlenecked Hairshirt and in We Think in Public), but I almost always find intellectual appeals to "the world" and "the public" to be disingenuous. For one part, who are we, holed up like we are with our French theory and our espresso, to talk of being "political?" If it means incanting Foucault and Žižek at one another, then that's not politics. If it means blogging about injustice to a group of twenty friends and acquaintances, then that's not politics. If it means gasping about injustices at wine bars and gallery openings, than that's still not politics.

I'm not just picking on Vitale here; I think this is a sickness that runs throughout all of the humanities, and has done for many decades. Being "engaged with the wider world" is a virtue worthy of our aspiration. But I'd hardly describe critical theorists as having even the most basic of relationships with the wider world.

He goes on then concludes:

If that's politics, you can have it. I'll take frogs and Fiats for now, for communing with them is sure to make me more attuned to the diverse world of things—among them the Marxists, the evangelicals, and the cynics, among so many others.

Levi responds in the comment section, and has a longer response to Bogost HERE.

This is stuff that needs to be hashed out, and is directly related to the brouhaha about normativity a few days ago (I linked to the relevant posts by Levi, Reid Kane, and Pete Wolfendale HERE.

As is clear from my thoughts in the comment thread to Levi's initial post, I think there's a strong connection between Harman, Bryant, and Bogost's metaphysics and what is interesting and right about certain forms of Buddhism. Moreover, I think this follows from the way Harman recognizes the inconsistencies in Heidegger and crafts a consistent view from what's there. That is, Harman's non-Daseinocentric non-pragmatist analysis of Tool Being fits in really nicely with Heidegger's later post Japan ethical musings (and Adorno and Horkheimer's critiques of technology for that matter). Anyhow, in the response to Levi I work this out with reference to the standard Euthyphro type critique of hedonism.]

responses by Levi

In response to one of Pete's challenges: a really interesting defense of the use of "translation" as a guiding metaphor (or perhaps a rebuttal of the claim that it is a metaphor!) for understanding the interaction of objects HERE (Part 1) and a related post on how Levi and Graham's Object Oriented Philosophy relates to our Kantian inheritance HERE (Part 2) [and now a continuation of the debate in the comments below this post HERE (Part 3); a post about normativity by Tom of Grundlegung HERE; and by Reid Kane of planomenology HERE, and two more by Levi in response to Tom HERE (Part 4) and HERE (Part 5); and another one in reaction to Pete HERE (Part 6)].

In the comment section Levi responds to Pete's challenge to Meillassoux. Since typepad is garbling any attempts to respond to it, I'm going to cut and paste it here: 

Pete,

I suggest you go back and reread my original post responding to Mikhail or that you reread After Finitude. As I outlined in that post, Meillassoux has a rejoinder to the Kantian charge of "conflating the transcendental and the empirical". As Meillassoux observes, while the transcendental philosopher wants to argue that the transcendental can't properly be said to "exist", the transcendental philosopher is nonetheless compelled to always attach the transcendental to the existence of a body in order to maintain the finitude of perception or the manner in which all perception involves a horizon. As a consequence, the existence of the transcendental is dependent on the existence of the human *body* and that body, in turn, depends on the coming to be of homo sapiens through evolution. If this argument is sound-- and I believe it is --then this entails that time in the Kantian sense *does* come into existence in the order of natural history. At this point you're left with one of two options: a) you can argue that the correlation is eternal, therefore absolutizing the correlation and holding that it's existed for all time. If this route is taken, then you've shifted from the epistemological domain favored by Kant and turned transcendental philosophy into a metaphysics, undermining the possibility of a critique of dogmatic thought that he sought. Or b) you can bite the bullet and recognize that the thesis that time is a form of intuition imposed by human minds on the world such that it never applies to things-in-themselves cannot hold up under scrutiny and that we need an account of time that belongs to things-in-themselves and doesn't just range over appearances.

Wolfendale's challenges

I'm moving a comment of Pete Wolfendale from the previous thread to the front, because it raises so many things worth thinking about. And I'm putting my response as the first comment. Here's Wolfendale's comment:

 
Levi: I should point out that most of these claims have been made in more detail in my most recent post (http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/hijacking-correlationism/) although some of them are backed up in earlier posts which are all linked to. This post also includes a very rough parsing of Meillassoux's argument from facticity if you're interested. However, I'll try to address your points in order, and bring in the relevant arguments without making this comment too long.

1. The idea of translation is a nice metaphor, but that's what it is - a metaphor - and it needs cashing out. The simplest way to cash it out is that the effect the affecting object has upon the affected object is in some way dependent upon the affected object, i.e., that the same object will produce different affects upon different things. However, this is something that everyone accepts, and they can accept it without having to talk about 'real objects' or 'proper being' that withdraws. Maybe you can enlighten me as to the correct stronger way to cash this out, and how this solves any of these issues.

Assuming you can provide an enlightening account of translation, you still have to explain how exactly translation can 'fail', as this is far from obvious. What is it that provides the normative standard for translations? Is it the withdrawn object and its unknowable real properties? If so, how do these actually constitute a standard if they are inaccessible? An inapplicable standard is no standard at all. Moreover, if the withdrawn object sets the standard, the standard cannot be to correctly represent it, as it is by definition unrepresentable, and we can't be bound to do something we can't achieve (ought implies can), unless this obligation is constituted out of some finite achievable obligations.

a couple more from Harman worth archiving

One with important links to Shaviro and Dominic on pantheism and speculative realism HERE. From reading Shaviro's stuff it's clear that Whitehead is now added to the list of great philosophers I need to catch up on in the next decade or so.

One on Williams, Heidegger, and the importance of the R7 thesis HERE. On this point, I think that Williams really is in a dilemma. Either you read Heidegger as affirming Harman's R7 (that the ontological relation between subject and object is not different in kind than that between object and object), or Hermann Phillipse is correct that Heidegger fails to rid himself of the Cartesian problematic, if not the external world then certainly the mind-body problem.

I think the Heidegger of Being and Time is incoherent exactly where Phillipse alleges,so that any consistent reading of the material is going to depart from what Heidegger wrote to some extent. So the question is how philosophically insightful the readings end up being, and on this score Dreyfus, Okrent, and Harman beat everybody else hands down.

[UPDATE: Levi has a reaction post HERE. I know that Allison tries to interpret "empirical realism" more along the lines that Williams does in the comments below. I hope to read Allison's book this year at some point. My point about Schultze, Jacobi, Maimon, and Schopenhauer's gripe is that even if you allow that Kant's version of "empirical realism" somehow recovers common sense (and I think Levi is absolutely correct that it does not), it doesn't really matter because transcendental idealism is *still* incoherent because it simultaneously requires and prohibits causality between things and themselves and phenomena. Moreover, I think that Phillipse and Harman are right that Being and Time is incoherent in the same way (though with Harman, I think that many of Heidegger's insights are really important).

I'm worried my tone in this exchange and the comments below is too testy because all of this has been hastily typed in between kid wrangling. I should just note that smart, informed people disagree about all of this, and more importantly I always find Williams' work on his blog and elsewhere to be worth thinking about.]

[UPDATE 2: Another round (with link to Williams' most recent post) HERE, and a nice reaction from Levi HERE].  Money quote from Harman.

Well, reality is spooky. We’re so stuck in the rut of automatically assuming that thinking = demystifying and demythologizing that we forget things might sometimes be of a more mythic character than we realize. Enlightenment doesn’t just go in one direction, turning spooky depths into easily surveyable surfaces. There are times for that and times for the opposite gesture, just as boxers need to be able to use both hands.

A conviction that this is right is in part why Harman and I take Lovecraft to be as philosophically important a fiction writer as many take Mark Twain or Fyodor Dostoevsky (Neal Hebert and I have one paper  we're shopping around on the metaphysics of magic that crucially uses Lovecraft and Harman has a book on Lovecraft either in the pipeline or forthcoming).

Harman also explains nicely in his post the part of his position that is oddest to me, where presence at hand is thematized as essentially relational and readiness to hand as essentially non-relational. By odd I just mean that this is one place where one could agree with Harman's distinctive radical exteriorization of scheme-content and R7 thesis but still disagree with the specifics of how it goes. I'm not sure where I come down on this. The metaphysics of relations is one of the oldest and most difficult in philosophy (see all the papers about bundle theory versus bare particulars in analytic metaphysics; Harman's view entails a distinctive position on this that deserves to be part of the dialogue).]

really nice review of Harman's "Prince of Networks"

Clay Spinuzzi just posted one HERE.

Spinuzzi is a professor of rhetoric at University of Texas at Austin. I'm going to bug Neal Hebert to check out his stuff as a tie to Harman's Latour book, as somewhere in this vicinity lays potentially article producing productive overlap between theater theory and  philosophy. Maybe next summer we'll do an independent study on it or something.

meditations on Harman and transcendental idealism

Sorry the blog is marginal notes on Graham Harman's blog today, but there is a fascinating post HERE in response to Shaviro  post (HERE). [In contrast to Levi, who actually does lots of philosophy via dialogue on his blog, I often use this space to take notes for things I might write about in paper or book form in the future]. Anyhow, here's the relevant bit from Harman.

Here’s one of his key passages:

“In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. (Quite ironically, this means that Harman and Bryant are more Kantian than I am — in spite of what I have said on this subject before).”

As for the Kant point, I already agreed with Shaviro last summer that my position is in agreement with Kant’s on the things-in-themselves. It’s the other side of Kant (privilege of the human world relation) which is more dominant these days, and on that point I have nothing to do with Kant. Shaviro knows and concedes this; I’m just adding the clarification for others.

This makes me happy because it fits very well with the way I situate Harman's work in terms of John McDowell's update of Davidson's problematic about the scheme/content distinction. Kant, of course, invented the distinction via his insistence on the hard and fast distinction between intuitions and concepts (he accused both empiricists and rationalists of collapsing this distinction but in characteristically different ways; it's actually not clear that we would differentiate philosophers into empiricists and rationalists had Kant not made this claim).

I realized while reading Tool Being that Harman's radical externalization of the Heidegger Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit distinction (where the play between presence at hand and objective presence takes place between objects themselves) could be read as a strategy for radically externalizing the scheme-content distinction. If I understand the Shaviro-Harman debate correctly, the extent to which Harman is a Kantian is actually in virtue of two things: (1) the externalization of scheme-content, and (2) thinking of content in similar ways as a Kantian would think of intuitions (as blind, or empty? I always get that confused).

The second part gives rise to what many regard as the overly Leibnizian weirdness of Harman's views, but I think a lot of people who disagree with that are uncharitable in that they don't recognize the philosophical import of the first point. I mean, you may not agree with the way he works out the insight, but it is a fundamental insight and to work it out in any way at all to the extent he has is important, and should become part of the story of these issues.

I think this is really pretty obvious with some historical background. The major part of Maimon's central importance was that he invented the trope picked up by Fichte, then (arguably) Hegel, and then a lot of phenomenology. This is the radical interiorization of transcendental idealism, where the distinction between appearance and the thing in itself is thematized as being a distinction within the realm of appearance.

Graham Harman turns this upside down (I want to say that Harman is Marx to Maimon's Hegel, but that would be confusing since Maimon ultimately gave rise to Hegel). Instead of radically interiorizing the relation between appearance and thing in itself, Harman radically exteriorizes it. Take whatever it is that is independent of humans in the sense that it existed long before human beings. These things have appearance/reality with respect to each other in precisely the neo-Kantian way Heidegger captures with Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit.

Again, whatever you think of the details, the guy gets a spot in dialectical space named after him.

I would be very happy if the dialectic proceeded to where lots of philosophers followed Harman and radically externalize scheme-content, but try to do this with different models of scheme and content. I think that some of the debate in the Object Oriented Philosophy blogosphere is exactly on this point. A lot of the interesting things Levi Bryant writes about can be understood in exactly these terms.

[Two things to think about: (A) And the potential ontological prize is huge. Phenomenology's (broken) promise of dissolving the problems of the external world and the mind-body problem will be redeemed. In this light I disagree with Gary Williams and see Alva Noe's enactivist philosophy of perception as actually being part and parcel of Harman's program. I also disagree with Harman in seeing Dreyfusarian approaches to Heidegger as being part and parcel of the Harman's program. Again, this is because I separate two facets of his program: (1) the radical externalization of scheme/content, and (2) Harman's particular model of scheme and content. Dreyfusarian/pragmatist approaches to Heidegger can be reinterpreted in terms of (1). (B) Maimon in many ways reintroduced Leibnizian tropes into post-Kantian German Idealism. It would be very interesting to compare the pressures for him to do this with the way that Harman's metaphysics ends up recapitulating Leibnizian themes.]

papers will be available!

I'm severely bummed I couldn't make it to the Object Oriented Ontology conference in Georgia this week [reasons I couldn't make it: (1) sleep deprivation from having a two year old and infant, (2) drying up of travel funding due to financial problems at my home institution; either one of these problems alone I could have negotiated, the two together crushed me].

I love friction in philosophy and it's really quite remarkable how Bogost is bringing his mammoth expertise in video games to the relevant issues. And seeing Bryant and Harman hash things out in person would also be worth the price of admission for me, as would the discussion engendered by the respondents.

Bryant and Bogost have told met that the papers will be publicly available in some form. I'll keep anyone interested updated on the status of that here.

[Some other gossip: Harman and Gratton both have what look to be pretty remarkable essays in a new SUNY anthology on Nancy I think edited by Francois Raffoul (I dug through page proofs on his desk yesterday while he was on the phone). This is relevant because it's some pretty good evidence that eight years after the publication of Harman's Tool Being that object oriented philosophy's radical critique is starting to break through "mainstream" American continental philosophy's reflexive false dichotomy between a naive post-Kantian idealism via phenomenology (naive when you compare it to what the actual German Idealists had to say about these issues) and the realism-of-the-remainder encouraged by people who put definite articles where they do not belong (THE other, THE event, etc.).]

nice post by Harman about Kazimierz Twardowski and Husserl's fundamental insight

The post is HERE.

Graham shows how Twardowski is the missing link between Brentano and Husserl and in the process manages to really clearly explicate what he takes to be Husserl's most important contribution.

Graham gets from Husserl a radical critique of the idea that an object is nothing more than a bundle of properties. From the perspective of analytic metaphysics, one of the interesting things is that Harman does not go from denying the bundle theory to embracing a Lockean "bare particular" (see Edwin Allaire's article of the same name and the ensuing brouhaha) theory. This too is motivated by Harman's reading of Husserl, where there is a sense in which objects are inexhaustible.

In addition to thematizing this aspect of Harman in terms of the the bundle-theory/bare particular debate in analytic metaphysics, one should also compare his reading of Husserl with Roderick Chisholm's classic critique of phenomenalism in his book Perceiving. Chisholm argues that any attempt to define ordinary objects such as chairs in terms of sense data (this was really Bertrand Russell's project, but we tend to think of it as Carnap's) is doomed to failure, because the reduction is going to involve counterfactuals that refer to other objects. [This, of course, is the macro for one of the main arguments against logical behaviorism. Putnam argues that any attempt to define mental states in terms of dispositions is going to involve counterfactuals that refer to other mental states.]

Clarification of some remarks I've made about Graham Harman

Anyone who reads the philosophy posts might be surprised about the majority of stuff on which I've published (abstracts of all published work HERE).

I pretty obsessively don't blog about whatever papers I'm working on. For example, I have eight papers under review right now (half of them in S knows that P epistemology), and haven't blogged about any of them. The problem is that in anything at all related to logic some people are really, really good at proving things. I'm not, but I'm still pretty good at coming up with (to me at least) marginally interesting ideas. If I put one of those ideas out there, it is not plagiarism for someone else to come up with the relevant argument. This is so ingrained that I always work in private on coming up with specific arguments, even when logic is not involved. [Side note: I don't recommend this practice at all. It has served me badly professionally, it is much better to get your ideas out there at every stage in presentations and networking. Almost nobody is just going to pick up a published article of yours out of the blue, no matter what journal it's in.]

I've kind of been throwing around in my head a book length project on Graham Harman and trying out some of the constituent ideas here, but my aversion to putting arguments that I'm shepherding to publication (even in a project that is going to take me half a decade, because of all of the history) has made some of these posts a bit cryptic.

Anyhow, I guess a book idea is different from an article, so I'll get over this neurosis briefly enough to write something. I've claimed to see two promising realist traditions in post-Kantian continental philosophy (construed broadly enough to include Wittgenstein, John McDowell, and Graham Priest!) and also claimed that Graham Harman's philosophy represents a culmination of both. But I've not been at all clear about how this works and also left the impression that I think Schopenhauer was not  a transcendental idealist. So here's a very brief overview.

The philosophical project since Kant has been to free ourselves of the problems with transcendental idealism without falling back into the very problems that led up to it (Hume's problematic about deontic and alethic modalities, paradoxes of totality, Berkeley's problematic). We have to get through Kant, not prior to him. So the null hypothesis is a strict division between mind and world, with it being totally unclear what we can claim to know or even say about the world side of this (this latter point against Kant motivated Maimon, Fichte, and Schopenhauer).

There have been two broad ways to get free of this view without returning to a pre-critical metaphysics (and I think a lot of analytical metaphysics is pre-critical in what I mean as a pejorative sense). The first is an outside-in strategy, where you are led to posit a real world precisely because any attempt to come up with a fixed set of categories for the mind (when the mind is doing the work Kant envisioned) is always overturned by things that surprise us. The phenomenology of surprise is evidence that there is something totally beyond the constitutive powers of our mind. Kierkegaard is the patron saint of this strategy and one can read Derrida as a version of it (and I should note that Lee Braver has a mind-blowingly fantastic paper on this). I call it "aporetic realism." [This is a much longer story, but I should also note that another anti-anti-realist strategy of quietism about transcendent reality ("apophantic anti-anti-realism") in common to McDowell, Wittgenstein, and late Heidegger (on some readings) actually leads to aporetic realism. Graham Priest's work shows this.]

The second broad way of getting at the real is an inside-out strategy. Schopenhauer made this strategy both possible and plausible (with Barbara Hanan I see Schopenhauer as in partial, and ultimately unsuccessful, revolt against Transcendental Idealism). Even though he remained a transcendental idealist he gave us enough building blocks to go through Kant to what I'm now calling "pantheistic realism" (terrible title, I'm sorry). In this strategy you take properties associated with the mind in the Kantian tradition and externalize them to the world. For Schopenhauer (in a certain moods and when read with some liberty) the human body is what licenses this. We ourselves experience frustrated will in our body. But this is experience of modal aspects of an object in the world. When will is frustrated something is not possible. So we have a post-Kantian answer to Hume's problematic about alethic modality. Necessity and possibility are, contra Kant, not things added to the world by the mind but really out there in human bodies and other objects.  [This is a much longer story, but I should also note that the other anti-anti-realist strategy of historicism that some people attribute to middle period Heidegger, can be seen as a precursor version of this. One that I think fails, we are moving against anti-realism from the inside out, but all we get to is a community of minds changing in time. And every problem you can raise about the Kantian mind can be raised about a community of Kantian minds.]

Where does Harman fit into this? Well, aporetic realism is constitutively unable to account for different things. It always falls into the real as some kind of spooky undifferentiated other (obviously, this is the view Schopenhauer could never ultimately break free from, though Hanan shows surprisingly that his ethical views do not require it). It collapses back into transcendental idealism in this regard. Pantheistic realism is constitutively unable to accommodate the independence of other objects from Mind, and hence collapses back into some form of idealism.

One of the things that is so fascinating about Harman is that he appropriates Heidegger in a way that allows him to craft a form of realism with the virtues of both aporetic and pantheistic realism, but that by combining the two, avoids the failings of the other. [Related side note: Heidegger owes much more to Schopenhauer than he ever admits; his account of how metaphysics started, his reading of Descartes, and the main Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal are all riffs on Schopenhauer's strange form of platonism, his 1919 critique of the neo-Kantians (that gives rise to the Vornandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal) is similar to Schopenhauer's critique of Kant, and his account of Gelassenheit is very little different from Schopenhauer's ethics]

One of the key ideas in Harman's Tool Being is that Heidegger's phenomenological account of mind and world (forget for now whether "world" really is the world or still a part of mind for early Heidegger; I think Heidegger wrote a lot of incoherent things because of this problem) can be externalized in the inside-out strategy of pantheistic realism. The Zuhandenheit-Vorhandenheit reversals happen whenever two things interact with one another.

This allows Harman's philosophy to satisfy the Realism thesis that he adds to Lee Braver's in his review of Braver's book.

R7 The human/world relation is just a special case of the relation between any two entities whatsoever (from his review of the book and brief note at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/realism-through-the-eyes-of-anti-realism/#comments). This is contrasted with A7 which would say that the human-world relationship is the ground of all the others.

[For a discussion of Braver's Theses, and how they relate Harman's and Crispin Wright's, go HERE.] 

But wait a minute, how do we know that Harman's philosophy is not vulgar anthropomorphism and as such collapses back into a form of idealism? This is a long story I can't recapitulate here (in part because I'm learning it now as I read his other books), but the way in which Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversals work allow Harman to recapitulate the strengths of the aporetic tradition. The real always is and always will surprise us with new things that spookily gesture towards a plenitude that transcends what we could shove into our meager conceptual schemes. But since discrete objects are doing this with respect to each other, they do this in a  way that does not force us to posit some undifferentiated other as the real.

Anyhow that's the basic story. (1) Berkelyean arguments applied to perception, deontic and alethic modality, totality, (2) Kant produces transcendental idealism in response. (3) But this doesn't work because he has to claim to know (or say or think) things about the world that by his own philosophy he can't know (or say or think) about it. (4) This motivates apophantic/quietist and historicist anti-anti-realisms. (5) These either collapse back into idealism, or get transformed into the aporetic (Kierkegaardian) and pantheistic (Schopenhaurian) traditions. (6) But the first of these collapses back into transcendental idealism, and the second back into idealism. (7) Harman shows how to combine these two to produce a genuinely novel form of realism that (imho) does not collapse back into idealism and also does not ignore (as most analytical metaphysics today does, I'm sorry to say) the genuine philosophical problems that led to Kantianism.

Part of what makes a great philosopher great is that they drag new histories of philosophy behind them in their wake. One can imagine a world without Kant where the early modern period is not read as consisting in a fight between empiricism and rationalism. One can imagine a world without Carnap where the important task after Kant is not to come up with an account of necessity free from Kant's view of the constitutive powers of the mind. One can imagine a world without Heidegger where Being is not that big a deal. But a great philosopher's books are alike a time machine that reconfigures what came before. Tool Being did this for me and Guerrilla Metaphysics is fleshing out the story. And I should note that my "history" does involve time travel, as late Heidegger and Wittgenstein historicism is part of what motivates Schopenhauer on my view! And then Schopenhauer motivates early Heidegger. I see no problem with this.

Great philosophers also open up new questions because their thoughts have friction with regards to lots of other areas. Which is why something unprecedented has happened with the object oriented philosophy version of speculative realism. Neither Graham nor Levi Bryant have PhD students. Yet some really smart graduate students from around the world have been drawn to their work.

There are lots of questions in these areas that could motivate a Ph.D thesis (honestly I've seen dozens of posts by Levi that could do this). What is a good philosophy of science for object oriented philosophy? What is a good theory of truth for object oriented philosophy (Levi has some great posts on this)? We want to say that special relativity dynamics is more true than newtonian dynamics, but we don't want this to commit us a kind of mechanistic view of the real that gives rise to Hume's problems of deontic modality. How do we accommodate both sets of intuitions? And speaking of deontic modality, what are the ethical and meta-ethical implications of all of this? A recent post by Levi and the ensuing discussion just begins to hint at some of the interesting issues involved.

Anyhow, once I start working on this book in earnest this Summer, expect my blogging about things related to Harman to fall way off. My tendency to separate my writings for publications and blogging is very deeply ingrained at this point. But at least I hope this post explains some of the otherwise cryptic things I've said here and in comments on friend's blogs.

some nostalgic reflections on 2nd Edition D&D rulebooks

Harman's post about his Dungeons and Dragons paper (HERE) inspired an overwhelming sense of nostalgia in me, in part because he posted a picture of the First Edition Monster Manual (which his paper is going to be on). If you are one of the Gen Xers for whom D&D was both a powerful escape and gateway to philosophy, it will inspire the same for you. Here it is:

Maybe the nostalgia is just because we associate these books with a certain time in our youth. I don't know.

I think part of it really is that First Edition D&D balanced the ludological and narrative aspects of role playing gaming in a nearly perfect way. It is no accident that all RPGs (including Third, Three Point Fifth, and Fourth Edition D&D, and contemporary computer based RPGs too) are footnotes to First and Second (which was not a radical change) Edition. Those of us who massively prefer Fourth Edition to the previous one in part like it because it has to some extent restored the First and Second Edition balance.

But there's also just something about these books. Remember this Second Edition classic:

A whole book of Fiends!

And prior to Edith Hamilton, I first learned of mythology and non-Christian religions from this classic.

These three books radically opened up my sense of possibility. The Monster Manual and Player's Handbook were basically Tolkienesque, but the Fiend Folio added a hint of traditional Christian dread, and with Deities and Demigods you got Lovecraftian creatures statted up as well as Greek, Indian, Egyptian, and the Norse pantheon that initially inspired Tolkien. All the sudden you could play characters and collaboratively create stories in these fictional worlds.

I think the only substantive improvement from 2nd Edition is probably the way non-magic classes in fourth edition are ludologically balanced with magic using classes, since all classes now have Daily, Encounter, and At Will feats that allow combat based powers as strong as magic users at the same level. This to some extent just corrects the creep by 3.5 that made higher level magic users god like and everyone else not that much more powerful than they were at lower levels.

But I still worry that Fourth Edition is too many rules to the detriment of narrative. I mean, with the simpler rule set of 2nd Edition, they were able to present a physics of sorts for of all of the mythological realms described above. This is really quite amazing.

The sordid history of Deities and Demigods shows the exact nature of the Third Edition Disaster. Consider this from the Wikipedia article:

The original edition of the book contained 17 pantheons of gods:

• American Indian Mythos
• Arthurian Heroes
• Babylonian Mythos
• Celtic Mythos
• Mesoamerican Mythos (i.e. Aztec and Maya)
• Chinese Mythos
• Cthulhu Mythos (from H. P. Lovecraft and related fiction)
• Egyptian Mythos
• Melnibonéan Mythos (from Michael Moorcock's Elric novels)
• Finnish Mythos
• Greek Mythos and Heroes
• Indian Mythos
• Japanese Mythos
• Nehwon Mythos (from Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar novels)
• Nonhuman's Deities (original TSR creations)
• Norse Mythos
• Sumerian Mythos

The third edition version edition contains only four pantheons:

• A condensed Greyhawk pantheon meant for insertion into any game world ("Core D&D Pantheon")
• Greek Mythos and Heroes ("Olympian Pantheon"), among them: Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Hades, Nike, Pan, Poseidon and Tyche
• Egyptian Mythos ("Pharaonic Pantheon"), among them: Re-Horakthy (Amun-Ra), Anubis, Apep, Bast, Hathor, Isis, Set and Ptah
• Norse Mythos ("Asgardian Pantheon"), among them: Odin, Balder (Baldr), Frey, Freya, Frig (Frigga), Odur, Sif, Skade, Thor, Thrym and Uller

So in Third Edition you have less worlds, but vastly more rules that players have to master to be able to collaboratively role play in these worlds. [I should note that the philosophical issue Neal Hebert and I address in our issue is whether something is lost when you stat up horrific creatures such as the Lovecraftian entities. We conclude that this issue actually leads to a refutation of ludology, since any set of algorithms to be mastered by the player robs magical entities of their magical aspect in the phenomenology of the player, and that the only way to handle it is through the Dungeon Master's narrative expertise. We don't draw this conclusion in the paper, but one could go on to argue from it that the rules/narrative balance in 1st and 2nd edition are much better than 3d and 3.5th.] Fourth Edition just has an elaborate mythology invented whole hog for D&D. I think that a sizable majority of adult players don't avail themselves of it.