Jon Cogburn's Blog

Lee Braver's NDPR review of A.W. Moore's "The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics"

Review HERE.

Braver, Paul Livingston, and A.W. Moore are the holy trinity of contemporary pluralism, roughly analogous to the role Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie play vis a vis rock (it would be cool if this was a homology, with each philosopher corresponding to a specific glam rocker.

I don't think the book I'm working on now on analytic anti-representationalism and speculative realism (focusing mostly on Robert Brandom and Graham Harman) would be possible had I not studied Braver's A Thing of this World so closely. Analogously, learning a couple of David Bowie albums and playing them with a band made it possible for me to write songs with decent melodies (for what that's ended up being worth).

I'm interested in what might distinguish pseudo-pluralism from genuine pluralism and might post something in THIS DISCUSSION at Newapps.

New APPS symposium on Paul Livingston, "Derrida and Formal Logic"

Top level post HERE, which includes the following links:

Link to pre-print of Paul Livingston, "Derrida and Formal Logic"

Context of Livingston's Derrida work in his Politics of Logic

Précis of Livingston's "Derrida and Formal Logic" paper

Jeffrey Bell, The Prince of Darkness Reads Derrida

Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Diagonalization and Différance: A Mismatch of Scope

Jon Cogburn, Livingston on Semantic Doubling

John Protevi, Logics of Deconstruction

There is no such thing as good history of philosophy, a derivation

This is absolutely clear from the following deduction.

1. Good historians realize that inconsistency in belief is the norm for humans, and that any writer who has written enough will have achieved inconsistency.
2. Good philosophers read anachronistically.
3. People who do history of philosophy try to discern consistent interpretations that are not anachronistic.
4. Therefore, the history of philosophy is neither good philosophy nor good history.
5. Thus, from 4. by logic, it follows that there is no such thing as good history of philosophy. Q.E.D.

I think I'm actually serious about this.*

[Note:

*This being said, the above deduction should make us appreciate all the more people like Frederick Beiser, Jonathan Bennett, Strawson, and Martha Nusbaum who manage to do good history and good philosophy, though the fact that Bennett, Strawson, and Nusbaum are routinely derided by other historians of philosophy for being anachronistic proves my point in the most chilling possible way. Beiser rocks so much that he is sui generis. If the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" means anything, then Beiser's picture is in the dictionary next to it.]

Kitcher on Parfit in The New Republic

Review HERE.

The highpoint of the criticism is Kitcher's discontent with gedankenexperiments, e.g.

You cannot respond to the imagined predicament without thinking hard, but hard thinking leads through a cloud of questions to a state of confusion. A few conditions are simply declared: the outcomes are known and the options limited. But since that sort of certainty and limitation is exceedingly remote from the circumstances in which we make our practical decisions, our judgmental capacities cannot be put to work in their normal ways. Readers are pitched into a fantasy world, remote from reality, in which our natural reactions are sharply curtailed by authorial fiat. When we are called on to render a verdict, the dominant feeling is a disruption of whatever skills we possess, and a corresponding distrust of anything we might say-often publicly visible when lecturers ask their audiences to respond to some puzzle case: only partisans of some particular theory answer confidently, while the rest sit in uncomfortable silence. The reader may even be left with a deep sense of unease that matters of life and death are to be judged on the basis of such cursory and rigged information.

The low point is the paean to naturalism at the end, as predictable as it is disappointing. I think Kitcher felt he had to do that because it ties to his bread and butter epistemology stuff and because he knows that the criticism from the first part of his article has historically been articulated by Moorean anti-naturalists.

When I finally get around to closely reading Becker's fantastic book on Stoicism I could conceivably come around to something closer to Kitcher's view on this too, minus the predictable Stephen Pinkerish just-so evolutionary story that seems to be the null hypothesis for contemporary naturalists (not to give one inch to Fodor, Chomsky, or Plantinga's ignorant remarks about evolutionary theory; it's rather that evolutionary theory doesn't do any of the meta-ethical work that Kitcher hints at in the article, so with Kitcher type naturalists you end up with just-so stories defending whatever prejudice the teller wants to defend).

Anyhow, Becker defends a quite different form of naturalism, one that actually necessitates sages in a manner inconsistent with Kitcher's dismissal of the same. Maybe I'll do a post on that topic in the next few weeks. I really hope to teach Becker's book (as well as Feldman's book on hedonism) at some point in the next few years, after I complete the Speculative Realism book. I think some of the issues I'm working out there will have some friction in these debates, but it's kind of a roundabout story.

Some cool links

Gary Williams' Three Quarks Daily finalist blog post (selected by Akeel Bilgrami) on direct perception.

New anthropological evidence and speculation about human relations with animals being the evolutionary driver for what makes humans distinct.

New Levinasian evidence about the neurobiology of evil (to the effect that evil behavior results from stunted amyglia and the resulting inability to register emotions from people's faces).

Another quick thought about Brandom

I just read Brandom's "Unsuccessful Semantics" and I can't for the life of me figure out why the same argument doesn't apply against Brandom's own views.

Brandom critiques the view that the content of a belief is fixed by the role it plays in sets of beliefs and desires leading to action (or construed as practical inferences leading to imperatives to action). The basic criticism trades on the way that such inferences are highly defeasible, depending upon what other beliefs and desires one has.

But on Brandom's own view the content of a desire is fixed by the role it plays in such practical inferences. So why doesn't the defeasibility also hit Brandom's own view of desires.

And things get worse, as Brandom's view of the content of subsentential expressions has them be a function of theoretical inferences involving those expressions (contrasted with the Heideggerian view that they are a function of practical inferences). But such theoretical inferences are also highly defeasible. So, again, why isn't the criticism a criticism of Brandom's own view.

(1) In Brandom's recent work he follows Mark Wilson and stresses the way content is underdetermined and appeals to a neo-Hegelian historical model of rationality to explain how we go on in light of this. This is a longer story, but I think that this move ends up addressing how the "Unsuccessful Semantics" argument applies against Brandom's own view. But I also suspect that it would be equally successful for the Heideggerian (and in fact, there is probably a connection here between this and  Lee Braver's interpretation of Heidegger's own historicism).

(2) If this tu quoque business is correct, then a lot hinges upon Brandom's critique of teleo-semantics, which I haven't read yet. If that critique is well motivated and doesn't apply to his own views, then there will clearly be a reason to go with him on the priority of theoretical inferences.

(3) The more I study Brandom, the deeper my adviser Neal Tennant's work appears (I'm writing something now on his paper on the withering away of formal semantics, which I contrast with Brandom's anti-representationalist strategy in Making it Explicit). It would be really interesting to take Tennant's account of cognitive significance in The Taming of the True as a starting off point for clarifying the above debate.

This weekend I hope to get clearer about the structure of the "Unsuccessful Semantics" argument so I can see if the above works out.

Really interesting intereview with Don Ihde (hat tip Graham Harman)

I'm still too ragged out from air-travel with family to say anything interesting about this, but the interview is HERE.

This red meat quote really doesn't do justice to the interesting things Ihde has done, so it might be goofy for me to include it. But of course I have a weakness for red meat, so here goes:

Too much of so-called continental philosophy acts as if the last words were said by the godfathers, but surely there can be development in new directions? Some would ‘naturalize’ phenomenology, others do ‘heterophenomenology,’ so I do postphenomenology. I certainly acknowledge my debts to Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty—and also the hermeneutic traditions which add Gadamer and Ricoeur to the tradition.  But I am also critical of the ‘subjectivism’ associated with Husserl, the ‘romanticism’ associated with Heidegger, and the ‘lingusticism’ associated with the hermeneuts. Moreover, philosophy of technology—better technoscience studies in my term—must be sensitive to materiality.  Husserl had very little to say about technologies; Heidegger had lots to say but retained a nostalgic romanticism over simple technologies; and Merleau-Ponty, often insightful, usually was indirect about technologies.

Anyhow, from the whole interview it's pretty clear that he's the next guy after Bogost I'm immerse myself into when I get back to thinking about games.

question about internalism

In Chapter 3 of Articulating Reasons, Brandom holds that it would be enough for the justificatory internalist (the person who thinks knowledge requires that one be able to provide a justification of one's true beliefs) if one merely was able to offer as a reason for the true belief that one is in fact reliable.

I'm not an internalist so I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I think there's something almost circular about this. What if the person believes they are reliable but are unable to provide a justification of the claim that they are. And what if their justification for that is just the true belief that they are reliable in determining when they are reliable.

My intuition is that if one could luck into the true belief that one is reliable, then just believing in one's reliability isn't going to work for the internalist. Maybe one would have to have the true belief that one is reliable in judgments of one's own reliability. Could one luck into that? How would that go? You flip a coin and believe you are in general reliable if it is heads and in general unreliable if it is tails?

Sorry if this is confused. Like I said, I'm not an internalist so my intuitions might be a little off here.

nice post from Harman about underrated philosophers

I forget who told me that there is a performative contradiction concerning underrated philosophers. Take Collingwood for example, He is so widely considered to be underrated among philosophers of art now that in virtue of that he is in fact not underrated.

Anyhow, here's a characteristically nice meditation from Harman on why it is nice to think about philosophers you consider underrated:

The “most overrated” question is also interesting, but there you’re more likely to see people at their worst: crabby, cocky dismissals of Heidegger as “nonsense,” for example.

But if you ask people about the most underrated, it brings out their most gallant and humane side. A question like that brings out the hero in all of us, asking us to stand up for some underappreciated figure and fight for them.

Perhaps even more importantly, it’s quite revealing about your own vision of philosophy when you tell us who the most underrated is, unlike the “overrated” answer.

Whole thing HERE. [Harman takes Brentano to be the most underrated. Meillassoux (in an interview in Harman's forthcoming book on him) takes Reinhold, Jacobi, and Maimon to be the most underrated. I am actually really chuffed to hear this, as it was reading Meillassoux's After Finitude (while reading Graham Priest during the same period) that in part got me interested in "the affection argument" and the manner in which early Kantians utilized it to get transcendental idealism to critique itself.]

I think there are two overlapping ways that a philosopher can be underrated. The first kind is the thinker to whom we would do better to pay attention in the sense that we would be addressing more interesting questions and perhaps also have more interesting and plausible solutions if we immersed ourselves in their texts. This is the kind of thinker who should be more influential. The second kind is the thinker who was at some point incredibly influential but for whatever reason now gets left out of the story or doesn't get taught very often. In the limiting case, the standard story is actually perverse in leaving this thinker out (for example, Carnap's development of semantic holism).

I think Schopenhauer fits both of the senses of underrated pretty admirably, so he gets my vote.

In previous incarnations I would have listed Alisdair MacIntyre. The time I actually taught Gilbert Ryle I was astounded at just how good it was, way, way better than what you'd expect from textbook reports of his views. Likewise when I actually taught Brentano's essay on intentionality, which just made me want to read more Brenatano (the fact that I haven't yet, I think supports Graham's vote).

Finally, this will seem completely nuts to people, but I think Daniel Dennett is actually pretty vastly underrated just as a philosopher. I mean, as with Ryle, there is a pretty big difference between the secondary text version of the views and what you actually get when you read his essays (I'm not talking about the free will or the religion stuff here which I haven't read closely, but rather the mind stuff). 

Dennett and Ryle both show how the value of a really first rate philosopher is in no way reducible to the propositions they defend. Actually I should say the same of Harman's work. I mean, these guys work is incredibly interesting and fruitful in all sorts of ways independently of how many of their main conclusions you end up agreeing with. I guess that's one pretty good measure of philosophical worth.

Some help would be appreciated

Given the possibility of financial exigency at my home institution, I'm putting things together in case I need to go on the market this year. Thus far I've LaTexed my C.V. and come up with a Research Statement, which tries to explain how my various projects hang together. Any advice about either would be greatly appreciated. I've already had lots of help about the C.V. so probably the research thing needs more help at this point.

Thanks for taking a look.

cool analogy from a paper by me and Roland

Just finished a resubmission of an epistemology piece with Jeff Roland today. I think this was the hardest thing I've ever written. There are just a lot of different kinds of modal operators swimming around in the principle proof so it ends up being hard to keep the whole thing in mind. I think one of the virtues of co-writing is that two brains and dialogue (along with a whiteboard) make it so much easier to keep up with all the relevant stuff at one time.

One cool bit of ephemera in the paper (relegated to a footnote) is that we found an analogue between principle philosophies of vagueness and principle responses to the skeptical paradox.

Where "H" is a generic skeptical hypothesis ("I am a Brain in the vat", "an evil demon is deceiving me about nearly everything" etc.), and O is a normal statement like "I have hands", the skeptical argument is the following.

(SA1) I don't know that it is not the case that H.

(SA2) If I don't know that it is not the case that H, then I don't know that O.

(SAC) I don't know that O.

The skeptic affirms all three of these. The sensitivity theorist such as Nozick affirms SA1 and denies SA2 as a way to deny SAC. Mooreans such as Sosa deny SA1 as a way to affirm SA2 while denying SAC). Contextualists such as De Rose affirm SA2 but hold that SA1 is true or false based on context.

Now consider a sorites series of objects from orange to red, where any two congruent spots look to be exactly the same color.

(VA1) This splotch is orange,

(VA2)-(VAN) If VAi is orange, then VAi+1 is also orange

(VAC) VAN+1 is orange. 

Then (1) the skeptic is the nihilist about vagueness, (2) the sensitivity theorist is the super (or sub) valuationist, and (3) the Moorean the epistemicist.

And the analogy is much stronger if you realize that one could model the contextualist's knowledge predicate using supervaluations, blocking the skeptical argument in exactly the same way the supervaluationist blocks the sorites paradox.

David Lodge has a game where you have to say the book that you haven't read that you most should have read. Mine is probably Timothy Williamson's book on knowledge. I've read some relevant chunks of it, but not the whole thing yet. Given his great book on vagueness (which I have read and taught) I imagine he's all over these analogies. Hopefully I can teach the knowledge book in the next two years.

philosophically productive week thus far

Today I'm working like crazy on this fantastic article on counterpossibles by Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno. It has non-trivial application to some outstanding debates in epistemology, but that's all I"m saying now.

Yesterday's classes and conversation with John Protevi were fantastic. From the first I got a really cool idea bout the relation between Dummett and Brandom and from the latter some real insight into how Heidegger led to 1968 Paris and Richard Rorty  and how Harman can be situated in terms of that dynamic. The latter hooks up with Levinas and Morton in interesting ways. I hope to blog on both ideas later today if I get far enough along in counterpossible land.

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.

Nice post by Abram Demski

Some really nice thoughts by Abram Demski on an article by Jason Megill and me on inferentialism and computationalism (forthcoming in Minds and Machines) HERE. On his earlier blog, Demski had been thinking along similar lines to the argument Megill and I made.

Please read and comment if you have time (and if you are interested in the paper, or a companion paper on computability theory and ontological emergence by Mark Silcox and me forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly, e-mail me at joncogburn at yahoo.com ).

Something I better figure out in the next two weeks

I'm in Chapter 5 of Brandom's Making it Explicit (have read all three of his shorter books and big chunks of Tales of the Mighty Dead), and I'm really caught up on something that should be basic.

I just don't get what Brandom means by "entitlement." On the one hand commitment and permissibility are treated as a species of obligation and permissibility, but on the other hand he wants it to be the case that being entitled requires either the ability to produce a justification or to defer to someone who can.

For the life of me, I can't see how both of these are true, at least without serious logical revision. (1) If commitment and permissibility are a species of obligation and permissibility, then it should follow from one being not committed to believing that P, that one is entitled to believe that P is not the case, (2) if entitlement carries with it the responsibility to defer to the right person or produce a justification yourself, then merely not being committed to something does not entitle one to believe it's negation. I mean you should just sit on the fence for lots of beliefs you are not committed to.

One could possibly (though even this seems implausible to me) get out of this with logical revision. One way to be an intuitionist about modality is to accept that Possibly P is true if and only if there exists a possible world where P is true and that Necessary P is true if and only if P is true at all possible worlds, but to reject the claim that one can define the two in terms of each other (e.g. Possibly P equals Not Necessarily Not P, and vice versa), just because in intuitionistic logic it not being the case that something holds at all possible worlds does not entail that there exists a possible world where something is the case. This means that it not being necessary that P does not in general entail that it is possible that not P. But this is exactly analogous to it not being obligatory that P not entailing that it is permissible that not P. Which is the problematic inference for Brandom's notions of comittment and entitlement.

That doesn't seem that plausible to me just because intuitionism is inconsistent with their being third values. Not (P and ~P) is a theorem of intuitionist logic. But the problem with Brandom's notions is that there do seem to be claims that are such that we are not committed to them and that we are not entitled to their negations. By the analog with modal systems, this would be like a claim that is not true at any possible worlds and such that it is not the case that there is a possible world where it is false. To affirm this is to run afoul of intuitionistic logic.

I suspect I'm missing something.

Slate interview with Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia)

I went to graduate school with Larry. He's a pretty singular personality. While finishing his dissertation he taught himself fiddle and started jamming every week with the Columbus bluegrass and Irish fiddle scene. In a short time he got good enough to teach lessons. He also ran a web page on Y2K related stuff that ended up getting cited in several books. And he and Ty Lightner (of Yvonne Craig fan site fame; one of the first such sites on the internet, one that he started half as a lark, but that ended up getting him face time with much of the cast of the original Batman; Ty is now a computer programmer and one of the top Netflix reviewers in the world) and I used to go to the great performances put on as part of the choreography MFA degree at OSU sometimes once a week.

His dissertation was on epistemic circularity. It's really interesting how that work played a role in the way Wikipedia was initially set up and then with Larry leaving it. Here are some of the many money quotes (whole interview HERE):

Yeah, I can imagine that the social dynamics get pretty ugly. But my understanding is that you left Wikipedia over deeper philosophical schisms.

I had lots of deep philosophical schisms with Wikipedia in the end, although also some agreements.  The first problem was what we were just talking about: reigning in all the bad actors, doing something to reduce the number of trolls and the amount of time we spent dealing with them.

The other problem was that there needed to be some sort of mechanism—it didn't have to be anything like editorships or review before publishing or anything like that—but some sort of low-key role for experts in the system.

Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.

Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

lovely N.Y. Times article by Galen Strawson (and some meditations on Critchley/Leiter brouhaha)

It's on the coherence of the notion of "free will," and it's HERE. I hope we can all agree at this point that Simon Critchley really has done a very good job with this series and deserves all of our thanks (for that matter I can hope we agree that his book about how philosophers die is also really a first rate piece of popularization).

If I wasn't so pressed for time, I'd try to defend Critchley on his claim that Leiter always mocks (for an example see Leiter's post HERE), to the effect that continental philosophy is to some extent a series of footnotes to Kant's Third Critique.

Really, there is a sense in which both Leiter and Critchley are right because they mean different things by "continental philosophy." Leiter means the stuff actually done on the continent and Critchley means the Anglo-American tradition of selectively and hagiographically appropriating key thinkers from the continent [And to be honest, the focus on 1968 Parisians as providing the romantic anti-rational Other to analytic philosophy not only ends up being sometimes obnoxiously hagiographic, but is also vastly more disturbingly Orientalist than all those gone-native colonialists that Edward Said (actually in most cases unjustifiably if you study the history) makes so much fun of, and if you don't get this you haven't presented papers in France and talked with actual French philosophy professors.]

In any case, I encourage everyone to read the second and third chapters of Noel Carroll's A Philosophy of Mass Art, where he shows how both famed critics and celebrants of mass art get all of their arguments from a certain kind of appropriation of Kant's Third Critique. If you read that, and are sensitive to the narrative of phenomenology as something that leads teleologically to Derrida (read Lee Braver or Dermot Moran's fantastic books to get this kind of narrative; both books are so good that you should read them anyway), then you'll see that Critchley's claim is highly defensible. At some point I'll do a post on this.

I should be clear that my point about selective appropriation is not meant to be a slam on SPEPish Anglo-American Continental philosophy. All great philosophers (and their students) reconstruct a selective, anachronistic, cartoon (really Whiggish) history leading up to the philosopher in question.

(1) But people who are historically sensitive always see these histories as cartoons and see how much is left out in doing so. This is Beiser's perfectly understandable gripe about contemporary Hegelians (though, ironically, they are doing exactly what Hegel did!) and part of Leiter's critique of SPEP type Anglo-American Continental Philosophy. Beiser and Leiter both have an incredibly deep knowledge of everything that is elided in making the cartoon histories in question. This is fine with me. Philosophy always requires a delicate balance of anachronism (which is equally ascendent in both analytic and continental philosophy) and history. I don't think anything would get done if you didn't have both kinds of people. (2) Leiter obviously really loathes Derrida. Thus, even to the extent he goes along with Brandom or Rorty and accepts Whig histories as being a necessary part of philosophy (and any reader of Kant has to accept them to some extent, because the whole bit about empiricists and rationalists just is contemporary philosophy's ur-Whig history), he reacts with revulsion to one that would lead to Derrida. I think this is somewhat an open question and one reasonable people can disagree about. I mean (as long as you are not hyper historical) the truth of a Whig history really comes down to its cash value. But I find myself more on Critchley than Leiter's side here. The fact is that Braver and Moran's books (and Rorty's too) are just very rich philosophically. And, whatever you think of Derrida. . . [Full Disclosure: I find his unprofessional behavior towards less powerful academics who disagreed with him on even minor things to be so extraordinarily contemptible that it perhaps irrationally colors my view of him as a philosopher; likewise with regards to he and (some of!) his students' morally and intellectually contemptible hypocrisy/sophistry put in the service of explaining away the Nazi bits of Paul de Man and Heidegger.]

I mean whatever you think about Derrida as a cultural force or human being (and here one must have some humility; fame is almost invariably infantilizing to whomever is cursed with it), it should be clear that a lot of people who hold him in high philosophical esteem have done really interesting work (I think even Leiter would admit this with regard to Rorty; recently I've just been reading Martin Hagglund and Timothy Morton's great work). And this is some evidence that Derrida deserves higher regard as a philosopher than many of us take away after engagement with his work. [I got Derrida through Douglas Kellner, Louis Mackey, Robert Solomon as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, but honestly did not at the time have enough background in Heidegger to understand what was going on. Every time I go back and try to read Derrida after reading a philosopher I like who uses his work (and there are a number), I find Derrida's prose affectations to be insufferable; it's like I'm witness to all of the awful and myriad ways a personality can be destroyed by the quest for fame, and then being further destroyed by fame itself. The really obscene spectacle of a possible genius shambling through the detritus of a kind of primordial decision to sell his soul (there's even a movie! - one whose promotional posters guarantee us is like following Plato around for a day). . . I hope I'm wrong about this. The fact that people I respect don't see the prose as completely blighted in the way I do (and to be clear I am a fan of Heidegger and Adorno, so it's not a response to difficult prose) does give me hope.]

Anyhow, at some point I'm going to explicate Carroll on Kant's Third Critique and show how that makes Critchley's claim about the tradition in which he works both defensible and philosophically interesting. Moreover, philosophically interesting to the most analytic of analytic philosophers. Maybe I should have started doing that in the time it took to write this post.

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.

Two new ones by Pete Wolfendale

Respone to Levi (part 1) and Response to Levi (part 2).

Levi's response to Response to Levi (part 1), and Levi's response to Respone to Levi (part 2).

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.]

great philosophy post-doc in Cairo!

Man this would completely rock. From Graham Harman's blog (HERE).

If you are a recent Philosophy Ph.D. and don’t know where to work next year, you can apply for one of our recently announced postdoctoral teaching fellowships. The American University in Cairo will pay to fly you here and fly you back when you’re finished. Good housing is provided, as are all utilities, and the income is untaxed in either Egypt or the USA (not sure about the law for other countries). You’re also eligible for a special research award of up to $5,000 on top of the usual total of up to $5,000 in Research Grants and $3,000 in Conference Grants during the year (I’m the one who administers the latter).

The teaching load is three courses, but at most two preps (two or one is still to be determined)

Moreover, there will most probably be additional funds available to help pursue your next job after this one. (This university takes good care of its faculty, including short-term faculty.)

We must fill several of these positions immediately, due to an unexpected retirement and another unexpected departure.

AOS: Open. AOC: History of Philosophy.

Deadline? Please apply right away, within the next week if possible, because we need to get the search going immediately. And please send a link to this post to anyone you know who might be interested and qualified.

This is a great place to work, and it goes without saying that Egypt is a country you have to visit at some point in your life.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ADVERTISEMENT.

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.

post on Chapter II of Maimon's Essay

I did my post for the Maimon reading group over at Perverse Egalitarianism. It's HERE [the figure at left is Pete Wolfendale responding in the comments; I'm the anthropomorphized walrus out of frame, ducking and covering my head].

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).]

Jonathan Bennett influential inferentialist?

It’s a strange experience to be reading Brandom’s Making It Explicit at the same time as I’m reading Jonathan Bennett’ Kant’s Analytic. Brandom’s reading of Kant as being so important in part because he thought of concepts inferentially as opposed as quasi-perceptually (e.g. Humean ideas) is one of Bennett’s guiding ideas. Even weirder, some of the specific views I associate with Brandom were argued for explicitly by Bennett.

The question of whether a language is a concept-exercising one does depend upon what sorts of statements can be made in it: for example, it depends partly upon whether statemetns of a general or reason-giving kind can be made in it (Bennett 1966, 87).

Then he goes on and differentiates between measuring devices and actual asserters in the same way that Brandom does.

The class of possible languages divides into those whose use does, and those whose use does not, consist solely in a pattern of responders to sensory stimuli. I discuss this at length in my book Rationality, and here sketch it only in outline. A language consisting solely in statements of the form ‘This is. . .’ and ‘That is. . .’ can be seen as a technique ofr the linguistic handling of items which are presented to the speaker: it has been called the speaker’s way of ‘hitting back’ at the things which sensorily bombard him. But human languages have means for making at leat two sorts of statements which are not like this: general statements, and statements about the past. These do not have to be responses to, or operations upon, the environments in which they are made.

Then Brandom gives the example of a dog digging up a buried bone in this context. In doing so he discusses Kant’s view that “the dog does not think that the bone is there unless it has reasons for thinking this. . . (Bennett 1966 88)."

The next section has the clincher though.

It is arguable that any concept-exercising language must contain negative statements: perhaps not precise analogues of the form ‘It is not the case that. . .’, but statements which reject or rule out other statements. I have argued for this in Rationality on the grounds--roughly--that a concept-exercising language must contain something like ‘because’ which in its turn requires something like ‘That doesn’t follow’. At a non-technical level it is perhaps worth noting that any pattern of behavior looks blind and mechanical unless it contains something of a mistake-recognizing and mistake-correcting kind (Bennett 1966, 89)

Both the interpretation of Kant and the reformulation of the metaphysical deduction look like pretty strong historical precursors to Brandom. Of course there are important differences; particularly that Bennett doesn’t subscribe to what Brandom calls the “Kant-Sellars Thesis” about modality; but the project of inferentialistically reformulating the deduction in a Quine friendly manner is in common to both Brandom and Bennett. I need to check out Rationality.

In Making it Explicit Brandom just attributes a story to Bennett and later contrasts his own perspective with the Gricean intention based one that Searle, Bennett, and Lewis have in common. The only Bennett book he cites is Linguistic Behavior. It Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom just parenthetically lauds Bennett and Strawson for making the study of Kant respectable for analytic philosophers. 

--------------------------------------

I should note in passing that I loathe the way people casually put Bennett's (and Strawson's for that matter) Kant and Spinoza books down. When you read these books you get to be party to a great philosopher struggling with the ideas of greater philosophers. You never lose sight of why Kant and Spinoza continue to be philosophically important. Actually, again, this is one of the great things about the essays in Brandom's Tales of the Mighty Dead too.

I worry that too many specialist historians today feel that it is anachronistic to read great philosophers as if their work is still philosophically relevant. I forget the sneering Sorabchi piece where he castigates Nusbaum and Putnam for not realizing that Aristotle hadn't read Descartes. Habermas actually explicitly discusses this issue in the beginning of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. He refuses to apologize for entering into philosophical dialogue with the thinkers he is presenting.

nice scientific american article about animal cognition

Article HERE.

I hope in the next two years (in addition to a bunch of other projects) to work through a good set of the relevant empirical work (I'll need to teach THIS BOOK). What seems to me to be basic to sapience is the ability to work through counterfactual scenarios "off-line," instead of making minute adjustments in trying a task different ways, sitting back and considering the different and novel ways it can be done and then picking one.

Moreover, I think the extent to which non-language users do this with means-ends reasoning is both empirical and something experimenters are already operationalizing.

Interesting Leiter Thread

Discussion of poll ranking twelve philosophers' likelihood of remaining relevant HERE.

Really nice Wolfendale discussion

Really, really astute point HERE by Wolfendale about how rendering Brandom's sense dependency asymetric yields a form of realism. This is worth thinking about.

Nice ensuing discussion too.