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    Graham Harman interviews Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn about Tristan Garcia

    The interview is online at Edinburgh University Press here.* There are lots of juicy tidbits, for example this from Ohm:
    The latter half of the 20th century bequeathed the Anglophone world a very one-sided picture of “French Theory.” The soixante-huitards were like our noble savages. Many important voices were silenced, due perhaps to institutional and sociological pressures, as well as individal and collective decisions about what works to translate. In many ways this Romantic image of French philosophy continues today.
    Mark's one of the most consistently interesting interlocutors I've ever had the pleasure to work with.** Some of the background is in the interview. As an undergraduate he initially worked in South Asian Studies, and as part of that lived in Nepal during a civil war. Then while finishing his degree at Madison he got interested in the French Theory presupposed by many of the people he was working on. So he went to France and studied there, a process which gave him an interesting distance from some of the canonical American receptions of French thought. Now he's at LSU getting a Ph.D in French and an MA in Philosophy.***

    Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out. Among other things we give a promo for the book we're writing that will hook up Garcia with contemporary analytic metaphysics, and in the process will hopefully bridge a little more the divide between continental (both in the geographic and SPEP sense) and analytic philosophy.

    [Notes:

    *There is one typo in the inteview (my fault). In my answer to the penultamite question, the word "who" should be inserted between "novelists" and "strike". I meant to be saying that the ability of great novelists still seems magical to me, while the ability of great philosophers just strikes me as people doing stuff I already do, but much, much better.

    **We just gave a paper (cowritten with Joel Andrepont) at this conference at MIT. The conference was really cool from an analytic aesthetics perspective, and I'll blog about it in the next few weeks.

    ***I should note that Ohm is also doing research on the metaphysics of modality (think Lewisiana through Williamson), ontological indeterminacy (think Jessica Wilson, Elizabeth Barnes, Robert Williams, etc.), and the philosophy of time (e.g. presentism, perdurantism, endurantism, etc.) Some of the French analytic philosophers that he mentions in the interview are relevant here.
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    6 responses to “Graham Harman interviews Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn about Tristan Garcia”

    1. David Gordon Avatar
      David Gordon

      Do you know yet when the book will be published?

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    2. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      It actually physically exists at this point and is available at Amazon’s UK site (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Form-Object-Treatise-Speculative-Realism/dp/0748681507/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396398893&sr=8-1&keywords=tristan+garcia ). My gratis copies are in the mail.
      If the American site is right (they often goof these dates up) they won’t have it in American warehouses until the end of this month.
      For the last week it’s been moving from 11 to 7 on the American Amazon’s “Hot New Releases in Philosophy Metaphysics,” at 9 today. I have no idea what that means though. It has a great beat and you can really dance to it?

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    3. BeboErgoSum Avatar
      BeboErgoSum

      Hi Jon,
      You say:
      ‘As far as I know, he is the only dialetheist (someone who, like Graham Priest, accepts true contradictions) who nonetheless would not accept that the set of all sets is a set.’
      Could you say a bit more about this, like who you have in mind? I think things are probably the other way around, and that Priest is in a minority here. He’s the only dialetheist I can think of who explicitly accepts set-theoretic contradictions. Other prominent dialetheists, like JC Beall, explicitly don’t. I guess one big reason is the weakness of paraconsistent naïve set theory, though Zach Weber’s work might change this, since he seems to be establishing various cool results.

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    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Ooh I didn’t know that about Beall. Is it just vagueness then that moves him (glut semantics), or does he have other Meinongian commitments too?
      There’s this huge debate about Curry’s Paradox that I haven’t even begin looking at yet, and I think my misimpression about what most dialetheists believe probably comes from not being up to date on that.
      Garcia’s dialetheism is mostly motivated by accepting something like the Routley/Priest Characterization Principle: for any condition A(x) there is an object characterized by that condition. Priest saves the principle from all sorts of traditional problems by allowing that the object might just exist at non-actual worlds. Mark Ohm and I aren’t sure that Garcia can avail himself to this restriction, given other things he says about possibility. It’s something we’re going to have to work out.
      Garcia doesn’t explicitly talk about the set of all sets, but his “world” is like a proper class in that it encompasses things but can’t be encompassed itself. And it’s the only such entity in his metaphysics. He argues that the world has this property because otherwise it would encompass itself (which violates other aspects of the system). So he rejects non-wellfoundedness but accepts true contradictions. That struck me as deeply weird, especially given the consistency of non-wellfounded set theory.
      I wish I understood Zach Weber’s work better. Do you know if he’s responded to Frode Bjordal’s criticism that his theory entails that all objects are non-self identical (http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FRSL%2FRSL4_01%2FS1755020310000171a.pdf&code=161a2cdfe6ce945bd4063bbf512011e1)? Bjordal’s criticism came out in the Review of Symbolic Logic 2011 and I know Weber’s done lots of cool stuff since then, so I assume that there’s some line.

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    5. BeboErgoSum Avatar
      BeboErgoSum

      Beall’s not a dialetheist about vagueness either, just the semantic paradoxes (at least, this is true of his time slice circa Spandrels). The view he defends in Spandrels is supposed to be super moderate. One of the problems with this sort of view, I think, is that you end up in a strange position where there are problems (like vagueness) where a dialetheic solution is available, the main reason not to go for it is that dialetheism is crazy, but you’re stuck, as a dialetheist, trying to defend some classical theory which is deeply counter-intuitive for other reasons.
      My impression is that most people working on dialetheism are happy to use a classical metatheory and focus on dealing with paradoxes like the liar and curry. Of course, Priest basically uses ZF as his metatheory, but gives a recapture result which he uses to support his appropriating the results of ZF and claiming that his metatheory should be taken to be paraconsistent set theory. The fact that other dialetheists could say similar thing but don’t makes me think they are at least a bit cagey about inconsistent set theory. Though since many don’t really talk much about the set theoretic paradoxes, it’s difficult to tell exactly what they think.
      Looks like Weber has replied:
      http://dtl.unimelb.edu.au//exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8yOTcxNTE=.pdf
      Haven’t had more than a quick scan, but looks like Bjordal added some assumptions Weber doesn’t make in order to get the result.

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    6. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Cool. Cool. Thanks so much for the link and for explaining this.

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