Big pile of exams to mark here today, so this will be a short post. I’m going with an unchallenged classic: ‘Fé cega, faca amolada’, from Milton Nascimento’s 1975 album Minas (one of the albums I listened to over and over again as a child), in a duo with Beto Guedes. Besides the awesomeness of the song and of Milton’s voice, I really like the instrumental arrangement: it mixes jazzy undertones with some psychedelic distorted guitars, and the overall result is quite unexpected — and quite something!
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This has been a semester of not just one but two courses based on a a big classic. As I explained recently, I gave a course on the whole of Montaigne’s Essays. I also gave a course on the whole of The Spirit of the Laws, by Charles de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu. I won’t go so far as to suggest that Montesquieu should be given a central role in introduction level courses. Rousseau is just too obvious an alternative for dealing with Enlightenment political theory, and himself follows on from Machiavelli or Hobbes as the standard opening figures for introductions to modern political theory.
I will only go so far as to say that Montesquieu deserves to feature more frequently, though preferably with some attempt, which does creates difficulty, at incorporating passages that represent the different aspects of The Spirit of the Laws properly. A course devoted to Montesquieu is a great way of getting deeply into questions such as: the relation between history and theory, the relation between political concepts in antiquity and modernity, and not forgetting the Medieval concepts; development of law as key to concepts of sovereignty, and therefore the basic concepts of political philosophy, as well as key to political economy; the multiplicity of different political forms and examples; the role of physical geography in history, political economy, and political life; the importance of gender relations and desire as key to social and political forms; comparisons between European political systems and those of the rest of the world; the role of colonialism in the politics of the European metropolis; the importance both of classical models and of states on the periphery of the Greek and Roman worlds; the place of war, invasion, force, and ethnic domination in the formation of modern European states.
On the more negative side, Montesquieu’s understanding of gender relations does include an excess of fascination with the harem in ‘despotic’ countries and the social role of female flirtation in ‘monarchies’, his understanding of the ‘south' is bursting with negative stereotypes, and he certainly misunderstands the Ottoman polity as a pure naked personal despotism, with no restraints on the power of the Sultan apart from religion. Nevertheless, Montesquieu is no worse than we would expect from his time in these kinds of leanings, and even where he looks obnoxious now he is often advanced in at least raising issues that expand the range of historical and political thought, pushing towards what we now understand as the social sciences.
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The Philosophy Department at the University of California, San Diego, is calling for applications for the 2014 Summer Program for Women in Philosophy, which will be held at UCSD from July 28 to August 8, 2014. The two-week program will feature two intensive courses and a variety of workshops, all geared towards providing an engaging philosophical learning experience and preparation for applying to graduate school in philosophy. Participants will be provided with housing and meals, will have transportation costs covered, will have all course and workshop materials provided, and will receive a $600 stipend.
Website is here: http://spwp.ucsd.edu/
Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/UCSD.SPWP
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I’m thinking (again) about beeping people during aesthetic experiences. The idea is this. Someone is reading a story, or watching a play, or listening to music. She has been told in advance that a beep will sound at some unexpected time, and when the beep sounds, she is to immediately stop attending to the book, play, or whatever, and note what was in her stream of experience at the last undisturbed moment before the beep, as best she can tell. (See Hurlburt 2011 for extensive discussion of such “experience sampling” methods.)
I’ve posted about this issue elsewhere; and although professional philosophy talks aren’t paradigmatic examples of aesthetic performances, I have beeped people during some of my talks. One striking result: People spend lots of time thinking about things other than the explicit content of the performance — for example, thinking instead about needing to go to the bathroom, or a sports bet they just won, or the weird color of an advertising flyer. And I’d bet Nutcracker audiences are similarly scatterbrained. (See also Schooler, Reichle, and Halpern 2004; Schubert, Vincs, and Stevens 2013.)
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In a recent blog entry, Laurie Santos and Tamar Gendler very nicely lay out the idea that explicit propositional knowledge is only a small part of the sort of understanding that guides action. As they say “Recent work in cognitive science has demonstrated that knowing is a shockingly tiny portion of the battle for most real world decisions. You may know that $19.99 is pretty much the same price as $20.00, but the first still feels like a significantly better deal. …You may know that a job applicant of African descent is as likely to be qualified as one of European descent, but the negative aspects of the former's resume will still stand out. “ (The post is short and really well written, go read the whole thing.) They then note, “You might think that this is old news. After all, thinkers for the last 2500 years have been pointing out that much of human action isn't under rational control.”
I would add: not only is this a point that one finds in Aristotle, but for the last 350 years it has been central to: Pascal, Marx Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Foucault, pretty much every feminist epistemologist and philosopher of science (longino, Harding, Kukla, and on and on), and forcefully developed within mainstream analytic philosophy by Dreyfus, Haugeland, and others. )I sometimes think that the only important philosopher not to accept the point is Jason Stanley. – j/k!)
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I'm posting this in the hopes that scholars of François Laruelle can add to the list. As people who have tried to read his difficult texts know, Ray Brassier is on to something when he writes (citation below):
The truth is that his thought operates at a level of abstraction which some will find debilitating, others exhilarating. Those who believe formal invention should be subordinated to substantive innovation will undoubtedly find Laruelle’s work rebarbative.
But I think that anyone reading the following texts with a minimal level of charity will agree that he is a fascinating philosopher:
- John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy (very good book containing a chapter on Laruelle; Notre Dame Philosophical Review by Alistair Welchman here),
- Ian James, The New French Philosophy (another great book with a chapter on Laruelle; Notre Dame Philosophical Review by Joe Hughes here, characteristically nice review by Todd May here, very long critical, yet rewarding, 3AM Magazine review by Richard Marshall here),
- Ray Brassier's Radical Philosophy piece "Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle"
- Benjamin Norris'* Speculations piece "Re-asking the Question of the Gendered Subject after Non-philosophy,"
- The three Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of Laruelle's books (Ian James, Graham Harman,** Anthony Paul Smith).
I know there's more good stuff out there, but that's all I've read thusfar.
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My six year old is rocking out with MIT's Scratch. He's half way through this great book (we're doing this one next). It's really cool, because you can do real programming with a drag and drop interface; kids who can't type well can put together pretty complicated programs (youtube search "MIT Scratch tutorial" for examples). Below the fold is the first program that Thomas actually designed himself (warning, slow load time).
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Oh wow this looks awesome. I'll hitchike there if I have to.
This year's Summer School is organized by Michael Forster and Markus Gabriel (discussed briefly in this post), and in addtion to Gabriel, Willem DeVries, Paul Redding, and Robert Stern will all be lecturing.
I'm in the middle of two Stern books and they're just dynamite, After Virtue level dynamite where you start reading at eleven and then realize it's four in the morning and don't know where the time has gone.
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Imagine for a minute how you might respond if I were to insist that Cornell West can only be understood as a black philosopher and presented my own work in terms of the necessity of overcoming black philosophy. Imagine that my work involved understanding the history of philosophy in terms of a contrast between black and Greek philosophy and moreover understood different black philosophers in terms of their place in this contrast. Moreover, imagine that Cornell West repeatedly publicly stated that he hated my reductive understanding of his work as merely being epiphenomenal aspect of some black racial essence, yet I continued to hector him with it.
Would it be hyperbole to say that I was being racist?
Is it hyperbole to say that the homologous aspects of François Laruelle's work are anti-semitic ("black" being "Jewish" and "Cornell West" being Jacques Derrida)? I write this because I feel bad for snarkily responding to a comment by "APS" to this post. The fact is, I had no idea what she was talking about when she wrote:
So is this what OOO does now? They just write posts about how they are unfairly maligned and treated poorly while their major figures go around accusing people of anti-semitism? Neat. Really makes me want to take you guys seriously.*
APS' comment was not only surreally uncharitable to my post, but I just had no idea who is going around accusing people of anti-semitism. This has prompted quite a bit of e-mail discussions to try to discern what she was talking about. Yesterday we figured it out.
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Philosophers' Carnival #159 is here.Lot's of great stuff, including one (By Chris Bartel) that contains the sentence "Punk recordings (at least some of them) are ontological anomalies in the wider tradition of rock. " We happy few!
New APPS 
