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    • Was the Aufbau meant by Carnap to be a refutation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit?

      Thanks to Michael Friedman's heroic efforts, the outright distortions that governed much of our common sense concerning the logical positivists is finally beginning to fade. For example, most of us now know that the so-called "Quine-Duhem hypothesis" was explicitly (e.g. "one can hold true a proposition come what may") stated and defended by A.J. Ayer before Quine, and that Carnap was every bit as holistic. For example, the Aufbau contains the sentence, "The unit of meaning is the language as a whole." A lot of salutary reassessment of Carnap's philosophical value and standard Whig histories of analytic philosophy have taken place in light of Friedman's labors.*

      One of Friedman's major contentions is that both phenomenology and logical positivism must be seen in terms of the "back to Kant" movements in Germany. Heidegger's dissertation advisors were the two dominant Southwest School neo-Kantians, Windelband and Rickert. His very first lecture series, where something like the tool analysis actually appears, is on these two thinkers. Carnap also was writing in the millieu of key Marburg School neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen.**

      Friedman does not just establish various anxieties of influences, but actually provides substantive philosophical sense to the claim that twentieth century philosophy was overwhelmingly dominated by neo-Kantianism. He does not, however, do much with the fact that "back to Kant" was a rejection of German Idealism, and indeed wishes to take us back to a form of neo-Kantianism distinct from both Marburg and Southwest school, Ernst Cassirer's.

      Though I find Friedman's variety of neo-Kantianism fascinating, I don't think that Cassirerian notions of the relativized a priori (and both Rorty and Brandom are doing something similar) go far enough. I am more excited about re-examining the entire German Idealist tradition in light of the fruits of positivism and phenomenology, a project I have argued in the blogosphere and in print to be at the very heart of the recent "return to metaphysics" in Continental Philosophy.  

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    • Quote of the day #5,642 Adrian Johnston

      Lovely bit from the preface to Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: VOLUME ONE The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy:

      Stuck between capitalist techno-manipulation and its irrationalist discontents, seesawing between the twin big Others of the nature of scientism and the God of superstition within the constraining global space of a neo-liberal economy, humanity is stranded in the waking nightmare of a disgustingly reactionary and horrifically hopeless period of history.

      Thus, the main metaphysical task by which Johnston critiques Zizek (earlier work) and Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux (in this book) concerns the extent to which they can develop a non-scientistic naturphilosophie that does not fall into superstition. In this context I find particularly interesting Johnston's development of Lacan's claim that extant naturalisms almost always tend to even more strongly embody what they take to be wrong about superstition. There is a lot in here that challenges both naturalists and anti-naturalists, as these debates have been working out over the last century or so.

      Here (hat tip dmf) is a really nice interview where Johnston describes to Peter Gratton the trilogy and his conception of transcendental materialism. If anyone has any time, I'd be interested to see in the comments what people think of the interview, especially since I'm still early in the first episode and relatively new to much of the relevant background material.

    • Privacy and Big Data III: When Security beats Privacy

      In a second court ruling on the NSA’s metadata collection program, Judge Pauley rejected virtually all of the arguments raised by the ACLU and other plaintiffs against the program.  This opinion thus stands opposed to Judge Leon’s ruling of a few weeks before (my analysis of that is here).  Here I want to look at Judge Pauley’s opinion, in the context of my original question about data and information as concepts in thinking about privacy in the era of big data.

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    • Ideology at work (literally)

      As a card-carrying Deleuzean, I'm supposed to be scornful of the concept of "ideology."* But it does have its uses, and here's a great example of ideology qua naturalizing the social.

      Fatal traffic accidents occurred in New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Authorities said a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease froze to death after she wandered away from her rural western New York home. And in suburban Philadelphia, as the storm approached, a worker at a salt storage facility was killed when a 100-foot-tall pile of road salt fell and crushed him. Falls Township police said the man was trapped while operating a backhoe.

      I'd rewrite that this way:

      A cruelly insufficient social safety net (the Alzheimer's patient) and dangerous work conditions caused by cuts to public workforce (the backhoe operator — I wouldn't be surprised if he was working for a private contractor; at the very best he was probably pulling a double shift, hence exhausted) plus the grossly insufficient public transport system and poorly maintained roads, coupled with economic desperation (the car drivers — dollars to donuts they were trying to get to a crappy service job, but don't worry, the Walmart where they worked will put out a collection basket) continued its reign of terror today, with the winter storm being the proximate cause that only a fool, knave, gull, or ideologue would blame for the social conditions that exposed these people to its effects.

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    • Two conceptions of criteria of adequacy for formalization: Tarski and Carnap

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      Formal/mathematical philosophy is a well-established approach within philosophical inquiry, having its friends as well as its foes. Now, even though I am very much a formal-approaches-enthusiast, I believe that fundamental methodological questions tend not to receive as much attention as they deserve within this tradition. In particular, a key question which is unfortunately not asked often enough is: what counts as a ‘good’ formalization? How do we know that a given proposed formalization is adequate, so that the insights provided by it are indeed insights about the target phenomenon in question? In recent years, the question of what counts as adequate formalization seems to be for the most part a ‘Swiss obsession’, with the thought-provoking work of Georg Brun, and Michael Baumgartner & Timm Lampert. But even these authors seem to me to restrict the question to a limited notion of formalization, as translation of pieces of natural language into some formalism. (I argued in chapter 3 of my book Formal Languages in Logic that this is not the best way to think about formalization.)

      However, some of the pioneers in formal/mathematical approaches to philosophical questions did pay at least some attention to the issue of what counts as an adequate formalization. In this post, I want to discuss how Tarski and Carnap approached the issue, hoping to convince more ‘formal philosophers’ to go back to these questions. (I also find the ‘squeezing argument’ framework developed by Kreisel particularly illuminating, but will leave it out for now, for reasons of space.)

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    • The Importance of Michel de Montaigne, or the Paradox of an Underrated Classic

      I’ve been teaching and studying Montaigne this semester with an intensity I’ve never undertaken before, though I have dipped into Montaigne previously to teach on friendship, and on skepticism in moral and epistemic contexts. Working right through the Essays  for the first time, I’ve discovered far more about Montaigne, the themes of his work, and the depth of his philosophical achievement. What stands out for me is how much Montaigne sets up major philosophical questions and approaches of modern philosophy, and is at least as deserving as Descartes is to be considered as important to the origins of modern philosophy. Montaigne’s very literary way of writing, his reliance on allusion to history and ancient authors, and the rather rambling nature of his writing are all possible explanations for his relatively marginal place in philosophy, his relatively greater presence in cultural history and cultural theory. 

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    • On cultural homogeneity and pre-State war

      In a recent FB status update, Justin E. H. Smith cites James Scott approvingly:

      As the anthropologist James C. Scott has compellingly argued, it is a fool's game to attempt to learn about human nature from 'isolated' or 'primitive' tribes, since every human group about which we have any knowledge has existed in some relation to a broader network of other human groups, and usually of states and empires. In this respect the idea of homogeneous national cultures attaching stably to territories is not only an illusion, to the extent that the homogeneity was initially imposed by a concerted campaign, but also to the extent that influence and goods are always flowing in from outside, even if in certain places and times foreign faces and foreign tongues are an unfamiliar occurrence. James C. Scott, "Crops, Towns, Government," London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 22, 21 November, 2013, pgs. 13-15. 

      While I agree grosso modo with Scott's point about skepticism about direct and naive conclusions from existing foragers back to pre-State times, I think we can make some reasonable, modest, and always open to re-interpretation, guesses (or if you want, hypotheses) for pre-State forager bands. When we do that we have to remember that claims that inter-group war was the dominant form of inter-group relation are themselves prone to illegitimate analogies with nation-state behavior (that is, society as boot camp: impose a homogeneous culture to better ensure success in war through loyalty to the group, etc).

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    • Tom Waits reads Bukowski’s Laughing Heart

      Nearly everyone with whom I find myself having long conversations* has at some time fallen into a kind of holidays era depression strong enough to take the comic edge off of Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse" (NSFW). The inevitable clash between promise and experienced reality is exacerbated by difficult family dynamics (even with respect to those we've lost) that seem to generally be our lot as rather depraved sentient beings.

      But there is grace too, and every Christmas I find that watching the following** comforts my inner Larkinism.

       Anyhow, here's a late wish to anyone reading this blog for a Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Saturnalia/Festivus/Winter Break/Solstice etc. etc. etc. filled with genuine grace.

      [Notes:

      *Selection bias!

      **I know it's schmaltzy, but I don't care. Beauty and truth just are sometimes schmaltzy and we ignore this in our own aesthetic practice at great peril. Johnny Cash himself in fact knew and lived much of his life in that schmaltz and anyone listening to his albums gains insight into the value of schmaltz.]

    • 2014 will be breakout year for Continental Philosophy’s return to metaphysics

      As an outsider I've been fascinated by watching continental philosophers shake off many of the neo-Kantian aspects of phenomenology in the same way that analytic philosophers earlier shook off many of the (sometimes identical!) neo-Kantian aspects of logical positivism.

      What's fascinated me most these past few years is the way in which lessons, themes, and issues from the glory period of German Idealism have been so much better recovered in the continental metaphysics renaissance. That is, one can easily trace the canonical set of issues that move Maimon all the way through Schopenhauer and Hegel* (that were thought to have been dissolved by logical positivists and phenomenologists) as all rising up again in various ways by once renegade Deleuzians such as Protevi and Delanda** and the Speculative Realist writers of the same recent era: Meillassoux, Harman, Hamilton-Grant, and Brassier.***

      The reason I think that 2014 is the Clash City Rockers gets released (or perhaps David Lewis visits Australia) moment for the revival of metaphysics in continental philosophy is that so much of this material a deepening of this very narrative of a dialectical recovery of what was covered over by twentieth century neo-Kantian philosophy. After the jump I'll list a few that are the most exciting to me.

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    • Brazilian music on Fridays: Tom Zé

      I’m still waiting for Rolling Stone Brasil to publish their ‘Best of 2013’ lists, which often give me good ideas of music to post here at BMoF. But for now, let me post a 2013 song by one of the most experimental of all experimental musicians in Brazil, Tom Zé. He is relatively well known outside Brazil in alternative, world music circles, after having become of one of David Byrne’s protégés in the 1990s (he was an iconic figure in the Tropicália movement in the 1960s, but was then by and large ‘forgotten’ for many years). But one of the remarkable things about Tom Zé is that he continues to make music exactly as he sees fit, completely ignoring any ‘market pressure’ and not trying to please anyone with facile tricks.

      The song below is ‘Tribunal do Feicebuqui’ (‘Feicebuqui’ being a transliteration of ‘Facebook’), a song that shows not only that Tom Zé keeps up with current social phenomena (recall that he is 78 years old), but also that he looks at these phenomena with astute, critical eyes. I’m also posting ‘Curiosidade’, from his great 1998 concept album Com Defeito de Fabricação. There is much more memorable music by Tom Zé one should listen to, but these two give at least an idea of the work of one of the most creative, independent musicians currently in activity in Brazil.

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