New APPS

I was saddened to learn this past weekend of the death on March 3 of Timothy J. Reiss, emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU.  Tim was the outside reader for my dissertation and was incredibly generous in supporting the project.  I had encountered his work first as an undergraduate, when I somewhat randomly pulled a copy of his Discourse of Modernism off the shelf of a used bookstore.  I was working on a thesis about Heidegger’s metaphors for thought; Discourse seemed interesting and like the kind of thing I’d like. I read it and didn’t understand it all that well, though my underlining and marginal notes suggest I worked pretty hard at it. A few years later, I was researching my dissertation, which was half on Hobbes, relied heavily on minor 17c primary texts and made a claim about what “modern” political philosophy consisted in.  I had already been thoroughly influenced by David Lachterman’s Ethics of Geometry and had this idea that something in Discourse of Modernism might be helpful. So I picked it up again.  That time I did understand it, and remember evenings sitting by the gas fire in an underheated Oxford flat working my way through it.

At some point during this process, during which I also picked up The Meaning of Literature and Knowledge, Voyage and Discovery in Early Modern Europe, I cold emailed him, describing my project and asking if he’d be willing to be my outside reader.  A couple of days later, I got a brief but polite reply to the effect that he was already on too many projects.  A few days after that, I got another email – this time to say that he’d been looking over my proposal again, that it sounded very interesting, and he’d very much like to be one of my readers.  After I finished my dissertation, he generously cited it in one of his later books.  He also offered both positive feedback and some needed encouragement for my heterodox treatment of Hobbes’s mathematics, which was my first post-dissertation work on Hobbes.

Tim’s erudition was astonishing – he published a long list of books, much longer than I’ve recounted here.  All of them were meticulously documented and carefully argued across wide ranging primary and secondary sources.  He was a “renaissance scholar” in that he worked on texts of the European Renaissance, but the scope of his reading and thought was truly global, including to contemporary work.  In the late renaissance and early modern period in Europe, he moved seamlessly between literature and philosophy (both in Europe and outside it), locating them both in their shared cultural moment and refusing to abide by our much later disciplinary boundaries.  When I teach Modern, I’m still informed by his treatment of Descartes and the ways he shows both that Descartes was deeply attuned to his own cultural moment, and that Descartes ultimately could be read as working toward a community of thinkers, rather than the isolated ego best known for a “retreat from the polis to the poêle,” as Tim cited Lachterman as having once quipped.

NYU has a memorial notice here, and you should really read the appreciations gathered at the bottom – they speak to his scholarly contributions, his personal generosity, and his immense influence in growing and transforming the NYU comp lit department.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve no doubt heard that Typepad is shutting down on Sept. 30. I’ve moved NewAPPS to WordPress, which is what you’re reading here.

In the coming days and weeks I hope to get nearly all of the content from the original site ported over, get the url’s working correctly, and then to resume posting on my ordinary semi-regular schedule.

For now, I’ve imported back to late 2013. Back then, NewAPPS was very much a group endeavor. Unfortunately, I’ve not (yet) figured out how to get original authors preserved in post titles. Everything will appear as me, even when it’s not.

Thanks to all of NewAPPPS’ readers over the years!

By Gordon Hull

For quite a while, I’ve been exploring how to relate Derridean concerns about language and the politics behind theories of language (and text), and how to think about those in the context of large language models (part one, two, three, four, five, six).  Last time, I talked about subjectivity and the question of whether a speaking subject necessarily subtends language production and how that might play out in the context of language models.  Here I want to return the conversation to Plato, since Derrida’s discussion of Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus is central to all of these thoughts.  One thing that emerges in Plato is that he is acutely aware of the political stakes involved, and the Phaedrus deploys various strategies with myths and stories to communicate those stakes.  Indeed, Plato does this basically all the time.

Most obviously, in the Republic, when he infamously banishes the poets, it is not all poets he banishes, but the Homeric ones.  The problem is that Homeric poetry teaches the wrong thing.  Socrates broaches the subject as follows:

“We must begin, then, it seems, by a censorship over our storymakers, and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject.  And the stories on the accepted list we will include nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their souls by these stories far rather than their bodies by their hands.  But most of the stories they now tell we must reject” (377c).

He then immediately cites the example of the Uranus Kronos story told by Hesiod, which he avers shouldn’t be told to young people even if true (I’ll return to this point, as I think it’s important).  Instead, for stories like that, “the best way would be to bury them in silence” (378a).  This is because “the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is not allegory, but whatever opinions are taken into the mind at that age are wont to prove indelible and unalterable” (378d).  As Penelope Murray comments of this passage, Plato “is not concerned with the factual veracity of history here, but with the ethical truth that should be expressed through myth” (252).  The problem is that the wrong myths have been told, and numerous examples of allowed and disallowed myths follow. For example, we must say that the Gods do not deceive, because words are a “copy of the affection in the soul” (382b) and “essential falsehood … is hated not only by gods but by men.”

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The announcement is here: https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2025/08/typepad-is-shutting-down.html

NewApps has its own URL, but it's hosted on Typepad.  I assume this means that Typepad blog content will disappear from everything other than the Internet Archive (I can also download a file, so I can explore migration options), which hopefully will capture a lot of it. I have limited experience with the Internet Archive however.

I don't know what this means for producing content going forward.  I know NewApps is not the only philosophy blog with this sudden problem (Leiter Reports is on Typepad, according to the URL; I'm not sure about Daily Nous).

By Gordon Hull

Over what’s become a lengthy series of posts ((one, two, three, four, five), I’ve been exploring a Derridean response to language models. Initially prompted by a pair of articles by Lydia Liu on the Wittgensteinian influence on the development of language models, and some comments Liu makes about Derrida, I’ve been looking at the implications of Derrida’s critique of Platonism in the context of language models, and in particular the need to avoid making ontological pronouncement about them when we should be seeing them politically.  At the end of last time, I suggested that one possible Platonism concerns the unity of a speaking subject: when I say “the cat is on the mat,” what kind of subjectivity subtends my speech?

That is, the Platonism question secondarily points to the question of the unity of a speaking subject (or at least the desirability of positing that speech emanates from a unified subject), which the Platonic priority of voice over text then enables one to associate with the production of language.  Language models produce speech but there is no unified subject behind them, only statistical prediction.  This predictive model treats meaning as a matter primarily of association and distribution across a language system. Anybody who’s versed in 20c “continental” thought will not be surprised by this, since one of the main endeavors of that thought from Heidegger (or even Nietzsche or Marx) onward has been to dismantle projects that posit such a unified subject.  As Henry Somers-Hall has argued, there has been a particular effort in French thought to move past constructions that rely on a broadly Kantian understanding of thinking as judgment (x is y) which are themselves subtended by an understanding of thought as representative.  Indeed, there’s a rich history of the developments in cybernetics making their way into France.

There are several implications for language models.

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I want to take a break from Derrida and language models this week to explore an emerging policy issue.  As is impossible to miss, “AI” is everywhere.  Not everything that claims to be “AI” really is, but it’s getting hard to avoid things that call themselves “AI” as the AI companies look to make the technology profitable.  This is happening despite the decidedly lukewarm public attitude toward AI.  Current Pew research, for example, shows that AI experts are very enthusiastic about it, while the public isn’t: only 17% of all the adults surveyed thought AI was going to have a positive effect on the US over the next 20 years.  Concern is growing.

This has generated at least three industry responses.  One is to push for deregulation of AI at the federal level.  Industry advocates nearly snuck in a total ban on state regulation of AI into Trump’s spending bill; it was excised at the last minute by the Senate on a 99-1 vote.  Industry has simultaneously tried to get the executive branch to push (mostly unregulated) AI as vital to national economic competitiveness and security.  Trump has obliged repeatedly, starting with an executive order all the way back in January.  Trump is all about this AI narrative, but it has been a consistent U.S. approach to and story about AI for quite a while.

The second and third approaches are to try to (for lack of a better term) engineer stronger public support.  This second is in the form of PR campaigns about the inevitability and magnificence of AI and the need of it to be shepherded by the incumbent AI companies.  Those who aren’t as fully on board the train – women, for example -  are chastised and presented as doing damage to their careers; their concerns are frequently ignored.  The third is related, and that is the all-out push to get AI into education at every level.  Ohio State and Florida have mandated that AI be in all the curriculum (what does this mean, other than as a branding exercise? Nobody knows).  OpenAI is doing everything it can to make itself ubiquitous on college campuses.  Microsoft is dropping a cool $4 billion on AI education in K12, and OpenAI and Microsoft are sponsoring teacher training.  A couple of weeks ago, Trump dropped an executive order promoting AI in education.

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By Gordon Hull

As part of thinking through the implications of Lydia Liu’s papers (here and here) demonstrating a Wittgensteinian influence on the development of large language models, I’ve made a detour into Derrida’s critique of writing (my earlier parts: one, two, three).  My initial suggestion last time was that Derrida’s discussion is designed to show that “Platonism” is a political move (not a metaphysical one).  For Derrida the Platonic priority of voice over writing disguises the fact that both are (in his own terms) repetitions of the eidos, and so the claim that writing is bad is the claim that it’s the wrong kind of repetition.  I suggested that for Platonism as read by Derrida, one could easily imagine a hierarchy of writing systems, based on their proximity to voice/speech.  Chinese ideography – which Liu argues is central to Masterman’s breakthroughs in computer language modeling – would be at the very bottom of a Platonic hierarchy.  But because this is Derrida, we can’t either proceed quickly or proceed without talking about Hegel.  So I closed last time with a long passage from Hegel in which he denigrates Chinese for being insufficiently spiritual and too hard to learn.  Today I’ll start with why it’s relevant.

(1) First, Derrida takes up Hegel’s understanding of language in “The Pit and the Pyramid,” first delivered in 1968 and thus almost exactly contemporaneous with “Plato’s Pharmacy.”  There, working from the other end of metaphysics (Hegel, not Plato), Derrida describes such a hierarchy:

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By Gordon Hull

I’ve been looking (part 1, part 2) at a couple of articles by Lydia Liu (here and here) demonstrating a Wittgensteinian influence on the development of large language models.  Specifically, Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the meaning of words as determined by their contexts and placement relative to other rules gets picked up by Margaret Masterman’s lab at Cambridge and then becomes integrated into the vector semantics models that underlie current LLMs.  Along the way, Liu argues that the Masterman approach to language, which learns a lot from Chinese ideographs, in this sense goes farther than the Derridean critique of logocentrism.  Here I want to transition to Derrida’s critique, not to criticize Liu’s account, but to see an additional point in Wittgenstein, one that Derrida takes further.

To recall, Liu notes that one effect of the Wittgenstein-Masterman approach is to overturn the logocentrism in Western writing, but that Masterman is doing something different from Derrida, who remains in the space of alphabetic writing:

“For Masterman, to overcome Western logocentrism means opening up the ideographic imagination beyond what is possible by the measure of alphabetical writing. This is important, as it follows that the scientist’s and philosopher’s reliance on conceptual categories derived from alphabetical writing in their commitment to logical precision and systematization as well as their deconstruction must likewise be subjected to post-Wittgensteinian critique” (Witt., 437)

As she adds a few pages later, “I am fully convinced that Masterman is the first modern philosopher to push the critique of Western metaphysics beyond what is possible by the measure of alphabetical writing, and, unlike deconstruction, her translingual philosophical innovation refuses to stay within the bounds of self-critique” (Witt., 444).

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