Philosopher Profile: Nicholas Rescher

Nicholas Rescher (b. 1928) is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.  He received his doctorate in philosophy at Princeton University in 1951 and has since served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, the American Catholic Philosophy Association, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, the C. S. Peirce Society, and the Metaphysical Society of America (founded by Paul Weiss).  While Rescher has published over 400 articles and 100 books (on a staggering array of topics), he is most famous for his system of “pragmatic idealism” that combines elements of continental idealism with American pragmatism. He has written widely on logic (in its various forms), epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, process philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy.

Typically I write my own coverage of a philosopher in "philosopher profile" posts, however as I am still learning Rescher I defer by linking to two web addresses.

First, the IEP entry on Rescher absolutely fantastic (link HERE).  Given the sheer breadth of Rescher's corpus I was abit overwhelmed in trying to find a summary of his work online.  But the IEP entry, from what I can tell, is an excellent summary which seems to lose very little.  To get a very good overview of what Rescher's work is about this is a "must read."

Second, THIS interview is very good and provides the flavor of Rescher's main interests, background, and future plans.  (Published in Kinesis (where I published my interview with Robert S. Corrington.)

Peirce on Epicurus and Lucretius

I am teaching Epicureanism in my ethics class (and then moving on to Stoicism).

Therefore I thought that this was fitting.  Link HERE.

We Have Never Been Individuals

"A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals." Link to .pdf below. Ht Andre Ling.

http://blogs.bu.edu/ait/files/2012/12/SymbioticViewQRB.pdf

more on Latour and religion

Terry Blake from Agent Swarm HERE and Chris Watkin HERE.  Some interesting reflections on how Latour sees commonalities between religious discourse and lover's discourse.  The point is that we must remain sensitive to "melody" and "rhythm" (or better perhaps "dissonance" and "consonance") when it comes to religious speech, and do so in a way that does not "literally" oblige one to the content of religious speech.

Watkin takes Latour to task with the "literally" part.  Is Latour "demythologizing" religion, a Derridean "religion without religion," pace Caputo (or even Santayana for that matter)?  Yes, Latour is calling for a "renewing repetition" of the rhythm and melody of religious speech, its transformative power of information, but for him, given the call for sensitivity to rhythm and melody, this information is not specifically Christian in content.  Why?

This leads Latour to an "awkward" position as both Blake and Watkin point out, although for different reasons it seems.

Again, I'll provide some of my initial thoughts - and they are roughly the same today as when I posted them some months back - HERE.

Bruno Latour, Talking “Religiously”, part 1 (MP3 AUDIO)

Link HERE.  My thoughts HERE.

Adrian Johnston interview (with some of my thoughts linked)

A very good interview making the rounds, link HERE.  The interview is care of Peter Gratton (of Memorial U Newfoundland) who conducted the interview.

Peter is a great personality to work with.  He is editing The Meillasssoux Dictionary (EUP, forthcoming) and I am glad to be a part of that, having contributed some entries on Meillassoux and the divine inexistence and related etc. etc.  Be sure to check out his blog Philosophy in a Time of Error - it's been around for awhile, is established, and has some great content.  Anyway, I'm thankful he posted the interview; a great read.

Adrian Johnston is an interesting guy as well - and he gave some fantastic responses to Peter's questions.  I've written to Adrian once, asking about his trilogy through Northwestern UP (it was listed as "available" on amazon, but was not available, at the time).

My interest in Adrian's work stems from some provocative comments he has made while giving talks on panels with Ray Brassier in particular, and of course there are one or two items in Peter's interview that I'd like to address.  I have as of yet to "officially" speak to Adrian's work via publication, but I've made my thoughts known HERE, HERE, and HERE.

I've been told on more than one occassion that mutual interests (naturalism, German idealism, Hegel, materialism, realism, etc.) but wildly different conclusions may make for a good debate between us.  The same has been said concerning Ray Brassier.

We'll see, hopefully one day. 

For now, these videos featuring Johnston and Brassier are worth rewatching if you haven't already seen them.  See HERE and HERE.

Louis Morelle: French "scene report" nature philosophy and metaphysics

I've been corresponding with Louis Morelle this past week, with curious questions concerning the state of metaphysics in France - particularly nature philosophy and metaphysics, the "nature ontologists."  Louis has agreed for me to publish a portion of our correspondence.  Perhaps this week at some point I can post thoughts/comments.  Below is what Louis reports.

- Pierre Montebello, who works on what he calls "l'autre métaphysique", by which he means Tarde, Ravaisson, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and is very much one important figures in trying to think a metaphysics of nature

- Frédéric Worms, who I mentioned in my first email, is a specialist of Bergson and contemporary (i.e. XXth century) French philosophy more generally, and an important number of PhD students under him are working around Bergson and therefore sometimes on issues related to nature

- Meillassoux is obviously instrumental to bringing contemporary metaphysics into view in the last decade

- Olivier Surel, who works on Nature and social ontology, is one of the few young people who writes on matters I feel affinity with, and who deals with Speculative Realism beside Meillassoux and Badiou

- The Simondonians have a journal, Cahiers Simondon ; besides Barthelemy (who has written a book on Simondon and nature philosophy), there are Baptiste Morizot Anne Sauvagnargues, and Anne Lefebvre ; they held a colloquium this summer at Cerisy : http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/simondon13.html

- Around Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers, other Belgian names that regularly turn up are Michel Weber and Vinciane Desprets. They also held a Cerisy colloquium this year : http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/gestes13.html. It is noteworthy, I think, that the center of gravity for francophone Whitehead studies is actually outside France

- The CIEPFC  is one of the major places, in Paris, where activity on such matters takes place ; their members list ( http://www.ciepfc.fr/spip.php?rubrique1 ) points to quite a few interesting names, such as Camille Riquier or Ioulia Podoroga, and Patrice Maniglier ; I wrote you a few months back about the collection at PUF, MétaphysiqueS, http://www.puf.com/Liste/Ouvrages_par_collection?dyncat=M%C3%A9taphysiqueS, which published Souriau, Garcia, and Viveiros de Castro

- A noteworthy book was published in 2011, an anthology on the "Philosophie des possessions", by Debaise, Latour, Stengers, and others : http://www.lespressesdureel.com/ouvrage.php?id=1475

- People working on or around Schelling, like Alexander Schnell, Miklos Vetö, Xavier Tilliette or Emmanuel Cattin, or Jean-Christope Lemaître are interesting. Schnell has recently written a book trying to alter phenomenology in order to make it speculative, En voie de réel, which looks like a must-read : http://www.editions-hermann.fr/ficheproduit.php?lang=fr&menu=9&ref=Philosophie+En+voie+du+r%E9el&prodid=1440 ; he wrote what looks like a summary of it in english : http://philpapers.org/rec/SCHSFO-2

- Descola, Latour, de Castro and others, had a Cerisy colloquium (again !) this year, which I attended, and which was a wonderful moment of intellectual life at its best : http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/metaphysiques13.html ; there I heard, among other things, about Eduardo Kohn's book on Forest-thinking, which references Peirce's theory of signs in trying to apply it to nature. He's American, so not a part of this report, but I think you might like his book !

- Mathias Girel works on James, Peirce, and pragmatism, has read some of Corrington's writing (on nature), and is very fluent in American philosophy in general. His site : http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mathias_Girel/publications/

- Klesis , an important philosophy journal, published an issue on philosophies of nature this year : http://www.revue-klesis.org/numeros.html#d25

Accelerationism – A Symposium on Tendencies in Capitalism

Link HERE.

ACCELERATIONISM – A Symposium on Tendencies in Capitalism

14 December 2013, Alexanderplatz Berlinwww.xlrt.org  /  info@xlrt.org

Contemporary capitalism is an object of high abstraction. The symposium is an invitation to discuss and disclose the anonymous and inner tendencies of capitalism, to study its monetary, algorithmic and energetic viscera. How can one grasp the living drives of financial markets and technological innovation? And more importantly: who really produces and controls those drives and how could any alternative political subject emerge without such a complex knowledge?

The recent debate on accelerationism and the philosophical scene of Speculative Realism just reminded of an old question posed by Deleuze and Guattari: Which is the real revolutionary path? To withdraw from the world market or, on the opposite, to go further and “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche already suggested long before the current Stillstand? For example today Germany finds itself in the eye of the storm: a mild social democracy at the center of Europe watching neoliberalism freely devastating the rest of the world.

There are multiple strategies of how to cross a stormy passage. In Ballard’s first and prophetic novel The Drowned World (1962), an imbalance in solar radiation causes the polar ice caps to melt and global temperatures to rise, leaving cities submerged by tropical lagoons where flora and fauna restart their evolution. Human population migrates towards the polar circles. Rather than being disturbed, the protagonist is enraptured by the new nature that is replacing the old world and decides to move south towards the sun. 

Though encaged within cognitive capitalism, we call for an epistemic acceleration. The symposium convenes to refresh the cartography of the keywords employed in the last centuries to describe economy and the political response to it: development, progress, growth, accumulation, peak, degrowth, revolution, speculation, entropy, singularity, sustainability and so on. Today it is time to anticipate and accelerate, for sure, time for anastrophism and not catastrophism.

metaxology: thinking from within the "in-between"

This came up during our "Metaphysics of Individuation" reading group this past summer.  A student from the group recently emailed me these two links to post, for those interested.  We had looked at some of these issues in Stengers, Latour, Whitehead, Tarde, Simondon, Deleuze, Leibniz, and the other usual suspects.

Didier Debaise, "What is Relational Thinking?" from Inflexions (no. 5, 2012) and Didier Debaise, "A Philosophy of Interstices: Thinking Subjects and Societies from Whitehead's Philosophy" from Subjectivity (no. 6, 2013).  The latter article's abstract is worth posting below.  I see resonance with metaxological ontology, e.g. William Desmond, Robert Corrington, Robert Neville, i.e. the American process ontologists. The space or interstice, the space of the "in-between," usually thought of as something empty or secondary with no importance to the identity of things, actually can itself through a negative activity be involved in the process of how "selves" come to be, especially within environments where this "in-between" is said to be absent or "not."  Rather, as Debaise points, it is quite the opposite:

The notion of interstice appears in philosophy as something empty, an in-between, with no importance in the constitution of things. I argue, on the contrary, that the concept can be retaken in a new interpretation of living subjects as a main category to interpret the spatial and temporal dimensions of a subject.

The Ontological Extravagance of Honeybees

Ht dmf.

Technobiophilia: Can we get all the nature we need from the digital world? [updated, again]

Link to a fantastic Aeon article, HERE.  It discusses whether nature digitally experienced - that is, digital or virtual environments - can supplant experience of "traditional" nature, that is, "nature" understood as the physical world and the living things in it.

A major premise of the article is that there is nothing "unnatural" (of course).  Thus computer viruses are just as "natural" as biological viruses.  But one might ask whether connections to the natural world (natural in the tradition sense, ie. organic, biological) are indeed vital to our experiences of the digital and electronic world.  In other words, how does one world "stretch" into the other, and vice versa.

With respect to this "stretch," one may say for example that there is a "culture" of bees as much as there is a an "online culture."  How is a "beyond" of each's specific reality status, that is, beyond nature and culture, beyond experience and nature, constituted?  The "beyond" of nature and culture, of nature and experience, to my mind, begins in the refusal to pose each against the other or taking each in strict distinction to the other.  The "natural" understood in its most generic sense is simply whatever is in and of the world.  This is the meaning of a capacious and judicious naturalism.

There is no category more generic than "nature" if nature means "whatever is, in whatever way it is."