Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy NDPR review

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Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

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Toadvine updates Maurice Merleau-Ponty SEP entry (SEP entry update)

Ted Toadvine replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty
// Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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"Do only humans have souls, or do animals possess them too?" (Aeon article)

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Do only humans have souls, or do animals possess them too?
// Aeon


In common parlance, the word 'soul' pops up everywhere. We may speak of a vast, soulless corporation or describe an athlete as the 'heart and soul' of his team. Soul music gets us swaying. We want our lover, body and soul. In each case, 'soul' connotes deep feeling and core values. 'Feelings form...
By Michael Jawer
Read at Aeon

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quote of the day

"The agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other."

- Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

Just a comment about this quote: pity is much like sympathy - feeling for another. The exchange mentioned here is external. But, empathy is unlike pity or sympathy in one crucial respect. Empathy is feeling with another. There the exchange is internal, immanent. This is the "firstness" or continuum of feeling - exchange - about which all of C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne wrote.

Here we might say that this first exchange of feeling is one of onto-empathy and is in another respect an Uexküllian standpoint, in the sense that from this sort of exchange through feeling one loses one's self in the objectivity of another's felt world.  It is the ultimate act of de-anthropocentrism ethically. Something hardly anyone in speculative circles addresses; actually, no one at all.

See After Nature posts "Emapthy in Rats" HERE and "Another Fantastic Uexküllian Paragraph" HERE.

"Why Prometheans Don’t Play Dice" (Inigo Wilkins video)

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INIGO WILKINS 'Upsetting Equilibria: Why Prometheans Don't Play Dice' on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/166925930
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"Blogos Synopticon: six years of philosophical blogging" (post by Agent Swarm blog)

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BLOGOS SYNOPTICON: six years of philosophical blogging
// AGENT SWARM

The blog AGENT SWARM has existed for a little over six years. There is a great coherence in my blogging over this period.
My constant theme has been epistemological and ontological pluralism. In fact, pluralism has been my concern for over 44 years, it was behind my coming to live in France 36 years ago. The only philosophical pluralist of any note in the Anglophone world during the 1970s was Feyerabend. Despite working in a philosophy department that took an active interest in contemporary French philosophy I was very intellectually isolated during that period and I was overjoyed to discover Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault and Serres as fellow proponents of the pluralist hypothesis.
Today pluralism is still a living hypothesis in France, elaborated and defended by Badiou, Latour, Stiegler, and Laruelle. This French pluralism is the major context for my thought. It has determined my amused interest in such storms in a tea cup as OOO and Speculative Realism.
From 1980 to 1987 I lived in Paris and I attended the seminars of Deleuze, Lyotard, Serres and Foucault. Now I live in Nice, but I follow Badiou's and Stiegler's seminars on youtube, and have been doing so for 5 years now. I participated in Latour's AIME project, made some contributions to the site, and Latour published a chapter by me in his catalogue RESET MODERNITY. I gave a paper at Stiegler's Summer Academy (French: video, text; English: text). Michel Serres is still going strong, and his pluralism has evolved over 50 years. I follow his publications, and I often listen to him on the radio or watch him on TV. I have just received his new book on philosophy of history.
I have had no career inside the university, but I have had and continue to have priceless access to pluralist thought in the making. I speak out of this immersion. I am living the pluralist dream.
Another of my interests is science fiction. I publish a science fiction oriented blog XENO SWARM. Twice in Nice I have given a paper on science fiction and philosophy. The first paper was on DUNE AND DELEUZE, the second was on Neal Stephenson's ANATHEM discussed from a Deleuzian-Badiousian perspective on immanentising Plato as the contemporary task of both philosophy and speculative literature.
The general compatibility condition of my philosophy blog is pluralism. This distinguishes it from other philosophical blogs which make scientism, or worse "speculative realism" or OOO, their boundary condition.
The principal contribution that has emerged from my philosophy blog is the treatment of the differing pluralist Continental philosophies, of Badiou, Laruelle, Zizek, Serres, Stiegler and Latour, as alternative metaphysical research programmes (in the sense of Popper). I analyse and evaluate these research programmes in terms of a set of criteria (pluralism, realism, diachronicity, apophaticism, and democracy). These criteria are taken from Feyerabend's later philosophy.
Note: François Laruelle has produced a constipated long-winded jargonised version of Feyerabend's view and criteria. His Anglophone disciples and popularisers have not the slighest care for situating Laruelle's thought within any realistic context. They prefer to contribute to a more general movement of rewriting philosophical history and of falsifying the recent past so as to create the illusion that their own research programme is unique and in progress over other programmes.
Bruno Latour has elaborated a very innovative system of modes of existence based on the concept of being-as-other, expressed in accessible prose, that well satisfies these criteria. Although Badiou has trouble reconciling his demand for universality with his criterion of equality, his system is also a good embodiment of these criteria. His immanence of truths project is pluralist, diachronic, apophatic, realist, and egalitarian (he calls this criterion of equality "communism" instead of "democracy" for his own special reasons).
Note: we are not talking about voting or government here, but about epistemology and ontology.
The problem with Laruelle is he thinks that he can define himself out of metaphysics. The linguistic naivety of his approach astounding. Badiou, like Deleuze, has no problem with the category of metaphysics, even if they transform it. Their philosophies are at least as "non-standard" as that of Laruelle, as are those of Zizek and Latour. Laruelle preaches non-philosophy, but he does not practice it very well. And "democracy" and "pluralism" even less.
The principal concept that has emerged out of my SF blog is that of "noetic estrangement" which permits a unified approach to SF and fantasy. A good example of this approach is to be found in my review of China Miéville's most recent novel: THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS.


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Whitehead’s Influence on Susanne Langer’s Conception of Living Form

Due to the fact that I've been engaging in research in aesthetics as much as I have been teaching it (both this past summer but also this fall), my Philosophies of Art & Beauty class has propelled me through Whitehead into the very interesting work of one of his most important students, Susanne Langer.

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985)

For those of you who haven't heard of her work it is most certainly worth looking into, even if at first glance a skimming over of it, before finding a text that would suit one's own vision in aesthetic philosophy, might be found. In her work I see much of Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and Whitehead; but of course, her work is highly original and impressive in its own right.  If I had more time I definitely would like to write a "Philosopher Profile" about her (I've been meaning to, in addition to one on John William Miller - another important American philosopher connected with idealism, realism, process-relational philosophy, ecological and environmental aesthetics.)

First and foremost I would recommend her Feeling and Form (1953), a .pdf of which can be found HERE. Otherwise do look over a nice biography concerning her life and work, also a .pdf, HERE.

Dryden's "Whitehead's Influence on Susanne Langer's Conception of Living Form" is quite excellent, HERE as is his "Susanne K. Langer and American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century" HERE. Both are taken from Anthony Flood's very honorable page dedicated to her work, HERE.

Some very nice Langer quotes HERE, some of which I'll put below.

"Art is the objectification of feeling and the subjectification of nature." 

"Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling." 

"Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality." 

"If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably." 

"Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import." 

"Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life."

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Robert Paul Wolff Lecture 2 (YouTube)

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// The Philosopher's Stone

Here it is, by popular demand, Lecture 2 in my immortal series on the Critique of Pure Reason [everything on the web is immortal, like nuclear waste.]  This one starts with a nifty story about me and Bertrand Russell ]and goes downhill from there.]  On to the Transcendental Aesthetic!
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That Time I Published a Personal Essay On the Internet (McSweeny's article)

A small tale that pretty well sums up the Internet.
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That Time I Published a Personal Essay On the Internet
// McSweeney's

Bleary-eyed at three in the morning, I submitted the personal essay I'd spent months crafting. When I woke up, an email was awaiting me with the subject THIS ESSAY IS EVERYTHING!
"Ur writing is srsly #OnFleek!" wrote the editor. "I need 2 tweak a little and then we can publish it on the site. Nothing cray-cray — just some bling 4 more eyeballs/shares/RTs."
Publish? I shakily set down my cup of coffee, my body buzzing with adrenaline and caffeine.
The essay was titled "The November of Her Years: My Mother's Final Thanksgiving at Her Brother's House."
"Love the stuff about ur mom… it gives me ~ all ~ of the feels," my editor later wrote via Instant Messenger ("my editor" — just thinking about her like that gave me goosebumps). "Quick fact-check: what does ur uncle do 4 CA$$$H?"
"Tim's a retired nurse, but he's gotten into computers and now does volunteer work with hospitals up in Maine to improve their databases and keep down costs — the state has hit a rough financial patch."
"BROGRAMMER ahahahahaha… ur next-level HILARIOUS… u do u," she wrote. "You mentioned ur mom and uncle were ✝."
"Yes, they were lapsed Catholics, but they found some comfort in religion at the end of my mother's life."
"So Tim didn't invite any1 Jewish to the dinner smh?"
"Anyone Jewish? Technically speaking, no — we were keeping it to just our immediate family, because Mom was so sick. But he wasn't intentionally trying to—"
"Lolwut!" she wrote. "It'll be up super-1st thing tomorrow."
"Wait — don't you want to give me a chance to look over your edits?"
"Kthxbai!" came on-screen before she logged off.
The next morning the essay was the lead feature on the site. The headline was "I Can't, I Just Can't: My Coder Uncle, Who's THE WORST, Had an Epic Anti-Semitic Meltdown at Thanksgiving." Here was the beginning:

"I'm chowing down on stuffing gravy turkey (om nom nom) while trying to tune out my Silicon Valley creeptastic uncle as he victim-blames the economy on the Jews."

"That moment when you're at my family's literally insane Thanksgiving. HOLIDAY FAIL."

"Thanks for running the piece," I emailed my editor. "However, I notice you attributed various remarks to my uncle that weren't in the original essay and removed all the references to my mother and her passing away the next week."
"U mad?" she wrote. "Tbh, those parts of the essay were kinda \(ツ)/, because death."
Then the comments section began filling up.
"Wow… just wow," was the first. "Essaysplaining clickbait by a caged-poultry-eating Zionist."
"Great job, you technophobe who clearly has a bias against parents' male siblings," said another that went on for three paragraphs before concluding, "No words."
Interview requests and violent emails flooded my inbox. I was fired from my job without severance for violating a morality clause. My landlord evicted me.
"The piece won teh Interwebz!" my editor wrote on IM. "Since we own all the media rights in perpetuity, we optioned the movie, video game, and action-figure (!!!) adaptations 2 Michael Bay. WHAT. IS. EVEN. HAPPENING?!?!"
"My family has disowned me," I told her. "My uncle filed a libel lawsuit against me."
"Awkwaaaaard AF."
"I'm getting death threats."
"#HatersGonnaHate amirite?" she replied.
"I don't think you understand," I typed. "I'm very scared for my safety and my life is in tatters."
There was a long pause before she wrote again.
"But dat Michael Bay tho."
Fast-forward to six months later. After numerous emails to my editor, then someone in accounting named Shelly, then someone in HR named Dennis, then Shelly again, I finally receive a check in the mail. It's for $50 and is accompanied by a handwritten Post-it.
"Oh hai! It'd be totes amazeballs 2 publish u again," my editor had scribbled. "I can haz more essays?"
I crumple it up, but before I throw it out, I realize I need the money desperately, and, perhaps more important, that although I'm battered and scarred, distrustful of people and cynical about the art of memoir in the digital-media landscape, not to mention living in a different city under a new name at a YMCA, the traumatic experience has forged me, for better or worse, into the person I now am.
Reader, I sent her a dozen pitches.
#YOLO.

- - -

Teddy Wayne will be on tour this month
in support of his new novel, Loner.
Locations and times can be found here.

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Philosophical Ecology: Invited talks in Korea this October

I have been invited to Korea to deliver lectures at three different universities (two at Yonsei University, one at Anjou University). Presumably I am also presenting at an annual international Whitehead Conference as well.

One of my talks will center on Plato, Schelling, and a Speculative Philosophical Ecology. The other will be a version of a paper that I presented one or two years ago here in the states but have since re-worked. While John William Miller is mostly an unknown figure in the still-developing tradition of environmental and ecological aesthetics, I feel that philosophical ecology might withstand great benefit from him. And the same is true of Susanne Langer - whom I plan to post about within the next few days (Langer being a student of Alfred North Whitehead.)

For those interested in philosophical ecology, perhaps the below abstract might be of interest. Again, I hope to deliver *some* form of this during my invited travels in Korea this October.

"Naturalistic Idealism: John William Miller and Philosophical Ecology" 

In this paper I attend to the naturalism (and idealism) of the American philosopher John William Miller (1895-1978).  I explore Miller's concept of the "midworld" and attempt to uncover its relationship to the notion of ontological "scale" within philosophical ecology.  Specifically, I argue that just as reality is ontologically flat - so "ordinal" and of "ontological parity" pace the ontologies of Justus Buchler and Robert S. Corrington - reality's ontological depth and breadth stretches to meet axiological value as well, most especially considering the reality of relational value. Relations on the level of the ant and its environment, for example, are not only "just as real as" but are also "just as axiologically ecologically significant as" the human relation to its world, thus forming a common world of environmental value.  To say that these relations are each as important as the other is not to say a.) that they are absolutely relative to the agents involved or b.) that relations collapse into the flat reality of one, univocal relation.  Rather, there are varying "scales" of ontological relation where each varying scale has just as much value as the next.  I think Miller's notion of "midworld" can add something to philosophical ecology in this respect: one gains a better appreciation for how other agents interact with their own environments, and yet those particular environments affect other particular environments within a larger scale of universal value. Axiological value is one although the perspectives and relations between perspectives are many.

Can students who are constantly on their devices actually learn? (Aeon Essays)

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Can students who are constantly on their devices actually learn? | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/can-students-who-are-constantly-on-their-devices-actually-learn
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