Good X-Phi and Bad Art

Jun 192013
 

[Editor's Note: Thanks to philosophy grad student and musician Al Baker for this guest post.]

The first time I heard the term “experimental philosophy,” part way through my master’s degree, it sounded like such an obvious oxymoron that I couldn’t help but think it was a terrible idea.  I shared, and continue to share, many of the worries that Seth pointed to in his recent post on the subject.  Although I can certainly see the appeal in having some kind of respectable yardstick against which to measure any philosopher’s intuitions (I share Dan Dennett’s suspicion of arguments overly dependent on the word ‘surely’), I think that many have probably underestimated the difficulty in obtaining empirical evidence actually capable of serving that purpose.

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Why can’t life always be beautiful?

Jun 162013
 

Hans Baldung Grien – Three Ages of Woman and Death (1510)

[A blog post from friend of PEL Phillip C.  It's a bit longer than our normal posts and is heavy with the name drops but I'm going to let it go because it's on art, is related to a discussion group and I make the editing decisions around here - Seth]

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” —Michel Foucault [1]

If life is beautiful, why can’t we always experience it as such? Is it not in moments of beauty that we find life most engaging? Anything could be beautiful. Beauty is an excess: the latent, frivolous, life-affirming power (eros), lurking around every corner, waiting to be noticed by anyone with the sufficient leisure to do so. And it’s not even necessarily a luxury of leisure, for even (or especially) in the face of death, the reality of beauty smacks us in the face and takes us by surprise. I’m reminded of observations recorded by the holocaust survivor and psychologist, Viktor Frankl:
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Topic for #78: Ayn Rand on Living Rationally

Jun 142013
 

Bowing to repeated listener requests for an Ayn Rand episode, on the eve of 6/9/13 the regular PEL foursome started our discussion, got tired after a couple of hours, and recorded some more on 6/13. We plan to edit the result heavily enough to reduce the amount of frustrated kvetching (“Is that actually supposed to be an argument? Why does she think just saying that and moving on is in any way adequate?”), but it’s not going to make objectivism fans happy, I can tell you. Know that we did make an honest attempt at engaging the material, though it was hard going, and not in the way that difficult passages in Heidegger are.

Rand offers up a foundationalist system that is is supposed to be in accord with modern science and based on empirically evident premises and clear reasoning from those that anyone who isn’t being self-deceptive or otherwise dense should be able to reproduce. Every perception we have reveals to us that the world exists (thus skepticism is incoherent and impossible as a practical matter), and a properly scientific understanding of concepts will show us that all legitimate tools of thought are based on abstractions from perceptual experience of concrete objects.

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Is Experimental Philosophy Bad Science?

Jun 122013
 

Wikipedia tells us that Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is:

an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called “armchair” philosophy by experimental philosophers.

So what makes X-Phi experimental is the use of data rather than (presumably) data-less a priori reasoning. This is confusing. Even when employing ‘pure reason’, philosophers use data – if only the data of their senses, experience and consciousness. Would anyone deny that Descartes used data when he came up with the Cogito? That it was the data of his own experience doesn’t make it less valid qua data. Continue reading »

Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

Jun 092013
 
Santayana

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:47:42 — 98.7MB)

On George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896).

What are we saying when we call something “beautiful?” Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying “yay!” without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an immediate experience–we don’t “infer” the beauty of something by recognizing some natural qualities that it has–we can nonetheless analyze the experience after the fact to uncover a number of grounds on which we might appreciate something. He divides these into areas of matter (e.g. the pretty color or texture), form (the relations between perceived parts), and expression (what external to the work itself does it bring to mind?) and ends up being able to distinguish high art (form-centric) from more savage forms (centered on matter or expression) while distinguishing real appreciation (which can include any of the three elements) from mere pretension (when you don’t really have an immediate experience at all but merely recognize that you’re supposed to think that this is good).

The regular foursome talk through Santayana’s theory with regard to expressionist painting, rock ‘n roll, beautiful landscapes, abstract expressionism, and more. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “Sense of Beauty” by Mark Lint with help from some PEL listeners. Read about it.

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Come Join My Heraclitus Not School Group

Jun 092013
 

For Episode #79 (to be recorded in late June and released in July), we’ll be reading Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus and interviewing her about it. She was a colleague of Dylan’s at St. John’s, and her book exhibits that love of etymology that has come up recently on PEL whenever Heidegger is mentioned, for which St. John’s is notorious. This is pretty much what you have to do to talk about Heraclitus, as there are no surviving full texts by the guy. He’s just quoted by other ancient writers. You can view all of his fragments here along with where they were quoted, but Eva really goes all out to weave a narrative out of this, bringing in Pythagoras and others whose work she thinks Heraclitus was responding to. The “logos” is about meaning, about patterns: she sees Heraclitus as the first real philosopher of science, who noted that nature performs according to regularities and asked about the relation between that lawlike behavior and the regularities themselves.

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Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Sense of Beauty”/Call for Musicians

Jun 072013
 

Listen to “Sense of Beauty.”

Eventually, I’ll run out of songs to put at the end of episodes, so I’m trying to write some fresh tunes while actually reading the work in question. For ep. 77, I wrote this song that at least has the same title as the book we read.

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The Self and Selfishness (and Aesthetics and “The Fountainhead”)

Jun 022013
 

SelfishnessI’m continuing to try to get some Rand thoughts related to The Fountainhead out of my system so that I won’t feel the need to bring them up while on the episode devoted to her more straightforwardly philosophical works. I also feel the periodic need for synthesis, to try to recap some ongoing themes in our episodes in a way that would require an overly long monologue if I tried to do this on the podcast itself. We’ve had a number of episodes now that weigh in on the development of the self. What I’ve often called the naive view of self is that advocated by Hobbes, who claimed that everyone is selfish, that all actions proceed from selfish motives.

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Not School Fiction Group Reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Jun 012013
 

This May, PEL’s Not School Fiction Group read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men (which PEL covered) and The Road. Blood Meridian is a dark masterpiece set in 1849 where a runaway kid joins a gang of scalp-hunters led by the Judge, a philosophizing warmonger. The Judge’s views on existence come out in several stories and fire-side conversations about witness, will, and war, though if you want to hear him, there is plenty of violence between his sermons which makes the book notoriously hard to read. Not gratuitous violence, though, as Harold Bloom says, “The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate.”

Here, the kid sees the Judge enter a city in Mexico:
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Philosophy as “Literary” (or “Is the Sky So Very Big?”)

May 302013
 

Following up on my recent post skeptical of a strong formulation of the difference between philosophy and science, I’ve been thinking about the character of many philosophical claims, particularly in light of my current reading of Rand.

In addition to the readings for the podcast proper (which I’ll post about within the next week, but I can tell you right now that we’re covering these two books), I’ve been choking down as an audiobook The Fountainhead, the earlier (and shorter) of her two main novels; she wrote it in the late 30s/early 40s (published 1943) before Atlas Shrugged or her expository philosophical pieces.

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The Moral Uselessness of Moral Outrage

May 262013
 

8_2Andrew Sullivan has accused Glenn Greenwald of “justifying” terrorism for a post that is largely about the inconsistent use of the word “terrorism.” Greenwald’s response is a thorough and decisive debunking of Sullivan’s accusations, but I wanted add something as a follow-up to my discussion of Sullivan’s incoherence on these issues.  In this latest piece, he doubles down on the completely irrational notion that such incidents as the killing of a soldier in London are “terrorism in its most animal-like form, created and sustained entirely by religious fanaticism which would find any excuse to murder, destroy and oppress Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of God.” That’s my emphasis on the entirely by religious fanaticism clause, because I think it’s telling that Sullivan feels compelled to make such an unworkable generalization, despite hinting in the past that he is aware of the idea that any such act must the result of multiple causal factors working together.

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“Conceptual Primaries” (Rand vs. Deleuze)

May 242013
 

When I start responding to a comment on a previous post and find that my answer is getting longer than a paragraph, that means it’s time to either stop or to make a proper blog post out of it. This morning a newish (I guess) listener named Lewis posted a comment on a post I wrote last summer on “reason” as used by Ayn Rand and others. We’ll be covering Rand in episode #78, which we’ll be recording in less than two weeks. By that point, I should have my thoughts together; this is just some initial spitballing that I wouldn’t mind hearing some of your reactions to.

Objectivism identifies three “conceptually irreducible primaries” that are the stopping point of inquiry. They are supposed to be epistemically basic and sufficient to found (and they’re the only possible basis for founding) the rest of Rand’s system. This idea of unavoidable, basic starting points and a Descartes-like justification of a system runs directly counter to the picture that Deleuze gives of a multiplicity of possible planes of immanence each of which encourages a set of philosophical concepts. I say “encourages” because it doesn’t logically entail them, but is compatible with them and does contain the problems that the concepts are then designed by the philosopher to address. The analytic philosopher in me has trouble really understanding Deleuze’s picture, and it sure would be nice if instead something more like Rand’s (or Descartes’s, or Russell’s) picture with experientially and logically undeniable starting points were instead correct.

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Philosophy Doesn’t Make Propositions?

May 232013
 

No ClaimThere’s a claim I laid out from Deleuze in the episode that I wanted to bring up for explicit discussion. I think it’s provocative and deserves some thought but is almost certainly wrong.

It’s about the picture of science as producing concepts and not propositions. I gave the example of Descartes’s Cogito, and laid out a few of the apparent claims involved in that (the inference from thinking to a persistent subject doing the thinking, for one) that haven’t historically stood up to criticism very well. I said there that Deleuze would point to a case like that to demonstrate that when you extract conceptual features and make them into regular old propositions, they become “mere opinions” of no scientific value, and you get endless, largely fruitless debate. This is what makes many people just dismiss philosophy as a lot of hot air.

But of course you could just take the case to be demonstrating weaknesses specific to Descartes’s position. So I’d like to invite readers here to consider other cases that they have some recent familiarity with to see if the same holds up. Here’s an example from the top of my mind:

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Virtual Insanity: Social Media with Jacques Lacan

May 212013
 

Jacques Lacan draws[A post from Peter Hardy, longtime fan and contributor]

For a couple of years I have been lurking on PEL’s Facebook group, biding my time for the perfect moment to pounce on this blog.  Recently I got to thinking about the philosophical ramifications of social media. Especially as we’ve just been looking at Jacques Lacan, for whom a central concern was to highlight negative aspects of language and by extension, social interaction. Continue reading »

Topic for #77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

May 202013
 

On 5/16 the regular foursome recorded a discussion of The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana. What is “the beautiful?” Do we have a “sense” by which we grasp it comparable to what Hume describes as the moral sense?

Where most pre-Humean philosophers considered beauty an objective quality in objects that people then can grasp (think about Plato’s equation of the truly beautiful with the good, which can be grasped by someone in the right frame of mind), Hume thought that finding something beautiful was a natural phenomenon comparable to the sense of taste for food and drink. Santayana (who was also very familiar with Kant and Schopenhauer in this area) has a similarly naturalistic approach, but tries harder to be true to the experiences involved and so has a more complex theory.

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Virtually Attend the New People CD Release Party via YouTube

May 182013
 

The entirety of my band’s recent (3/23/13) CD Release Party is now posted on YouTube:


Watch on YouTube.

This combines footage from two stationary cameras plus a couple of iPhones that my friend Glenn walked around with. He did some editing to remove the dead air. The audio is open-air in the club, so it’s not stellar, but you can hear anything, and if your computer plugs into your stereo, you can crank your bass EQ to get a good representation of what it was like there.

The performance was probably our best, though some of the songs are really played substantially faster than I’d like. For somewhere between half and a third of the songs, this was our first time playing them in public, and our first gig in over a year regardless, so it went quite well given that.

-Mark Linsenmayer

On Daniel Coffeen, Rhetoric, Deleuze and Such

May 172013
 

Daniel in his native habitat

[editors note:  Daniel was our guest on the Deleuze episode recently and will be posting a bit in our blog over the next couple of weeks]

Since I discovered Deleuze in grad school, he has pervaded in various ways my teaching, writing and thinking. My dissertation proffered a model of rhetoric and specifically the trope; its final chapter focused on Deleuze.

And so when I began teaching the Intro to Rhetoric at at UC Berkeley (where I also earned my doctorate), I delivered a highly Deleuzian view of rhetoric (even though we never read Deleuze in that course —an intro lecture is no place for Deleuze). The texts included Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” JL Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, Nietzsche’s “On Truth & Lie” and Plato’s Phaedrus.  I taught that for the sophist a text is never right or wrong, true or false. It’s our job as readers to maximize what’s interesting in a text, to articulate its performance (not just what it says but how it says). This, alas, is how Deleuze and Guattari argue we should assess philosophical concepts: Not whether they are true but whether they are interesting, remarkable and important. Continue reading »

Intro Philosophy Readings: Beyond 101

May 162013
 

Not School[Editor's Note: Hillary S. has been good enough to lead the Not School "Introductory Readings in Philosophy Group" earlier this year and then again this month, and will be doing so again for June, so we asked her to write a little something about it. Maybe you might want to join up?]

Introduction classes, done university style, tend to be selling plugs for the subject as a whole. In true Not School style, our Intros are a bit different. I was very excited by the response to my first class featuring Common Sense (Thomas Paine). It worked as a wonderful platform to dig in to political theory, exploring philosophy from the inside out. Trashing Celebrating the theory, function and design of that piece led to an exploration of common philosophical categories and terms, and a discussion of the key elements in developing our own personal philosophies.

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Episode 76: Deleuze on What Philosophy Is

May 142013
 
Deleuze

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:10:55 — 119.9MB)

On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1991).

How is philosophy different from science and art? What’s the relationship between different philosophies? Is better pursued solo, or in a group? Deleuze described philosophy as the creation of new concepts, whereas science is about functions that map observed regularities and art is about creating percepts and affects. Just reading or writing about past philosophers is not enough; you have to actually create concepts, and to create or understand a concept requires a “plane of immanence,” which is something like a set of background intuitions that is not private to a particular mind. Such a plane constitutes an image of what thought is and determines what questions will be considered legitimate, so trying to evaluate a past philosophy without grappling with the plane means you’ll inevitably misunderstand the philosopher and your critiques will just talk past him or her. Likewise, if you yank a philosophical concept out of its plane and try to turn it into a proposition that you can evaluate, it’s inevitably going to seem weak, like “just an opinion,” because propositions are not what philosophy creates. As for a pragmatist, “truth” for Deleuze is something defined within a plane, not some transcendental standard used to judge planes or concepts.

Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by “sophist” (PhD in rhetoric) Daniel Coffeen to try to figure this out. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “Tolerated” by New People, the new album Might Get It Right. Read about it.

Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate to help support our efforts. A recurring donation will gain you all the benefits of PEL Citizenship, including another Deleuze discussion.

David Bordwell Shows How Critics “Make Meaning” Out of Films

May 132013
 

When we interpret a text, are we uncovering a hidden meaning? Or are we imposing a meaning from the outside? Film scholar David Bordwell’s book Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema confronts this question head on in a rigorous and analytical way. His chief question is: how are interpretations made? Although on the granular level the book deals with issues specific to cinema, its broader arguments (the ones I’ll be focusing on here) are more or less equally applicable to literary interpretation.

Bordwell is first and foremost a historian of film, and so his book takes a historical approach. Looking at both intellectual and social factors, he charts how and why various interpretative methods fell in and out of fashion at the times they did. But he is also a cognitivist, and he organizes his study not chronologically, but rather as a sort of taxonomy of the mental tools that critics use to find patterns, draw analogies, and build interpretations.

He starts by challenging the language we employ when talking about interpretation. We may talk of “uncovering” or “pulling out” meaning. Or we may even make analogy with archaeology, treating a text “as having strata, with layers or deposits of meaning that must be excavated.” Bordwell thinks this way of talking obscures what interpretation actually does. Interpretation is a process of building up, not digging in. “Meanings are not found but made.”
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