Posts Tagged philosophy blog
Is It Really Philosophy? (Are You an Ass for Asking?)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on March 28, 2012
In this post brought to my attention by our commenter DMF in light of our race episode, Kristie Dotson of Michigan State University attacks the question that one might ask when reading DuBois, for instance: Is this really philosophy?
The question, how is this paper philosophy, is a poorly formulated question. At best, when asked in good faith, the question could in fact be one of several questions. At worst, when asked with ill will, the question indicates pernicious ignorance in the asker. Either it is a well-intentioned, problematic question or a poorly intended, bad question…
Stokely Carmichael’s Sartrean Influences
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on March 26, 2012
One of the names dropped during the Race and Philosophy episode was that of Stokely Carmichael. Below is a famous recording of one Carmichael’s “Black Power” speeches, given after Carmichael was appointed Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC:
Elizabeth Brake on Minimizing Marriage
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on March 25, 2012
[Note: This post was requested by Laura, one of our big-spendin' financial supporters. While making a donation through this site will not guarantee that we'll read/write about something you request, greasin' the wheels won't hurt.]
I’ve used the gay marriage issue as an example of a prototypical example of progressive morality: something that we should have realized (as a society) was perfectly fine a priori, but which it’s taken us a lot of growing up to accept. A good moral theory, of course, should allow us to call these cases far before they’re trendy, and feminist philosopher Elizabeth Brake argues in Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law
…Marriage should be demoralized—that it does not have a sui generis moral status or a transformative moral power. …The great social and legal importance accorded marriage and marriage-like relationships is unjustified, and that this privilege harms, sometimes unjustly, those not oriented towards monogamous, central relationships. Those harmed include members of multiple significant overlapping friendships such as adult care networks or urban tribes, the asexual and solitudinous, and the polyamorous. …A truly politically liberal law of marriage would expand the legal category of marriage in surprising ways, minimizing special restrictions on entry, exit, and what transpires between.
The Karaoke Dilemma: A White Guy Wants to Sing His Favorite Hip-Hop Songs
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on March 23, 2012
@BusaBusss
So I’m the kind of guy that pays attention to the words of songs and a large part of my enjoyment of music is knowing lyrics and singing. So much so that I am practically always on call for Karaoke, particularly when it’s Karaoke Apocalypse (greatest thing since the Redskins won the Super Bowl – for the record I own I Want You to Want Me). I can remember all the words to Billy Bragg and Smiths’ songs if first heard 25+ years ago. I sing in the car and hum songs to myself to enhance or change my mood.
So after the recent race episode, where once again it was established that white guys cannot appropriate the *n*-word, I was corresponding with Law about hip-hop on Facebook. My main goal was to get some street cred with him, but it occurred to me that my experience of hip-hop has been largely solitary rather than social like my experience with pretty much every other kind of music. I’ll happily serenade my friends or family with some REM, Black Sabbath, Cage the Elephant or whatever, but not Busta Rhymes. Read the rest of this entry »
More Things to Read Regarding Race and Philosophy
Political philosophy through the prism of Black-American thinkers: Tommie Shelby is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Harvard university. In this text, he examines the political thought of black thinkers to arrive at a philosophical articulation of black solidarity. This is a great text to examine if one is interested in understanding black philosophical thinking about politics.
Womanist Perspective on Race: Womanism is concerned with what Bell Hooks calls the “unholy trinity of sexism, class, and race.” Womanists argue that feminists should focus on sex and class, but they must not forget the ill of racism. This is a seminal text in the Womanist tradition.
-Law
Things to Read: Philosophy of Race and the Social Contract
In this text, Charles W. Mills argues that social contract theory has racist underpinnings. While his argument is not completely persuasive, this is an intriguing take on the theory.
-Law
A Full Course of African-American History from Stanford: Clayborne Carson
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on March 20, 2012
Here’s that Stanford African-American Freedom Struggle course I referred to several times during the episode by Clayborne Carson. iTunes U link.
It’s really an excellent course, with maybe 2 and a half lectures on DuBois covering his (long) life, starting with this one:
Watch the introductory DuBois lecture on youtube.
Carson’s lecture on MLK is great; you can see him respond to the plagiarism issue, talk about King’s theology, and more. For more King, don’t miss the later ones by Vincent Harding and Clarence Jones, who worked directly with King. Other lectures fill the historical gaps between DuBois and MLK, and this course is one of the few (Carson says) that goes up to modern times, with episodes on Tupac and Obama (as he was running in the primary for the 2008 election).
-Mark Linsenmayer
Spirituality Without Religion? (James and Flanagan)
Posted by David Buchanan in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on March 16, 2012
In the same way that Owen Flanagan wants to naturalize Buddhism by stripping its hocus-pocus, William James focused his attention on personal religious experience rather than the “smells and bells” of traditional institutions. As biographer Robert Richardson puts it, “much of what one usually thinks of as religion James rejects at the start”. James says he has no interest in the, “ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation and retain by habit.” James says he wants to confine himself to “personal religions pure and simple” and say as little as possible about systematic theology or institutional history. The latter are second-hand religions, but he wants to look at the original article. As one might imagine, Richardson says, “James continues to be attacked by church leaders and systematic theologians for his failure to start where they start.” James’s biographer tells us that this approach to the psychology of religion was a “radical departure, more radical even than that of Friedrich Schleiermacher.”
On What Matters–A Recommendation
[Editor's Note: Lawrence Ware is the guest on our not-yet-posted episode on race, but he's been eager enough about blogging here that we're not going to make you wait to hear from him until the episode is up... at least on topics not related to that episode like this one.]
Derek Parfit is one of the most important ethicists of our time. I’m sure that his Reasons and Persons
It appears that the best was yet to come. On What Matters
The book is very long—but, as Peter Singer states in his review, one could just read the first 400 pages and walk away with the gist of Parfit’s argument. This is necessary reading for anyone interested in ethics. Highly recommended.
-Law Ware
Dear Philosophers, Please Get Over your Science Envy Now
Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on March 5, 2012
Colin McGinn (a philosopher whose work on the philosophy of mind I have admired) has published an embarrassing piece in the Philosopher’s Stone that is at the same time a plea for others to take philosophy seriously and a case in point as to why many don’t. He proposes to rename the field of philosophy “ontics” and reclassify it as a science rather than part of the humanities. He justifies this proposal by making the case that philosophy is a science by the following standards: “the subject is systematic, rigorous, replete with technical vocabulary, often in conflict with common sense, capable of refutation, produces hypotheses, uses symbolic notation, is about the natural world, is institutionalized, peer-reviewed, tenure-granting, etc. We may as well recognize that we are a science, even if not one that makes empirical observations or uses much mathematics.” He goes on to reduce “humanities” to its dictionary definition, “studies of human culture,” and argue that philosophical sub-specialties are not studies of human culture.
This is a laughable replacement of wordplay for argument that might have the average reader believing that philosophy should simply be renamed “Semantics.”
Zizek and Adorno: The Function of the Popular?
Posted by C. Derick Varn in Things to Watch on March 5, 2012
[Editor's Note: We welcome Derick from our semiotics episode You can read more of him on his blog.]
With Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanized form of Hegelian Marxism being all the rage these days, it is interesting to look at the Frankfurt School’s earlier Freudian version of the Hegelian Marxism. One can wonder why the specter Hegel of looms in a discussion of popular music by two Marxist of entirely different time periods?
There is a certain kind of embrace of popular culture in Zizek that is absolutely abhorred by Theodor Adorno, and yet both Zizek and Adorno see a relationship between the strange way protest music functions in general society works and its supposed function as a check for governmental or social aggression.
Thumos, Dogs, and Authority
Posted by Dylan Casey in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on March 4, 2012
Socrates famously calls dogs “philosophical animals” in Plato’s Republic. In this vein, a friend of mine, Gary Borjesson, has a book coming out that’s in large part a philosophical meditation on our relationship with dogs and the nature of friendship. I’ll get to posting about the book itself this summer, but he had a nice conversation with KMO of the C-Realm Podcast not too long ago that’s worth a listen. Midway through he has a nice discussion of thumos (or “spiritednesss”) and the Socrates’ tripartite soul which we never did get to in our discussion of the Republic. (Maybe next time; it is a long book.) There’s also a nice bit about understanding our own authority and its proper use.
-Dylan
Rick Roderick on Derrida
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on March 4, 2012
For anyone still trying to sort Derrida out, here’s a hopefully helpful attempt at explication from Rick Roderick. I liked Roderick’s approach in directly opposing Derrida’s theory to the “Theory of Reference.” This is an allusion to Gottlob Frege, who was discussed in an earlier PEL episode.
I found it impossible to follow Roderick’s argument toward the end of the lecture, until I tracked down the Derrida essay to which he was referring, White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. (After you open the online PDF file, do an on-screen text search for “The breath is seated,” and you’ll find the relevant passage.)
-Daniel Horne
55 Online Philosophy Courses (via OpenCulture)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on March 2, 2012
Openculture.com has expanded its listing of philosophy courses.
If you listen through one of them, I’d be happy to pass on your review of it through this blog.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” Dissection, Part I
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on February 29, 2012
Yesterday I started trying to record a “Close Reading” on the Derrida essay we read for the podcast, and I just couldn’t get more than a few sentences into it before losing patience, so I thought I’d either as a substitution for that effort or possibly a warm-up do a few posts dissecting the essay here. I want this to be group effort, so you folks should comment here to help out my interpretations.
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term “event” anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.
Paul Fry (Yale) on Levi-Strauss (and the rest of ‘em)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Things to Watch on February 26, 2012
On the podcast both Derick and I made some references to Paul Fry’s literary theory course, which includes lectures on Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida.
It’s a much longer course, of course, so you can get ahead of us to get a handle on the dreaded Lacan, or see what Fry has to say on feminism and African-American criticism. The individual lecture pages linked above even have links to specific points within the videos, so you can jump right to, say, his comments on “langue” and “parole,” which were less than clear during our presentation. You also have the option to download audio or a transcript, and can get the lectures on iTunes U as well.
At 17:33 into lecture 9, Fry gives a more lengthy treatment of Levi-Strauss’s treatment of the Oedipus myth, explaining the different columns on his chart (though, he doesn’t draw this on the board; you can see it here).
Watch on YouTube.
He thinks Levi-Strauss’s treatment is pretty good in that you can even put some of the events from the story into these categories that Levi-Strauss doesn’t bring up. The examples he gives, though, make it sound like Batman logic: the letter “lambda” that starts many of the names in Oedipus’s genealogy looks like someone walking with a limp, which is related to the meaning of Oedipus’s name (“swelled foot”), which is in turn related to having a foot of clay, which is a thematic way of expressing autocthony, i.e. being born from the earth. Whatever, man.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Process Philosophy Explained
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on February 21, 2012
Thanks to Burl for including this link in a comment on this blog:
Watch on YouTube.
It’s an interesting take on energy here: energy being just a relationship between entities. So heat is the motion of particles, but what is this “motion” other than the fact that the relations between the particles changes in a lawlike way? The alternative might be that the heat is what makes the particles do this. This dispute seems to me very much like that about gravity: is gravity a force acting on things, or just a characterization of certain behaviors?
Lila Notes, Pt. 5: Pirsig, Philosophology, and Crankism
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on February 20, 2012
To wrap up my thoughts on this subject: Probably the most interesting part of this Pirsig immersion experience for me has been thinking about his stance as a lone philosopher, rebelling against academia.
Like Ayn Rand’s, much of Pirsig’s attitude towards academia seems to be a direct result of some assholes he had to deal with in school: arrogant professors, sheeplike fellow students, and colleagues who had definite ideas about inquiry that seemed to rule out what he was interested in. As a result, some of what he has to say seems reactive and bitter, and really won’t apply to your experience, unless you read him so repeatedly that you accept his picture of his status quo as an accurate representation of the philosophy profession as a whole today, which it’s just not.
For instance, you might think that, say, Kant was so revered that no one challenged his notion of a thing-in-itself for 150 years until Pirsig, but that’s really a pretty terrible take on the history, given that Hegel and Fichte challenged this immediately, during Kant’s lifetime even, and this strain then dominated most of continental philosophy (it’s particularly blatant in Heidegger). This is hardly just a historical quibble; however valuable you may find Pirsig, your perspective on him will change completely if you read him not as a lone thinker but as giving his own modern articulation of ideas that are the common property of whole trends in history. In some ways, his formulations were fresh and unique; in others, they were a hastily sketched retread of things he’d read, and would have been much improved if he’d read more. Read the rest of this entry »
Lila Notes, Pt. 4: Pirsig Solves All Philosophical Problems in Five Pages
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on February 18, 2012
If my notes here have gotten a bit dismissive sounding, it’s largely to provide a counterweight to Dave’s discipleship. This is not to diss Dave (or Bo or other Pirsig fans posting on our board here), but my approach, and the approach I see in enthusiasts like Katie re. Foucault or Matt Evans did for Plato is yes, to try to figure how out to charitably elaborate and defend the view, but perhaps moreso to independently parse and critically appraise it: you pick it apart, test the limits, and see what remains. (Again, this is not to diss Dave, who I’m sure is seeing his role here as sharing his enthusiasm and trying to get more folks interested in Pirsig.)
While of course you want to get out of a reading every bit of richness you can (so as to make it worth your time to have read it), I’m extremely suspicious of anyone who focuses too exclusively on any one philosopher (for non-professional reasons; if you’re a Kant scholar, than of course you have some reason to get obsessed, though of course to be a good Kant scholar you’d need to really know your Hume and Leibniz and many others), whether it be Marx or Ayn Rand or Jesus or whomever. Genius is overrated… even great thinkers steal 90% of their ideas from their predecessors and contemporaries, and don’t necessary end up with the greatest versions of these ideas. The progress of ideas makes any one thinker to some extent instantly obsolete. Pirsig provides a fine model of a very smart guy thinking through things deeply to come to his own conclusions, but don’t think for a second that he invented the idea of overcoming subject-object dualism, which is one of dozen or so major themes pervading philosophical history in the 20th century (see Heidegger, for one, though arguably he was just following on to Hegel), and Pirsig’s account, taking up a whole two books of musings totaling something like 100 pages when you get rid of all the travelogue stuff, is just not going to be the most developed and comprehensive take on this however you slice it.
OK, enough with the general cautionary words to keep perspective, which no one in need of them is likely to listen to anyway. I wanted to recount here a part of Lila that struck me as a particularly stark example of casual overreach: pages 152 to 157. Here he explains how denying subject-object metaphysics solves a whole mass of traditional philosophical problems.
Pure Experience and Dynamic Quality
Posted by David Buchanan in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on February 16, 2012
William James’ pure experience, the central idea in his radical empiricism,
The most common objection is to simply to deny that there is any such thing as pure experience. “All awareness is a linguistic affair” or “it’s text all the way down”. Even our basic sensory perceptions are structured by concepts or categories of thought we inherit from language. There is no way to peel back the human contribution, they say. These slogans represent perfectly good objections against positivism, against traditional sense-data empiricism and against the kind of phenomenology that sought the pure essence of things. These objections rightly push back against any claim that says we can gain direct, untainted access to objective reality or somehow peel back our own subjectivity to get at the things-in-themselves. When educated critics hear phrases like “pure experience” and “pre-intellectual experience” or sometimes even just the word “empiricism”, lessons from thinkers like Sellars (or Quine) spring to mind and immediately there are flags down all over the field. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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