Eva von Dassow clearly articulates the academic reality of the humanities today. I would imagine that as a professor of classical and Near Eastern studies her discipline is on the potential list of programs to be cut. Regardless, what she says about the plight of U of Minn could be Read more…
To treat Spinoza’s understanding of substance and how substance in turn relates to the attributes, God, and the modes, is far beyond the scope of a single post – perhaps even an entire manuscript – but a few suggestions will be offered that follow through on arguments made in previous Read more…
22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America. Although this link doesn’t do much more for me than to validate what I already know, it nicely puts all the stats into one spot so that I can come back to them. Not Read more…
In the next few posts I’d like to develop a few arguments concerning Spinoza’s method, hence the title of this post, then move on to Spinoza’s notion of substance as a radical aberrant monism, and finally touch upon the third kind of knowledge as the solution to the problems with Read more…
In his account of necessity David Lewis proposes that given two worlds that are exactly alike at time1, W and W*, and in which the same natural laws apply, then at any later time these two worlds will continue to be exactly alike. As a good Humean, however, Lewis encountered Read more…
Before moving on to work on Spinoza and the concept of aberrant monism, I want to add one more post on Latour. I hope that between this and previous posts there may emerge a relatively coherent picture of my reading of Latour. I also hope to indicate how Latour’s thought Read more…
Harman responded quite quickly to my post and I just want to add a few things that I perhaps should have added in the initial post (I’m new to blogging – I suppose it’s obvious now). First, my post was intended to be a praise for and attempt to think Read more…
As most know, especially those who would be reading this post in the first place, interest in Latour has increased dramatically. No longer the eccentric novelty of being an anthropologist working at the Salk Institute and carving out a niche that came to be known as science studies (which in Read more…
In reading through Steven Nadler’s nice introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics I was reminded of how dangerous Spinoza’s thought was taken to be at the time. Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment also drives this point home. Spinoza himself was excommunicated from his church before he had even published a word, an unprecedented Read more…
In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour adopts a cartographic metaphor to explain the stabilization of the Nature-Society duality from unstable events, or the trajectory from A” to D” marks, as Latour puts it, ‘the gradient that registers variations in the stability of entities from event to essence.’ (p. 85). Read more…