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In the comments to my previous post on clarity, a number of good points were made, especially about the relevance of teaching and teachers. It seems to me that we need to emphasize more seriously the relationship between philosophy and pedagogy, and I don’t just mean the educational institutions and the threats they are under in terms of public funding, their corporatization, etc. (although these are certainly important and relevant points), but rather I mean the essential relationship between philosophy and pedagogy itself. One of the consequences of the German university reforms of the early nineteenth century was that it resulted in a split between teaching and research. This split is manifest in our very academic institutions, as we academics know all too well. We have the research one institutions where there is a reduced teaching load and where much of the teaching and student contact hours is transferred to graduate students, and then there are the universities that emphasize teaching, and where teaching loads are such that it is not expected that one would be able to produce the same type of research as a colleague at a research one institution. But even at the teaching institutions (and I teach at one of these) the split is still apparent and is integral to tenure and promotion decisions, for example, or it is reflected simply in the general attitude of professor themselves, many of whom would rather be researching than grading exams and papers.

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When I first heard Brian Eno’s album Another Green World I found the rhythms and musical textures so odd and disconcerting that I felt like jumping from my friend’s car. In time, however, this became one of my favorite albums, one I would listen to again and again, and I soon came to recognize why many consider Eno to be a musical genius. What happened here? Now you could say I became familiar with Eno’s music and that I began to see an inner logic, a musical sense, that first escaped my notice. But to get to this point required repeated listenings. What did I become familiar with? And what were the disconcerting layers that needed to be worked through to reveal the inner logic and sense? Hume’s answer to this question is that with repeated experience I became increasingly sensitive to differences and patterns that were initially experienced as a muddled, confused mess. With a developed and refined ‘delicacy’ of taste and imagination, Hume argues that one’s taste can be affected by subtle differences that are missed by others for whom what is present is ‘all mixed up with other such qualities, so that one can’t pick out all the particular flavours from the jumble in which they are presented.’ There are thus qualities in the work of art, according to Hume, that prompts pleasant feelings, feelings that may, on many occasions, only be accessible to one with finely tuned perceptual capacities – in short, to one that has the power to be affected by this music, a power others may lack.

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The paradox of expressibility is quite simple – it involves saying what cannot be said. For Priest, much of twentieth-century philosophy, and especially the best of twentieth-century philosophy, the philosophy and philosophers that have truly plumbed the depths and limits of expression, has for this very reason ended up within Read more…

In Mind and World McDowell describes Gareth Evans’s ‘master thought’ as follows:

Frege’s notion of sense, which Frege introduces in terms of modes of presentation, can accommodate the sorts of connection between thinkers and particular objects that have been recognized to make trouble for the generalized Theory of Descriptions. 106.

A consequence of this ‘master thought,’ as McDowell reads Evans, is that ‘the right gloss on “conceptual” is not “predicative” but “belonging to the realm of Fregean sense”.’ I agree that this point is extremely important. In the appendix to Mind and World, McDowell offers clarification that draws out the importance I see in the implications of Evans’s ‘master thought’. McDowell there argues that ‘The realm of sense (Sinn) contains thoughts in the sense of what can be thought (thinkables) as opposed to acts or episodes of thinking.’ Up to this point the Fregean theory of sense is much in line with Husserl’s theory of the noema. The noema as Husserl understands it, including the perceptual noema as I argue in The Problem of Difference, is not to be confused with ‘acts or episodes of thinking,’ including perceptual acts, nor is it to be confused with the objects that are thought about, the objects that consciousness is consciousness of to stick with the Husserlian way of putting it. Deleuze himself will stress this Husserlian theory of sense, noting how the noema is neutral with respect to subjective acts on the one hand and states of affairs in the world on the other; moreover, as Deleuze will go on to point out, it is precisely the noema that makes possible the relationship between subjective acts and the world, it is what puts them into relationship with one another, or as Deleuze will also put it: it is the relationship that is external to the terms. Graham Harman has rightly stressed this aspect of Husserl’s thought, and in his hands he extends Husserl’s understanding of the noema as a noematic correlate or object in order to explain how withdrawn objects can come into communication with one another – they do so by way of another object, e.g., the noema. McDowell’s reading of Evans’s ‘master thought’ is much in line with this Husserlian point; however, as McDowell goes on the problematic reading of Frege occurs when sense is taken to be an object, and here McDowell would break sharply from the Husserlian account, as does Deleuze for whom sense is not an object but an event (more on this below). For McDowell ‘objects belong in the realm of reference (Bedeutung), not the realm of sense,’ for it is only in the realm of sense where, on McDowell’s Fregean view, ‘thought and reality meet.’

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Focused as I have been on issues in continental thought, I have not read as much in the analytic tradition as I should, and hence I am often late to books I probably should have read a long time ago. This is the case with John McDowell’s Mind and World. Read more…

One does not have to do more than a cursory review of intellectual history to find intellectual bifurcations everywhere. There’s nominalism vs. realism, rationalism vs. empiricism, analytic vs. continental, and so on. Earlier this month at the Claremont Conference Steven Shaviro nicely articulated the bifurcation between his position and Graham Harman’s. Whereas the problem for Harman is how objects can enter into contact and communication with one another, a problem he solves with his notions of vicarious causation and allure, the problem for Shaviro is one of how to break free from the incessant web of contacts and relations, how to get some elbow room as Shaviro put it (citing Whitehead). In Priest’s book in contradiction, which I discussed here in yesterday’s post, he highlights the early modern bifurcation between the continuous and the discrete (a bifurcation that of course predates early modern thought and is not exclusive to the western tradition). Priest signals Leibniz and Hume as emblematic of this bifurcation. In a response Leibniz wrote to a letter of Malebranche, Malebranche arguing for his occasionalist position (that is, coming down in favor of the discrete), Leibniz puts forth what Priest calls the “Leibniz Continuity Condition.” Citing Leibniz:

When the difference between two instances in a given series or that which is presupposed can be diminished until it becomes smaller than any given quantity whatever, the corresponding difference in what is sought or in their results must of necessity also be diminished or become less than any given quantity whatever. Or to put it more commonly, when two instances or data approach each other continuously, so that one at last passes over into the other, it is necessary for their consequences or results (or the unknown) to do so also).

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Following up on my earlier post and Skholiast’s helpful comment and post, along with Timothy Morton’s own comments and posts, I’ve been thinking through numerous issues and will post a few tentative thoughts, more for the sake of dialogue and/or further thought rather than to achieve any sort of resolution Read more…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feh3wPk3oCo Having taught Nagarjuna recently in my intellectual history class, I’ve begun rethinking the non-dualist approaches of Hindu and Buddhist thought, connecting this in turn to the work of Graham Priest and Deleuze. In this context I’ve finally taken the time to read Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a Read more…

Over at the NPR group blog, Stuart Kauffman has an excellent response to Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that there are two non-overlapping magesteria–science and religion. Kauffman’s critique of natural law as a sufficient basis for understanding evolution argument Meillassoux’s argument concerning necessity. As Meillassoux argues that regularities bring about necessity Read more…

I’d like to add my favorite underappreciated philosopher to the list (as has been done here and here): Seneca. Seneca’s very underappreciation has become a source of his newly found appreciation (as was discussed in a Times Literary Supplement piece a few months back), and so maybe I’ll soon be Read more…