When all is said and done, on Matthew Stewart’s reading of the Spinoza-Leibniz encounter in The Courtier and the Heretic, Leibniz’s philosophy is a reactive philosophy – a philosophy founded on not being Spinoza’s philosophy rather than being a philosophy that Read more…
A standard reading of modern political theory, or one could arguably say the standard reading, lays the greatest emphasis upon the state of nature theories and their attendant arguments concerning the social contract. Beginning with Hobbes, this standard reading continues on through Locke and Rousseau, emphasizing along the way the influence of Locke upon Jefferson. Given the revolutions of the late 18th century, especially in light of the social contract justifications given by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, it is perhaps not surprising that this has become the standard reading.
What I would like to argue is that it is precisely the importance of the social contract theorists for the intellectuals who sought a justificatory ground for revolution that has resulted in the great stress that has been laid upon this aspect of modern political theory. Lurking beneath this standard reading of political theory we can find a deeper tension at play, and a tension that provides for a more comprehensive and illuminating account of political and economic processes as they have actually unfolded since the late 17th century. This is the tension between the thought of Spinoza and Leibniz.
Teaching American philosophy this semester has given me an opportunity to revisit the texts of Peirce. I’ve long drawn great intellectual sustenance from Peirce’s thought, using some of his concepts for example as part of a general critique of Badiou in an essay I published a few years back in the Southern Journal of Philosophy. But I’ve not read Peirce recently and in the interim I’ve been delving into speculative realism, Latour, Hume, and a number of other areas not directly connected to Peirce. It therefore came as a pleasant surprise to come across this passage from “Synechism, Fallibilism, and Evolution”:
If all things are continuous, the universe must be undergoing a continuous growth from non-existence to existence. There is no difficulty in conceiving existence as a matter of degree. The reality of things consists in their persistent forcing themselves upon our recognition. If a thing has no such persistence, it is a mere dream. Reality, then, is persistence, is regularity.
In his excellent book, Before Logic, Richard Mason (who also has a nice book on Spinoza, The God of Spinoza) argues that problems in logic as logicians understand them, and as they attempt to resolve them, are themselves consequences of particular choices, choices that exclude options that might have been on the table had another choice been made. Mason is quite adamant that this does not involve historicizing logic, nor does he adhere to an ahistorical view of logic. The arguments of Mason’s small book are all ‘intended,’ as he claims in the final lines of his book, ‘to show how logic must be part of philosophy, not in any sense before it. Too much must come first.’ And some of what comes first are particular interests and choices that set the stage for the logical developments to follow. One such choice is between Spinoza and Leibniz.
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.
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.
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 Read more…
The work of Graham Priest and Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari) converge in significant ways on the concept of the nondenumerable.
Turning to Priest first, and to his Beyond the Limits of Thought especially, one finds in this book an interesting history of philosophy, and one with a particular narrative at work; namely, he uncovers numerous contradictions that are encountered as certain unthinkable limits to thought become the subject of thought itself (e.g., primary substance for Aristotle, God for Cusanus, the noumenon for Kant, among other examples). In the history of thought prior to Hegel, according to Priest, these contradictions were largely denied, primarily through a denial of the very limits that gave rise to them. But with Hegel there is an open recognition and affirmation of the contradictory nature of the limits of thought. It is for this reason that Priest claims that the ‘chapter on Hegel [in Beyond the Limits of Thought] is therefore the lynch-pin of the book.’ (7).
In the first paragraph of his Beyond the Limits of Thought, Graham Priest notes that we have long speculated about limits, limits that may be unknown but are known to be there nonetheless. ‘For example,’ Priest claims, ‘we can only guess what the limit time for running a mile is; but we know that there is a limit, set by the velocity of light, if not by many more mundane things.’ For the longest time, the 4-minute mile was thought to be such a limit time. From 1852 to 1954 race times slowly crept down from 4:28 to 4:01.3 by Gunder Hagg in 1945. It was nearly 10 years later when, on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran a time of 3:59.4. Here’s the race, with commentary by Bannister.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWqwi6FcyH8
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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