quick summary

It’s off to dinner north of the river on my last night in Dublin, but just to give a few quick pointers…

Nice serious group today with a good, focused discussion that made me realize why I really wish I were doing an invited lecture every single week. It keeps the brain sharp.

This discussion was an extension of some of last year’s LSE discussions, in the sense that we talked about what the practical consequences would be of an object-oriented approach as opposed to an ANT relational sort of approach.

My immediate response is still the same… I think ANT is better equipped to do analysis after the fact, but has a harder time with counterfactuals, since it’s not especially well-equipped to ask questions like “what sort of physicist might Pasteur have been?” or “what might Pasteur have done if he had lived in the 1500’s”, the sorts of questions that I think are not just carnival novelties, but pretty close to the heart of what the intellect does. We most often do this unconsciously, such as when getting initial “reads” on new people we meet. In no way do we make a simple list of known actions, facial expressions, and sentences emanating from a person and then sum it all up. No, we try to read behind all this surface information and gain a sense of the style of the person.

But more generally, I tried to make a point about method and about philosophy as an anti-method. A method is a useful oversimplification that is often quite fruitful, such as saying “an object is nothing more than its mass, velocity, and current position in space-time” or “a thing is nothing more than its effects on other things,” the latter formulation being roughly what Latour’s version of ANT is all about. But I would argue that philosophy needs to be the anti-method, resisting all such simplifications as much as possible. Indeed, I think this is the central lesson taught to us by the career of Heidegger and his critique of Vorhandenheit.

All right, dinner… still one of several possibilities for that. Just whipping through London tomorrow afternoon briefly and won’t see any of you there. See you in Bristol, though. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.