wasted trip, but had to try

Wasted two-hour round-trip to the new campus this evening in quest of Prince of Networks, but it wasn’t there yet. I give up, and will wait for Ian Bogost to bring me a copy from Atlanta as he kindly promised. I’ll post about his books again in the next day or so. They are about videogames, which he designs, and about which he is a world authority, but the first two books are also literate philosophical treatises. I’ll do a post and link to them all before he arrives for his Microsoft event. This was lucky timing, and I will be meeting both him and my own book for the first time in the same instant, and you all know I love quirky little coincidences of this sort.

But as for the trip to campus… It wasn’t completely a waste, because it’s so breezy and beautiful out there at night, especially when it’s largely deserted as was the case this evening. But there’s no question, it’s pretty far from central Cairo. I could have been in downtown Alexandria in as much time as it took me to get to my office and back.

great geo-engineering article

In April I gave a horrified report of James Lovelock’s terrifying lecture in Dublin on climate change.

So, I should also post another perspective– the idea that the use of geoengineering to reverse climate change might actually be too cheap and easy.

See Graeme Wood’s wonderfully presented piece in the Atlantic Monthly.

I’d heard of a couple of these ideas before, but this piece is filled with surprises. Wood is an occasional reader of this blog, by the way. He spent a year in Cairo and I got to know him a bit then. He’s a Harvard philosophy graduate from Canada, and at over a decade younger than I am, he’s still about 40 countries ahead of me on the travel front.

“Give me half a tanker of iron,” Martin said, “and I’ll give you the next Ice Age.” If Martin’s ideas are sound, Climos could in effect become the world’s gardener by seeding Antarctic waters with iron and creating vast, rapidly growing offshore forests to replace the ones that no longer exist on land.

the market’s priorities

With the latest drift of the tides, Prince of Networks is now #15 in Amazon’s metaphysics list. But here is #19:

The Attraction Distraction: Why the Law of Attraction Isn’t Working for You and How to Get Results – FINALLY! by Sonia M. Miller (Author)

Glad to see the market get its priorities straight. First figure out the metaphysics of actors, and then, maybe, you’ll understand the law of attraction.

good food cooking at Levi’s place

He may be “stoked” about Prince of Networks (and I think he’s right that it’s my best book so far, which I suppose is a good sign– I’d hate to be regressing since 2002).

But I’m even more stoked about this word concerning Levi’s new book-in-progress:

“For the part on endo-relations or endo-consistency, I am planning on reworking Deleuze, DeLanda’s, and Protevi’s work on the virtual, manifolds/multiplicities, attractors, and emergent systems in terms of Zubiri’s account of individual essence.”

A Zubirian account of attractors is, I think, worth living another couple of years just to read.

We’ll have to see how far Zubiri goes, but if I were writing good science fiction about continental philosophy in the year 2025, I’d probably put Zubiri at the center of it. Lots of good would come from that. HERE IS A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF HIS WORK.

In case you just walked in on the middle of this Zubiri discussion… I got into Xavier Zubiri purely by accident. I happened to be a huge fan of José Ortega y Gasset even before I was a fan of Heidegger (there are some similarities, but Ortega is a spectacular stylist, indeed a perennial if failed candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature). In that way, I started reading around the fringes of early 20th century Spanish philosophy a bit, and that’s how I came to purchase and (much later) actually read Zubiri’s On Essence.

YOU CAN FIND AFFORDABLE USED COPIES HERE.

The style will take some getting used to for many. Stylistically, it looks less like Deleuze than like Aquinas. But what he does in this book is to re-vivify the concept of essence, which is obviously a pariah in continental philosophy circles these days, and undeservedly so. (Since my biggest objection to DeLanda concerns his dislike for essence –and I am a great DeLanda fan– I was especially happy to see Levi mentioning DeLanda and Zubiri in the same breath.)

The essence of a thing, for Zubiri, is a system of “notes” or real traits. The essence is not how the thing is known, how it becomes, or how it relates to other things, but how it is. If this sounds familiar to readers of my own books, that’s because I got the idea from none other than Zubiri himself. (What I still dislike is his too-close connection between essences and nature. He is too quick to deny an essence to things like farms, hammers, etc., and for this reason falls back into a two-world theory with essences on one side and relations on the other, whereas Latour provides us with the capabilities to envision an infinite regress of black boxes that function simultaneously as shielded units and as actors in networks.)

I’ve said it before, but after five years of ferment, what really let me find my own voice in philosophy was the simultaneous reading of Zubiri and Whitehead during one very important summer in graduate school. (I had read both of them before in fits and starts, but it didn’t click until then. I must not have been ready.)

For someone coming from a heavily Heideggerian background, it was a good combination because both authors address a key weakness in Heidegger: Whitehead explodes his Sein/Dasein correlationism, and Zubiri subtracts the essence of things from all “respectivity” to other things. In other words, my reading of the tool-analysis is arguably more Zubirian than Heideggerian… An entity has a private essence, irreducible to the effects it has on other things. (I simply find Zubiri too restrictive, though not any more so than Aristotle and Leibniz, in limiting the number of things that have essences.)

division of labor

“kpunk99he blogs at the speed some tweet… but now Graham Harman joins twitter @doctorzamalek. about 5 hours ago from web”

Does that mean I should tweet at the speed that others blog?

But seriously, it’s going to take a little while to figure out the “division of labor” between the blog and Twitter, since I already like posting rapid-fire thoughts on this page and do not wish to stop.

Twitter can obviously take the stuff that would be far too trivial to post here, such as my complaint an hour or two ago about a stale box of Triscuits. And obviously the long stuff goes on the blog because the Twitter format does not allow it.

So, thinking aloud as I type… I guess the real division of labor question is simply which short things go there and which go here. Or perhaps it will appear in both places– a pattern familiar to those who are both readers of this blog and Facebook friends of mine.

not sure how to abbreviate this one

The next Heidegger volume set to roll off the presses is Volume 76, affectionately entitled:

Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik

It looks pretty long, too. Contains 24 essays from 1935-1955. Or rather, not really “essays”, but supplemental materials to other already known works.

This is one of those projects I’m simply never going to be finished with. They are never going to stop releasing volumes at Klostermann. How much more could the man possibly have written?

Bultmann slowly warms to Gadamer

Reporting to Heidegger on August 24, 1930 about a Marburg Greek language reading group, now covering the Neoplatonist Philo of Alexandria:

“I have learned to value Gadamer, who works in a philologically exact manner, interprets things carefully and subtly, and does not speculate in the manner of Krüger.”

that missing passport

I guess it no longer matters in practical terms, but I still can’t find that now-cancelled lost passport. Weird.

June wrap-up

22 good things happened

13 bad things happened

And as usual, the good things were much better than the bad things were bad.

If you steel yourself in advance for the fact that around 8-10 unpleasant things happen pretty much every month, then they aren’t so debilitating, especially if you remember that there are also at least a half-dozen very nice surprises pretty much every month as well, plus a lot more run-of-the-mill good things.

now on Twitter

Finally caved and got a Twitter account, as doctorzamalek.

Just what I need… more time on the web.