more Biagioli

This has some relevance to what I’ve been saying about arguments. This comes from page 204 of Biagioli, and Feyerabend is footnoted:

“By assuming a presentist point of view, we would say that Galileo (or Copernicus) were ‘basically right’ in the sense that their claims are genealogically connected to those we hold today. However, at the stage of articulation at which they were published, Copernicus’s and Galileo’s theories contained anomalies and unanswered questions which problematized their acceptance. Delle Colombe’s experiment [placing a floating piece of ebony on the surface of water to refute Galileo’s theory of buoyancy] could be construed as a refutation of Galileo’s views even after Galileo had tried –with mid success– to introduce auxiliary hypotheses (like the magnetic virtue of air) to bypass that anomaly. I would say that the danger of early mortality (a common one among new and yet unarticulated paradigms) cannot be countered by dialoguing with adversaries but rather through a range of tactics aimed at gaining time so as to allow for the further articulation of one’s claim.”

“In fact, it is not at all evident that Galileo tried to dialogue with the Aristotelians– and certainly not on their own grounds. Rather, he tried to raise the stakes of the discussion by attaching all sorts of philosophical, methodological, and cosmological issues to his initial treatment of buoyancy. In doing so, he did not quite hope to convince his adversaries but to present and establish his own alternative philosophical package.”

These passages are certainly an apt summation of Galileo’s behavior during this controversy, at least as presented by Biagioli. (Presumably like most readers, I’ve never studied the primary source documents on that particular controversy.) And it does sound like Feyerabend a bit!

Concerning the latter passage, I have always been struck at how seldom either of two parties in a debate is convinced by the other. The spectators to the debate are generally the real target for convincing.

don’t forget this

K-Punk:

“Surround yourself with people who have projects.”

Tearing down other projects does not count as a project. At most, this is a tactical necessity now and then, since projects occasionally come into conflict with one another. But that is an intermittent sort of situation, not the basic element of intellectual discussion.

more Comp. of Phil. statistics

Finished so far in final form…

Introduction. 1 hour, 6 minutes.

Chapter One. 6 hours, 31 minutes.

Chapter Two. 3 hours, 50 minutes.

Chapter Three, 4 hours, 36 minutes.

Totals:

16 hours, 3 minutes
41 pages
12,622 words

[ADDENDUM: There are now 9 sections remaining to be revised in the first half of the book, 3 of them too long, 6 of them too short.]

Composition of Philosophy. July 26.

Chapter 3 is now completely revised. Other than 3C, a terrible bear that would have bored or lost the reader in its initial form, this was not an especially difficult piece of revision.

From zero to final draft, Chapter 3 took 4 hours and 36 minutes.

Total length in signes is 24,293, so it’s still going well on that front. (I should be averaging just under 25,000 signes, or characters including blank spaces, for each of the ten chapters. Better to be slightly under than slightly over, because final revisions always tend to add clarifying words more often that they subtract superfluous ones.)

The most recent target of having a polished final draft of Chapters 1-5 by the end of July is now so within reach as to be nearly inevitable, barring sudden illness such as swine flu, or some other unforeseen crisis. There are five days remaining to revise the final two chapters, and though 4D and most of 5 will be tough, five days should be plenty.

I have business on campus tomorrow, and hence may decide that tomorrow is worth a simple day off to recharge the batteries. It depends on how I’m feeling.

I’m glad I read the Montfort/Bogost book on the Atari, Racing the Beam, at the beginning of the month (a lot has been packed into July– it feels like ages since Bogost & Co. were in Cairo).

The main theme of that book was the clever programming tricks required to design playable games for a piece of hardware as surprisingly feeble as the Atari VCS really was. Read the book if you’re interested in hearing all the examples, but one of the funniest is that the “neutral zone” in Yar’s Revenge is a visual depiction of the software code itself, a brilliant memory-saving idea that also had a suitably ominous visual effect.

With this book I’m in a similar position to Atari programmers or weapons miniaturizers. Never have I packed this many of my ideas into a mere 70 double-spaced pages (the final 70 pages will be largely new material that none of my readers have ever seen before). Many of the cuts have been painful, of the order of: “my God, will the argument even make sense if I remove that step?”

But more often than not, compression and allusiveness can be made to work. This book is certainly going to have a very rapid pace, like a high-speed film of a horse running. But though I wouldn’t wish to write every book this way, it’s a fascinating exercise. And I’m having to invent a lot of “Atari programming tricks” to pull it off.

on tough audience questions

Consider this a “trivia” post; I just thought these were fun anecdotes. Incidentally, I was not present for any of these incidents. But they aren’t from “a friend of a friend.” They’re directly from people I know who claim to have seen them happen.

Weirdest audience question

Question posed to Jürgen Habermas:

“Professor Habermas, someone once told me that it is said that, as Plato’s cosmology is to ancient physics, and as Kant’s philosophy is to modern physics, so is your philosophy to post-Heisenbergian quantum mechanics. Would you care to comment on that?”

The report I received is that Habermas was not especially generous in his response to this question. (Though I should add that I met Habermas once and found him to be wonderful, as has been the case with every “star” figure I’ve met or corresponded with, no exceptions.)

A couple of Derrida comebacks to harsh questions

Q: “Professor Derrida, do you think you’re a genius?”

Derrida: “No, no, no, no, no, no, nooooooo….. But that doesn’t mean I’m not.”

Q: “Professor Derrida, do you think you’re Jesus?”

Derrida: “Sometimes. Especially when I’m being crucified.”

Levi on short-circuits and Triple-O

LEVI RESPONDS TO THE CRITICS AT GREATER LENGTH THAN I DID, HERE.

As Levi points out, it’s less a matter of “if you’re pissing people off then you must be doing something right,” since any smart-aleck or troll can piss people off with limited effort and limited fruitfulness. Instead, the point is “if you’re pissing people off for opposite and contradictory reasons then you must be doing something right.” This suggests that you’re doing something that’s so misunderstood that it can appear in opposite guises depending on the prejudices of the critic.

Also, Levi comes up with a nice little trick in referring to object-oriented ontology. This is a nice term because the OOO acronym is aesthetically pleasing and mysterious, it avoids the accusation of theft from the OOP of object-oriented programming, and it also avoids the annoying temptation to make “oops” jokes.

“Ontography” was amusing to me mostly because of its occurrence in the great M.R. James ghost story. But while writing L’objet quadruple, use of that term has felt a bit forced for some reason, and I’ve found myself using “object-oriented philosophy” instead, even though it’s going to be a pain to render into French, I’m sure.

But I like the Triple-O. And if we make an Organization dedicated to it, then we have the Quadruple-O, or Organization for Object-Oriented Ontology.

in praise of “Ramses”

That was the most unopenable jar of olives I have ever encountered. The lid may as well have been super-glued to the glass. I took it back to its store of origin, ready to trade it in. But suddenly there appeared “Ramses” (only his nickname, apparently) the toughest young employee in the store, and he opened it.

quick response to a critic

Glen at event mechanics doesn’t seem to be liking Prince of Networks very much, and says he is preparing a critical review. I’d expect it to be quite critical indeed, considering the following paragraph:

“Philosophy blog wars are a little bit lol and a little bit sad. I have little professional investment in some arguments/critiques over others as I am not a philosopher by profession. The political economy of the academic blogosphere in relation to the academy needs to be accounted for in these stoushes. Some academic have ‘professional’ blogs, others couldn’t think of anything worse. My interest in all this is purely on the level of interest: I am an enthusiast. Even though I have a PhD, I have had no formal training in philosophy at all except for some introductory units 12 years ago. I did not pass through the US grad system, which seems to produce eaither a certain kind of intellectual paranoia or a counter-movement against this paranoia. I pick up and read ideas to figure out if they seem to work. If they work then I run with them. If not, then they are mere folly.”

He never clarifies whether my and Levi’s responses to his objections were “lol” or merely “sad,” nor whether we are motivated by “paranoia” or instead by a “counter-movement” against such paranoia. He simply drops this opening tone, and moves on to actual debate. Which is a good thing, because I was actually enjoying the occasional interchange with Glen and had no idea he was so disappointed with it.

A few quick points in response…

1. Glen says the Deleuze presented in Prince of Networks is “a straw person.” But Deleuze barely appears in the book at all. All I say about him is that for Deleuze as for Bergson, it makes sense to speak of becoming or flux or whatever you wish to call it. The notion of a cinematic instant is not one that makes much sense for either of them. By contrast, one can and must speak of punctiform instants for Latour and Whitehead (and even for Heidegger, somewhat surprisingly as I argued in Tool-Being). In another post Glen then feints at a scientific discussion of how it’s impossible for there to be an isolated moment, but we’re not talking about physics here, we’re talking about the ontologies of Latour and Whitehead. There is a reason why Whitehead also gives his actual entities the alternate name of actual occasions.

I’ve found through experience that no one ever wants to concede that any philosopher could possibly believe in isolated instants of time. But obviously there are many examples of philosophers who think this. It’s out of keeping with our current Zeitgeist, which identifies any theory of isolated moments or substances with reactionary stupidity, but many adherents of substance and cinematic time-frames were neither reactionary nor stupid.

2. Glen pulls “conceptual prehension” from Whitehead’s Process and Reality to argue that Whitehead does in fact make humans very different from non-humans. This does not prove his point. Conceptual prehensions are still prehensions. They are varieties of prehension. Whitehead is quite clear that he aims to return to the pre-Kantian period in philosophy. That’s the whole point. There is no concept resembling prehension in Kant, at least not in the Critical period. Which leads me to my next point…

3. “I have a feeling that the so-called realists are far too preoccupied with discounting Kant’s philosophy than anything else!”
What’s so surprising about this? Kant is the greatest philosopher of the modern period, with the unfortunate side-effect that it is now more or less taken for granted that the human-world relation is of central philosophical importance whereas other relations are derivative of this one. This is highly problematic and counter-intuitive, and we’ve all been professionally schooled simply to assume it.

I’ve found more defensiveness about Kant than about any other philosopher, including Heidegger. Sometimes I wonder why this is so, given that Kant’s canonical status has never been seriously doubted by anyone I can think of other than Ayn Rand.

My theory about Kant-defensiveness is that the human-world dual monarchy in the Copernican position is viewed as the only bulwark against rampant scientism. In other words, if the relations between cotton and fire or raindrops and wood are placed on the same level as the relation between human and world, I think people are afraid that everything is going to turn into atoms and neurons and the precious human sphere will be annihilated. Hence, the odd remarks (already discounted here) about speculative realism being a form of “positivism.” All misuse of that term aside, what people mean is that the speculative realists are going to turn philosophy into natural science. But only in Brassier’s case would such a worry be even remotely relevant.

I’m sorry that Glen had such a negative reaction to our last exchange, which I found neither “lol,” nor “sad,” nor “paranoid,” nor “counter-paranoid,” but useful and clarifying.

it’s the pant legs, I think

If that robot simply had metallic legs, I think it would be less frightening. But those black pant-legs are a cruel touch, making it look like a cross between a rehearsing jazz dancer and a spider.

another scary robot

Hat-tip to aleatorist on this one… The video is somehow almost as scary as the Big Dog robot itself. Built by Boston Dynamics, with defense research funding. Are these sorts of things actually going to be loose in the woods 100 years from now?