Composition of Philosophy. July 27.

Though I’d planned to take today off on the book, I did in fact revise Chapter 4, Section A, but am now feeling the effects of having had only 90 minutes of sleep last night for various reasons. I’ll give a longer report on Chapter 4 and its progress tomorrow. One of the remaining three sections is too long, the others are too short.

K-Punk at EuroDisney

K-PUNK IS BACK following his honeymoon to EuroDisney, as reported in the post to which I just linked.

And, it was the nicest wedding you can imagine. It was my first time in Suffolk, but won’t be the last.

Best wishes to the K-Punk family.

the formation of new schools

Perhaps my favorite part of Biagioli’s Galileo book is his discussion of the creation of new schools or socioprofessional identities over time.

The background to this is his exciting overview of the controversy over buoyancy between Galileo and the Aristotelians. Part of this is just basic “science studies”… Today we see Galileo is the hero of reason and the Aristotelians of his time as hair-splitting pedants. But when the experiments are considered, the Aristotelians had some points that Galileo simply couldn’t answer very well. Faced with a deadlock in their debate, both Galileo and the Aristotelians resorted to other, “non-rational” strategies to bring the debate to a close.

The new twist Biagioli adds to this sort of history is his claim that simply ignoring or dismissing one’s opponents without argument can have a genuine positive value in the creation of a new school. By definition, any new school of thought that emerges will not yet have a fully-developed paradigm, with ready answers for every counter-objection. It will be filled with anomalies and dark spots. By comparison, reigning schools of thought will always be staffed by armies of defenders with much to lose if the status quo is overthrown. In short, “debate” is almost always a stacked deck favoring the ruling discourse of the moment. Biagioli sees a positive value in Galileo saying that the Aristotelians were unintelligible and not even worth answering, though this looks bad from the usual view of knowledge as formed through transparent rational argument.

This got me thinking… Why is everyone so quick to bemoan the analytic/continental divide in philosophy? What is so bad about having a discipline fragmented into competing subfields that view one another with scarcely veiled contempt? In ecology, that’s called biodiversity. But in intellectual life, it is somehow taken to be a lamentable crisis if there is no communication across the great divide.

Don’t get me wrong… I think that hunting expeditions to the other side of the divide are very useful. But I’m not really sure that it’s a good idea to eliminate all camps in philosophy and turn us into one giant happily communicating field. Sometimes it is necessary for a few philosophers to drop on an island somewhere, out of touch with the others, in order to form a new species of thinking.

The idea is credited, by Biagioli, to Paul Feyerabend… New theories would face a terrible risk of early mortality if they had to debate their merits against the entire world form the start, just as a baby should not be expected to fight against Olympic boxers. The baby might grow up to be an even better fighter than the boxers, but it needs to be protected from the frost of critique for a little while. (The baby metaphor is mine, not Feyerabend’s.)

and this one

Though I could easily link to all of Levi’s posts, I’m limiting myself to linking to those that are fairly directly related to something I’ve said, or which are otherwise of especial interest.

THIS ONE would be worth seeing even if only for the pumpkin photo.

on old notes and notebooks

Every so often I run across old notes or notebooks that I haven’t seen in months or years. Almost always, I am both happy and alarmed to find that the old notes are of much higher quality than I would have expected. Happy, because it’s inspiring to run across these little treasures. Alarmed, because it suggests that we have more backslides in intellectual life than we remember having. That is to say, if I run across notes from 2003 that really impress me, it suggests that if I had simply progressed a bit further in the past six years then I wouldn’t have been impressed with those old notes.

In any case, I am delighted tonight to have run across the little Mickey Mouse notebook that I purchased in Alexandria on March 10 of this year. The notes in there are going to save me a week or more as I plan the second half of L’objet quadruple. There already I was working out some of the issues that concern me at present.

I told the story on the first incarnation of the blog as to why I came to write philosophy notes in a miniature Mickey Mouse notebook. It wasn’t an act of deliberate cheekiness, I assure you.

Egypt simply doesn’t have many trees. I’m not sure of the details of the paper industry here, and so can’t tell you if all the paper in this country is imported or only a certain percentage. What I can tell you is that paper is not nearly as ubiquitous here as it is in Western countries. (When maple syrup is served here, it is only the tiniest amount. I can’t imagine that there is even one maple tree in all of Egypt.) If I need a notebook in the USA, even the junkiest convenience store will have them for sale. Here, that’s not always true. You can always get paper here too, but you might easily have to try 5 or 6 stores before you find it. In short, Mickey Mouse was the end of the line for me that day, my only option after 20 minutes of searching. Lots of ideas came to mind that day, as is always the case in that wonderful Alexandria air, and I was keen to write them down before they passed away like vapors.

The notebook was made in China, and has the following wonderful words on its cover:

Have a ball..
HAPPY TIME!

MICKEY PROJECT

Mickey is rich in protein and
calcium which help build the
musclesyou need to throw
a ball or climb a tree

Levi crosses the Rubicon

LARVAL SUBJECTS ON CAESAR AND THE RUBICON.

It’s an interesting post, and it’s especially noteworthy that military history was the first example that came to Levi’s mind. One of the reasons I’m fascinated by military history (despite being a non-violent vegetarian who hopes never to so much as touch a gun in his life, let alone fire one) is that military people have to take both human and non-human realities into account. In academia we get in the habit of viewing military people as nothing but a bunch of ignorant thugs, but if you think that way then you’re talking to the wrong military people: there’s a fundamental wisdom and honesty about many of them, precisely because they can’t afford to jerk around with pretentious theories. There are severe consequences if an army chooses the wrong place to cross a river, or has insufficient logistical preparations.

Entities that need to be taken into account in analyzing the Iraq War, for instance, include not just Bush, Blair, and Saddam, but also the precise geography of Iraq, the fact that “sandstorm season was coming” and they didn’t want to postpone any longer, weapons inspectors, world oil supply, religious factions, and so forth. And just as sandstorm season is not a “text,” the proclamations of Bush and Saddam cannot be successfully interpreted as pure ideology, whatever that means. Their proclamations had a certain contact with realities, however twisted that contact may have been.

The best way to see the importance of this is to compare any ANT-type reading of some historical event with a more reductive reading. In the latter case you’ll see histories claiming that “the Crusades were all about economics,” or in the other direction, “Pasteur brought light to the darkness and gave birth to a new, enlightened era of medicine.” In the ANT’ish case, you’ll always find something much more interesting and surprising– actors displaced from their original goals due to chance material obstacles, forced to translate their progress along strange paths that they never intended.