Levi on the materialism issue

I agree with ALL OF THIS POST.

the Dissenter

Mike Johnduff discusses MY ACCOUNT OF LATOUR’S “DISSENTER” CHARACTER.

follow-up

The simple act of holding that there is (or may be) something outside human experience that poses obstructions to human will… This may free you of the charge of absolute idealism. But you’ll still be a correlationist as long as it’s wholly a story of human and world. As long as you take the human-world relation as the pillar of all other relations, you are a correlationist.

Example: when Heidegger says that Being itself is responsible for history, not Dasein, this does not take Dasein out of the center of the picture. For it still remains nothing but a question of how Being manifests itself to Dasein.

Imagine a sadomasochistic relationship between two people, and we’ll label those people “Sein” and “Dasein”. Sometimes Sein is the aggressor, and sometimes it’s Dasein. But these shifts between active and passive don’t really change much: it’s still the same relationship between the same two people. Fresh air is needed.

the many senses of “materialism”

Gratton with A WITTY POST taking off from the fact that Bennett, Johnston, and Malabou all call themselves materialists.

Count me very sceptical, as well, that Zizek or even Meillassoux are actually materialists. I’m not sure how they can make that claim. To some extent words can mean whatever you stipulate them to mean, but given the usual associations of “materialism” I think there are a lot of things being called materialist these days that aren’t materialist at all.

an annoying trope

Once in awhile I read things like this:

“My remarks may seem rude and dismissive, but it’s only because I care so much about philosophy.”

No, if you cared about philosophy you wouldn’t overidentify your own current views with Truth, and you might listen a bit more. What you really “care so much about” is beating other people in arguments. But this is a social desire, not an intellectual one.

They are religious zealots without religion. The psychology is no different.

unrepentant sociopaths

This is a CNN user posting in response to outrage by other users over some very insensitive comments about a story:

“Try to understand, the majority of anonymous comments on the internet are made by unrepentant sociopaths, many of them teenagers fueled by their own hormones and insecurity. It’s an outlet for them to say pretty much anything they want to say anonymously, with no ramifications or accountability. Also keep in mind that nearly all of them will never look at this article, or the comments made after they have, ever again. So preaching at them doesn’t do a whole lot.”

the relation of Peirce to the debate

MORMON METAPHYSICS has an interesting post up on Peirce in relation to yesterday’s discussions. I meant to link to this last night, but fell asleep with the task undone.

great Levi post

In the usual place, LARVAL SUBJECTS.

I especially enjoy his riff on Jane Bennett. And yes, it’s weird reading Bennett at times, because there has been no academic contact by any of us with her at all (just a few brief requests to join the anthology) yet quite often I would have been happy to sign my own name to whole sentences and paragraphs, and Levi seems to feel the same.

Happy Birthday greeting

It’s my father’s birthday tomorrow. I won’t say how old, but not very old, considering what a dinosaur I already am. He likes reading this blog quite a lot, so I thought I’d give him a surprise. (He may even show up at the OOO meeting in Atlanta; he was reading Bogost almost as long ago as he was reading me.)

I’m also surely the only person in continental philosophy whose father belongs to the IOWA ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME.

One thing we’ve gotten into doing in recent years is meeting each other abroad and traveling, though it’s been a couple of years since the last one. Hard to pick a best-ever of the 5 or 6 trips we’ve done, but Portugal would have to be near the top of the list, and we also spent a nice day in Andorra once.

Andorra’s a really odd place, by the way. It’s part ski resort, part isolated valley, part duty free shop. We saw lots of guns and cigarettes for sale, after driving up from Barcelona for the day. That was another nice trip, actually: the Barcelona/Venice trip.

a good place to visit

In case you’ve never been there: Toulouse, France. Loads of charm.

I was just thinking of Toulouse again today, probably because I bought this computer there.