you can only beat what’s in front of you

Today’s piece of wisdom from the ESPN GameCast person, whose name is bizarrely impossible to discover so far:

“87′ A great performance from Vera. As poor as Slovakia have been, you can only beat what’s in front of you and Paraguay have done that comfortably.”

I can’t decide whether it would be more amusing if “you can only beat what’s in front of you” is a spontaneous crack from the gentleman, or if it’s an old English saying. Not sure which it is.

who is Lampard?

Mark Fisher:

“Lampard has the curious ability to be so invisible for England that you genuinely forget that’s he’s playing; it’ll sometimes be the 70th minute or so before I remember that he’s in the team.”

If you had told me just now that Lampard was on the bench with an injury for all of last night’s game, I would honestly have believed you.

Manute Bol dies

A sad note for NBA fans, as 47-year-old Manute Bol HAS DIED IN A VIRGINIA HOSPITAL. As a 7’6 beanpole from Sudan, he started out as a classic sports gimmick, especially when teamed with shortest-ever NBA player Muggsy Bogues in Washington (see photo below). And while he never rose to the level of NBA star, he was more than a gimmick: he was a remarkable shotblocking force.

Manute Bol (left) and Muggsy Bogues (right), the tallest and shortest players in NBA history at the time, and possibly even to this day (though my American sports knowledge has slipped a couple of notches in the past decade, I’m afraid, so maybe that’s no longer true):

World Cup wrap-up

The Dutch came back to look better in the second half. (And they’re still not underachieving as bad as England and so far Spain, obviously.) Ghana blew a golden opportunity with a one-man advantage and will live to regret today’s draw, I’m afraid. And Cameroon disappointed with a blown 1-0 lead, and are now the first team eliminated from the Cup. They’ll be playing for pride next time, and that won’t be enough to stop the Dutch, I don’t think.

Hypertiling and Meillassoux

A strange response from FABIO AT HYPERTILING to my earlier Meillassoux post. After correctly quoting me as saying that I only agree with the first of the six key points I mentioned in After Finitude, he proceeds to a rather confusing criticism:

“Point 1 is, of course, the one ‘stating’ that ‘Correlationism is the Enemy’. Now, I am looking forward to read in detail Harman’s reading of Meillassoux, but sometimes (with his reading and with most of the readings done so far) I find puzzling how much attention has been given to only a part of Meillassoux’s argument (the part where he identifies the enemy and its weaknesses so to speak), mostly downplaying the rest of his book… I can’t help but think that Meillassoux would like to be remembered –should his philosophical work somehow stop tomorrow– as being the one who debunked the principle of sufficient reason, the one who individuated a new kind of absolute in contingency and the one to envision (but still not flesh out, and we should remember that he explicitly tells us that this is the direction that he’s interested in pursuing) a link between the possibility of absolute mathematical statements and the absolute character of his principle of factiality (what I would call ‘point 7′, something which he arguments more organically in that bit of his lecture that I translated some time ago)”

The first confusing point is that when Fabio speaks of my reading of Meillassoux, he could be referring to one of three different texts, and I’m afraid he’s either wrong or irrelevant in all three cases.

*If he’s referring to my early Philosophy Today review of Meillassoux’s book, then he’s simply wrong. That review touches on all aspects of the book, as any thorough review will do.

*If he’s referring to Prince of Networks, then he’s correct but irrelevantly so. That was a book about Latour, not about Meillassoux, and hence the only relevance of Meillassoux in that context was the correlationism question. Factiality and sufficient reason are of little import when contrasting Latour with Meillassoux as I did. Only correlationism matters in that context.

*But if he’s referring to my post of earlier today (“6 Keys to After Finitude”) as appears to be the case, then he’s wrong again. Exactly two of the six keys refer to correlationism. And his addition of the seventh point of factiality and sufficient reason, supposedly missing from my account, strangely overlooks my third point from the post of just a few hours ago. Namely: 3. When strong correlationism is radicalized, what we end up with is the necessity of nothing else besides contingency.

That’s the principle of factiality, Fabio. And that’s where the critique of sufficient reason comes from. Your point 7 is redundant, since it was already my point 3.

Furthermore, he seems to think that since I only agree with point 1, that I will only mention point 1 in the book, which is a bizarre assumption to say the least.

And there’s at least one other strange point in his post:

“Yet rejecting Pythagoreanism. In this context Harman mentions Ladyman and Ross, but I would add that to find the most hardcore and shameless contemporary Pythagorean one should look to the work of Max Tegmark (interestingly not a philosopher but a theoretical cosmologist)…I am planning to write something about Tegmark and Meillassoux so stay tuned.”

But this misses the point of what I said. Ladyman and Ross were not cited in my post as Pythagoreans (which they are not), but as people who refuse to decide either way as to whether they mean Pythagoreanism when they talk about the mathematical nature of reality. By contrast with this refusal to decide, Meillassoux explicitly rejects the Pythagorean approach.

Like all book authors I’ve had negative reviews, and like many authors I’ve even had negative reviews containing factual inaccuracies. But this is the first time I’ve had a negative review containing factual inaccuracies before the book is even published– indeed, before I’ve even finished writing.

A couple of my friends in Dundee met Fabio and said he’s a nice guy. I wouldn’t know. He never introduced himself, and instead apparently just hovered around my conversation at Reid’s barbecue without my knowing who he was, gossiped incorrectly on his blog about what I said there, and then didn’t seem to think it was that big a deal to misquote (or even correctly quote) party chat in public. “Nice” or not, how can I be expected to like or trust such a person? We’re off to a bad start, Fabio and I.

the call of good sport

All right, that Australia-Ghana first half was obviously good enough to make it worth heading over to the Hostel for the second half. (I’ll have to skip Cameron-Denmark for a party anyway.)

Australia came out roaring, but a red card for a handball followed by a successful Ghana penalty kick has tied it at 1-1. Good stuff.

not in this heat

I had half a mind to walk over to watch the second half of Netherlands vs. Japan. But the following commentary from the GameCast is not encouraging (even making the needed statistical adjustment for the fact that this guy, whoever he is, is pretty much always a smartass):

32′ Last night was a late one watching the dreadful England performance. A game like this was not what I needed.

37′ It’s Sneijder who chips it in, nowhere near an orange shirt.

40′ We’re being treated to several fascinating slow-mo replays. There’s nothing else to show.

42′ It’s 40 yards out. Honda shoots … a waste of everyone’s time.

44′ I’m hoping half-time will bring about a change of tactics. It’s probably going to bring nothing more than a cup of tea and a chocolate bourbon.

45′ And there it is, the half-time whistle and thank the Lord for that.

The Cairo temperature has now dropped to 97 fahrenheit, but I don’t think I’m ready to leave the house yet, at least not to watch an underachieving performance by a Dutch team I really want to do well in this Cup.

6 keys to After Finitude

Today I’m working on the chapter of the Meillassoux book on After Finitude. Rather than “summarize” a book that is already written with sufficient clarity as it is, I’m going to try to isolate the key pillars in the argumentation of the book. (And I’ll categorize this as a “Composition of Philosophy” post, though I don’t intend to live-blog the writing of another book this summer. Maybe I’ll do it again in the future, but I don’t feel like it this time.)

If you’re writing a book honestly, you’ll always change your mind about a few things while writing it. But at the moment, I would say that the following are the 6 pillars of After Finitude. Incidentally, I am only convinced by point #1. I think the other five are all incorrect, though still very interesting.

1. Correlationism is the enemy. Instead of coming right out and calling themselves idealists, most post-Kantian philosophers choose the watery middle ground of correlationism. “Hey, the subject is always already outside of itself, immersed in a world.” That sort of thing. I call it “idealism with a realist alibi.”

2. There exists a position called strong correlationism that does not slide into absolute idealism. This is key for Meillassoux, because strong correlationism is not just his enemy, but his starting point. Meillassoux’s philosophical project is nothing other than to find the resources, within strong correlationism, for an overcoming of correlationism itself.

3. When strong correlationism is radicalized, what we end up with is the necessity of nothing else besides contingency. This step is the key to Meillassoux’s entire philosophy. If you’re not convinced by this step, you won’t be persuaded by the rest. (However, Meillassoux remains interesting even to the unpersuaded, which in my opinion is one of the surest marks of a genuine philosopher. If no one likes your work except those who agree with you, then you are simply a useful tool for achieving their aims. You are nothing but a surface. Being respected by those who reject your conclusions is the greatest honor there is.)

4. Temporal distance is more important than spatial distance. What I have in mind are two different passages, but especially the one he added to the English version of After Finitude. This is the passage where he rejects as superficial and trivial the claim that ancestrality (that which existed before any humans did) is of the same order as objects so spatially distant that no one can currently observe them. Meillassoux is quite firm on this point, and it has consequences that I will explore in the book. Basically, his rejection of the principle of sufficient reason is too focused on diachronic reasons: e.g., there is no reason why the law of gravity can’t change at random in the next moment. The theme Meillassoux ignores entirely is that of sufficient reason within any given moment: e.g., gold is the way it is because it has a certain molecular structure and the atoms in those molecules have certain properties, the quarks and electrons in those atoms have certain properties, and perhaps so on and so forth. In short, Meillassoux is interested in the contingent relations between events across time, and has no discernible interest in the emergence of wholes from parts in any given moment. If you were asked to write an essay called “Meillassoux’s mereology,” it would be tough to write, because the composition of entities (as opposed to the history of entities across time) is not really on his radar.

5. The contingency of natural laws does not contradict their apparent stability. This is Meillassoux’s own Cantorian moment… Since we can’t totalize the possible number of universes, we can’t be stunned by the miraculous odds that the universe as it is would support intelligent life, because no calculation of probability is relevant here. This is one of Meillassoux’s most shocking arguments, and one that I didn’t find at all convincing at first. But as the years go by I’m warming to it somewhat, and will explain why in the book.

6. Primary qualities are those that can be mathematized. For Meillassoux, the mathematical is the in-itself (he escapes the ambiguity of Ladyman and Ross on this point by denying the Pythagorean option outright: mathematical laws have an indexical relation to the real and are certainly not the real itself, though I don’t think this helps us much more than Ladyman and Ross– it’s simply a bit more frank). Readers of my writings will know that I disagree that the mathematical can be the in-itself.

On the whole, recent rereadings of After Finitude have led me to be more impressed by the book than ever. There is such a fresh feeling to everything Meillassoux does. His wagon wheels never fall into the ruts on the roads. Every couple of pages it seems like he’s reversing some familiar hand-me-down cliché from our view of the history of philosophy. When you read his books and articles, you feel the need to work a lot harder to be able to think with the same degree of rigor that he himself is employing.

come on, Dutch team

Come on, Dutch team. This World Cup is wide open now, and you can jump to the top with a bit of effort.

Some people seemed really impressed with them against Denmark. I wasn’t, because I know they can and must do better. As I write this they are scoreless in the 20th minute against Japan, and (I’m not near a television) apparently not making very much happen so far.

Now in minute 30, and here are the two most recent updates from the ESPN GameCast guy:

29′ Three shots in almost half an hour, all off target.

28′ It truly is a stinker, it must get better.

Abground

If we agree that it’s a poor translation choice for Abgrund, which of the following would Abground be a better name for:

1. A fitness center?

or

2. A Scandinavian death metal band?