interview moved

Just as with the two articles previously cited here, Mike Watson’s interview of me has been salvaged from the ashes of Indieoma and moved to DIALOGICA FANTASTICA.

fighting inside the AUC Tahrir Building on January 28

Below is the first public statement on the grim events that took place inside the Main Building of our downtown campus on Friday, January 28.

That building is directly on Tahrir Square, so I guess it’s not too surprising. Most likely government forces wanted to use our roof as a firing point for tear gas and worse, and what probably happened is that the protestors saw this, broke through the gate, and went after them. (This is speculation on my part, though, since I’m not part of the emergency management team.)

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A Statement by AUC Regarding the Events of January 28

On January 28, the security of the Tahrir Square campus was breached. The long-unused gate in front of the Palace Building was forced open by individuals the university believes to have been protesters from Tahrir Square and the entrance from Sheikh Rihan Street was forcibly opened by individuals we believe to have been police from the Ministry of Interior. Fighting took place throughout the building, including on the roof. Windows were broken and a number of the offices of the AUC Press, which is housed in the Palace Building, were looted. The AUC security regained control of the building and the rest of the grounds of the University after about four hours. The cornice of the roof was damaged; there was considerable blood on the roof and in the stairwell of the building as well as broken glass throughout. AUC security collected spent shells and tear gas canisters in and around the building.

In recent weeks we have been provided video which appears to show uniformed individuals throwing objects from the roof of the building, including what are probably pieces of the cornice, and in several places they appear to be shooting firearms. The video is not clear, although it appears that at least some of the shots were fired toward the crowd of protesters below.

This action was completely unauthorized. The American University in Cairo has its own security staff and does not use armed police or state security on campus. The presence of any such personnel on our Tahrir Square campus, which was closed at the time, was illegal and counter to all University policies and procedures. Under no circumstances did AUC invite or agree to the use of force on its campus.

the second Amsterdam lecture

One of the noteworthy facts about the history of European philosophy is that important thinkers have often occurred in clusters. (In Islamic philosophy, to name just one contrast, the important figures were more distant from each other in time.)

Direct personal influence isn’t really the explanation for this, because it wasn’t true in every case that there was personal contact. I think the real explanation is that neither individual people nor collectives of people are the protagonists of the history of philosophy. Instead, it seems that there are certain crucial ideas that arise from time to time, and the first person to grapple with that idea never exhausts it, thereby leaving room for other permutations, which are detected and promulgated in short order.

Whitehead’s theory is that these thinkers always come in pairs, one of them stating an idea vaguely but in depth, the other whittling it down with rigid consistency while depriving it of some scope. But much though I appreciate Whitehead’s remarks about most matters connected with the history of philosophy, this one doesn’t seem right to me. For one thing, the aforementioned clusters of thinkers usually come in threes and fours rather than in pairs.

If we look at this process in the history of philosophy, it seems that there are two basic ways that an immediate predecessor can be transformed: let’s call them radicalization and reversal.

Radicalizing, obviously enough, means that our great predecessor had the right idea, but remained inconsistently devoted to the old regime and didn’t push the central idea far enough. The post-Kantian reaction against the things-in-themselves would be a classic example of radicalization. “Kant was a genius, but just needed to push things a bit further.”

Then there are the reversals: when our great predecessor got something important right, but in some sense the truth is exactly the reverse. Aristotle turning Plato’s eidei into mere secondary substances would be a classic example, and another would be Heidegger’s reaction to the presence-at-hand of phenomena in consciousness for Husserl.

In several places I’ve spoken of “hyperbolic readings” in which, rather than nitpicking philosophers, we imagine their ideas as having gained absolute dominance at some point in the near future, and wonder what would still be missing. The idea there is that we focus too much on the “mistakes” of people’s reasoning, and not enough on the limitations of their reasoning, which is usually the real problem: lack of imagination, and insufficient scope. As a corollary, I claimed that the more important the philosopher, the more plausible it is to attempt a hyperbolic reading.

But I think there’s another way to test the magnitude of a philosophy: namely, try to imagine how its successors might attempt to radicalize or reverse it. The more interesting these maneuvers in any given case, the more interesting the philosopher. As a corollary, it follows that invulnerability to critique is not the sign of a good philosopher, but of a poor one. An interesting philosopher will be the most vulnerable to radicalization or reversal: it can be done to Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, or Husserl, but is less likely to be done to a sandbagger who finds ways to win every argument, no matter what the situation. Invulnerability is an intellectual vice, not a virtue. It’s a sign that one has retreated into some Fortress Impregnable, claiming that the burden of proof is on everyone else, and then mowing down everyone who tries to charge up the hill and give battle. It’s not much of a philosophical life, I’d say.

But then there are authors like Meillassoux who take major risks. It takes guts to say that only contingency is absolutely necessary, guts to attempt “proofs” of non-contradiction and things-in-themselves in the manner that he does, and certainly guts to talk about a virtual God in an intellectual environment where dogmatic atheism is still the default position of intellectuals (despite claims of a supposed tidal wave of theologians rolling back the enlightenment).

Anyway, this what I’ll be speaking about in Amsterdam on Friday night (the second of the two lectures). What if you were a generation or two younger than Meillassoux, a great admirer of his thinking, but trying to radicalize or reverse it? How might you go about doing that? The exercise is relevant to Meillassoux, but also to our understanding of how the history of philosophy works. The fact that he takes so many risks in his own thought gives us lots of options about where to experiment.

We can also ask “what if” questions of the following sort. What if Aristotle had radicalized Plato rather than reversing him, and the same for the Heidegger/Husserl relationship? What if Kant’s successors had reversed him rather than radicalizing him? (I’ve already tried the latter experiment with my fictitious “Tannenbaum” character, the anti-Fichte steeped in Leibniz.) Are there reasons why one maneuver is usually tried rather than another, or is there a continual series of crossroads where it might go either way?

sustained automatic and heavy weapons fire in Tripoli

HERE.

The governments claims it’s “celebratory” fire after numerous victories, but there seems to be no sign of such victories.

The most likely conclusion to be drawn, given that there are no armed protestors inside Tripoli that we know of, is that portions of Qaddafi’s own forces are turning against him. But we’ll have to await further news.

Sheen, Qaddafi, or Beck

A funny game where you have to choose which of those uttered a series of unhinged statements. HERE.

burning archives

Egyptian State Security seems to be in a frenzy of archive-burning, amidst protestor efforts to stop them. HERE.