Speculative Realism in Berlin

The four original Speculative Realists only met together once– in April 2007 at Goldsmiths. (I deliberately capitalize the phrase Speculative Realism– here it’s a proper name for a group, not a definite description.)

But starting next week, the Freie Universität in Berlin is going to have us consecutively rather than simultaneously.

Click HERE for details.

remarks by Cogburn at New APPS

My review of Garcia prompts Cogburn to make some remarks at New APPS, HERE.

Cogburn is not only an analytically trained philosopher, but also a dues-paying member of SPEP, and he has some thoughts about SPEP in that post with which I am largely in agreement. (For my foreign readers, SPEP is the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, recently turned 50 years old, the main continental philosophy society in the U.S.)

But for the record, I think SPEP is an important group for keeping a certain type of philosophical discourse alive in the USA that would otherwise be in peril. As to why that is necessary, look no further than the first comment under Cogburn’s post for a sample of the sort of dismissive snottiness that is generally aimed at our subfield.

the revised details on Žižek’s Hegel book

“Hardcover: 1056 pages
Publisher: Verso; 1 edition (May 22, 2012)”

Just took this information from Amazon. So it will be two months later than expected (not rare for Amazon pre-announces) and will shed maybe 150 pages from the initial total (not a bad idea). I’m looking forward to this book a great deal.

Why looking forward to it, given the fact that I will surely disagree with almost every word of it? (I hold that more Hegel is the last thing we need.)

Because, thinking is not about attaining accurate or inaccurate propositional content (I believe in reality, but am a hardcore atheist about accurate content; truth is always translation). Instead, thinking is about avoiding the ready-made cookie cutters into which our surrounding societies always invite us (see the previous post).

That’s not as easy as it sounds. You can’t do it just by playing with surface formulae and generating pseudo-novel doctrines (that’s not what Meillassoux did with his virtual God; every step of his proof is something he obviously feels deep in his bones). You actually have to see the world with your own eyes, learning to do it slowly and consistently over the course of many years until it finally gels.

Žižek may have his moments of excess where you want to roll your eyes. Fair enough. But he also displays such marked force and originality of intellectual character that you know you’re in the presence of someone who’s really thinking, rather than someone who is just robotically trouncing on enemies by means of some oversimplified rule of thumb. If we had 10 more Žižeks it would be one of the most golden of golden ages.

a sign of second-rate philosophy

In graduate school there was a fairly annoying student who acted as a general lackey for a powerful professor, up to and including providing personal services– such as being tasked with finding the professor an apartment at an unrealistically low price for the required neighborhood, and in the middle of winter when it was physically very unpleasant to make such searches.

For some reason, the following statement was the most annoying thing I ever heard from him. The name of Pascal came up. And this student made a sort of lemon-sucking smirk and said that he “has problems” with Pascal. Why?, I asked. Because, he said, he “has problems” with “philosophers who talk about God.”

Disbelief in God was cutting-edge in the 1600’s and is still cutting edge at age 15. I’m not saying you should believe in God after those two landmarks; I’ll leave that up to you. I’m just saying, it seems a bit absurd to use the question of someone’s belief or disbelief in God as one of the chef pillars of your judgment about that person’s intellectual caliber.

To some extent, the parochialism of presumed atheism among Western intellectuals (i.e., everyone enters every conversation simply assuming that they can dump on religion from the first minute and everyone else will automatically agree with them) really bothers me. Once I talked about winning two slot machine jackpots of $1,000 and $700 (it really happened) and the person I told this too said: “It probably made you question your atheism.” But I never told this person I was an atheist. He simply assumed that I must be, since all non-idiots are atheists, just like him. Such provincialism, masquerading as remorseless enlightenment.

In Egypt, I happen to be surrounded by quite a number of extremely intelligent and very religious people. Not all very religious people are extremely intelligent, of course, but some of them are, and you’d better come to the table with something better than a lemon-sucking, condescending smirk about Pascal when you deal with these people.

The reason this topic is on my mind is because of some really lame-o critiques of Meillassoux’s The Divine Existence that are in the air lately.

Meillassoux makes an argument for the divine inexistence, after all, and that argument hinges on: (1) the non-existence for Meillassoux of probability at the level of the laws of nature as a whole, and (2) the view that the sudden appearance of God and justice would be no more astonishing than the previous contingent appearance of matter, then life, then thought.

What bothers me about some of the critiques of this argument (which I by no means accept, since I do not accept contingency and the rejection of sufficient reason in the first place) is the depressing reminder that some atheists would prefer an idiot atheist to a brilliant theist. There really are people out there, apparently, who think that any run-of-the-mill bad boy eliminator is truly a better thinker than Thomas Aquinas. They would “have problems” with Aquinas, after all, simply because of the God question.

To go back to the title of this post, I would say that one sign of second-rate philosophy is philosophy that is able to judge other philosophy only according to whether it agrees or disagrees with the explicit propositional content of that philosophy. It would be like me hating Tristan Garcia simply because I’m a vegetarian but Garcia criticizes vegetarianism in Forme et objet.

It’s intellectually very important to be able to admire and utilize authors whose world-views are nothing like your own. Rejecting all theists as idiots on an a priori basis is not a promising sign of intellectual health. If that’s what you’re doing, then you need to get out a bit more and see more of the world. There really are some smart people out there who believe in God, and some of them might be able to crush you in an argument from time to time.

On a related topic, have you ever noticed that the people who insist most that arguments are all that count are generally the first to resort to argument-free, hyper-emotional dismissals whenever the chips are down?

the old days of patent struggles

I recently finished reading a fascinating doctoral thesis on steamboats. A couple of remarkable facts stand out about patents in those days.

*Individual U.S. states were handing out patents, and sometimes even granting monopolies. The status of state vs. federal patents was not yet settled in 1809, and eventually the Supreme Court had to get involved. (For non-American readers of this blog: no, there is no such thing as state patents in the U.S. anymore. This sounds utterly bizarre to us today, even though murder is always a state rather than federal crime and the death penalty is used or not used on a state by state basis. But back then, Fulton and Livingston actually had a New York state patent on their steamboat design.)

*The U.S. Federal Patent Office consisted of just one man, a guy by the name of Thornton.

*Thornton sometimes tried to strike business deals with the people who wrote in to apply for patents, which by today’s standards is obviously completely inappropriate.

*It wasn’t yet clear in 1809 whether the public could see patent filings, though to us today it’s obvious that this is the whole point of having such filings. Thornton, when asked about this, had to write to the Attorney General for an opinion. The Attorney General decided that, yes, anyone can see a patent filing.

Another of my favorite aspects of the story was that Fulton’s steamboat was rammed 2 or 3 times by anti-steam ship operators, causing serious damage to the boat and a lot of danger to the steamboat passengers.

I hope this thesis becomes a book. You might not think you’d be interested in reading about steamboats from an actor-network theory perspective, but ANT histories often produce very good reads, and this is one of those cases. You find yourself as a reader getting emotionally involved in the history of steamboats.

Philosophy M.A. program approved at AUC

With a 95% “yes” vote, our proposed M.A. program was approved by the University Senate this morning. It will start in September 2013. The orientation of the program, matching that of the faculty, will be continental (I almost used scare quotes but decided not to) with quite a bit of Islamic philosophy (we have three specialists in that area).

One of the keys to making this happen was a very strong outside review that we received in late 2010 from two external referees.

I started at AUC in 2000, and the M.A. program was the topic of my very first department meeting. Or rather, my first unit meeting– Philosophy was a unit of English & Comparative Literature here until 2004. And now we are double their size.