Invitations and Becomings

"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because
I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of
them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave
me my name!" Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Is philosophy's relation to politics changing? Two recent online posts have me wondering... The first is a review on NDPR of Allen Wood's book Kantian Ethics, which blurs the line by infusing a scholarly philosophical publication with political invective. The second is a musing in the Daily Kos that 'purity trolls' in the lead-up to this year's US election are in fact a contemporary manifestation of Hegel's notion of a 'beautiful soul'.

"The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism." - Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

I'm re-reading FP on the advice of a friend visiting from Shanghai, and finding many new resonances since the first time I read it (13 years ago). Still, it's comforting to find that chapter ten, in which Belbo confides to Casaubon his four ideal types of people from a publisher's perspective, is just as enjoyable as ever. In Belbo's taxonomy, everyone is either cretin, fool, moron or lunatic.

Alex Howard: "Philosophy, it seems to me, is about being able to travel cross country, it is a kind of intellectual four wheel drive if you like." Presumably without the same environmental impact - but perhaps that depends on whose driving...

In a couple of recent posts to his NY Times blog (1,2), Stanley Fish has come out strongly in support of the unmitigated uselessness of the humanities.

Over at my other blog, I just posted a note on VoiceThread, a collaborative media site. It got me thinking about the profound socialisation of everything, from bookmarks to blogs to production processes, in the context of my Masters thesis.

There (ch3), I presented a version of the argument that intersubjectivity is a transcendental condition of our experience. If that's true then it raises the question of why we need to have the shared character of things reflected back to us, if they're inherently intersubjective?

In preparation for a trip to the MCA later today, I've been reading up on the work of Julie Rrap, whose work is on show in a retrospective exhibition called Body Double. I just want to riff for a moment on a point made in the MCA's Education Kit, i.e. that despite the fact that Rrapp's body appears in almost every one of her photographic works, she does not regard herself as undertaking a project of self-portraiture.

Reading Bernadette Wegenstein's Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006
I picked this book up while killing some time in the library before a very annoying meeting on Wednesday. I won't go into the details of that meeting, but the meeting I was coming out of prompted me to look at possible cross-overs between my thesis and Media Theory. I think Wegenstein's book popped up via a search for phenomenology and media. In any case, it's got me quite excited, largely because of the kinds of reading this book promises to open up.

Husserl thought he had gotten beyond the traditional realism/idealism debate, but he consistently held the view that phenomenology implied a transcendental idealism.
In this very dense post, which I actually wrote a long time ago (June 2006), I try to cash out how transcendental idealism differs from its traditional/mundane cousin, and explain why Husserl's transcendental phenomenology isn't dependent on formal justification for its legitimacy, and so can't be ignored by rebutting any or all of these justifications, no matter how regrettable they may be.

I've just discovered - somewhat belatedly - Gary Sauer-Thompson's ... well... über-blog is perhaps the only way to describe it. There are actually no less than four blogs on the site, Thought-Factory.net, which seem to be added to almost daily.

In any case, I'm inspired by the way he uses his postings in the Philosophical Conversations blog, not as opinion-pieces or arguments, and more as pointers.