Imagine a world where English Literature students were placed in charge of political revolution. Marshalling the full resources of their limited literary perspectives, what might we expect? A preoccupation with anything-goes-readings of the microsymbolic (read: irrelevant), a prioritization over the histories of phrases and words rather than people who speak them, and a Continue Reading …
Duality without Dualism
In contemporary analytic philosophy the word ‘exists’ has a very limited meaning: the things which exist are, more or less, the referents of our referential language. If I say ‘over there is a skyscraper’ then I take there to be such things as skyscrapers. And I take my sentence to pick-out, in all that is, that which is a skyscraper (ie. that my sentence refers to a Continue Reading …
a note on The Latest Zizek Thing
The New Statesman is a ‘British political and cultural magazine’ – it’s mostly a place for budding writers to attempt journalism, or sarcastic British public intellectuals to write editorials. It’s the kind of place where articles begin with a tid-bit of academic general knowledge, a theoretical curio, which is immediately dispensed with when the underequipped authors drop Continue Reading …
Phenomenology is Wrong
We should distinguish between two traditions within phenomenology: realist phenomenology and idealist phenomenology (fathered by Heidegger and Husserl respectively). The distinguishing feature is how they treat their ‘pre-bracketed’ and ‘post-bracketed’ states: in the realist case when we interpret (describe) the world we can bracket the truth of the claims epistemologically: Continue Reading …
Justice and the Dialectic of Anger and Guilt
Are those who can do as they wish powerful? For Socrates, acting on your own whim, killing whomever you please or obtaining great wealth does not make you powerful, if you act unjustly you are acting against your own good. It does not matter how extreme or sophisticated your ability to be unjust if this is all you can accomplish. Callicles offered Socrates a different view, Continue Reading …
Democracy and the Freedom of Choice
At a bakery you can have any kind of cake you like: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, raspberry.. Indeed thanks to the great defenders of individual choice in the baking world there are now hundreds of flavors for you to choose. You can't choose bacon or chicken at the bakery however, and bakers have yet to introduce the lamb custard. The baking industry has been deliberately Continue Reading …
Inverting the Gaze: Pagan Political Philosophy
[From Michael Burgess, edited by Seth.] A traditional means of founding political or moral philosophies in the west has been the construction of a point from which we can be seen and judged. This is an internalization and politicization of the Christian God who surveys and intervenes in his creation: we are always under the gaze of God and must therefore be Good. For Hume this Continue Reading …
Ecce Zizek! Feynman Homo
In the normal functioning of intellectual discourse we expect interlocutors to obliterate themselves before the alter of the Eternal Progress of Human Wisdom, that is, people should not feature amongst that which we praise, contemplate or idolize. That a particular person has offered us an idea is a purely contingent fact: he is merely at the right place and time to do it and Continue Reading …
June’s Intro to Philosophy Not School Group: Metaphilosophy
[Though June has already begun, and we thought that the fabulous Introductory Philosophy Readings Not School group might be on hiatus, we're happy to announce a new group leader for June, the every-popular Michael Burgess. If you're not a member of Not School, join up. Don't know what it is? Read here.] So far in the Intro group we have considered works which through their Continue Reading …
Murder and Ideology: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.
In the ordinary business of science it is reasonable to claim that the moon causes the tides, and to refer to empirical data as evidence. In the ordinary business of literary criticism it is reasonable to claim that Gordon Geko was greedy or that house elves are moral stand-ins for the peoples of our world who are enslaved and oppressed – and to refer to various theories of Continue Reading …
Tales from the Crypt: Transhumanism, wow!
The licence to speculate on the fringes of human progress is immediately issued when that which we hadn’t even imagined transitions to that which we merely know we do not fully understand. This transition point is the playground of the so-called “popular imagination”, the stage on which esteemed careers are built without the effort and determination of achievement. Though, Continue Reading …
Not School Group Proposal: Zizek!
For March I'm proposing a Not School reading group on Zizek. The group will read a 25-page transcript of a talk he gave at the International Journal of Zizek Studies 2012 conference. It is, I think, a very nice summary of some of his key philosophical positions and where his current theoretical interests lie. The added advantage of this reading is that a recording of Zizek Continue Reading …
Why the Divide? A Note on Continental Philosophy
The term Continental philosophy has no singularly accepted formal definition, nor does it even signify a “you know it when you see it” kind of activity, because it is not really a distinguishable activity at all. Indeed, most people who study philosophy on the continent have no idea that it is “continental philosophy” they are studying, but simply see it as philosophy proper. Continue Reading …
The Existentialist Self in the World: Doubt, Being and Caring
If from continental philosophy you throw out transcendental phenomenology and older idealist trappings–transcendental subjects and so on–you are left with a system which still has two components: the world and the self. It was the relationship between these two that took hold as the major problem for 20th C. continental philosophy. The upshot of the first phase of the Continue Reading …
The Subject: A Brief History
[A post from Michael Burgess. This reiterates some of the first half of our Popper episode.] The Cartesian subject, the "I" of the "I think", sits apart from the world, receiving it. Descartes' 17th Century inheritors, the British Empiricists took “the world” to be little more than a series of sense perceptions, perhaps perceptions of something – but we would never know. Continue Reading …
How to Flunk Philosophy: or Here we go Again
Editor's Note: Thanks for this submission from listener and PEL Citizen Michael Burgess. The principal critics of philosophy appear to come from one ideological view point, though it has been expressed in different guises throughout the ages. I'm going to call it, “I don't understand this so it doesn't make sense”ism. At its most sophisticated, this might be logical Continue Reading …
Chomsky vs. Zizek
Editor's Note: We feel the need to provide some coverage of one of the few big news stories in philosophy, which is the ongoing hostile exchange between two giants of the philosophical left, Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek. Since none of us podcasters has read much by either fellow or has much patience for following this story, I've asked PEL Citizen Michael Burgess to fill in Continue Reading …