Office Hours (Awkwardness)

I’ve been inpired by Jon Cogburn’s latest movies. So here’s mine. It’s a synthesis of many awkward conversations I’ve had with students over the past few years. The most recent one was just the other day.  I can’t get it to embed properly, here’s the link

I wish I titled the video: “For those about to take on Peirce’s Method of Tenacity and/or Authority we salute you…”

Philosophy: destined to lick up its own vomit?

It seems like everybody wants to somehow mark the limits of philosophical thinking.  Historically, perhaps, this came from those who stood outside the reaches of philosophy. My students–especially the Christian fundies–always mock the pretensions of philosophers by rejecting the search for total knowledge even when I insist that philosophy is much humbler than that.  Reason, history, experience…philosophy are still at work, they’re just stripped down,  reworked, perhaps even a bit overmodest.  I don’t think anybody would begrudge that the impetus for encyclopeidac knowledge is passe, and certainly in the context of the last fifty or sixty years, the idea that we can make some sort of neat and progressive discovery based on some sort of grounding method used to seem so antiquated what with the talk of violence and metaphysics, geneaology, deconstruction, ordinary language, positivism, empiricism and on and on.   We do philosophical work and then seem to not know more than we know. “Reality is completely incomprehensible.” “I don’t even understand my own experience.”  Yet, nobody has really suggested we jump ship and move our desks into the math department (as Kant would have us do).  Philosophy’s impotence demands some sort of critical turn.  Since someone just told me that Hegel is coming back (did he ever leave?) into some sort of vogue it seems ironic for me to suggest that every since Hegel’s system philosophy has been recoiling, but at least it’s been recoiling in delight.  

Random Picture: German Idealism Summer

Fun Facts: Chapaev and Void

Reading Markus Gabriel’s essay “The Mythological Being of Reflection” from Mythology, Madness, and Laughter (Gabriel/Zizek) – great essay, by the way, I haven’t read anything this thought-provoking in a while (admittedly, just because I like it doesn’t mean it’s good, regardless of what people say – incidentally, I find the substitution of “It is good” for the simple “I enjoyed it” to be the most annoying substitution among philosophically inclined authors, right next to “I think you should do it this way” advice justified with a simple “because I do it this way and it works for me” – anyway, out of the long parenthesis we go) – came across the reference to Victor Pelevin’s Buddha’s Little Finger.  Apparently this is how Pelevin’s Chapaev and Emptiness/Void (Чапаев и Пустота) is rendered into English. Fun fact!

New Translation of Hegel’s Science of Logic

If you weren’t aware of this, you are now – start saving money! George di Giovanni’s new translation of the formidable Science of Logic is out in September 2010 (but it’s already listed on amazon.com at a whooping $180, $121.50):

This new translation of The Science of Logic (also known as ‘Greater Logic’) includes the revised Book I (1832), Book II (1813), and Book III (1816). Recent research has given us a detailed picture of the process that led Hegel to his final conception of the System and of the place of the Logic within it. We now understand how and why Hegel distanced himself from Schelling, how radical this break with his early mentor was, and to what extent it entailed a return (but with a difference) to Fichte and Kant. In the introduction to the volume, George di Giovanni presents in synoptic form the results of recent scholarship on the subject, and, while recognizing the fault lines in Hegel’s System that allow opposite interpretations, argues that the Logic marks the end of classical metaphysics. The translation is accompanied by a full apparatus of historical and explanatory notes.

• Includes a substantial introductory study that places Hegel’s Logic in an historical and conceptual context • Explains key terms and translations • Sets the text out in a clear and accessible manner, including Hegel’s own style points, making it easier to read

Contents

Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Notes on the translation; The Science of Logic: Preface to the first edition; Preface to the second edition; Introduction; Book I: the doctrine of being; Book II: essence; Book III: the doctrine of the concept; Appendix: Hegel’s logic in its revised and unrevised parts; Bibliography; Index.

The Cambridge Hegel Translations will have An Encyclopedia Logic out in September as well.

John Adams Blogs.

No, not that John Adams, this John Adams:

Plato & Socrates: the musical mind police

Preparing Louis Andriessen’s“De Staat” for a performance next week in Zankel Hall, I got to thinking about Plato and his strange comments about music.

“De Staat,” which is Dutch for “The Republic,” is a 35-minute setting of several of Plato’s texts about music and politics for a quartet of amplified female voices and an industrial-strength ensemble of brass, electric guitars, winds and pianos. Composed between 1972-76, it is a fabulously high energy meeting of Stravinskian primitivism, funky American bebop and ritualistic Indonesian modalities. It is a masterpiece, emphatically one of the best works of the early era of Minimalism.

Plato’s writings about music go with Adorno’s about jazz. You read them and seriously wonder how a great analytic mind could make such bizarre evaluations and see such subversive evils lying hidden behind the tones.

Random Tune: Jean Barraqué, le temps restitué

Jean Barraqué is/was an interesting character in contemporary music. All of his works fit on a nice 3CD set (like this CPO one). Aside from the famous Piano Sonata, I also like this piece (which I was reminded of while reading about Nono’s Il canto sospeso):