"The study of philosophy was more professionalized during the Middle Ages than at any other time before the present -- hence the term "scholastic". Philosophy was largely the province of tight university communities sharing a common curriculum, a common patrimony of texts, and a common arsenal of technical terms. Most of the works that have come down to us are, in one way or another, the product of university lectures, exercises, or debates, and those who produced them could expect in their hearers or readers a familiarity with a complicated jargon and an ability to pick up erudite allusion."
"If there were ever a real crisis, it would be our inability to cope with collateral outcomes of committing to the real content of humanity as undergirded by the neurobiolgical import of human and the ability to enter the space of reasons. The trajectory of reason is that of a global catastrophe whose pointwise instances and stepwise courses do not harbor an observable effect or noticeable discontinuity. Reason, therefore, is simultaneously a medium of local stability that reinforces procedurality and a general catastrophe, a medium of discontinuity and anti-conservation that administers the discontinuous identity of reason to the anticipated image of man." ~ Reza Negarestani, http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/
"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, "ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE"
A materialism committed to the reality of abstraction, as Marxism is, must be able to account for this interpenetration of the abstract and the concrete without lapsing into idealism, for which such interpenetration is pre-ordained because reality is ultimately endowed with conceptual structure. The challenge for materialism is to acknowledge the reality of abstraction without conceding to idealism that reality possesses irreducible conceptual form. Thus materialism must be able to explain what constitutes the reality of conceptually formed abstraction without hypostatising that form. The key to the de-reification of abstraction is an account of conceptual form as generated by social practices."
"Meaning cannot be invoked either as originary constituent of reality (as it is for Aristotelian essentialism) or as originary condition of access to the world (as it is for Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology): it must be recognized to be a conditioned phenomenon generated through meaningless yet tractable mechanisms operative at the sub-personal (neurocomputational) as well as supra-personal (sociocultural) level. This is a naturalistic imperative. But it is important to distinguish naturalism as a metaphysical doctrine engaging in an ontological hypostasis of entities and processes postulated by current science, from naturalism as an epistemological constraint stipulating that accounts of conception, representation, and meaning refrain from invoking entities or processes which are in principle refractory to any possible explanation by current or future science. It is the latter that should be embraced. Methodological naturalism simply stipulates that meaning (i.e. conceptual understanding) may be drawn upon as an epistemological *explanans* only so long as the concomitant gain in explanatory purchase can be safely discharged at a more fundamental metaphysical level where the function and origin of linguistic representation can be accounted for without resorting to transcendental skyhooks (such as originary sense-bestowing acts of concousness, being-in-the-world, or the *Lebenswelt*) The Critical acknowledgment that reality is neither innately, meaningful nor inherently intelligible entails that the capacities for linguistic signification and conceptual understanding be accounted for as processes within the world -- processes through which sapient creatures gain access to the structure of reality whose order does not depend upon the conceptual resources through which they come to know it." -- Ray Brassier, "Concepts and Objects" in *The Speculative Turn*
I’ve been thinking a lot about why I do what I do lately. I admit, I am a workaholic most of the time. I’m pretty intrinsically motivated. Just getting “one more thing done” is my mantra, just ask Kelsey. Even so, I keep asking the question, why? Especially when I’m working on my passion projects...
You should see the crazy looks I get when I tell people I love what I do. Writing Papers. Reading dense, thick books. Attending seminars. It's a weird thing to "do" philosophy, most don't get it. But to me, essays are sonnets or symphonies. Forms of expression. A tiny contribution to the human project.
If I had an overarching piece of meta-advice for job applicants it would be to try to analyze the academic job market as a player in a game: know the rules, understand your position, figure out how to get the best possible outcome from where you are, and then make your next moves accordingly. That could mean staying on the path you're already on; it could mean doubling down on a risk you think might pay off; it could mean "folding" and finding another line of work entirely. Maybe it means forging new alliances with other players; for the would-be grad student, it could mean that the only winning move is not to play.
Early this summer, I reworked a talk I had given into an article for an edited volume. The topic was one I would feel confident listing as an "area of specialization," and when I completed the chan...
I have been taking a class on truth called Theories of Truth (big surprise). Its about time to hand in our Term Paper Proposals. I just thought I would put mine up to share. I am basically taking the opportunity to engage with Sellars work.
As many have observed, truth is a difficult notion. Its difficulty stems from being — seemingly, at once — epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical in its use. While most philosophers tend to see this complex nature of truth as a surface level ambiguity in need of analysis, this paper takes the complexity to be truth’s ‘flower in a crannied wall’ character. That is, truth is to a philosophical system as the flower is to the crannied wall. In understanding the operation of truth in a philosophical system, we come to know what that philosophical system is as a whole.
When understood this way, the varieties of positions regarding the nature (or lack thereof) of truth are seen in a new light. Namely, a philosophers particular formulation of the nature (or lack thereof) of truth is contingent upon that philosopher’s precedent philosophical positions. Thus to investigate into what a philosopher says regarding truth is to lay bare the philosopher’s entire enterprise.
This essay is such an investigation. Truth, as accounted for in the work of Wilfrid Sellars, offers a multi-layered formulation that gives regard to more narrow conceptions of truth while dialectically exposing and overcoming their insufficiencies. The structure of the essay will correspond to Sellars’ multilayered account:
Truth is accounted for in its normative sense as being what he calls correctly semantically assertable. Taking up the formal results of Tarski and Carnap, Sellars argues that such results are inadequate and must be integrated with a richer account of the role of meaning and truth as categories in the philosophy of mind. In doing so, Sellars articulates a non-relational account of truth that is tied to a conceptual scheme that can is realized in different languages.
Sellars, however, is not satisfied at this level of investigation and insists that an account of “factual truth” — truth of propositions at the perceptual and introspective level and the truth of propositions which involve the complex techniques of concept formation and confirmation characteristic of theoretical science. In doing so, Sellars attempts to salvage a crucial insight misapplied in correspondence theories of truth via Wittgenstein’s Tractarian notion of “picturing”. However, whereas Wittgenstein famously rejected this notion as a theory of meaning, Sellars argues for its essential role in a naturalist theory of linguistics and cognitive representation. Picturing allows Sellars to link language to the natural order without reducing one into the other. The consequence of this for a theory of truth is that different conceptual schemes can be rationally adjudicated. Truth, in a very specific sense, corresponds to what really is.
Finally, Sellars utilizes the previous two accounts in order to refashion a Peircian Scientific Realism in which we distinguish between truth simpliciter — truth with respect to a logical conceptual framework — and “(ideal) truth” — truth with respect to the regulative ideal of the scientific enterprise “achieving a unified vision of the world in which the methodologically important dualism of observation and theoretical frameworks would be transcended, and the world of theory and the world of observation would be one”
Broad in its scope while surgical in its analysis, Sellars account cuts across both correspondence and deflationary theories and coherence and scientific eliminative theories of truth. Resulting in a theory of truth that is essentially a theory of an activity, the motivation of which is the perennial philosophical task of distinguishing appearance from reality.
Churchland, Paul M. (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78 (February):67-90.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
——. 1971. Review of The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, by A.J. Ayer. Philosophical Review 80: 96-100
——. 1970. Review: Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Philosophy 45 (171):66 - 70.
Rosenberg, Jay F. 2007. Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images. Oxford University Press Inc..
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1968. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. New York, Humanities P.
——. 1974. Essays in Philosophy and its History. D. Reidel Pub. Co..
——. 1996. Naturalism and ontology: the John Dewey Lectures for 1974. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
——. 1991. Science, perception and reality. Atascadero (Calif.): Ridgeview.
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