Philosophical Percolations

Saturday (November 28th) Linkorama

By Phil Percs (with Jon Cogburn and Debbie Goldgaber)

Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right.

     - William S. Burroughs

The Plasticity of Empathy: Enfacement Illusion, Bodily Resonance, and Racial Cognition

By Debbie Goldgaber

This summer, I went to Towards a Science of Consciousness conference (in Helsinki) which was above-averagely awesome for an academic conference not only because it was in HELSINKI (which is rad) but because, since it was on consciousness, featured an above-averagely diverse crowd including philosophers, neuroscientists, quantum physicists, economists and Deepak Chopra.

To justify the expense of attending a conference in Scandinavia in the days of austerity, I thought (belatedly) to pass along some of what I learned.  As well, since this week many are wishing for a revolution in what cognitive scientists politely call social cognition, I thought the research  Lara Maister (Royal Halloway, University of London) presented on altering social cognition through manipulating body ownership particularly apt.

"Enfacement," Bodily resonance and Racial Cognition

Philpercs Interviews....Ruth Groff (St. Louis)

Ruth Groff (her blog here) has published extensively on the nature of power and causality and the relation between metaphysics and social and political theory--who or what can be said to have powers and capacities? What does it mean to attribute causal powers to something?  

Her recent book Ontology Revisited (OR) details the sort of Humean assumptions that she sees undergirding standard accounts of causation in contemporary metaphysics.  Humeanism entails a view of the world as comprised of independent, successive events (Groff uses the image of a flip book).  In this world nothing, strictly speaking, causes anything.  Moreover, she specifies how these sort of metaphysical assumptions influence contemporary social and political thought. As she writes below: "you can’t do radical social theory with a passivist, anti-essentialist, atomistic, physicalist metaphysics (no more than you can with a logical positivist epistemology)."  

Nine Questions for Ruth Groff:

Philpercs Symposium (Inaugural Edition): Schneider on Peterman's "Spinoza and Extension"

This week, philpercs is hosting a symposium on Alison Peterman's "Spinoza on Extension" (Philosopher's Imprint, 2015).  Please find the paper here.  Alison invited Daniel Schneider to present a critical response to the paper, below.  They (and we) invite readers to continue the discussion in the comments section.  

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Alison Peterman kindly invited me to kick off an informal discussion about her recent Philosopher’s Imprint paper, “Spinoza on Extension.” I say “kindly” for two reasons. One, I am excited to be given the opportunity to discuss her novel—and radical—interpretation of Spinoza’s account of Extension. Two, she extended to me this invitation knowing that I take a very critical stance towards her interpretation. To put it bluntly, I think it is deeply mistaken.

 As I understand it, Alison’s thesis is that according to Spinoza, neither extended substance, nor the modes of this substance, is dimensionally extended. She claims that in the Ethics, “when Spinoza writes that God, corporeal substance, or nature is ‘an Extended thing,’ he does not mean that this substance is extended in length, breadth and depth,” and that Spinoza believes “bodies or finite modes of extension” are not properly understood as possessing dimensionality.

Philperc Symposium (Inaugural Edition): Peterman's "Spinoza on Extension"

This summer we discovered that reading together is fun!!!  Inspired by the article discussion series over at The Brain Blog, we decided to host a discussion forum here on philpercs featuring recent articles making challenging, bold arguments (with a curatorial tilt towards younger scholars).

Moved by Eric Schliesser's FB comment that Alison Peterman (Rochester) "has just published one of the most controversial and important papers on Spinoza, ever" we thought to launch the series with Alison's "Spinoza on Extension" (Philosopher's Imprint, 2015).

 

Saturday (9-12-15) Linkorama

By Phil Percs (with Jon Cogburn, John Fletcher, Debbie Goldgaber, and BP Morton)

As a cultural force, the anti-hippie hobgoblin has had a truly profound impact on our era. While the cumulative accomplishments of ’60s social movements (civil rights, antiwar, environmental, etc.) undeniably altered the country, they also drove a rancorous wedge between those who applauded and those who condemned the changes. Consequently, a broad sense of loss and betrayal was felt by those deeply invested in the dream of a fully transformed society – a freer, gentler, peaceful ideal that never came to be, much mocked in subsequent decades by conservatives, realists and cynics. Many blamed this loss, literally or symbolically, on Manson and his execrable behavior. Superficially, this meant that the Family gave hippies, free love, communal living, etc., a bad name. But at a deeper level, it meant that their vilest acts, committed less than a week before the Woodstock Festival, caused a tear in the social fabric that may never be sutured: a legacy of reflexive doubt that routinely scorns idealism as hopelessly naïve – the stuff of “flowers and unicorns and rainbows.”

     - Steven L. Jones

Posthuman Life (Summer Reading Group Week 4)

Welcome to Week 4 of Posthuman Life (Philperc's summer reading group).  We'll be covering chapter 6 & 7 below!  

For the second week in a row, I'm late posting (very late this week).  Partly this is due to travel and partly to the difficulty of this week's material.  In any case it won't happen again because Jon Cogburn! takes over next week, wrapping up the final chapter (8) of Posthuman Life  and (I predict) deftly weighing in on some of the issues that have dogged us over the last month.

Now also seems like a good time to thank (so very much) Jon Cogburn and BP Morton for guest blogging and David Roden for being so unstintingly generous with his time and comments!   And thanks to all the readers for engaging.  Let us know if you have any idea for future reading groups in the comment section.

Now for chapter 6 & 7...

Week 3 Posthuman Life: The Disconnection Thesis (Summer Reading Group)

Welcome to week 3 of Posthumanism—a Summer Reading Group (and apologies for posting late!).  Last week we had two really excellent posts by BP Morton and some great discussion in the comments section.  I’ve yet to respond to  the second post on trans*humanism but plan on doing so as soon as I wrap up this week’s comments.

Today, chapters 4 and 5 of Posthuman Life.  As it happens, I’ve already posted on Chapter 4 here and I aspire to post a follow-up related to the “Dark Phenomenology” material later this week. 

People who are just joining might want to (re)read the post/comments and then read David Roden’s new post (on his own blog EnemyIndustry) which details some of the ways his thinking is developing on the subject.  

Quick Synopsis of Chapter 4: "Anthropologically Unbounded Poshumanism")

The goal of Chapter 4 (in terms of the book's argument trajectory) is to make the case that a priori constraints on the forms that subjectivity or agency can take are unwarranted.  Those who are argue for such constraints anthropocentrically bind the posthuman possibility space PPS.

The phenomenological tradition presents us with a particularly strong version of such an argument.  Grappling with its claims allows Roden to unbind PPS from anthropocentrism. Roden argues that pheomenological evidence (on which its a priori claims rest) related to the "necessary" structures of experience is necessarily incomplete and requires empirical supplementation.  The upshot of the argument is that we just can't know, from the armchair, what forms posthuman agency could take.

Now I’ll focus on Chapter 5 (“The Disconnection Thesis”) but feel free to use the comment section below to weigh in on on issues related to Chapter 4 or on any of the material we’ve covered so far.

Saturday (7-18-2015) Linkorama

By Phil Percs (with Jon Cogburn, John Fletcher, Debbie Goldgaber, BP Morton, and Duncan Richter)

A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.

          --Tom Wolfe

Posthuman Life reading group (Summer 2015)

By Phil Percs

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss...

Speculative Posthumanism and “Dark Phenomenology” (Debbie Goldgaber)

Interview with David Roden (friend of the blog R. Scott Bakker, at Figure/Ground)

Announcement Post (Debbie Goldgaber)

July 8: Intro and Chapter 1 (hosted by Debbie Goldgaber)

July 15:  Chapters 2 + 3 (hosted by BP Morton)

Queering the Human: Is the Transhuman already here? (B.P. Morton)

Dark Posthumanism I: summer’s ice (David Roden, at enemyindustry)

July 22:  Chapters 4+5 (hosted by Debbie Goldgaber)

The King of Weird Futures (Rick Searle, at Utopia or Dystopia)

July 29: Chapters 6 +7 (hosted by Debbie Goldgaber)

A Gallapagos Objection to Speculative Posthumanism? (Jon Cogburn)

Posthuman Life: The Galapagos Objection (David Roden, at enemyindustry)

August 5: Chapter 8 (hosted by Jon Cogburn)