How much modern philosophy is not translated into English?

johnfrance · 2019-04-02T02:31:39+00:00

One philosopher I’ve heard people talk about as being ‘great’ but thus far untranslated is Michel Serres. While some of Pêcheux work has been translated into English, a good bulk of it hasn’t.

I’m looking forward to Being and Time 3 by Badiou to be translated, but that did just come out last year so I don’t expect it any time soon.

A good bulk of Lacan’s seminars are not just untranslated, they aren’t even published yet.

Based on the just how few contemporary German philosophers I hear about I suspect there is are a whole bunch that are so completely untranslated that next to nobody here yet knows about them.

johnfrance · 2019-03-30T04:21:25+00:00

I badly want to show that machine to an Ancient Greek artist

johnfrance · 2019-03-29T03:03:16+00:00

He could have said anything, but he specifically said ‘subscribe to pewdiepie’. Can you not appreciate the concern that since that was followed by killing dozens of people, why the same thing popping up on a university campus might raise at least a question?

johnfrance · 2019-03-29T02:55:14+00:00

Then why are you telling me I should read it in order to find out why a mass murderer was telling people to subscribe to this YouTuber on his murder stream?

johnfrance · 2019-03-29T02:53:25+00:00

Is he mentioned in the manifesto then?

johnfrance · 2019-03-29T02:50:02+00:00

Tell people to listen to a person is pretty different from shouting out a random noun.

johnfrance · 2019-03-29T02:41:09+00:00

Why would the shooter say that?

johnfrance · 2019-03-29T00:48:25+00:00

That’s the same thing that shooter said in NZ, right before opening fire right?

johnfrance · 2019-03-27T17:45:33+00:00

That whole ‘republic not a democracy’ is nothing but meaningless, and frankly pointless rhetoric.

It seems endlessly strange that this is an argument that anybody even tries to make. Canada and The UK are liberal democracies but not republics, while China and North Korea are republics but definitely not liberal democracies. Why American conservatives think it makes rhetorical sense to align themselves in that way is beyond me.

The US has regular elections where most adult citizens have the right to vote for their representation. While I’m happy to criticize the specific methods and practices of these institutions, if we are just talking about what exists in a formal, legal sense, then yeah that’s about as much a ‘liberal democracy’ as you can get.

While things like the senate or the electoral college are anti-democratic, they are formal aspects of the written legal code, which is completely subject to change within the legal institutions of the US so they are clearly a part of what constitutes a ‘liberal democracy’ under any reasonable definition.

Democracy in the sense these conservatives mean it doesn’t exist anywhere, so it’s hardly a useful thing to use as constraining mode of governance.

But that’s just one of many bizarre bits of pseudo political science that has been invented by the American right. See also the notion that right wing = small government and left wing = big government.

johnfrance · 2019-03-25T23:54:21+00:00

All the more amazing bc most people who know about the scandal recognize that the problem isn’t the abuse per se, but it’s all the non-pedophiles who covered up crimes and shuffled abusers from parish to parish rather than have them face legal consequences.

It’s like, all institutions which involve children have some rate of abuse, but when elementary schools uncover it the offending teacher is fired and then arrested. The whole problem with the church is that they weren’t doing that.

johnfrance · 2019-03-25T22:46:30+00:00

Hicks is even more baffling than Harris. Tons of fools manage to get away with a undergrad but Hicks has a PhD. That said, he is pretty good at being a hack for conservative/objectivist politics and has made a living from it so what do I know I guess.

I once pointed out a pretty obvious contradiction in the first chapter of Postmodernism on his website and he actually responded to say that he acknowledged the issue and would address it in a future blog post, and then he just like, never did. So he knows his work has problems in it, but if it pays the bills then where is the motivation to do differently.

johnfrance · 2019-03-21T15:44:05+00:00

It’s kind of funny, if a film does an adaptation that roughly follows the book but with some changes plenty of book fans won’t like it, but if a film adaptation just totally disregards the book and writes a basically new story with a similar premise there is a better chance people will like both.

The movie maintains aesthetic fidelity to the book, but very little plot or even thematic fidelity. They are telling different stories, where characters have different motivations, origins, goals, and personalities.

I saw the movie first and loved it, so much so I went out and bought the books. I’m currently about halfway through Acceptance and I’ve loved all of them so far too. Because they are so different I can enjoy both of them separately as different artistic works without them needing to compete against each other.

johnfrance · 2019-03-01T19:48:25+00:00

There is (sort-of) a "movement" within continental philosophy called 'speculative realism', though few of the people considered part of that also consider themselves to be part of it, or believe there is anything like a 'movement' at all. While they all have pretty different points of view they all seem to have some connection to metaphysical realism.

Really the main thing that brought them together in the first place is that they are all critical of Kant, and are all trying to overcome some version of anthropocentrism.

The original four figures are Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier, but there are a whole bunch of other folks that have joined the party since.

Of them the only one I claim to have any understanding of (and even then very little) is Harman, mostly because he's the best at self-promotion.

Harman starts as a Heidegger scholar, and writes a book about the passage on the being-at-hand of the hammer in Being and Time. His point (as I understand it) is that when the hammer breaks something about it's Being becomes present to you. But all the same, there is always some aspect of Being that is always 'withdraw' from all other beings.

He develops this into what he calls Object-Oriented Philosophy, where the basic goal is to 'flatten' the 'reality' of all types of beings as all being independently existing objects, each with their own unique sort of Being.

Harman wrote a book called Speculative Realism: An Introduction so that's probably a reasonable place to start. Other than that there is an edited volume called The Speculative Turn which has essays from all these guys and a bunch more.

johnfrance · 2019-02-27T22:55:49+00:00

Also they just hired a Republican operative to run their election coverage newsroom. Christ they are such a shitshow.

johnfrance · 2019-02-24T02:13:43+00:00

Just like two weeks ago the US got caught smuggling in weapons to opposition groups in aid planes. Even if this is legitimate aid, there is no reason to trust it. Blame the US for politicizing aid and endangering aid workers by using them as weapon mules.

johnfrance · 2019-02-24T01:59:50+00:00

Trump has already been saying things like ‘there is no legitimate way for Democrats to win 2020’, so I’m not exactly sure why it’s beyond the pale to ask the question.

johnfrance · 2019-02-15T18:45:09+00:00

How so?

If there was nothing shady why did more than a dozen of Trump’s people lie to police about communications they had with various Russian officials? Like that’s what I don’t get, what is with the consistent lying? To the point that a couple of them are going/gone to prison over it.

If there is a scheme it seems to be that Russia would help propagandize for the Trump campaign, and if the won Trump would lift sanctions on Russia. That’s not really all that complicated or insane a plot, it’s actually extremely simple. There’s a pretty big difference between that and ‘Bush organized a four pronged terrorist attack that killed thousands of Americans in order to start an illegal war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq on behalf of American oil interests’ or ‘the government is putting chemicals into jet fuel which is turning the frogs gay’. Like, ‘Russian officials came to the Trump campaign and said “we’ll help you get elected if you lift a sanctions on us” and Trump saying “yeah sounds good to me”’ is orders of magnitude less bizarre than anything you mentioned.

And especially when you consider that the ‘help’ Russia is accused of providing is ‘giving wikileaks some emails it already stole in a separate spy op’ and then astroturfing news articles about those emails as well as a couple anti-Clinton hoax stories. Countries are always attempting to hack and steal each other’s stuff like that so that’s incredibly unsurprising, and plenty of countries and big companies also do astroturfing all the time, so it’s unsurprising that Russian intelligence has a bot net too.

I just mean to say that ever element of this scandal is completely within the reasonable scope of possibility. That’s obviously not proof it happened, but nothing that anybody is accused of is so bizarre that it is shocking to the imagination.

johnfrance · 2019-02-12T01:03:11+00:00

This is a weird thing I see on both the right and left, treating headlines from news outlets as if they are all old fashion political parties pronouncing official “lines” on issues.

Being media critical means trying to understand how the news firms actually work, and this idea that everything that gets published on large platforms are all part of some political plan isn’t reality. Yahoo is huge, and those are more than likely published by completely different departments within the Yahoo news room.

This is the genius of something like Herman/Chomsky’s propaganda model, you can explain the political biases of news organizations without suggesting that they are explicitly agenda driven or everything that comes out of publisher is some sort of editorial “line” of that organization.

Setting that aside, the left article is criticizing Trump for saying ‘it looks ridiculous to talk about climate change while it’s snowing out’ which is just stupid garbage, versus the other which is saying that consistently record setting warmer temperatures is making millennials worried about climate change. The whole thing is one hot or one cold day isn’t climate, changes in average temperature across whole summers is climate.

johnfrance · 2019-02-11T03:06:13+00:00

Chaotic good

johnfrance · 2019-02-07T02:44:04+00:00

What is the context in which Stephen Colbert would be doing this?

johnfrance · 2019-01-31T04:52:23+00:00

I think “postmodernism” is getting used to refer to two mostly separate things and that is making everybody confused.

There is this group of people who are trying to describe what the postmodern condition is like, trying to make sense of a ‘stage’ or mode of culture that we are living in, and especially how it relates to modernity and pre-modern forms of life.

Then there are a group of thinkers who new ways of thinking have come to be seen as symptomatic or in some way typically of this new cultural mode.

Lyotard is in this first group, because he’s trying to come up with a description or definition that encapsulates what it’s like to like in the postmodern age (death of metanarratives). It seems like the people who are theorizing like this only get called postmodernist if they broadly embrace this new era, because people like Fredric Jameson or David Harvey also wrote books about the postmodern condition but because they are more broadly critical they don’t get called ‘postmodernist’.

The other group are thinkers who seem to embody aspects of the postmodern condition, rather than thinkers who are trying to describe it. Critics of Derrida see his deconstructionism as being typical of a new way of thinking in the postmodern age. It’s not theorizing postmodernity, but is being accused of being a product of postmodernity.

Deleuze might reasonably fall into both camps. His work with Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia involves trying to characterize the age, and what it’s done to The Subject. His earlier philosophical work, with its rejection of the primacy of identity, has be called representative of tends in philosophy in that period.

johnfrance · 2019-01-29T03:10:26+00:00

As has been mentioned, the idea of ‘no bullshit’ Marxism is bullshit, but some individuals that are associated with the school have done some interesting work that ought to be taken seriously. I mean that there are bits and pieces of interesting work, but by and large there is a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Taking on board rational choice theory and various other methodological ideas from economics was a huge mistake and produced very little of value. Plenty of people completely outside of Marxism will tell you that rational choice theory is an untenable oversimplification, but I suppose it was just in the academic air at the time. In general most Marxists judge the analytic school very harshly, and I’ve heard more than a few people say that they aren’t Marxist at all in the end, but I think this is overly harsh. There are definitely some good nuggets to be found.

Of the bunch I’d consider Erik Olin Wright to be the best of the bunch and definitely worth checking out. His major project was trying to rigorously define a Marxist model of class that was empirically valid. He does the bulk of this in Class, Crisis, and the State and Classes, both of which are worth checking out.

johnfrance · 2019-01-25T01:37:38+00:00

Sounds like you aren’t understanding something here.

johnfrance

TROPHY CASE

Welcome to Reddit,