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my two books by plugging them in to what i m reading at the moment i may also just throw out new thoughts and problems that may or may not get legs these will be rough drafts of ideas incipient problems or my digressions and impressions as eric schliesser might say that i note along my intellectual path next up will be a post on a book i m reading recommended by john protevi habeus viscus by alexander weheliye weheliye adopts deleuze and guattari s concept of assemblages and explores what he calls racializing assemblages along the way there are some important criticisms of agamben and foucault and their argument also has resonance with the manner in which i understand the nature of problems i ll spend the next few posts thinking about race and problems on garlic and magnets september 26 2017 jeffrey bell 2 comments having recently read daryn lehoux s wonderful book what did the romans know university of chicago press 2012 i was led to revisit and reconsider a post from some time ago on latour s concept of factish the term factish is a neologism latour uses to combine ideas that are widely thought to be contradictory namely a fact and a fetish the former refers to a reality that is independent of those who may come to discover facts the latter is a human construction and is a projection onto objects of our desires wishes and hopes facts thus correspond to a reality that is what it is regardless of what we think about it fetishes correspond to realities that are what they are solely because of what we think about them a factish points to a central claim of latour s and it was this claim that was the subject of the earlier post namely to be constructed and to be autonomous are synonymous or the more constructed the object the more real and autonomous it is this gradation of being more or less constructed or more or less real is captured by yet another term of latour s relative existence lehoux s book has reminded me of the importance of this theme continue reading hume s political theory part 3 of 3 september 25 2017 september 27 2017 jeffrey bell 1 comment at the end of the previous post i claimed that understanding language as a fundamental convention helps us to understand davidson s controversial conclusion that language does not exist more precisely language as ordinary convention does not exist but language as a fundamental convention i argued does exist this does not appear however to be sabl s claim sabl s concern as he states from the beginning and as cited above is to show how hume s history can be understood as a continuous meditation on how conventions of political authority arise change improve by various measures and die hp 7 language tends to be treated as a convention but as equilibrium case that is relatively static 6 as sabl puts it in some of life and a great deal of politics the right thing for each person to do is that which he or she has reason to think others will do speak the same language meet at the same rendezvous use the same measurements accept the same authority for choosing officers and making laws ibid the philosophers such as david lewis and others who focus upon language as a convention or the game theorists who accept that the identities and expectations of the relevant actors is already known are each beginning with a static convention as the basis for their explanations sabl however turns to the challenges that arise in times of historical crisis when we do not have reason to think what it is others will do it is in times like this when one turns to the focal points the prominent obvious markers that one can use to orient oneself following schelling as discussed in the previous post sabl argues that these are temporary however for as the fundamental convention that constitutes the political authority of government comes into being these focal points increasingly become ignored and unnecessary but it is this process that we seek to understand and i think the account offered in the previous post concerning davidson s rejection of language is illuminating even if the fundamental conventions that concerned sabl were those concerning political authority and not language he may even reject the very idea that language is a fundamental convention and follow lewis and others and accept that it is an ordinary convention continue reading hume s political theory part 2 of 3 september 23 2017 september 25 2017 jeffrey bell 5 comments continuing from part 1 we turn now to the role of focal points play in solving coordination problems focal points emerge as a crucial piece in andrew sabl s account of how hume s history should be read focal points in other words are integral to the solution of coordination problems and are essential therefore as sabl will argue to understanding hume s account of how fundamental conventions of political authority arise change improve by various measures and die hp 7 the concept of focal points sabl borrows from thomas schelling s classic work the strategy of conflict 1960 where schelling addresses the problem of how two or more people are to coordinate as they desire to when they do not know where the other is and cannot communicate with them if two parachutists need to meet up with each other after landing but they don t know where the other lands nor can they communicate with them but they do each have a copy of the same map as in the figure above which is from schelling s 1960 book then the question is whether or not the parachutists will be able to coordinate their actions and meet schelling argues that they would and that in many cases people resolve such coordination problems all the time schelling offers another example of a man who loses his wife in a department store and schelling argues husband and wife will likely think of some obvious place to meet so obvious that each will be sure that the other is sure that it is obvious to both of them schelling 54 similarly in the case of the parachutists each will likely think of an obvious place to meet and as experiments have shown the most common place people pick when asked what they would do if they were one of the parachutists is the bridge it is the most unique prominent and obvious place on the map such obvious places are focal points most situations schelling argues provide some clue for coordinating behavior some focal point for each person s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do and the prime characteristic of these focal points schelling continues is some kind of prominence or conspicuousness ibid 57 continue reading hume s political theory part 1 of 3 september 22 2017 jeffrey bell 2 comments few would deny that hume regards both private and public law as matters of convention hume repeatedly uses the word himself but few have recognized that he regards certain conventions as fundamental immune to alteration except in the extremely long term at least generations and more likely centuries by the usual methods of political power and social change the claim that hume does believe in fundamental conventions that he rests a distinctive form of constitutionalism on the foundations of custom and mutual advantage it finds little support in hume s philosophical works only in the less familiar history the development of fundamental conventions could be seen as the central story of the history of england these conventions are both below and above ordinary laws below because their fundamental status can never be codified as such above because they limit at least arguably the authority of the lawmaking body whose own right to enact positive law itself derives from fundamental conventions andrew sabl hume s politics hereafter hp 121 2 in his book hume s politics andrew sabl provides a fresh look at hume s history that not only makes a strong case for reconsidering the importance of hume s political theory but also and perhaps more importantly he offers a critique of a many of the presuppositions of contemporary political theory central to doing all of this is sabl s reading of hume as one who develops a concept of fundamental conventions to address the coordination problem associated with who ought to have political authority and thus government as a fundamental convention is an answer to a coordination problem continue reading foucault and wittgenstein march 31 2017 march 31 2017 jeffrey bell 5 comments i m dusting off my wordpress site and will begin turning to this as a place where i ll sketch ideas as i begin to work on my next project i m not sure what the final form of this project will be but at the moment i m beginning with some ideas related to foucault and wittgenstein the picture in this post is from where wittgenstein s norway cabin stood i ve been teaching an existentialism class this term along with a political theory class and as a result i ve been immersed in wittgenstein and foucault i also recently gave a talk at memphis on wittgenstein and subsequent work has begun to crystallize around some of the ideas i introduced in that talk in particular as strange as it may sound i m working on a wittgensteinian political theory in many ways this is not faithful to the wittgenstein who insisted on leaving everything as it is calling upon philosophy to simply describe our grammatical practices in order to remove the confusions that come from wrongly applying rules of grammar where they do not naturally fit the key concept here however is grammar and this concept can be repurposed in a way i find harmonious with wittgenstein and with the work of foucault and deleuze it is this concept of grammar that will be central to the political theory i ll be working on among many other sources recently i ve found inspiration in stuart elden s book the birth of territory and from geoffrey ingham s nature of money i believe there should be some fruitful work to be done in applying my humean insights from this book to this project this blog will become a depository for rough partially formed ideas and concepts but as hume and his colleagues of the polite culture of eighteenth century scotland might have said these rough thoughts may become more refined and polished through their encounters with others deleuze on learning and skill april 18 2014 april 18 2014 jeffrey bell 2 comments when it comes to learning deleuze argues that it is so difficult to say how someone learns dr 23 more dramatically deleuze adds there is something amorous but also something fatal about all education dr 23 in learning to drive a stick shift car for example it is not sufficient simply to be told by the instructor to do as i do or to follow the rule as they have stated and or exemplified it in their actions learning is not a matter of following a rule or of doing what someone else does to the contrary what one encounters in learning to drive a stick shift car is the task of connecting various elements namely the hand foot clutch accelerator slope of the road etc and of connecting them systematically so that the foot releases from the clutch right when the accelerator is being pressed etc similarly in learning to swim it is a matter of establishing connections between the various parts and motions of one s body with the resistance currents and buoyancy of the water as deleuze puts it to learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective idea in order to form a problematic field dr 165 in clarifying what deleuze means by conjugating the distinctive points in order to form a problematic field will offer i argue what i take to be a helpful perspective from which to understand merleau ponty s example of the expert organist as well as jason stanley s recent work on skill continue reading a higher life or no future revisited april 7 2014 jeffrey bell leave a comment in an earlier post i argued that one way to think of foucault s project is as an extension of camus thought or as i put it there as a philosophy with no future just as camus sought to encourage the recognition of the absurd as a prompt to live life with more passion and consciousness of the present so too foucault s project sought through his archaeological enquiries to unearth from the past a problem contemporaneous to our present field of experience for both camus and foucault therefore a philosophy that has no future is not a philosophy that denies the future or a philosophy that denies the importance and relevance of an awareness and orientation towards a future that is foresight but rather it is a philosophy that subordinates the future to the concerns of the present to a problematization foucault and consciousness camus of the present for it is in the present where life unfolds and where change begins this same emphasis on the present is also found in seneca s fifth letter to lucilius continue reading posts navigation older posts search for recent posts blog has moved four problems what s the problem on garlic and magnets hume s political theory part 3 of 3 top posts eternity and duration in spinoza deleuze and analytic philosophy dialetheism latour on factishes and belief real patterns all the way down blogroll digressions and impressions eric schliesser know future economy brad delong mish s global economic trends robert reich reading matter anarchai blog archaeolog archive fire berube s blog contemporary culture critical animal deontologistics grundlegung how the university works immanence jon cogburn s blog k punk larval subjects latour s website mcshandy s metastable equilibrium minds and brains object oriented philosophy philosophy in a time of error pitchfork music reviews planomenology plastic bodies protevi s blog public reason shaviro s blog speculative heresy trancissions wordpress documentation plugins suggest ideas support forum themes wordpress blog wordpress planet archives august 2021 september 2017 march 2017 april 2014 march 2014 february 2013 august 2011 july 2011 june 2011 may 2011 april 2011 march 2011 february 2011 january 2011 december 2010 november 2010 october 2010 september 2010 august 2010 july 2010 june 2010 categories adam smith analytic philosophy aristotle badiou camus comedy compositionalism contemporary culture david lewis deleuze dewey dialetheism donald davidson economy foucault frege graham priest higher education hume ladyman and ross latour leibniz maimon marx meillassoux merleau ponty moritz schlick ooo philosophy politics psr robert brandom scientism seneca speculative realism spinoza tarde track and field uncategorized whitehead wilfrid sellars william james wittgenstein topics adam smith 1 analytic philosophy 2 aristotle 1 badiou 1 camus 1 comedy 1 compositionalism 1 contemporary culture 2 david lewis 2 deleuze 25 dewey 1 dialetheism 3 donald davidson 2 economy 5 foucault 2 frege 1 graham priest 3 higher education 1 hume 12 ladyman and ross 1 latour 5 leibniz 2 maimon 1 marx 1 meillassoux 2 merleau ponty 1 moritz schlick 1 ooo 1 philosophy 2 politic...