Ben Woodard Says: October 23, 2009 at 1:37 am
There and when he is cataloging idealisms…and it should come as no surprise that I find Kant completely unconvincing there. And yes you are certainly right about Iain’s book – his Schellingian injunction would be what is the ground of that Kantian ground? For Schelling it is Kant’s inability to face the terror of the absolute and Kant’s use of the transcendental subject does not meet Schelling’s qualifications for the prius or origin, or first ground. Stuck between the over externality of the rationalists and the over internality of the (ideal) empiricists Kant seems to ground conceptualization itself as ground and, as Iain makes very clear in his book, this does says nothing about the genesis of ideation or, in Hume’s case, its limit. Basically, I think, since transcendental realism indexes a non ideal (in the naive sense) source of the transcendental function, it is unpalatable to Kant. This is why Schellling attempts (particularly in his naturephilosophie and the system of identity) to produce a speculative physics where the strata of ideas and the strata of geological investigation are different in degree and not necessarily in kind. larvalsubjects Says: October 23, 2009 at 1:07 pm Hi Paul,
I suppose the question would be whether they doubt this on good or sound grounds. There are inquiring minds that doubt evolution, but that doubt isn’t enough to discount the mountains of evidence that support evolution. In philosophy, between Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan the idea of immediate access to mind is pretty thoroughly demolished. Deleuze is far from rejecting this psychoanalytic trajectory. In the sciences proper, neurology and cognitive psychology pretty decisively undermine the idea of any direct access to mind. Consequently, all things being equal there’s not a whole lot of reason to grant privilege to mind. We find precisely the same epistemic quandaries emerging with respect to claims about our own minds and how they function as we do with respect to objects. Thus, all things being equal, the points about transcendental idealist arguments, I think, stand.
There and when he is cataloging idealisms…and it should come as no surprise that I find Kant completely unconvincing there. And yes you are certainly right about Iain’s book – his Schellingian injunction would be what is the ground of that Kantian ground? For Schelling it is Kant’s inability to face the terror of the absolute and Kant’s use of the transcendental subject does not meet Schelling’s qualifications for the prius or origin, or first ground. Stuck between the over externality of the rationalists and the over internality of the (ideal) empiricists Kant seems to ground conceptualization itself as ground and, as Iain makes very clear in his book, this does says nothing about the genesis of ideation or, in Hume’s case, its limit. Basically, I think, since transcendental realism indexes a non ideal (in the naive sense) source of the transcendental function, it is unpalatable to Kant. This is why Schellling attempts (particularly in his naturephilosophie and the system of identity) to produce a speculative physics where the strata of ideas and the strata of geological investigation are different in degree and not necessarily in kind. larvalsubjects Says: October 23, 2009 at 1:07 pm Hi Paul,
I suppose the question would be whether they doubt this on good or sound grounds. There are inquiring minds that doubt evolution, but that doubt isn’t enough to discount the mountains of evidence that support evolution. In philosophy, between Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan the idea of immediate access to mind is pretty thoroughly demolished. Deleuze is far from rejecting this psychoanalytic trajectory. In the sciences proper, neurology and cognitive psychology pretty decisively undermine the idea of any direct access to mind. Consequently, all things being equal there’s not a whole lot of reason to grant privilege to mind. We find precisely the same epistemic quandaries emerging with respect to claims about our own minds and how they function as we do with respect to objects. Thus, all things being equal, the points about transcendental idealist arguments, I think, stand.
larvalsubjects Says: October 22, 2009 at 12:34 pm Hi Chris,
I don’t think we can run sociology and anthropology together. Anthropology has been pretty good on these issues. As Latour remarks in We Have Never Been Modern (and I think I make a similar point in this post or perhaps the earlier one on realism), anthropology is able to simultaneously weave together things like crop production, techniques, technologies, weather conditions, geography, resources, kinship structures, narratives, etc. It could be that we’re coming at the social sciences through different background literatures. I come from the continental tradition, so I’m primarily thinking of social thinkers such as Bourdeau, Foucault, Luhmann, Adorno, etc., as well as continental political theory such as Zizek and Badiou. This tradition is strongly influenced by the primacy of the linguistic and the semiotic, such that these other factors get reduced to receptacles for social forces, power, language, perception, signs, and so on without contributing differences of their own.
I don’t think we can run sociology and anthropology together. Anthropology has been pretty good on these issues. As Latour remarks in We Have Never Been Modern (and I think I make a similar point in this post or perhaps the earlier one on realism), anthropology is able to simultaneously weave together things like crop production, techniques, technologies, weather conditions, geography, resources, kinship structures, narratives, etc. It could be that we’re coming at the social sciences through different background literatures. I come from the continental tradition, so I’m primarily thinking of social thinkers such as Bourdeau, Foucault, Luhmann, Adorno, etc., as well as continental political theory such as Zizek and Badiou. This tradition is strongly influenced by the primacy of the linguistic and the semiotic, such that these other factors get reduced to receptacles for social forces, power, language, perception, signs, and so on without contributing differences of their own.
larvalsubjects Says: October 23, 2009 at 2:59 am Chris, I’m fine with discussing the theoretical concepts of OOO, its lines of argument, and so on, but I’m not interested in “selling” it, which seems to be what you’re asking for. larvalsubjects Says: October 23, 2009 at 3:00 pm While I do not think Continentalists are mistaken to see importance in things such as signs, the discursive, the linguistic, social forces (whatever those might be), power (whatever that might be), and so on, I do believe it needs to be opened up from its myopia to make room for the sorts of actors or objects you talk about in the sort of work you do. I see the speculative realists and OOO theorists as engaging in this sort of project. 10:27 AM
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