I'm not sure if I would call them interesting, in my opinion at least. They're kind of silly for someone who isn't totally into the whole God thing. And the silliness of them makes me doubt the legitimacy of theology in the first place. Hair-splitting and tangles all over the place. — darthbarracuda

The trick is to recognize the specifically philosophical, rather than theological import of much of what is discussed. Agamben, from whom the quote I provided was taken, specifically discusses the scholastic debates over the body's resurrection in the context of a broader discussion about the issue of the human/animal divide, for instance. Elsewhere, one could speak about the contributions of negative theology (John of the Cross, Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius) to the study of negation, or the importance of Aquinas to the theorization of analogy (given that God and the world relate analogically; and let's not forget the many debates over the nature and meaning of 'homology'); Eugene Thacker has tracked the concept of 'life' in terms of the work of John Scotus Eriugena and other scholastics, while ideas of John of St. Thomas regarding signs have famously been employed in modern semiotic thinking. A personal favourite reference for me is that of Nicholas Malebranche, whose occasionalism seems ever more pervasive (if unacknowledged) in alot of pop-scientific writing on causality. And these are just a few examples.

Deleuze has a wonderful quote regarding Christian philosophy in particular that "it does not produce concepts except through its atheism, through the atheism that it, more than any other religion, secretes." He cites Nicholas of Cusa, Eckhart and Giordano Bruno in this respect, noting that "all philosophers [in the Christian tradition] must prove that the dose of immanence they inject into world and mind does not compromise the transcendence of a God to which immanence must be attributed only secondarily", but that this 'injection' is impossible to properly suppress - hence the 'secretion of atheism' that Christianity is particularly prone to. In any case, it's always a questioning of harnessing the creative energies of scholastic thinking - or even religious thinking - for ends other than scholastic ones. The hair-splitting is useful in that it makes us aware of the implicit stakes of many of the claims that we make over things. Insofar as 'we' don't hair split, we're just not being explicit enough.

The singular glory of the scholastic tradition is to have made philosophy aware of just how far the ramifications of thought might lead - even if one disagrees with their points of departure.

1.) Its inherent connection to organized religion. Does Scholasticism justify Catholicism? Is Scholasticism truly impartial, or is it metaphysics-in-the-service-of-religion? In other words, would studying Scholastic philosophy lead you to Catholicism, or does it merely act as a psychological support structure for those already invested in the religion? It's not too difficult to find amateur philosophy enthusiasts touting around Scholasticism as the end-all, be-all solution to everything. Looking at history, wasn't Scholasticism basically tailored to Catholicism? — darthbarracuda

Part of why I find scholastic philosophy so fascinating is precisely because it so rigorously tries to make a place for God, while at the same time trying to 'get things right' at the level of the world. This kind of double imperative, stretched between the two poles of God and world, lit a fire of intense philosophical creativity which resulted in all sorts of philosophical permutations that tried to strike the 'right balance', as it were, between the two. The entire spectrum of scholastic thinking can be mapped onto the various articulations between (the) transcendence (of God) and (the) immanence (of the world).

I think that any philosophy that would proceed today without attempting to absorb the lessons of this intellectual ferment - even if only taken as a series of mental exercises - would be at a great disadvantage. At it's most minimal, scholastic philosophy shows us just how hard it is to break the grip of theological thinking, and functions as a fantastic road-map of pretty much everything to avoid, precisely because of it's wide-ranging rigor. One can be all the more secure in one's thinking if one can properly coordinate or triangulate just where one stands with respect to the many strands of scholastic thought that exist out there.

--

And apart from all of that, all the theological puzzles are just so interesting! A snippet from Agamben's the Open about one of them: "The problem that the Fathers had to confront first of all was that of the resurrected body’s identity with the body of the man in life. For the identity of these two bodies seemed to imply that all the matter that had belonged to the body of the dead person must come back to life and take its place once again in the blessed organism. But this is precisely where difficulties arose. If, for example, a thief — who had later repented and been redeemed — had had a hand amputated, would the hand be rejoined to the body at the moment of resurrection? And the rib of Adam, asks Thomas, from which the body of Eve had been formed, will it be resurrected in Eve’s body or in Adam’s?

Moreover, according to medieval science food is transformed into living flesh; in the case of an anthropophagus who has fed on other human bodies, this would have to mean that in the resurrection one single matter would be reintegrated into several individuals. And what about hair and fingernails? And sperm, sweat, milk, urine, and other secretions? If the intestines are resurrected, argues one theologian, they must come back either empty or full. If full, this means that even filth will rise again; if empty, then we will have an organ which no longer has any natural function."

Daniel Heller-Roazen - The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World

I find etymology useful for breaking the sedimented semantic resonance of words. Or rather, etymology shakes things up a bit, allows us to recognize the mobile and historical character of meanings and concepts. Not just the 'history of ideas' but the 'practice of ideas' can always find use for a bit of etymology.

There are many examples in physics. George Ellis (responding to Sean Carroll) provides an example in the comment section of this post on emergence by Massimo Pigliucci: — Pierre-Normand

What a fascinating discussion! I was most struck by the vigorous push-back from some of the commentators to Pigliucci's post. Many of the ideas he espouses seem so elementary and obvious to me that I always forget that the reductionist wing of science is as well entrenched as is it. The paper he discusses is equally as fascinating, and it jibes with so much of what I've been reading recently. I love that Pigliucci is so attentive to the fact that the reductionist program so rarely fits the science itself, being rather read-into the data from the 'outside'. It gives me hope. Thanks for the link : )

:D Yep, you got it!

Wittgenstein lived, wrote an essay, left some notes, and died.

Catherine Mills - The Philosophy of Agamben
Benjamin Noys - The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (rereading)

This is true, but if one pays attention to the specifics of what Plato actually says and does with sound, what he consistently attempts to do is extract the logoi from the phone: he values the acoustic to the extent - and only to the extent - that it conforms the ideals of harmony and ideality. It's to this degree that Plato is a consummate heir of Pythagoras, who as the story goes, drowned his own student Hippasus for his discovery of irrational numbers. And like Pythagoras, Plato consistently attempts to cleanse the acoustic sphere of it's specifically sonorous, libidinal charge, in favour of it's noetic, idealizing, and discursive form. Cavarero's entire For More Than One voice details, almost dialogue by dialogue, each of the places where Plato goes about 'devocalizing' the voice in favour of the noetic. But with respect to the flute, consider:

"Alcibiades tells the story of Marsyas, the arrogant satyr who is the protagonist of a cruel myth. Marsyas was a champion of the art of the flute, who challenged Apollo and his cithara [lute]. Marsyas was convinced that the flute produced an irresistible and extremely sweet melody that was superior to that of string instruments. But he was wrong. The myth in fact tells us that Apollo won the competition, and as punishment, Marsyas was flayed alive. His skin was torn off while his mouth, no longer intent on blowing into the flute, emitted tremendous cries of pain. Thus Marsyas learned, at great expense, that one should not challenge the gods. But he also learned that the wind instruments are a prolongation of the mouth and that they are too similar to the voice. Besides the fact that they swell the cheeks and deform the face, they require breath and thus impede the flutist from speaking. In other words, the flute lets itself, dangerously, represent the phone in the double sense of the term: voice and sound.

Whoever plays it renounces speech and evokes a world in which the acoustic sphere and expressions of corporeality predominate. It is the world of the Dionysian dithyramb, where the flute modulates rhythms that accompany an orgiastic dance. Nothing is further from the videocentric comportment of the philosophical logos. ... Underneath Socratic speech — the very sonorous, audible speech that comes out of his mouth — there is a devocalized logos whose reality is truer, more originary, and thus, more divine. ... This order, as the harmonious, right joining of ideas that are grasped by a simultaneous vision, in fact corresponds to the logos that is the dream [in which] there are no more flutes, nor voices, nor sounds; only a perfect noetic ecstasy."

Cavarero goes on to show how this anti-acoustic current is of a piece with Plato's dislike of Homer and poetry more generally, as well as accounting for his portrayal of woman like the Muses and the Sirens (the link between women and the acoustic is not incidental but perfectly considered): "The epic worries Plato above all for its musical and vocal performance, linked to corporeal pleasure. The harmonious voices of the Muses and Sirens, and the monotonous and penetrating song of the cicadas, continue to disturb the platonic imaginary whenever the philosopher seeks to critique the poets. The principal function of these figures — who re emblematically feminine — seems to be to emphasize the sonorous, libidinal, and presemantic materiality of logos. What is certain is that in this contagious pleasure, the acoustic register... stands in opposition to the solitary style of theoria. This pleasure alludes to harmonious links that are different from those of the philosopher’s logos; it alludes to a closer relation, at times too close, with the female body."

So perhaps an effective metaphysics of perception differs based on what aspect you are focusing on, such as a focus on how the medium affects the experience of perception (brightness and shades of flashing colors/loudness) in contrast to how it reveals the attributes of objects (appearance of objects/hardness of objects) So I'm suspicious of using what you described as a justification for using properties of sound waves as the basis for metaphysics of hearing, unless we are to do the same for vision in respect to its medium. I'm not really sure how much the ontology of waves actually reveals about the nature of its coinciding experiences. — Saphsin

I guess I'm not so concerned about a 'metaphysics of hearing' so much as what the experience of hearing can offer a metaphysics: a different focus, as you say (already a visual metaphor!), or an emphasis on a different mode of thinking. With sound as a basis, would or could one think in terms of subject and property, for instance? Is a sound anything other than it's properties, the so-called accidents that 'befall' 'it'? Could one be an Aristotelian if one were born blind? Or a Hegelian? A - God forbid - analytic metaphysician? I suspect not.

Three things immediately come to mind, one of which you've already alluded to with "figure/background". Sound may be "around a corner", but sound is also "everywhere". We can locate a sound's location in space, but space itself is already a visual notion. When we hear something it melds entirely . That isn't to say you can't have a melody and a harmony, or the ability to pick out particular instruments in a symphony (though these would be more akin to looking at a painting than just the experience of sound), but I think that particularity would be less central to metaphysics -- so generalizing from some particular visual cue to a universal wouldn't be quite as an important of a question -- "cutting across appearance/reality" as you note. — Moliere

Yeah absolutely - there's definitely a kind of cosmic, a-centered element to sound that doesn't jibe quite as well with the visual; even the language we use for sound is far broader and 'baggier': there is a line or a ray of sight and vision, but a direction of sound - these expressions also locate agency in a slightly different way; the line of sight belongs to 'us', whereas the direction of the sound belongs to it's source. There's an asymmetry to how we think about these things.

Moreover sound tends to be more readily recognized as indifferent to either humans or even the living: we 'pick up' sounds to the degree that we are in range of it's vibrations, but then, strictly speaking, so does anything else, which, if sized correctly (as per the wands of an antenna), will vibrate along with the sound even if it doesn't have the phenomenological experience of 'hearing' the sound as a quality. Sound tends not to be 'for-us', even though we 'participate' in it's being. The visual, on the other hand, always seems directed to the eye; the visual world emanates about us, where the aural world is one we enter into (this plays into your point about 'the self' as being less privileged when thinking in terms of sound).

This strikes me as a problematic evaluation. Obviously we might say that the visible must be present-to-sight, but so too might we say that the audible must be present-to-hearing. I can also turn this around and say that the visible can be out of earshot without compromising its authenticity.

And with respect to hearing something through speakers; how is that different to seeing something through a television? This likely ties in with Saphsin's query. — Michael

Perhaps the point is better specified in terms of representation than spatio-temporal orientation: the visual tends to be thought of as either ‘the thing itself’ or as a copy or representation of the thing itself. But aurality tends to scramble this division - we don’t tend to think of, say, a song on an iPod as a ‘representation’ of the thing itself: the recorded song just is the thing itself (we enjoy the recording as a recording, it’s not a degraded representation of the real thing; the tune, melody and rhythm of this song, playing now, in my ears, is the experience of the thing itself). And seeing the song played live, is, I think, generally taken to be an experience of a qualitatively different order.

Again, this is of course not a distinction set in stone: art, and especially the photographic arts, tend to challenge this model, presenting the picture or the painting as something complete-unto-itself, something to be savoured on it’s own terms. In this sense art always tends to emphasise immanence over transcendence, drawing attention to itself as art - photorealism perhaps even more so than anything else (note the the first reaction to a good photo-realistic painting or drawing is to usually express amazement at how real it looks: what better to confirm it’s ‘irreal’ status? - reality itself would of course be met with indifference).

Sound on the other hand doesn't tend to need to draw attention to itself as art in order to assert it's authenticity; even a degraded recording of someone speaking - so long as more or less audible - isn't generally thought of as 'not the real words of the speaker'. It doesn't necessarily put into question what is being heard - whereas a bad, blurry photograph but put into question the very reality of what is being seen. Again, these distinctions are very much a matter of emphasis and tendency, than anything categorical and immutable. They function better as provocations to thinking differently than as 'the right way to think'.

This is interesting, but I find something off about analyzing the metaphysics of hearing as an act of perception based on the properties of sound waves (the medium that provides information for perception) rather than the objects of perception (if there are such objects to be said, I'll have to think about this) when you do not for vision with respect to electro-magnetic waves. How do you justify this difference? — Saphsin

Perhaps - and again, I'm working in an exploratory mode here - the precise advantage in thinking in terms of sound is exactly this inseparability of medium and content. Once you begin to explore the psychoacoustics of sound, this becomes all the more palpable I think: the specific timbre or 'quality' of sound (whether from a French horn or a violin) is shaped by a variety of factors including the exact shape of the wave (which may be jagged, smooth - in any case always distinct depending on the source of the sound); the harmonics of the note played as it is amplified or cancelled out by other vibrations (which may be from the instrument itself or from the room it is played it), the exact manner in which the note is played, etc. There's a kind of materiality or corporeality to thinking in terms of sound which makes it always-already 'environmental' and not 'detached', as with vision.

We don't hear a 'thing out there' (as with sight); so much as we are implicated in the sound itself; we - or our ear drums and cochlea - vibrate along with the sound, such that we - as bodies - are enfolded into the very phenomenon of sound without which we would not be able to 'hear' it. Hearing is not the passive imprint of sound upon a docile body, but a kind of activity. Evens speaks of sound as a 'compression' or contraction effected by the body: "What hearing contributes to sound, therefore, is a contraction. Hearing takes a series of compressions and rarefactions and contracts them, hears them as a single quality, a sound. Or, rather, hearing contracts this wave of compression and rarefaction into a number of qualities that together determine a singular sound".

In this, hearing is active: "the temporalities of sound are things that we do, extraordinary powers of perception and the perceptive body. The body must compress time, it draws into a singular moment an interval of difference ... To feel a rhythm means to feel the entirety of a beat all at once, even while anticipating the next beat. The space between one beat and the next is not itself a metrical or metered interval; to the listener, performer, conductor, and composer, it is rather a pulse, a moment that does not lose its integrity when divided. Once entrained, the perceptive body can hear the rhythm even when it is not being played." Again, this seems to me to be an interesting resource when it comes to thinking about our metaphysics, which traditionally sets subject against object, separating medium and content, abstract and concrete. Sound scrambles things in very nice ways.

The Tractatus never did much for me, but the PI is a consummate work of philosophy. My fundamental takeaway of the latter is as a kind of methodological handbook of philosophical purification: a guide for the cleansing of badly posed philosophical problems, an injunction to get - not the answers - but the questions of philosophy right. It's a Critical book on language in the Kantian sense: A Critique of Pure Language. On Certainty and the Notebooks are of the same vein.

(Bergson, funnily enough, thus counts as perhaps one of the philosophers closest to Wittgenstein in this regard, even though the two couldn't be further apart on matters of speculative ostentation - but where Wittgenstein was an utter philosophical neurotic, Bergson treated philosophy as innocent from the beginning).

No.

No.

If you're interested, there's a rich and pretty lively literature on this phenomenon, but probably one of my favorite's is Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech". It's an old text (1878), but pretty short (5 pages), and a classic. Here's part of the intro:

"IF there is something you want to know and cannot discover by meditation, then, my dear, ingenious friend, I advise you to discuss it with the first acquaintance whom you happen to meet. He need not have a sharp intellect, nor do I mean that you should question him on the subject. No! Rather you yourself should begin by telling it all to him. I can see you opening your eyes wide at this and replying that in former years you were advised never to talk about anything that you do not already understand. In those days, however, you probably spoke with the pretentious purpose of enlightening others - I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself".

It kind of defines my approach to many discussions on the forum too : )

Perhaps interestingly, I think the experience you mention often - if not always - comes about in the very process of 'working out' the thought to begin with. There is, in other words, a kind of mutual propelling of the idea in which articulating the thought makes or fabulates the very thought which is there as a hazy seed to begin with. Recall also that the etymology of the word 'articulate' comes from the Latin arthron, or 'joint', referring back to the language of woodmaking, with it's cognates relating to the conjoining or uniting two pieces of wood.

This reference to the 'joining of two' is important I think, because the it says something about the nature of the 'hazy seed': it refers in fact to a grasping of a distinction which then subsequently gets 'filled out' depending on the problem at hand; that is, part of what makes a work of philosophy (say) 'relatable' in the sense of 'I knew it all along but this just articulates the point in the right way...', is that it creates a distinction around which one can begin to categorize the phenomena under question: 'it's this kind of thing, rather than that kind of thing'. And once this primary distinction emerges, one can begin to trace it's ramifications: 'given that it's this kind of thing, these consequences follow, and not these other ones...' and so on.

This is why great philosophers are not those who provide 'new answers' to old questions, but those who rearticulate the field of problems, who drive a wedge - a distinction - into the field of phenomena in a new and novel way, reorganizing our very approaches to questions. To identify with a philosopher is to identify with the way in which they parse out the field of intelligibility, the ways in which they say 'this belongs to this category, and that, to another'. This is what accounts for the fact that the understanding in question is, as you've put it, 'pre-reflexive': it is operative at the level of the 'problem', the organizing principles of intelligibility, and not at the level of 'answers'.

Aden Evens - Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience

Their problem not ours. Make PF great again.

My personal stance on the matter is that 'nothing' should not be used in ordinary language. There are few examples in the real world where nothing can mean anything useful apart from creating distortions. — Question

People use the word 'nothing' in ordinary language all the time without issue. The confusion only comes about when the word is treated as as somehow problematic - as it is in the OP. It's a self-perpetuating circle that, unable to 'make sense of nothing', projects it's own confusion onto a perfectly good word and then declares 'it shouldn't be used'. This isn't 'ordinary language philosophy' - its it's exact opposite.

Oh but see if you just define it differently then the other thing won't exist because that's how reality works see.

Nice link to Linda Nochlin's canonical feminist essay on how institutional barriers and not talent - and least of all 'biology' - have made it very hard for women to make it in the art world.

What a bunch of misogynist bullshit. These so called 'well established facts' would have any bearing whatsoever if (1) women have had the educational, social and cultural oppertunities that have been offered to men, and (2) if any of the 'biological/evolutionary' nonsense was true. Check out the work of Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young especially - the magnificent pair Delusions of Gender and Brainstorm respectively - who consistently show that the so-called studies regarding the evolutionary-developmental differences between men and women to be mostly projections out of pre-conceived, biased readings of the evidence. What an absolute hack of a thread - unsurprising it's gone form 'there are no significant female philosophers' to 'these are the reasons why females are generally inferior humans'. Sexist filth.

But then, if you're disqualifying Arendt, Naussbaum, Foot or Anscombe, I'd suggest the issue lies in your judgement, and not the works in question. You can call foul that this 'attacks the speaker and not the statement', but what kind and of trivial, utterly personal statement is one that begins "I do not consider..."? There's nothing to 'attack' at the level of statement because the whole thing is personal through and through: you may as well say " I do not like the color blue - please attack the statement not the speaker". But it's a ruse, a pseudo attempt at 'objectivity'.

The Atlantic article you linked to makes exactly the right point I think when it rejects the question itself as a complete sham, or at least transforms it into a point of departure to put not women, but 'the tradition' into question: "The real question shouldn't be "can woman do philosophy?" but rather "can philosophy make itself worthy of women like Sojourner Truth, Patricia Hill Collins, and Joanna Russ?" Is there a philosophy that can speak thoughtfully about equality, about injustice, and about women?".

'Translating history'? I'm not even sure what that means.

I didn't say that noble means good, although I did quote Nietzsche himself tracing the etymological significance of 'good' to nobility. So yes, Nietzsche acknowledges and respects the providence of the terms, but his usage of them is philosophical and not historical or anthropological. Hence why salve morality is not tied to the existence of actual slaves, nor are aristocratic values tied to the existence of actual aristocrats. Or rather it is the values which define the 'beings', and not the other way around.

What is at stake is a genealogy of morality, not societies. Hence also why slave morality - and not 'slaves' - is exactly the kind of morality that does not accept social stratification, irrespective of what individual, 'historical slaves' might or might not have accepted. The employment of these terms are conceptual, not historical. Again, Nietzsche will almost always speak of aristocratic values (or an "aristocratic mode of evaluation" - GoMI, §10) as the subject of his discourse, and it would be a reductive misreading to think that every time he does so, he is simply speaking of 'military values' or a 'military mode of evaluation' - especially given Nietzsche's explicit distaste for the military:

"Perhaps a memorable day will come when a nation renowned in wars and victories, distinguished by the highest development of military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifice to these objects, will voluntarily exclaim, "We will break our swords” and will destroy its whole military system, lock, stock, and barrel. Making ourselves defenceless (after having been the most strongly defended) from a loftiness of sentiment — that is the means towards genuine peace, which must always rest upon a pacific disposition" (The Wanderer and His Shadow, §284).

When N talks about aristocrats, he means military. — Mongrel

Not quite. The aristocratic in Nietzsche refers to all those who value ranking, or the stratification of society into differing ranks. It is a concept which is opposed to democratic and egalitarian. Hence why Nietzsche will often speak of a aristocratic society, spirit, values or even morality tout court. Consider his quite explicit definition: "Every enhancement of the type "man" has so far been the work of an aristocratic society - and it will be so again and again - a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other." (BGE §257).

In the Genealogy, he will in fact equate the aristocratic with the noble, to the extent that it simply stands for precisely the morality which is 'beyond good and evil': "what was the real etymological significance of the designations for “good” coined in the various languages? I found they all led back to the same conceptual transformation— that everywhere "noble,” “aristocratic” in the social sense, is the basic concept from which good" in the sense of “with, aristocratic soul,” “noble,” “with a soul of a high order,” “with a privileged soul” necessarily devel­oped: a development which always runs parallel with that other in which "common,” “plebeian," “low” are finely transformed into the concept "bad.” (GoMI, §3).

Very rarely will Nietzsche simply employ the term 'aristocrat' to refer to the military (look though the GoM for every reference to the term if you're reading it now - it will almost always be used in a wider sense, and almost always as a synonym for 'noble'). The aristocratic for Nietzsche is a kind of 'way of life' or approach to morality, and those who come close to that approach are aristocratic.

It's important to remember though that Nietzsche coupled his rejection of the self ("self-antirealism") to a realism about drives or impulses that swarm within us and which are the true subjects of 'decisions': "a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives"; “Every drive is a kind of lust to rule ... each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm." Consequently, any 'action' is a kind of precipitation of a 'victorious drive':

"The I is not the attitude of one being to several (drives, thoughts, etc) but the ego is a plurality of personlike forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world ... Within ourselves we can also be egoistic or altruistic, hard-hearted, magnanimous, just, lenient, insincere, can cause pain or give pleasure: as the drives are in conflict, the feeling of the I is always strongest where the preponderance is".

Elsewhere: "However far we may drive our self-knowledge, nothing can be more incomplete than the image of the totality of drives that constitute our being. We can scarcely even name the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counter-play, and above all the laws of their nourishment remain quite unknown to us. their nourishment is thus a matter of chance: our daily experiences throw a piece of prey now to this drive, now to that one, which they seize greedily, but the entire coming and going of these events does not stand in any rational relation to the nutritional requirements of the drives as a whole, with the result that some of them are starved and waste away, with others are overfed".

Ressentiment stems from treating these drives as both unified and cohesive, rather than as the medley of contradictions that they are. To be beyond good and evil, consequently, is to refuse to impart intentionality or calculated action of behalf of the subject, recognizing instead a kind of innocence of the drives, a refusal of to 'hold action against the subject' (which was never 'a' subject to begin with), in the form of a moral debt (of which the 'original sin' is a model of). I definitely think that this is a far more attractive model of ethics than the Christian one that Nietzsche is attacking, but I wonder if the insular/aristocratic alternative that Nietzsche presents is sustainable today. Rather than looking 'inward' at the multiplicity of drives, perhaps looking 'outwards', towards a kind of virtuous community is more amenable to today's interconnected, globalized world.

Giorgio Agamben - The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics

Ooooh nooooo! You grabbed a random paper off the internets and critiqued it! Whatever will I do??? Wait, nothing lol.

Well, I mean, the way you described it, it seems like the singularity is essentially of 'non-quantifiable' quantity, because if you quantify anything, it becomes immediately converted to a particular. Yet we still can refer to singularities, like Thatcherism or Caesarism — discoii

Well, proper names kinda just are ways of referring to singular entities. So I think there are resources in language to deal with this.

Fine, but I'm just pointing out he's your mirror image — The Great Whatever

I don't think that's fair. My main complaint is that he's erasing the specificity of my position by translating it into terms - his terms - that aren't adequate to it, and then critiquing that improper reconstruction of it; and further, that he's so caught up in those terms, that he can see neither that nor why it's inadequate. If I'm doing the same to him, then I'd welcome some correction.

Oh so you are arguing that the bad guys are the Laplace guys and the good guys are people like Leibniz and Spinoza (to take a completely different 'singularity' insofar as metaphysical thought is situated). — discoii

I guess?

By the way, how would we talk about a singularity in language? Because it seems like language is very particular by nature. — discoii

I'm not sure what you mean by the question.

Woah cowboy, that first quote isn't mine (is it?); and yeah, the second quote is quite specific that it isn't adequate to this task, i.e. the one set out in the OP. And Apo isn't exactly some innocent wide eyed lamb whom I've been eviscerating; he's an arrogant nong whose basically trailed me around every other post I've made in this forum to register some antagonism or another. So I'm not exactly predisposed to show him any love.

But I didn't begin the discussion of formal logic to begin with - you did. I've tried to make the viewpoint I've adopted re: becoming and relations as clear as I can - do you think they can be formalized? Are there resources in the formalisms to accommodate those views? Given that the POV here is designed to work against any notion of subject-predicate coupling, do you think I am wrong to say that this approach cannot be formalized?

I dunno, I think you're being a bit dramatic. I've never gone out of my way to comment on formalism without prompting, and my issues, where I do have them, are more methodological than technical: can it be taken for granted the the subject-predicate form is adequate to philosophical thought as a whole? I don't think it can, and this has no bearing on whatever technical magic that takes place 'within' the formalisms themselves, none of which I've said anything about either way.

As for Deleuze, as I said, I don't expect that people 'know their Deleuze' to engage with me, but if - like Apo - you're going to grab a quote (one employed in the OP because I thought it had pedagogical value) and say 'this is all wrong because it doesn't agree with my pre-fabricated POV', then you can expect some push-back on a technical level. Especially when it gets the technicals totally, absolutely wrong.

I think there is a broad tension in your posts, SX, in that you object to people who deny the relevance of your highly specific tradition-internal approaches to problems to general concerns, but at the same time base a lot of your philosophical identity on a snobbery towards anyone not versed in that specific tradition. — The Great Whatever

I think actually that this is fair, with the caveat that I will always try, as far as space and time allow for, to explain what I mean when I invoke the authors and traditions I do, and explain the relevance of much of what I call in. If my posts tend to be sprawling and long, it's because I'm trying quite hard to make admittedly tough ideas digestible. On the other hand I do expect an equal hearing - even if to register incomprehension - and I will tend to treat bad reading with the scorn or indifference it deserves. Long story short, I'll tend - I hope - to meet like with like.

As for formal logic, I do regret not being more acquainted with it, if only because one ought to know one's enemy to all the better to engage it. But I really do think the subject-predicate form is inseparable from a kind of Aristotelian substance-accident metaphysics that it's almost incomprehensible to me that anyone takes it seriously other than as a kind of engineering tool. And what little I have read of the metaphysics that takes logic as it's base - Ted Sider, David Lewis - has always made me balk, if only because of what seems like it's breathtaking naivety in taking that form itself for granted. I've a strong interest in the paraconsistent guys and gals, but even then I think they're exploring the limits of the field "for" that field. But if you're not invested in it then...

So yeah, I find it hard to motivate myself to engage with this stuff, which just seems so - backward. Especially when the sciences seem to be a vastly richer resource for philosophical thinking (and there seems to be an almost inverse relationship between how well one is versed in formal logic and scientific ideas among many of those who use logic as the touchstone for their metaphysics - a relationship I'm guilty of playing into as well, on the other side).

That's unfortunate. Part of the appeal of this approach is precisely that it's allowed me to make sense of fields as far flung as aesthetics, ethics, perception and politics, all the while being in conversation with the great traditions of philosophical history more generally. Indeed, I think most of these are largely unintelligible without an approach grounded in the milieu surrounding questions of relationality, individuation and becoming. So sincerity notwithstanding, I do think that many of your perceived objections are largely off the mark, even if it is, as you say, taste which is the final arbiter here.

There's a very useful distinction in democratic theory regarding the difference between enemies and adversaries (antagonists and agonists) - the difference between the two is whether or not one treats the other as a legitimate enemy (adversary), or an illegitimate enemy (enemy). The legitimate enemy is the one who you might disagree with, but whose whose right to defend and espouse their opinions is not in question. The illegitimate enemy being the one whose opinions are void by dint of it coming from that very person. This might be a useful way to approach your two modes of argument.

That said, the distinction probably works better in a political setting, because there are more obvious criteria by which to judge which is which (which side's policy gets implemented? (adversaries) vs. who get vanquished and loses the right to speak (enemies)). Probably why internet discussions get so heated so easily, because there's no real guiding light to mandate what kind of discussion (agonistic or antagonistic) is taking place.

On a forum like this though, it's clear I think that it's the adversarial model of argument that ought to be the ideal; and that moreover, 'argument' ought to do a little more with giving and asking for reasons, rather than simply pitching differing opinions at each other.