That time of month again! Some suggestions:

Gottlob Frege - On Sense and Reference
Christine Korsgaard - Skepticism about Practical Reason
Judith Butler - Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life?
Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction

I'm late to the party, but here's my attempt at a summary of what's going on here:

The paper is basically broken into two parts. The first is an attack on what might be called 'ontological substantiality' - the idea that we can parse in any kind of substantial way – as if one were God deciding before he made the universe – what kinds of things are, or are not. The second part of the paper will go on to argue that if we cannot grant this substantialist conception of ontology, then we ought to instead grant what might be called a ‘relativized ontology’, wherein what is, is relativized in accordance to whatever we happen to be speaking about at the time, and hence, to language – or what Quine will later call ‘a semantical plane’.

Anyway, Quine begins by wrestling with the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘is not’. First, he notes that it’s not a simple case of declaring that certain things are not, without in fact implicitly admitting that they are (there’s a performative contradiction in doing so, as it were). He continues by noting that one way to avoid these paradoxes is to leave behind the is/is-not distinction, and instead cleave a distinction internal to being itself, wherein what is, is either thought about in terms of actuality on the one hand, and possibility on the other. Quine rather quickly dispatches this line of thought with the wonderful passage about the possible fat men in the doorway. And to further drive the point home, he then tries to see what happens when the realm of possible is expanded to include the contradictory (like the ‘round square’ Copula on Berkeley collage). This too doesn’t end well.

Having done with his destruction of substantialist ontologies, Quine now turns to sketching out his deflationary, relativized one. The basic idea is simple: that using words to mean something does not commit one to positing the being of that thing. Stated baldly by Quine: “we no longer labour under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term.” It is in fact Russell’s theory of descriptions which allows Quine to make this move, insofar as per Russell, any singular terms can be ‘analyzed out’ in terms of bound variables like ‘something, ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’, such that when we speak of ‘X’, all we are committed to saying is something like: ‘there is a something, X, of which we are speaking about’.

This, in turn, allows Quine to bypass the paradox of speaking about that which ‘is not’: to say that something ‘is not’ is simply to say that there is nothing which satisfies the thing X, of which we are speaking about. Cashing out the is/is-not distinction in this way is important because it deprives the motivation of projects like Wyman’s, which have to recourse to possible entities in order to deal with the paradox of not-Being, here now diffused by Quine. As Quine puts it, “we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is …. But we do not commit ourselves to ontology containing Pegasus when we say that Pegasus is not”. Simple.

Anyway, in holding to this view, it is important for Quine that names become reducible to descriptions. Only in this way can Russell’s theory hold for singular terms. This is important to take note of because in future developments, this idea will be challenged (like @schmik pointed out) by those like Kripke, for whom names are in fact irreducible to descriptions, and require a ‘primal baptism’ that fixes their referents in all possible worlds. As the paper stands however, Quine sees no issue with reducing names to descriptions, writing that “Names are, in fact, immaterial to the ontological issue … whatever we say with the help of names can be said in a language which shuns names altogether.”

To the degree that names are reducible to descriptions however, this will allow Quine to pronounce the paper’s ultimate point, which is that “to be is to be reckoned as the value of a variable.” A most concise statement of what it is to be as there’s ever been. Concluding, Quine then affirms that if this is the case, our differing ontological commitments in turn entail that we can have different ‘conceptual schemes’ when it comes to talking about ontology. It is the convergence or divergence of our conceptual schemes which allow us to find – or not find – common ground by which to make arguments. As such, “ontological controversy… tends into controversy over language”. Again this is important because this too will be challenged down the track by those like Davidson, who will aim to do away with ‘the very idea of a conceptual scheme’.

But circling back to Quine, the upshot the reference to different conceptual schemes is the pluralistic thought that “what ontology to actually adopt still stands open, and the obvious counsel is tolerance and an experimental spirit” (although Quine does end by suggesting that the ‘epistemological point of view’ – one among a variety of others – holds a certain priority).

Lots of critical comments to make, but this'll do for now.

So, absolutely, we can create a web of inferences from statements/facts about that which lies beyond experience, but the real question is: If we pause for a second, do we really have a sense of what we're talking about? Are we not tacitly making use of the scales and perspectives we inhabit in trying to understand the truths we utter?

Much of this comes back to one's concept of 'concept.' I take the Kantian view that a concept without intuition is empty - imagination is necessary. I gather that for Brassier/Sellars, a concept is something like a move in an inferential game. And this is what I was getting at with the idea of 'secular speaking-in-tongues.' Like Zizek's 'symbolic real' - We can do the math, we can see what checks out and what doesn't, but that doesn't mean we have any grasp of what we're talking about. — csalisbury

I think this is an important observation, but I see this more as a challenge for Brassier to address, not a problem for his conception of things in and of itself. For example (to reel off an immediate thought), so what if we 'tacitly make use of the scales and perceptives we inhabit in trying to understand the truths we utter'? I'm not sure that anything Brassier says precludes such a use, nor that such a use would in fact be problematic for the rationalist realism that Brassier is trying to advocate for. In fact, isn't the whole point of the paper to establish that even if we make use of specifically 'human' resources - perception, conceptualization, etc - none of this precludes realism? One thing to note is that elsewhere (in his paper "Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism"), Brassier in fact does try to explicit address how it is that meaning functions (in what is more or less a recapitulation of Sellars's theory of 'picturing'). The upshot is that meaning is a relation between words and other words, insofar as words are themselves objects:

"The criterion of pictorial adequacy is formulated using our most extant conceptual categories and, as such, is internal to our signifying scheme and dependent upon our predicative resources, yet it can still be used to track the correlation between conceptual order and real patterns. [How? Because...] meaning is not a relation: meaning statements establish metalinguistic correlations between words and other words rather than a metaphysical relation between words and things. The basement level of language consists of pattern-governed connections between natural--linguistic objects and other physical objects. Words do not depict reality because of what they mean but because of physical connections between the semantic regularities obeyed by speakers and the physical patterns in which these semantic regularities are embodied ... These uniformities are incarnated in phonetic, graphic, or haptic patterns, as well as behavioral ones. They are exhibited in the uniformities of performance that constitute pattern-governed linguistic behavior. But these patterns reflect espousals of principle that constitute linguistic competence."

In terms of your objection, I think in such an account there is in fact a way to respond to conceptualization mererly being a 'symbolic real', or in the famous AP term, "a frictionless spinning in a void" - namely, that such a spinning takes place only by way of the friction provided by dint of language's being an 'object among objects', and not a ephemeral 'mirror' of the world, as it were. Whether this account is itself adequate is an open question, but these at least might be the rudiments of a Brassierian reply.

Jeffrey Bell - The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructuralism
Jeffrey Bell - Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference

@John Thanks! Its just a matter of making time - it can be done, it you love it enough :) (sorry for the late reply!).

Compared to the Davidson at least, this paper is as breezy as can be!

But this would make us almost like programs, or vehicles of truth. We would be able to speak truthfully about that which lies outside the pale of meaning, but, despite our speaking truthfully, we literally would not be able to make sense of these truths. Like a sober, secular version of speaking in tongues. — csalisbury

How do you mean?

That part seems to be making the simple point that it is problematic to use contradictoriness as a criteria for meaninglessness because there are no cut and dried criteria to measure for contradictoriness in the first place. The 'methodological drawback' is not that there is a lack of a test for meaninglessness as such, but that contradictoriness cannot be used as a benchmark for that test. Quine isn't equating meaninglessness and contradictoriness - on the contrary, he's trying to pry them apart, in order to throw spanners into 'Wymans' ontology.

It's Quine ahead even with discoii's change of vote - any last votes to wring out?

But would Brassier be comfortable saying that a conception of a mind-independent watermelon as being pretty much how we spontaneously imagine a watermelon( but with no one around) more or less gets it right? I kinda doubt it what with all the scrambling for Laruelle and stuff. But so wait what's the problem with that spontaneously imagined watermelon ? — csalisbury

But Brassier's realism isn't cashed out in term of phenomenality but in terms of epistemology: it's not a question of appearance, but a question of knowledge. How can we come to know things of the world if there is no "pre-established harmony between reality and ideality" (§§3)? If "thought is not guaranteed access to being [and] being is not inherently thinkable", then how does thought 'track' being? Then §§4:

"We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is not originarily infused with meaning. Meaning is a function of conception and conception involves representation—though this is not to say that conceptual representation can be construed in terms of word-world mappings. It falls to conceptual rationality to forge the explanatory bridge from thought to being."

The rest of the paper will not go on the 'forge' this bridge, but clear away the debris that stands in the way of it's being forged. This is what Laruelle is useful for (the negative moment). The bridge itself is something B. locates in Sellars's conception of rationality (the positive moment).

In the space of mere paragraphs, we're told both that the Gem asserts that "things depend for their existence on being thought or perceived" & that "The Gem does not assert that there is no mind-independent reality."

I think there's a reason for the slippage. Brassier/Stove's dismantling of the gem is a dismantling of Gem(A). It's true that only by illegitimately conflating ideatum and object can one argue that the mind-dependence of a conception entails the mind-dependence of that which is conceived of. — csalisbury

I think this is fair point to make, but I suspect that the source of the slippage goes beyond Brassier's own inattention but to the inattention of those who use the Gem as an argument in the first place. That is to say, it is the 'correlationist' who slips from 'we can't conceive of things without conceiving of them' to 'therefore things can only exist mind-dependently'. The purely negative result of the Gem ("a mind-independent reality is inconceivable") is illegitimately sublimated into a positive one ("therefore things can only exist mind-dependently"). As I read the paper, Brassier aims to attack the first, negative result. If, as a result, the positive one falls as well, then so be it.

So when you say that Barkeley's argument is essentially a provocation, it's a provocation that Brassier's paper is meant precisely to diffuse. §§33 puts the paper's intended result succinctly: "By implying that mind-independence requires conceptual inaccessibility, the Gem saddles transcendental realism with an exorbitant burden. But it is a burden which there is no good reason to accept." It's this 'burden', that the paper is meant to get rid of in order to clear the way to a positive project.

Just finished reading what'll probably be my last book of 2015, so here's the years list :D :

Agamben or books on Agamben:

Giorgio Agamben - Homo Sacer
Giorgio Agamben - State of Exception
Giorgio Agamben - The Kingdom and the Glory
Giorgio Agamben - The Sacrament of Language
Giorgio Agamben - The Signature of All Things
Giorgio Agmaben - Stanzas
Giorgio Agmaben - Pilate and Jesus
Giorgio Agamben - The Church and the Kingdom
Giorgio Agamben - The Highest Poverty
Giorgio Agamben - Opus Dei
Giorgio Agamben - Stasis
William Watkin - Agamben and Indifference
Kevin Attell - Giorgio Agamben

On Francois Laruelle:

Katerina Kolozova - The Cut of the Real
Alexander Galloway - Laurelle
John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith (eds.) - Laruelle and Non-Philosophy
John Mullarkey - Post-Continental Philosophy

Phenomenology, Movement, Sensation, and the Body:

Alphonso Lingis - Foreign Bodies
Carrie Noland - Agency and Embodiment
Renaud Barbaras - Desire and Distance
Michel Henry - Material Phenomenology
Maxine Sheets-Johnston - The Primacy of Movement
David Morris - The Sense of Space
Tom Sparrow - Plastic Bodies

On Merleau-Ponty:

Renaud Barbaras - The Being of the Phenomenon
Jessica Wiskus - The Rhythm of Thought
Veronique Foti - Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty

On Deleuze and related themes:

Gilles Deleuze - Pure Immanence
Francois Zourabichvili - Deleuze
Erin Manning - Relationscapes
Erin Manning - Always More than One
Pascal Chabot - The Philosophy of Simondon

Politics and Ethics of Subjectivity:

Adriana Cavarero - Relating Narratives
Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
Judith Butler - Giving an Account of Oneself
Denise Riley - The Words of Selves
Denise Riley - Impersonal Passion
Mari Ruti - The Singularity of Being
Alphonso Lingis - The First Person Singular

Other:

Martin Hagglund - Dying for Time
Dennis King Keenan - The Question of Sacrifice
Peter Gratton - The State of Sovereignty
Eugene Thacker - In The Dust of This Planet
Eugene Thacker - Starry Speculative Corpse
Vicki Kirby - Telling Flesh

-

Currently Reading: Brian Massiumi - Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

47 books, 14 by women (better than last year, but room for improvement), and lots learned.

Also, I managed to do a write up on almost everything here but Lingis's Foreign Bodies.

Goals for next year: more science, and more politics.

Happy New Year all :)

This essay only has worth if Brassier has some legit method of accessing the thing-in-itself. — csalisbury

I'm not sure about this: given that the essay is meant to address an objection (to realism), it ought to stand on it's own. It's an argument against an argument, not a positive argument for something. Granted, it's precisely that 'positive' side which still requires elaboration, but you get my point I hope.

I agree with you about 'non-philosophy' by the way, and incidentally, so does Brassier. I forget if it's in Alien Theory or Nihil Unbound, but he more or less makes one long extended complaint that Laruelle does too much posturing to set himself apart from what he calls 'philosophy', which really in fact only refers to a very narrow set of (French) references to define philosophy, and that in fact, Laruelle can be appropriated into philosophical without much loss of fidelity, as it were. One of his recent(ish) essays, 'Laruelle and the Reality of Abstraction' (in the edited collection Laruelle and Non-Philosophy does alot to situate him with respect the Kantian 'critical turn' and put him right into the 'philosophical' continuum.

Is he suggesting that because Du Champs 'Readymades' are not 'works' as might be commonly understood, that it (and all conceptual art) cannot be therefore considered 'works' of Genius. Or? — Cavacava

Interesting passage to have picked out! Taking a stab at it, my guess would be that the readymades render explicit the distance or rather passage between Genius and the 'I', the impersonal and the personal, by dint of their not being 'personalised' like most other works of art: the whole point of readymades is that they are 'ready-made' - and not 'products' of the artist in the usual sense; Duchamp's 'fountain' is precisely not a 'work' in the way a Titian or Renoir can be said to be.

On the other hand, the 'success' of the readymade relies precisely on the fact that it spans the breadth between both the personal and the impersonal: it never entirely 'coincides' with Genius because it is still defined negatively in relation to it: it is a matter of 'decreation' or 'destroying the work' (the Italian word, decreando, is not a standard term, and has a meaning quite peculiar to Agamben). This is why the readymade is 'ironic'. As such, I suspect Agamben's take on the readymade is essentially ambiguous: while it allows us to cast Genius in sharp relief, it never quite goes all the way to do without reference to Genius altogether: it "proceeds around the world as the melancholy proof of its own inexistence", without attaining a positive valence of it's own.

I read it this way especially because of the way in which the essay ends, which essentially calls for discarding the category of Genius altogether: "For each of us there comes the moment when we have to part company with Genius... The gestures [of the painter]: for the first time they are entirely our own, they are completely demystified." This in contrast to the 'failure' which any attempt to 'take hold of Genius' entails: ". Every effort of ‘I’, of the personal element, to take possession of Genius, to constrain him to sign in his name, is necessarily destined to fail." Moreover, it should be noted that in Agamben's other writing, 'inoperativeity' or 'worklessness' has in fact a positive, rather than negative valence. Simplifying alot, rendering things 'inoperative' is generally understood to be a 'good thing' by Agamben, and not something bad. It is the first step to allowing us to "begin to live a purely human and earthly life."

It's hard to parse this from the essay itself, which is full of allusion and is rather poetically written, but knowing a bit more about Agamben's other stuff, this is how I think one ought to read the reference to Duchamp.

Could you add some flesh to these rather bare bones of thread?

Giorgio Agamben has a beautiful essay on genius, in which he aims to show how genius designates not something we possess, but rather something that possesses us:

"Genius was the name the Latins gave to the god to whom each man was placed under tutelage from the moment of his birth. The etymology is transparent and still visible in Italian in the proximity between genio (genius) and generare (to generate). That Genius must have had something to do with generation is otherwise evident from the fact that the object pre-eminently considered ‘ingenious’ (‘geniale’) by the Latins was the bed: genialis lectus, because the act of generation was accomplished in bed. And sacred to Genius was the day of one’s birth, which because of this, is still called genetliaco in Italian. The gifts and the banquets with which we celebrate birthdays are, despite the odious and by now inevitable English refrain, a trace of the festivities and sacrifices which Roman families offered to Genius on the occasion of the birthdays of their family members. Horace speaks of pure wine, a two month-old suckling pig, a lamb “immolato”, that is, covered in sauce for its sacrifice; but it seems that, initially there was only incense, wine, and delicious honey focaccia, because Genius, the god who presided at birth, did not welcome bloody sacrifices.

...But this most intimate and personal of gods is also the most impersonal part of us, the personalization of that, within us, which surpasses and exceeds ourselves. “Genius is our life, in as much as it was not given origin by us, but gave us origin”. If he seems to identify himself with us, it is only in order to reveal himself immediately afterwards as something more than ourselves, in order to show us that we ourselves are more and less than ourselves. To comprehend the concept of man which is implicit in Genius, means to understand that man is not only ‘I’ and individual consciousness (coscienza), but that from the moment of his birth to that of his death he lives instead with an impersonal and pre-individual component. That is, man is a unique being in two phases, a being who is the result of the complicated dialectic between one side not (yet) singled out (individuata) and lived, and another side already marked by fate and by individual experience.

But the part that is impersonal and not isolated (individuata) is not a chronological past which we have left behind once and for all, and which we can, eventually, recall through memory. It is always present in us and with us and from us, in good times or bad times; it is inseparable. The face of Genius is that of a young man, his long restless wings signify that he does not know time, that when he is very close to us we feel him as a shiver, just as when we were children we felt his breath upon us and his wings beat our feverish temples like a present without memory. This means a birthday cannot be the commemoration of a day that has passed, but like every true festival, it entails the abolition of time, the epiphany and the presence of Genius. And this presence that cannot be separated from us, that prevents us from enclosing ourselves in a substantial identity, is Genius who breaks apart the pretext of the ‘I’ that it is sufficient for itself alone."

The whole essay is only six pages long, but totally worth the read.

One more: GEM Anscombe - Modern Moral Philosophy

Hello! Suggestions for next month anybody?

Mine: Iris Marion Young - Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality

Philosophy puts man in touch with the more-than-human within him: Nietzsche's inextirpable lesson, threatened with eclipse every time philosophy is placed on the same footing as tailoring or agriculture. Anyway, I think I've said all I want to say here.

So, in your opinion philosophy holds no potential to help angsty young men overcome their psychic turmoil?

Sure it does, but one mustn't confuse philosophy's being able to be used as a crutch for philosophy being nothing other than a crutch. This sort of instrumentalization of philosophy as a tool for the consolidation of egos denies the autonomy of philosophy as that which subjects us to it's own imperatives, travels according to it's own history, and co-opts thought by disorientating it with respect to it's comfortable zones habitation. If philosophy ends up helping you with your 'suffering', then so be it. But philosophy is no more one's teddy bear for all that. Philosophy doesn't serve anyone, not least the "miserable".

Tom Sparrow - Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology

Again, these sorts of claims leave me indifferent. The so called 'distorted natural disposition' you speak of seems like nothing more than an idiosyncrasy on your part, extrapolated to a universal experience on the basis of... what? What authorizes this claim other than your own personal psychology? Whence the argument? Perhaps you want to argue that people ought to feel world-weary or whatever have you, but then the idea that feelings and affections can be motivated at a purely intellectual, rather than lived level is, well, naive to say least. 'You should feel like how I'm telling you, dammit!'. And so long as your 'suffering' remains at this abstract, bookish level of calculation, it's has about as much motive-force as a storm in a teacup.

If one were to translate what Nietzsche understood as 'decadence' into modern terms, it'd be precisely this lamentable attempt to reason one's way into despair as the expense of Life. So decadence isn't a bad way to think about it, although even that term is also overwrought and affected.

Good thread. The trick when thinking about teleology is to avoid the double sided trap of taking teleology as an all or nothing deal: either teleology is there from the beginning, or there is no teleology at all. The 'third way' is instead to conceive of an emergent teleology: a teleology that comes to be, ateleologically. Modern evolutionary theory, which you mentioned, is an exemplary instance of this. The classic Darwinian account of evolution as proceeding through natural selection is in fact explicitly ateleological: the selection of the genotype is entirely relative to the prevailing environment, and what may at one point be considered a 'fit' species, may, with a change of environmental fortunes, be rendered entirely unfit. Teleology simply doesn't exist at this level.

However, natural selection is not at all the only mechanism through which evolution takes place. Other mechanisms, discovered since Darwin's time, show how teleology - or what scientists prefer to call teleonomy to distinguish it from teleology - can be instituted in a process of coming-to-be. One such mechanism is symbiosis, where different species - and in some cases their environments - end up co-evolving together in a mutual manner which benefits the survival of both. Another such mechanism is the way in which the very capacity to evolve can itself be a product of evolution: some organisms have in fact developed mechanism to try and generate and thus increase the number of heritable phenotypic variations upon which selection can act upon.

At stake in both symbiotic niche construction and the evolution of evolvability is a reflexive moment in which evolution comes to bear upon itself in a self-recursive manner, and in so doing, generate 'local' teleological tendencies. The upshot of course is that such reflexivity is itself contingent: nothing about natural selection, which is the main motor of evolution, necessitates any such reflexivity. However, once having come into being in the contingent way in which selection affords, these processes 'take-hold' in a manner that cannot be foreseen before hand, generating teleology as they play out.

Now, the trick to understanding teleology is to generalize these conditions beyond the biological sphere: the history of social systems, or in the OP's case, technology, is in fact not so different. Utterly contingent discoveries or innovations spur further innovations which in turn rely upon those past discoveries, conferring upon them a degree of necessity which did not exist at the 'beginning'. Design is something that 'comes to be', it is laid out in the walking of a path which did not pre-exist the journey taken. It's not something that exists 'from the start', nor does is simply not exist. If one is to think teleology, it's a matter or rescuing it from it's theological roots, subjecting to a naturalization which, far from being unscientific and 'spooky', can be shown scientifically to be of a piece with a world entirely immanent to itself.

I don't really have much to say about Camus - I've only read Sisyphus and The Stranger - and it's been a long time since I read either. I think I once took issue with the abstraction of both - the protagonists lack a certain affective depth - which is meant to be the point - but also ends up painting a distorted picture of humanity in the process. They are good thought exercises in that regard.

As for Sartre - he was a philosopher of freedom above all. His 'existentialism' was a product of the marriage he attempted to make between Marxism and phenomenology (the relation between which evolved over time between his works) and was grounded in a rigorous study of both, together with a great deal of political awareness. The anxiety that Sartre talked about was of interest less in it's own regard than as a sign that indicated to man a freedom inherent within him that Sartre was above all interested in theorizing. In some sense the 'existentialist' label was a PR move - one that worked perhaps too well. Everyone knows Sartre today, but who in fact has read the giant tome that is Being and Nothingness? Or the two volume Critique of Dialectical Reason that followed it up? I've only read bits and pieces myself: Merleau-Ponty is where it's at, as far as French phenomenology goes.

Frankly, there's few things that I feel are 'play' more than the abstraction of suffering that is purveyed by many who talk about it here. Maybe it's not 'hip', but if you want to talk about suffering, then fine, let's talk about poverty, let's talk about war, let's talk about cultural alienation, let's talk about disease, let's talk about systemic disenfranchisement, love lost, friends and family passing. What do you get instead? 'Weltschmerz'. Weltschmerz is what you get. As if this is somehow less abstract, more true to the 'real world' than the fluffy abstractions of 'mainstream philosophy' or what have you. Please. It'd be indistinguishable from parody in any other less self-serious context. The conception of suffering (qua 'human condition' or what have you) that is thrown about here is so bloodless and lazy that the it's no surprise that the threads on the topic are continually monotonous rehashings of almost the exact same ideas phrased differently. The 'life's difficulties' you refer to seem to look suspiciously like the sort of 'life difficulties' espoused by angsty young men who, while perhaps really, honestly are struggling with psychic turmoil, aren't so much doing philosophy than inflecting their attempt to grapple with their issues through it's rhetoric. There's nothing wrong with that, but a spade is a spade is a spade.

As for the 'academic issues' that I want to valorize, they sure are filtered through that set of references you mentioned, but they aren't only drawn from there. There is plenty that harkens back to, and places itself in communication with the ancient problematics like that of the One and the Multiple, the place of the body and the organization of the polis and so on. Not, of course, and an appeal to tradition means much at all. But I'm happy to affirm philosophy as a discipline, one that does require an investment in time, knowledge and understanding - like any other discipline, rather than something can be be sprouted off the top of one's head as if Athena from Zeus. For some reason, this annoys people, because apparently the humanities aren't allowed to have any specialized knowledge, and unlike sciences, is supposed to be graspable by anyone, anywhere, because arts are supposed to be easy and intuitive or some nonsense. It isn't, and too bad for anyone who thinks it is. This is the internet of course, so I'm not really expecting too much different, but I can call it out when I see it.

Can't help but agree with John here: these sorts of discussions tend to reek of personal psycology disguised as philosophy. I don't doubt that there are some interesting things to be said about the place of suffering in the world, or about pessimism and so on but by gosh, there's a whole world of philosophy out there that can be explored as well: questions about the genesis of forms, about the possibility of exercising political agency, about the links between movement, affect and thought, about how perception works, about how individuation occurs, about the production of sense, about the vicissitudes of language, about the limits and possibilities imposed by the body, about the nature of time, about what constitutes ethics, about the relation between empiricism and rationalism, about the status of scientific discovery and so on. Compared to these issues, this sort of woe-is-me everything-is-suffering threads just seem to be bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, the sort of thing you talk about when one is unprepared to engage with the wider world of philosophy.

Like @Ciceronianus the White - with whom I agree with here :O - the whole thing just feels like making a mountain over a molehill of thwarted, unrealistic expectations to begin with. Also, I tend to be of a rather chirpy disposition, so when people say that everything is suffering or whatever, these claims leave me utterly indifferent. Anyway, long story short, this stuff generally tends to strike me as philosophically uninteresting - or at least stifling and narrow of concern - and these are the reasons why.

"Some Reflections on Language Games" is the relevent paper. Google will bring it up. The talk I linked is a nice summary.

You're right, knowing the position you're critiquing is an incredibly elitist expectation. Give me a moment while I come down to earth in order to make things up as I go along.

'Interiority' and 'subjectivity' have nothing to do with conceptuality, at least not in the way that Sellars employs it. May I suggest farmiliarizing yourself with the subject matter you aim to critique, rather than continue offering an opinion which is uninformed about what exactly it is attempting to address? Here is a nice talk that summerizes the point. If you demonstrate some measure of understanding in your next post, we can continue. Otherwise this is a waste of time.

@schopenhauer1: It's a mistake to confuse concepts with "ideas" in the classical sense. For Brassier - and Sellars from whom he draws these ideas from - concepts belong to the order of language, and language - on Sellars's account - can be explained as belonging wholly to the natural order without invoking any sort of spooky 'emergence'. This is because on Sellars's account, to employ language is simply to employ a certain kind of 'knowing-how' or embodied competence according to which we learn how to make the appropriate inferences within an inferential-economy which governs the consistency of our employment of concepts. It's all a little bit complex, but the point is that one of the acknowledged strengths of Sellars's understanding of language - and hence conceptuality - is that it is designed to be compatible with a naturalistic point of view. Without going too much into it, here's how Brassier put it elsewhere:

"Humans are concept mongers. This is the essential difference between humans and other animals. But this difference makes an immanent discontinuity within the natural order, not a transcendent exception. We can make sense of the discontinuity. Nature is not reasonable, and reason is not natural. Yet nature's unreasonablness is not unintelligible, just as nature's unreasonableness is not supernatural. The problem that Sellars confronts is this: how do blind evolutionary contingencies generate purposeful rule-governed activity - i.e. conceptual rationality. This has to be explained. So how do human animals
learn to speak, use language, and therefore think? If concepts are rules, and rationality is the ability to follow rules, and concepts and linguistically instantiated function, then the key to understand the specificity of the human lies in understanding how an animal can follow rules."

And this is just what Sellars's account of language is meant to provide. In order for your objection to have any force, it's that account you'll need to examine, in order to see if it holds up. Qualia and 'subjective experience' and so on are wholly irrelevant in this context.

If the idea of essentialism lives on in DNA, it's because these outmoded ideas are so incredibly hard to shake that even scientists are quick to annex their discoveries to them, despite their doing total injustice to their own findings. That you yourself would find an affinity with what might as well be the apotheosis of biological reductionism says alot about just how damaging these ideas are, and just how far we need to go in expelling them from the field of thought.

If everyone were a assigned a unique number at birth, this would no more speak to their essence than the use of DNA for the purposes of identification. Frankly, that we share 50% of our DNA with bananas should place the idea of DNA as essence under immediate suspicion to begin with.

Right, the assumption of there being no difference needs to be defended, which means that the 'neutral' positon just is to assume a distinction between concepts and objects. The 'netural' position is not 'we don't know' - it's that there is a distinction.

Remember, Brassier is aruging against a negative proposition, not a positive one (i.e. 'there is no difference between concept and object'); the aim of the paper is to enact a negation of this negation: ¬¬p. And if ¬¬p, then p.

@John: Yeah, sorry, I meant intra. Late night slip of the keyboard/mind.

DNA most certainly does not function like an essence. Unlike what most people think, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a DNA sequence and the protein which results from it. What sort of protein actually results from a DNA sequence is profoundly influenced by the cellular environment in which that synthesis takes place. In John Protevi's words,

"The standard picture is the slogan “DNA makes RNA. RNA makes protein. Proteins make us.”
But the real process is more complicated than this unilinear process... [Instead] One gene (DNA string) = many (mRNA transcripts) = many proteins ... Think of it this way: we have to learn to separate the heredity gene (as contiguous string of DNA passed down in reproduction) from the functional gene (end-product of transcription processes "forming," from separated strings of DNA, a gene which plays a role in protein synthesis).

And here's the important point: what controls the editing and splicing? It depends on the state of the cell at any one time. Thus control has migrated from DNA (structural plus regulatory genes) to the complex system in which DNA plays a (certainly very important) role, but no longer a controlling role. But the story is not over yet. Not only are different proteins formed from the "same" gene (that is, to repeat, different mature mRNA transcripts can be formed from the same primary mRNA transcript), but proteins function in different ways, according to the cellular context in which they find themselves. This change in protein function is due to changes in their structure; this is known as "allostery." So now we have, instead of "one protein = one function," the case that "one protein = many functions."

DNA is anything but a blueprint of a controller that functions like an essence. What results from a DNA sequence is as much modulated by 'external factors' as DNA itself modulates the process of Geneomic development. The whole process is thoroughly differential, the idea of DNA functioning as essence is entirely wrong.

Sure, but as I said, the idea is that if such privileged access cannot be assumed, then the only alternative is to begin by making the assumption of such a difference: See §§28: "The difference between the conceptual and the extra-conceptual... can be presupposed as already-given in the act of knowing or conception. But it is presupposed without being posited" (the discussion of Saturn later in the paper elaborates the distinction between presupposition and positing). Anything else is dogmatic metaphysics in the Kantian sense. This is entailed by the rejection of any presupposed coincidence between concept and object: "The rejection of correlationism entails the reinstatement of the critical nexus between epistemology and metaphysics and its attendant distinctions: sapience/sentience; concept/object" (§§28). To argue against the assumption of inter-conceptual difference is to argue for the assumption of extra-conceptual difference. The one rather straightforwardly entails the other. Hence (§§45): "Realism is uncircumventable, even for the most stubborn anti-realist."

§§30 is a defense of the distinction. It criticizes those approaches which do not begin with such a distinction.

Carrie Noland - Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture
Gilles Deleuze - Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life

What the above implies though is that if one wants to contest what Brassier is doing here, such a contestation needs to take place 'one level up' from the distinction between concepts and objects. In particular, one might take issue with the claim that knowledge is ultimately a manner of conceptualization. The relevant passages are as follows:

"The articulation of thought and being is necessarily conceptual follows from the Critical injunction which rules out any recourse to the doctrine of a pre-established harmony between reality and ideality. Thought is not guaranteed access to being; being is not inherently thinkable. There is no cognitive ingress to the real save through the concept" (§§3)/ "We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is not originarily infused with meaning. Meaning is a function of conception and conception involves representation ... It falls to conceptual rationality to forge the explanatory bridge from thought to being. (§§3)/ "To know (in the strong scientific sense) what something is is to conceptualize it." (§§28)

Although what Brassier understands by conceptualization is not too clearly spelled out in the paper, it's safe to assume - given the passing references to Sellars and Brandom, as well as his work elsewhere (the video "How to Train an Animal that makes Inferences" in particular) - that to conceptualize is to be able to make an inferential move in a game of giving and asking for reasons. In other words, to know is to conceptualize, and to conceptualize is to be able to give reasons for a claim about this or that. But I can't help but feel - as do legions of others who have called Sellars out on this point - that this is an incredibly limited, if not debilitating account of what it means to know. I have no doubt that this is undoubtedly a kind, or a 'species' of knowing, but I cannot accede to the idea that it constitutes knowing tout court. In some sense, Brassier does acknowledge this. The knowing he speaks of does in fact seem to be a qualified one: "To know (in the strong scientific sense) what something is is to conceptualize it." Yet elsewhere, this qualification is not found: "Meaning is a function of conception."

It's hard though to mount an effective critique at this level because this notion is in fact not explicitly addressed in the paper, and is more or less deferred elsewhere. Perhaps Brassier does have an adequate answer to this sort of concern, but it won't be found here. What in particular concerns me is the exact status of sensation and affect, and the way in which the sensible relates to the rational machinery of rational conception.

It does seem to me that if this among our presuppositions, if we think this to begin with, we will inevitably end up with this gulf between concepts and objects, and an underlying notion of the 'reality' of 'objects'. — mcdoodle

This is something B. does address, and I quoted it earlier - §§30 is the relevant passage. The idea is basically you have two options: either you begin by assuming that the concept is indistinguishable from the object, or you do not. If you do, you beg the question in favor of conceptual idealism. If you don't, you leave the relation between object and concept 'open' in order to be subsequently elaborated - it may turn out that they are indistinguishable, but this will have to be argued for:

"Contrary to what correlationists proclaim, the presupposition of this difference is not a dogmatic prejudice in need of critical legitimation. Quite the reverse: it is the assumption that the difference between concept and object is always internal to the concept—that every difference is ultimately conceptual—that needs to be defended. For to assume that the difference between concept and object can only be internal to the concept is to assume that concepts furnish self-evident indexes of their own reality and internal structure—that we know what concepts are and can reliably track their internal differentiation—an assumption that then seems to license the claim that every difference in reality is a conceptual difference... Is it is not clear why our access to the structure of concepts should be considered any less in need of critical legitimation than our access to the structure of objects. To assume privileged access to the structure of conception is to assume intellectual intuition. But this is to make a metaphysical claim about the essential nature of conception; an assumption every bit as dogmatic as any allegedly metaphysical assertion about the essential nature of objects."

"SX, let's say we assume a distinction between concepts and objects.

[frames a statement which utilizes no such distinction in any way, shape, or form]

Ha, contraction!!"