Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[Constance]

Had we but world enough, and time
This coyness, Lady, were no crime

Lol. I've never been accused of coyness. Always a first time for everything I guess. In any case, we'll find out if the above represents coyness when/if we mutually come to understand phenomenological philosophy in this little circle of discourse.

 

[Constance]

Watermelon definitely has a very "round-about-ness" to it, I grant you Lou:

Sounds like a line from Wallace Stevens.

an expansivity region that is discoverable across a totality of equipment circumspectively at one's edible disposal. Hmmm yum yum

Don't know who that sounds like.

 

[Constance]

think [object-oriented ontology] is the next step after the end of philosophy. (in my opinion what comes next is "work")

I wonder if you'd expand on that statement. I think human philosophy has always worked with that which philosophers were capable of knowing or, more importantly, understanding at the time and in the place in which they did their thinking. It seems to me that philosophy has not ended but continues, in the present, with the ideas of these new 'speculative realists', but now further beyond the presuppositions of 'correlationism'. That term was foregrounded at first by Quentin Meillassoux, so it will be necessary to get an idea of his arguments to understand what he is claiming to constitute 'correlationism'.

re 'correlationism', this paper distinguishes between the leading 'speculative realist' claims of Q. Meillassoux and Ray Brassier:

http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static...hought.pdf?token=r6+V92UWP00ZTTJYrwKiVstet0I=

 

[Pharoah]

ho ho and pip pip is the very bad language stereotype we have of upper crust Britons like Scruton ... he got busted out for fox hunting, I believe ... tally .... ho!

But I am serious about Dreyfus being a good way into Heidegger, particularly his critique of AI and also serious about OOO as another perspective on MH.

@smcder Ahh!! Hoity toity philosopher.
Scruton was a bit naughty I hear with a tobacco company? I thought you were refering to that.

Got the Dreyfus recommend on the list thanks.

Sounds like a line from Wallace Stevens.

Don't know who that sounds like.

It is my fun take of p.103/136:
"Something like a region must first be discovered if there is to be any possibility of allotting or coming across places for a totality of equipment that is circumspectively at one's disposal."... re "the "round-about-us" " of entities which we encounter.

 

[addseo1115]

It's so nice post. I have enjoyed with your language discussion so much. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Constance]

It is my fun take of p.103/136:

"Something like a region must first be discovered if there is to be any possibility of allotting or coming across places for a totality of equipment that is circumspectively at one's disposal."... re "the "round-about-us" " of entities which we encounter.

Very good. That does sound like MH in English. I wonder if his prose sounds more natural in German. Let's ask Steve.

ps, your parody is so good I think you should do a whole paragraph.

 

[Constance]

Pharoah, how do you respond to these speculative materialists? I'm also interested in hearing from @Soupie about this. The Shapiro paper I linked characterizes their approaches.

the link: http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static...hought.pdf?token=r6+V92UWP00ZTTJYrwKiVstet0I=

 

[Soupie]

Pharoah, how do you respond to these speculative materialists? I'm also interested in hearing from @Soupie about this. The Shapiro paper I linked characterizes their approaches.

the link: http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/1181229/24797439/1398712509557/02_Shaviro_Non_Phenomenological_Thought.pdf?token=r6+V92UWP00ZTTJYrwKiVstet0I=

One of my problems is that I'm so uninitiated in philosophy that it's hard for me to discern how OOO/SR differ from previous metaphysics. However, I think it's obvious a la Nagel that a new metaphysics is necessary to address the (so-called) explanatory gap. So I'm all for it despite it being beyond me.

 

[Soupie]

Here's your post about difficulties in communication.

Why do you think your intuitions typically leave others bewildered and confused?
Why do you think your associations "leave conversations participants" (sic) befuddled?

You say you will try to do better ... try to do better in what way exactly? Does this indicate that you have some idea as to how you might "do better"?

I'm not sure why. Probably several reasons. I see my thinking style as holistic; so when I think about a concept, I tend to think about it in relation to, well, everything. Many of the people I interact with are more pragmatic/down to earth, and thus think of concepts in a more compartmentalized fashion.

Thus, when I suggest that concept might apply to domain that is far removed from the typical domain to which the concept is associated, it confuses people.

I will try to do better at explaining how I am conceiving of and connecting two concepts.

 

[Pharoah]

Very good. That does sound like MH in English. I wonder if his prose sounds more natural in German. Let's ask Steve.

ps, your parody is so good I think you should do a whole paragraph.

@Constance. I'll have to take a look at the Shapiro. Bit snowed under ATM.
Re MH... read some good stuff today but got the giggles at one point: try creating a portentous sentence whilst keeping a straight face using the 3 words whither, hither, and thither in it. MH couldn't. Perhaps a bit montypythonesk.

 

[smcder]

I've posted this site before ... but I'm about seeing what's new in thinking ... and if/ where does OOO and SR fit in ... it is really anything new, are there other new movements ...

this site is pretty sciency really, focus on cognitive neuroscience and many articles are quick to get "based on the latest empirical research" etc at the top of articles, nothing wrong with that and many interesting topics, but a lot seems to be the same old, same old.

About

New Books in Philosophy features peer-to-peer discussions with philosophers about their new ideas as expressed in their newly published books. The program is co-hosted by Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt University). Between the two of us, we will be exploring new books in

ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science, social and political philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of language, and many other subfields.

Our goal is to bridge the academic and public spheres without shortchanging the complexity of the ideas being discussed. Expect to be challenged – we’ll avoid the jargon, but we won’t avoid the difficulty.

And here's a list of interviews, with some very provocative topics ...

Heidegger
Metacognition
Personal Identity
Life (digital) after death

but no (0, zero, null set) books and no interviews, no hits at all could I find on "Object Oriented Ontology" or SR, Tim Morton or Graham Harmon

List of Interviews

• Wayne Wu, "Attention" (Routledge, 2014)
• George Sher, "Equality for Inegalitarians" (Cambridge UP, 2014)
• Marya Schechtman, "Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life" (Oxford UP, 2014)
• Seana Shiffrin, "Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law" (Princeton UP, 2014)
• Evan Thompson, "Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy" (Columbia UP, 2014)
• Carol Gould, "Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2014)
• Erik C. Banks, "The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived" (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
• Terence Cuneo, "Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking" (Oxford,
• Joelle Proust, "The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness" (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Claudio Lopez-Guerra, "Democracy and Disenfranchisement: The Morality of Electoral Exclusions" (Oxford UP, 2014)
• Eric Steinhart, "Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death" (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Michael E. Bratman, "Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together" (Oxford UP, 2014)
• Stephen Yablo, "Aboutness" (Princeton UP, 2014 )
• Susan Haack, "Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law" (Cambridge UP, 2014)
• Richard Fumerton, "Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism" (Cambridge UP, 2013)
• Samuel Scheffler, "Death and the Afterlife" (Oxford UP, 2013)
• Anne Jaap Jacobson, "Keeping the World in Mind" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
• Elise Springer, "Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness" (MIT Press, 2013)
• Marcin Milkowski, "Explaining the Computational Mind" (MIT Press, 2013)
• Simon Blackburn, "Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love" (Princeton UP, 2014)
• Jakob Hohwy, "The Predictive Mind" (Oxford UP, 2014)
• Mark Alfano, "Character as Moral Fiction" (Cambridge UP, 2013)
• Melinda B. Fagan, "Philosophy of Stem Cell Biology: Knowledge in Flesh and Blood" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
• Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, "Epistemic Paternalism: A Defence" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
• Michael Strevens, "Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure" (Harvard UP, 2013)
• Adrienne Martin, "How We Hope: A Moral Psychology" (Princeton UP, 2013)
• Josef Stern, "The Matter and Form of Maimonides' Guide" (Harvard UP, 2013)
• David Edmonds, "Would You Kill the Fat Man?" (Princeton UP, 2014)
• Sarah Pessin, "Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism" (Cambridge UP, 2013)
• Joseph Carens, "The Ethics of Immigration" (Oxford UP, 2013)
• Michael Weisberg, "Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World" (Oxford UP, 2013)
• Michael Huemer, "The Problem of Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
• Jennifer A. McMahon, "Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy" (Routledge, 2013)
• R. Jay Wallace, "The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret" (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Muhammed Ali Khalidi, "Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences" (Cambridge UP, 2013)
• Helene Landemore, "Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many" (Princeton UP, 2012)
• Tadeusz Zawidzki, "Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition" (MIT Press, 2013)
• Simon Keller, "Partiality" (Princeton UP, 2013)
• Michael Marder, "Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life" (Columbia UP, 2013)
• Jody Azzouni, "Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists" (Oxford UP, 2013)
• Carlos Montemayor, "Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time" (Brill, 2012)
• Thom Brooks, "Punishment" (Routledge, 2012)
• Berit Brogaard, "Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Christopher Hookway, "The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Julia Tanney, "Rules, Reasons and Self-Knowledge" (Harvard UP, 2012)
• Kimberley Brownlee, "Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Helen Longino, "Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression & Sexuality" (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
• Philip Pettit, "On The People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
• Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker, "The Road to Maxwell’s Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
• Cheryl Misak, "The American Pragmatists" (Oxford UP, 2013)
• Jesse J. Prinz, "The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Roslyn Weiss, "Philosophers in the Republic" (Cornell UP, 2012)
• Beth Preston, "A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind" (Routledge, 2012)
• Clayton Littlejohn, "Justification and the Truth-Connection" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
• Herman Cappelen, "Philosophy Without Intuitions" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Brian Leiter, "Why Tolerate Religion?" (Princeton UP, 2013)
• Alva Noë, "Varieties of Presence" (Harvard UP, 2012)
• Corey Brettschneider, "When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? How Democracies can Protect Expression and Promote Equality" (Princeton UP, 2012)
• Miguel de Beistegui, "Aesthetics after Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor" (Routledge, 2009)
• Jamie Kelly, "Framing Democracy: A Behavioral Approach to Democratic Theory" (Princeton UP, 2012)
• Jill Gordon, "Plato's Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
• Nicole Hassoun, "Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
• Kristin Andrews, "Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology" (MIT Press, 2012)
• Paul Weithman, "Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn" (Oxford UP, 2010)
• Lee Braver, "Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger" (MIT Press, 2012)
• Anthony Laden, "Reasoning: A Social Picture" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Helen Steward, "A Metaphysics for Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Kok-Chor Tan, "Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Eric Marcus, "Rational Causation" (Harvard UP, 2012)
• Elizabeth Brake, "Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law" (Oxford UP, 2012)
• Paul Thagard, "The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change" (MIT Press, 2012)
• Michael Lynch, "In Praise of Reason" (MIT Press, 2012)
• Charlotte Witt, "The Metaphysics of Gender" (Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Karen Stohr, "On Manners" (Routledge, 2011)
• Uriah Kriegel, "The Sources of Intentionality" (Oxford UP, 2011)
• Allen Buchanan, "Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves" (Oxford UP, 2011)
• Peter-Paul Verbeek, "Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things" (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
• John Christman, "The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves" (Cambridge UP, 2011)
• Crawford (Tim) Elder, "Familiar Objects and their Shadows" (Cambridge UP, 2011)
• Robert Audi, "Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State" (Oxford UP, 2011)
• Peter Ludlow, "The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics" (Oxford UP, 2011)
• Fabienne Peter, "Democratic Legitimacy" (Routledge, 2011)
• Troy Jollimore, "Love's Vision" (Princeton UP, 2011)
• Jason Brennan, "The Ethics of Voting" (Princeton UP, 2011)
• Carolyn Korsmeyer, "Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics" (Oxford UP, 2011)
• Elizabeth Anderson, "The Imperative of Integration" (Princeton UP, 2010)
• Susan Schneider, "The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction" (MIT Press, 2011)
• Sanford Goldberg, "Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2010)
• Robert Pasnau, "Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671" (Oxford UP, 2011)
• Gerald Gaus, "The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bound World" (Cambridge UP, 2010)
• Eric Schwitzgebel, "Perplexities of Consciousness" (MIT Press, 2011)

 

[smcder]

http://philosophybites.com/ ... nothing on OOO or SR, Morton or Harmon

Philosophy Talk - nada

Philosophy TV - no

LOTS of hits on Philpapers ... but nothing in the SEP ...

Nothing here:
Recent Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

or here:
Recent Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

And the Leiter Reports reports:
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Why Do These People Just Make Things Up?

 

[smcder]

The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

"Shaviro, by contrast, will accept the idea that there is more to reality than what is actually given or present to us -- "Things are active and interactive far beyond any measure of their presence to us" (49). This surplus or excess, however, is not a hidden reserve withdrawn from relations but is instead an excess of relations that cannot be captured and constrained within a predetermining set of normative categories and objective types.

The goal for philosophy, Shaviro claims, is therefore "not to deduce and impose cognitive norms, or concepts of understanding, but rather to make us more fully aware of how reality escapes and upsets these norms" (67).

This is again why when we do philosophy "we are compelled to speculate," for when we are "confronted with the real" this reality escapes our "cognitive norms, or concepts" and puts us into a situation where "we must think outside our own thought" (67). We are forced into doing philosophy as speculative realism, and speculative realism, if done right, "must maintain," as Shaviro sees it, "both a positive ontological thesis and a positive epistemological one" (68).

The ontological thesis asserts that "the real not only exists without us and apart from our conceptualizations of it but is actually organized or articulated in some manner, in its own right, without any help from us" (68); and the epistemological thesis claims that "it is in some way possible for us to point to, and speak about, this organized world-without-us without thereby reducing it yet again to our own conceptual schemes" (68)."

 

[smcder]

SR(OOO) reminds me of Dadaism/Surrealism?

Some of the response and lack of recognition in the more staid places of philosophy ... might well be seen as snobbery.

(which is another name for the analytical/continental split ;-)

But this is an entire movement and has a good command of media and technology and a strong online presence and appeal to other than those who are traditionally interested in philosophy (DWMs) with frequent mention of feminism and queer theory, popular media, ecology and anthropology, philosophy of the body, etc. In the meantime, more conservative voices don't seem to have an idea of how to use these new technologies and remain in amagazine/interview format.

And it all starts with a rejection of correlationism and the privileged place of consciousness.

So what I think the phenomenologists did is break the ice, to recognize the water we are swimming in and maybe to move us out of the self centered childhood that was the Copernican Revolution of Kant. Which would, philosophically, put us at ... adolescence? Again, that kind of energy and irreverence was at the core of the Dadaist/Surrealist movements.

 

[smcder]

The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

When Shaviro argues that Brassier and Meillassoux "aren't anticorrelationist enough," therefore, this is because they continue to assume that thought always involves an intentional relationship to things beyond or outside this thought, a relationship that fails to be successful and hence meaningful for Brassier and is only meaningful by way of mathematical formalism for Meillassoux. If we push anticorrelationism far enough, then we also abandon the correlation between an intentional thought and its objective correlate.

We have what Shaviro calls "noncorrelational sentience," (133) an "immanent, noncognitive contact" (148) or "contact at a distance" (147),

?????

which Shaviro claims we are to think of "as a sort of sensibility, or sensitivity, without knowledge and without phenomenological intentionality" (147). We have, in short, an aesthetic appreciation that is irreducible to being understood in terms of the bifurcation of nature; and with this move, as well, we find Shaviro returning to Whitehead's claim "that 'the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty'" (Adventures of Ideas, 265; cited 20).

Let me close with a brief critical comment. Shaviro has done an excellent job showing how it is precisely aesthetics that is the branch of philosophy that takes seriously the view that "reality escapes and upsets" our cognitive norms, leading us to speculate and "think outside our own thought" (67). A guiding premise of these arguments, however, is that thought is always finite and limited. Shaviro is straightforward on this point: "I accept Kant's insistence on finitude. There is no such thing as absolute knowledge" (136).

If a central concern of speculative realists is to move beyond the correlationism one finds in Kant, however, then why not push anticorrelationism full stop and not only move beyond the epistemological correlationism Shaviro critically examines so masterfully in this book, but also move beyond the aesthetic correlationism Shaviro ultimately comes to support -- that is, the aesthetic correlation of a finite entity with the reality that exceeds, "escapes and upsets" this finite entity? Why not allow that for everything there are two sides, as Shaviro argues, but unlike Shaviro this would be in the tradition of Spinoza where these sides entail the absolute and infinite on one side and the relative and finite on the other. These arguments have been developed among philosophers with close affinities to speculative realism. Bergson, for instance, calls for an absolute knowledge in his An Introduction to Metaphysics, and Deleuze will argue for the inseparability of the infinite and absolute from the finite and relative, drawing from Bergson at key points as he does so. Shaviro does refer to Deleuze in the final pages when he points to Deleuze's claim that there is an "object that provokes thought without letting itself be thought" (154), an object that is not a phenomenological correlate of thought. If one unpacks the nature of this object, however, one finds that rather than being in line with the speculative realism that still traces its roots to Kant and to Kant's embrace of finitude and limits, we have instead what one might call a dogmatic realism that traces its roots to Spinoza and to Spinoza's embrace of the infinite and the absolute

????

 

[smcder]

I wonder if you'd expand on that statement. I think human philosophy has always worked with that which philosophers were capable of knowing or, more importantly, understanding at the time and in the place in which they did their thinking. It seems to me that philosophy has not ended but continues, in the present, with the ideas of these new 'speculative realists', but now further beyond the presuppositions of 'correlationism'. That term was foregrounded at first by Quentin Meillassoux, so it will be necessary to get an idea of his arguments to understand what he is claiming to constitute 'correlationism'.

I'm not sure what I mean exactly by:

I think it's the next step after the end of philosophy. (in my opinion what comes next is "work")

But it is related to what I think OOO/SR is trying to do - which is very simply to try something new, analytical philosophy seems mired down in decades to centuries old assumptions.

There is a Zen saying of new students that they "stink of Zen" ... so the idea is to not try and do philosophy but just sit down and think, do the work of figuring out what comes next (or even where we are). Again, the closest parallel I can find is with Dadaism ... but I don't know much about art history sense or if what came after Dadaism could shed any light on it ... commercialism in philosophy? May be because I am surprised at the number of books, blogs and podcasts on philosophy and what that means (for philosophy) and what it says (about us).

Principles of Non-Philosophy // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

"Laruelle takes up the task of demarcating a domain from which we could make the philosophical itself an object of thinking rather than the standpoint of thinking. This domain must not already be subject to the law of the philosophical; it must not "auto-position" itself within the philosophical;

it must not be meta-philosophical but must be non-philosophical.

The questions for this text are the following. How is it possible to think about philosophy from a perspective that is no longer automatically subsumed within the philosophical, that looks in from the outside? More generally: how is it possible to take up the task of thinking in a manner no longer under the thrall of philosophical authority? Is it possible to overthrow the philosophical's self-appointed and privileged access to the Real in the name of disciplinary democracy?"

 

[smcder]

Have any of you all, you-all (y'all) seen

The Zero Theorem? - (Terry Gilliam)

 

[Constance]

"When Shaviro argues that Brassier and Meillassoux "aren't anticorrelationist enough," therefore, this is because they continue to assume that thought always involves an intentional relationship to things beyond or outside this thought, a relationship that fails to be successful and hence meaningful for Brassier and is only meaningful by way of mathematical formalism for Meillassoux. If we push anticorrelationism far enough, then we also abandon the correlation between an intentional thought and its objective correlate.

We have what Shaviro calls "noncorrelational sentience," (133) an "immanent, noncognitive contact" (148) or "contact at a distance" (147),

?????

Yes, as the reviewer recommends, see Spinoza -- the absolute and infinite on one side and the relative and finite on the other. We need to recognize that we cannot claim to understand the nature of "the absolute and infinite," which exceed us on every side to an incomprehensible degree. But the 'world' we think we live in, as phenomenologists recognize, also exceeds us on every side, despite our progress in scientific exploration beyond our visible horizons. The humanly constructed 'world' superimposed on the naturally given physical base of our existence merely defines the limits of what we can know and what we can understand about our own existence as part of 'what-is', and what-is as a whole {Being, or the being-of-things-that are, including our limited access to them} is something we can merely contemplate but not reduce to propositions or concepts. However, within our own environmental niche in physical being, we remain temporally free to significant degrees and are therefore responsible for what we do within this niche, having taken immoderate control of the processes that have locally enabled our life and the other life that exists here. It's not the case that what phenomenology and existentialism have revealed about the situationally limited nature of our being and our thinking -- where and as we are -- is a minor discovery. The phenomenological turn itself undid the assumptions of prior philosophy from the inside out, precisely "overthrow[ing] the philosophical's self-appointed and privileged access to the Real." I'm surprised that these self-proclaimed revolutionary thinkers have not understood how phenomenologically informed philosophy generated the explosion of postmodernist discourse, producing not just a "disciplinary democracy" but an interdisciplinary democracy.

You also wrote:

I'm not sure what I mean exactly by:

I think it's the next step after the end of philosophy. (in my opinion what comes next is "work")

But it is related to what I think OOO/SR is trying to do - which is very simply to try something new, analytical philosophy seems mired down in decades to centuries old assumptions.

Yes, it is analytical philosophy growing out positivism that "seems mired down in decades of centuries old assumptions." That is not the case with phenomenological philosophy, which opened up the site of human experience and consciousness from which old assumptions could be critiqued, loosened, and undone. You continue, quoting from a review of a book by Laruelle:

Principles of Non-Philosophy // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

"Laruelle takes up the task of demarcating a domain from which we could make the philosophical itself an object of thinking rather than the standpoint of thinking. This domain must not already be subject to the law of the philosophical; it must not "auto-position" itself within the philosophical;

it must not be meta-philosophical but must be non-philosophical.

The questions for this text are the following. How is it possible to think about philosophy from a perspective that is no longer automatically subsumed within the philosophical, that looks in from the outside? More generally: how is it possible to take up the task of thinking in a manner no longer under the thrall of philosophical authority? Is it possible to overthrow the philosophical's self-appointed and privileged access to the Real in the name of disciplinary democracy?"

Laruelle and the other speculative materialists operating under the flag of 'object-oriented ontology' are misreading or have failed to read the bulk of phenomenological philosophy, which with the exception of a period in Husserl's developing oeuvre, has not claimed "self-appointed and privileged access to the Real" in terms of an 'absolute reality', the description of which phenomenologists in general recognize to be beyond the scale of human thought, beyond the scale of that which is thinkable in concrete terms from the temporally and spatially limited situation in which existential consciousness finds itself.

So my impression is that these guys are trying to outdo one another in the extent to which they disclaim and seek to erase the limited insights possible to existentially situated consciousnesses wherever they might arise in nature and being, as for example here in the local world we live in.

As so often in reading thinkers new to me, lights have gone off in my stored memory of Stevens's poetry. He already thought and expressed everything these people have thought. I'll probably write a paper demonstrating this, it being a paper-length subject more readily completable than the book-length ms on Stevens and M-P that I've been developing for several years now. If I do write it I'll post it here or somewhere on the net where it's accessible for anyone who might be interested in it.

 

[smcder]

I would be very interested in that paper, Constance.

 

[Constance]

I would be very interested in that paper, Constance.

I'm motivated to write it and will probably do so over the summer. And I intend to ask you first for your critique of the first draft.