I can’t think of a better way to start introducing the occasional discussion of music and culture onto this blog than by encouraging you to check out a new mix-tape by philosopher (and fellow transcendental materialist) Ryan Krahn. It makes me happy to be living in a world in which I get to know individuals with whom I could gladly discuss the merits of a contemporary Hegelian materialism and the brilliance of Frank Ocean in the same conversation. Listen to this now.
Next semester I am going to be teaching two sections of ‘introduction to ethics’ at a small liberal arts college, and as i’ve never taught this course before, am interested if anyone who has is willing to share any thoughts/advice. I’ve been told that most courses in the department are taught in a seminar style and usually tend to be based around the discussion of primary texts rather than using a textbook. In light of that, I am hoping to use 4-5 primary texts which exemplify different ethical positions in the western philosophical tradition. Here is what I’m thinking of using thus far:
Nicomachean Ethics- Aristotle
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals- Kant
Fear and Trembling- Kierkegaard
On the Genealogy of Morals- Nietzsche
I want to add a fifth text, either something that would come before Aristotle (Plato maybe?) or something which would fit in between Aristotle and Kant. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
While this blog has basically fallen off the map in the past year or so, I have decided to at least attempt to breathe some life back into its stagnant online existence. I’ve found it nearly impossible to get myself into any sort of writing routine recently and I figure there is no better way to get myself to write a bit every few days than to re-commit to using this space. To make this happen, however, I am planning to shift the focus of this blog a bit. While I will still post on explicitly academic/philosophical matters, I am also going to begin posting on more ‘popular’ topics such as: sports, film, music, literature, politics and culture. I flirted with the idea of starting a new blog which would be more focused on such popular pursuits, but while reading a back issue of n+1 yesterday realized that there is no reason that one cannot discus topics as diverse as Kierkegaard’s appropriation of German idealism and the curious career of Tim Tebow in the same space.
That said, I hope many of you won’t mind seeing me pop up in your readers a bit more frequently. Along with this, I will likely place any thing I write that deals explicitly with political philosophy (or more precisely, political ontology) on the new’ish group blog Stubborn People, a site initiated by the lovely Dave Mesing.
I just read Scu’s blog post which provides his riff on Harman’s thoughts on the Adrian Johnston interview carried out by Brian Smith and myself. While I completely get where he is coming from, I think it may be a bit much to call the position outlined by Johnston an ‘anthropocentric backlash’ for at least two reasons. First, it’s hardly a new position to privilege the human to some extent, and there is a certain French reliance on Descartes and Rousseau that seems to have never really left (the best contemporary example would be Badiou). Second, it seems like the position of someone like Johnston is far to subtle to be taking for a sort of reactionary humanism, as for him, following someone like Zizek, the point is that through a sort of evolutionary glitch (or fuck-up) humans have been left with a certain capacity for freedom and reflection which is unique to our species. Thus rather than being a ‘traditional’ humanism, it’s a sort of humanism grounded in a thoroughly materialist account of how life and subsequently thought are events which take place after the primacy of matter. After reading some of the excerpts of Meillassoux’s Divine Inexistence in the Harman book, I think his own position (in which humans are ‘the ultimate’) is probably a better target for anyone out to fight the ‘new humanism’.
The ‘Real Objects or Material Subjects’ issue of Cosmos and History edited by Dr. Brian Smith and myself is now online here.
We put some work into this and I hope some of you enjoy it, or are at least productively provoked by it.
So I’ve let this blog wither away into nothingness….but would like to try to insert a spark of being into it again by posting the table of contents for an upcoming issue of Cosmos and History edited by Brian Smith and myself. It features papers that are based on presentations given at the ‘Real Objects or Material Subjects?’ conference which took place at the University of Dundee in March, 2010. As C&H is open access, the issue will be available for everyone. I’ll post again once it’s online. Until then, here is what you can expect:
Real Objects or Material Subjects?
The Future of Continental Metaphysics
Table of Contents
Editors Introduction
Michael O’Neill Burns & Brian Anthony Smith
The Problem with Metzinger
Graham Harman
The Transcendental Core of Correlationism
Paul Ennis
Critical Idealism and Transcendental Materialism: A Speculative Analysis of the Second Paralogism
Michael Olson
Objects in manifold times: Deleuze and the speculative philosophy of objects as processes
James Williams
Becoming L’Homme Imaginaire: The Role of the Imagination in Overcoming Circularity in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason
Austin Smidt
Beyond Objects, Beyond Subjects: Giorgio Agamben on Animality, Particularity and the End of Onto-theology
Colby Dickinson
Fanon and Political Will
Peter Hallward
The Necessity of Contingency or Contingent Necessity: Meillassoux, Hegel, and the Subject
John Van Houdt
Aufhebung and Negativity
Ryan Krahn
Lacanian Materialism and the Question of the Real
Tom Eyers
Materialism, Subjectivity and the Outcome of French Philosophy
Interview with Adrian Johnston
In early April i’ll be leaving full-time residence in the UK and moving back to Orlando, FL to have free rent, finish writing my PhD, and hopefully get some teaching work. Luckily, I’ve been invited to give a colloqium paper in the department of philosophy at the University of Central Florida on April 14th. If any readers are in the central Florida area, I encourage you to come. Here are the details of the paper I’ll be giving:
Title: Anxious Ontology: Reading Søren Kierkegaard between Idealism and Materialism
Abstract: In much of the recent secondary literature, Søren Kierkegaard has been read as pre-figuring much of what took place in 20th century European philosophy. Often this reading places Kierkegaard in a philosophical lineage that came to be embodied in the ethical, hermeneutic, and deconstructive methods which are often considered to be parts of the larger post-modern sensibility of 20th century philosophy. In this paper I will break from this tradition of considering Kierkegaard’s relation to 20th century philosophical trends by considering him in both the 19th century context of German Idealism and the recent 21st century turn to speculative, or transcendental, materialism. In particular, I will focus on Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, reading this text both as a response to theories of immediacy emerging in German Idealism and as pre-figuring recent materialist re-considerations of Idealism. Along with providing my own attempt at a 21st century reading of Kierkegaard, I will place my argument into dialogue with two recent interpretations of Kierkegaard offered by David Kangas and Slavoj Žižek. At the heart of my argument will be the claim that Kierkegaard’s potential relevance to 21st century debates is dependent on a rigorous re-consideration of his indebtedness to the philosophical climate of the early 19th century.
Registration for 21st Century Idealism is now open on the conference website. It is absolutely 100% free, all you need to do is fill out a simple form. Easy.
Details on affordable accomodation in Dundee should be on the website soon as well.
While this schedule isn’t 100% certain as of yet, it should look something like this:
21st Century Idealism: April 1-2, 2011, University of Dundee
Friday, April 1st
10:15-10:30 Welcome
10:30am-12:00pm
Sebastian Ostritsch (University of Bonn): The Philosophical Ubiquity of Idealism and the Possibility of a Fundamentally Non-Idealistic “Philosophy”
Søren Rosendal : Hegel’s Realism: The Ex-timate Real
Claire Pagès (Université Paris Ouest/Nanterre): Should we abandon the Hegelian idealism?
2:00pm-1:00pm Lunch Break
1:00pm-2:00pm
Tom Eyers (CRMEP, Kingston): The Underground Current of the Idea: Idea, Idealism and Ideology in Althusser, Lacan and Badiou
Joseph Carew (Bergische Universität Wuppertal): German Idealism and Ontological Catastrophe: Slavoj Žižek and the Horror of Subjectivity
2:00-2:30pm Coffee Break
2:30-4:00pm
John Van Houdt (Tilburg): The Ali Baba Problem: Idealism for the 21st Cenutry
Kirill Chepurin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow): The Absolute’s Blind Spots: Geist and Contingency through Hegel’s Anthropology
Guillaume Lejeune (Université Libre de Bruxelles): Self-Construction and Society. Malabou and Brandom about Hegel.
4-4:30pm Coffee Break
4:30-6:00 Keynote Presentation: Markus Gabriel (University of Bonn):
21st Century Idealism: Facticity, Accessibility, and Contingency
Saturday, April 2nd
10:00-11:30am Keynote Presentation: Beth Lord (Dundee): TITLE TBA
11:30-11:45am Coffee
11:45-12:45pm
Alexander William George Andrews (University of Nottingham): Invisible Hands: Hegel, Marx and the Market
Dave Mesing (Duquesne University): Political Prefaces: Kierkegaard’s Politics of the Beginning
12:45-1:45pm Lunch Break
1:45-3:15pm
Daniel Whistler (Liverpool): Schelling, Tautegory and the History of Philosophy
Jeremy Dunham(UWE-Bristol): G.E. Moore’s The Refutation of Idealism and the Late 19th/Early 20th Century Idealist
Pete Wolfendale (Warwick): The Greatest Mistake: A Case for the Failure of Hegel’s Idealism
3:15-3:30pm Coffee Break
3:30-4:30pm
André Reichert (Freie Universität Berlin): A Deleuzian Idealism. Postcartesianism, Diagrammatics and Prephilosophy
Johan Nystrom (Kingston University): Dancing and Leaping: Repetition in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Deleuze
4:30-6:00 Iain Hamilton-Grant (UWE-Bristol) TITLE TBA
Note that this year registration is FREE and coffee/snacks will be provided for all attending. If you are planning to attend, please email me to register at mykeburns [at] gmail [dot] com. Further details on the schedule, accomodation, registration, and pre and post conference events should be available on the conference website soon.
With the recent decline in full-time academic jobs (and jobs in general), and especially jobs in the humanities, there has been a bit of talk amongst friends and colleagues about potential back-up plans if some (or many) of us are unable to acquire full-time academic employment.
For the time being, I’m hoping to move back home (to Florida), finish writing my thesis, and find some sort of adjunct teaching at a local college. Past that, I have thought about doing an alternative teaching certification program in urban education, but have just realized that the job market in that area is just about as grim as the academic market. If not that, I used to work in community development, and while I think I’d find it fairly intellectually stimulating, the non-profit market is just as bad as education these days.
I heard from a friend last night that in some states nurses are being hired with six-figure starting salaries. While I’d never considered nursing before, it could be an interesting option after finishing my thesis. I feel like ‘Dr. Michael Burns, R.N.’ would be a great title, and cause quite a bit of confusion amongst doctors at the hospital who would take shots at a man who was a nurse and not a ‘doctor’. Also, if I could deal with the piss, puke, and shit; I’d make way more than any academic position.
All of that said….what are the non-academic back-up plans others have been considering? I think this is an important discussion that some of us may be avoiding…..
