hard books

Right now I’m engaged with a colleague in a slow and intense study of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Embarrassingly enough, I’ve never really spent that much time on Hegel, and have been content with the crude (and incorrect) ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ version of his system that has been handed down through generations of laziness. The only real Hegel study I’ve done before this has been selections from the Phenomenology, read alongside Kojeve’s lectures.  I’m now starting to get why someone like Badiou holds such contempt for the influence of Kojeve’s reading of the Phenomenology on the French reception of Hegel, and while the Science of Logic is a much more difficult work, it is infinitely more rewarding as an attempt to think through systematic metaphysics. The intensity of this work seems to be obvious when looking for secondary work on the Science of Logic, as thus far I’ve seen only two book length studies which seem decent, and this is compared to the countless studies of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Well, as I’m sure none of this is news to anyone else, feel free to share what the hardest book you’ve ever come across is, I’m always into stories of intellectual self harm of this extent. Or, if anyone has any recommendations for any secondary sources that deal with the Logic, that’d be nice too.

whats going on

So, after a pretty good stretch of consistent blogging I’ve taken a two week+ break. But I have good excuses! I spent a little over a week travelling around going to conferences with little to no internet access.

The first conference was the Immanence and Materialism event at Queen Mary, University of London. By clicking the above link you can access some of the papers, and hopefully I’ll have mine up soon. While I’m not the type to recount conferences play by play, I will say that I found this to be an excellent event, and almost every paper was highly interesting and there was some great debate during the discussion times. One interesting aspect was the contrast between the panels. For example, myself and a colleague were the only two papers on the first panel, and we both gave presentations that dealt with issues of freedom, subjectivity, choice, will, and the like. The next panel then featured papers of a highly determinist/monist bent, and one presenter even said, during her paper, “I’m glad that there have already been some papers dealing with will and freedom, because I am TOTALLY against that.” It was bold, but I appreciated the honesty, and it led to a fun debate over dinner where the two of us from Dundee attempted to convince this individual of the necessity of an ontological account of freedom. I don’t think we were convincing enough…

Wonderful conference though, and I look forward to future events at Queen Mary.

The next conference I attended was the ‘Towards a Philosophy of Life’ event at Liverpool Hope University. This event was the launching point for the new Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. Although my panel was absolute shit, due to the fact that no chair showed up to moderate, and the first person decided to take 35 minutes to give their 20 minute presentation, the conference itself was a very good event. I got to meet lots of interesting people, and catch up with some old friends, and overall I was left feeling quite positive about the future of Continental Philosophy of Religion in the UK. The only horrible parts were the keynotes by John Caputo and Don Cuppit, who are collectively the most boring philosophers of religion still living, maybe when they die this obsession with ‘postmodernism’ will die too. Cuppit was one of the most bold apologist for globalization and the religion of capital I’ve ever seen, but maybe he can blame it on age or something.

Overall, I had a great time at both, and it was a wonderful excuse to get out of scum-dee Scotland for a week.

That’s all for now, but will attempt to get back to ‘real’ posting soon enough.

what just happened?

So, in the past 30 hours or so, everyone has collectively decided that they hate Badiou. What a burst of originality.

I’m glad at least some people are getting the ridiculous and sad irony in all of this. I’m not going to bother linking to all the ‘lets kill the father’ posts out there, I’m sure you’ve seen them or can find them, but almost all of them share one troubling thing, an odd absence of any philosophical or textual engagement with his work. And, if I can make a guess, at least a few seem to be written by people critiquing a book (LoW) which they have not read, or, understood.

As I said in a comment on one of the previously mentioned blogs, this reminds me of being 14 years old and turning violently against one of my favorite punk bands when they would sign with a major label or put a video on mtv.

Dark and obscure doesn’t always equal rigorous or interesting.

a necessary distinction.

Just a thought. I think a distinction should be made between two sorts of people who are all over academia:

The Procrastinator, and the Lazy ass.

Whereas these two are often conflated, I think the distinction is crucial. One who procrastinates does (or, can) still work very hard and produce a very high quality of work. The main problem being that they usually have near panic attacks every time deadlines approach, but are willing to go nights without sleeping or cancel days worth of social activities to produce work they are proud of. I usually tend to fall into this.

Lazy people on the other hand, do not work hard. They do the absolute least amount of work to get by, and more often then not end up producing sub-standard work, and getting by on the merits of being good talkers, or sometimes (as Graham has pointed out on his blog recently) simply by being hyper-critical of the work of others.  Lazy people can sometimes be fun people to talk to, or decent friends, but intellectually they will always fail to produce good work.

Lazy people really piss me off, especially when they get in the way of people who actually work hard, even if much of this hard work takes place in an intense and last minute period of time.

Apologies for the rant, but it was needed.

re: journals

After some looking around, I think I’m going to submit the chapter to the heythrop journal, as it’s a journal of philosophy-theology, and looking through the recent issues, has published pieces dealing with fairly interesting continental topics. And as much as I’m more keen to publish a philosophy-as-such journal, almost all of the interesting/important Kierkegaard scholorship in recent years has taken place almost exclusively in theology based journals. This may be because when taught in theology departments, Kierkegaard is more connected to issues of existentialism and phenomenology, while I’ve come across much recently ‘philosophical’ work on Kierkegaard with a heavy analytic taste to it.

that said, if anyone has any good reasons why I should not attempt to submit to heythrop, let me know!

Journal Advice.

A bit of advice is needed from anyone who would be willing to share…

I’m currently writing up a draft of the first chapter of my PhD, which will be called something like ‘Kierkegaard and the Politics of Outwardness’, and I’m hoping to submit it to a journal within the next month. Partly because it’s about time I start submitting things, and partly because we’re having an essay contest in my department where the best submitted essay wins 300 pounds.

In basic terms, the essay deals with two periods of Kierkegaard’s writings, first considering CUP and Two Ages, and then moving to a consideration of Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. In the first section I critique the implicit existential ontology of the Postscript, basically arguing that Kierkegaard doesn’t need a transcendent ontology to accomplish what he hopes in regards to subjectivity and undecidability; in the second I reinforce Merold Westphal’s argue that Kierkegaard’s later writings move from the inwardness of ‘Religiousness B’ to a properly relational and outward ‘Religiousness C’, arguing that here we find not a break, but a consummation, of Kierkegaard’s earlier work, and one that provides a paradigm for radical socio-political thought and critique. Towards the end of the work I also re-think the notion of the religious in Kierkegaard in terms of a mode of relation, and also respond to Levinas’ critiques of Kierkegaard for being a-social and a-political.

All that said, I’m wondering where a good place to submit this piece would be? I’m hoping to find a ‘mid range’ journal, and something that wouldn’t be turned off by a piece that basically attempts to situate Kierkegaard as a precursor to contemporary materialism. Thus far I’ve thought about ‘Philosophy Today’ and the ‘Southern Journal for Philosophy’, but may have better chances with a philosophy of religion/theology journal with a Kierkegaard piece… but at this point, ANY advice would he helpful.

Thanks.

just a thought…

Does anyone else notice how (some of) the online scientific-realism contingent is basically becoming the reformed Calvinism of continental philosophy? This may reveal a bit of ‘naivete’, but are we really back at the place where continental philosophers need to take too seriously questions of determinism and eliminitivism? If the determinist are right, then almost all of the work in recent continental philosophy falls out the window, so one should either find one of the sub-groups within contemporary anglo philosophy who rejects free will. And as for eliminitivism, as I understand it, weren’t the Churchlands basically disregarded by the anglo philosophy world years (and years) ago? I confess I wasn’t studying philosophy a decade ago, and am only familiar with bits and piece of the literature, but speaking with people who were around then, and do know the literature, they seem astonished when they find out young Continental philosophers are taking this stuff seriously again.

I’m just not sure what motivates someone to ‘do’ philosophy if theories such as determinism and eliminativism are right? If there is no such thing as a freely existing subject…then shit…count me out.

(sorry for the micro rant)

request for advice.

I’m spending the next month writing a draft of the first chapter of my PhD, which broadly construed, is going to deal with issues of politics, ontology, subjectivity, and relationality within four of Kierkegaard’s works I find to be fundamental to my understanding of his work. Along with Kierkegaard, there will likely also be short sub-sections dealing with Marx, Hegel, and Zizek within this chapter.

One of the conceptual issues I’ve moved towards is relationality, and in the context of Kierkegaard, the relationship between internal self-relation, and external socio-political relation between self-relational subjects. I feel like I’m moving towards a steady argument within Kierkegaard’s texts, but would like to at least consider some recent work in European philosophy that deals with relationality, and am not so sure where to look. One figure who has been recommended is Nancy, but even there I’m not quite sure where to start, as I don’t have time to read his corpus anytime soon.

So, I come to you, whoever you are, to ask for recommendations on philosophers with interesting theories of relationality. All recommendations are highly appreciated.

the ups and downs of research, or, the importance of luck.

One of the odd things that I’ve found thus far about doing doctoral research is the extreme ups and downs one experiences in both motivation and activity. For example, about 3 weeks ago I had a fairly intense meeting with my supervisor, and spent the next two weeks working up a quite comprehensive outline for my entire PhD, as well as doing a large chunk of research/writing. I had another supervision this monday, which went really well and was quite encouraging, and thus afterwards I let out a gasp of relief, and have spent the rest of my week doing what can only be described as ‘pissing around’.

It seems as if rather than hoping to develop some sort of consistent work ethic (i know some are capable of this, and I admire them, but I am not) that those such as myself need to rely on luck and good timing for our intellectual and academic success. For example, this week I can ‘get away’ with being fairly unproductive, but I must hope (against hope) that sometime within the next couple weeks I hit a productive stride for a few days and produce some work for my next supervision.

I’ve experienced this same thing in the weeks leading up to conference presentations. I’ll often try for weeks to get a paper written, and end up waiting for the ‘moment’ where all of the sudden I find myself able to produce work worthy of being read in a public setting. Thus far the moment has also occurred within an appropriate time frame; but I must admit, I still fear the day where I’m sitting on a train on the way to a conference, lap top in front of me, blank screen, with an inability to produce anything. But I guess research, as with all things, takes a certain amount of faith, and somehow this faith seems to come to fruition in the last minute production of work one considered them-self to be incapable of.

Sorry for the unsubstantial post; but hopefully soon I will re-occur to try and convince you that Kierkegaard had a realist social ontology.

Leiter on getting a job in the US with UK degree

There is a conversation going on right now on Leiter Reports regarding the success of students with a UK PhD applying for jobs in the states. As someone who plans to be doing just that in the next few years this is of some significance, as it is to many other students in my department; sadly though, the comments left so far have given the impression that the only reason to get a PhD is to get a good job. Now I obviously understand that we all have to make money one way or another, but if someone doesn’t have a passion for their field of study then they should just get a job in business and make a lot more money for much less effort. One comment literally gave the advice to make sure your adviser helped you develop a ‘marketable’ topic for your dissertation. As one who is planning on writing  PhD that will most definitely not be marketable in the states, I find it ridiculous that anyone would focus years of research around marketability.

The only advice that is really necessary for this situation is that one should study with the adviser and department that will best facilitate their field of interest and work their ass of for however many years they are there. Screw marketability. What is the point of spending years of your life in a department that doesn’t fit your academic interest for the sake of better chances in an unpredictable job market?  Eh.