3:AM Magazine

Habermas has a rare and enviable capacity to sense the issues that are relevant to the present. In the mid-1980s he was among the most vocal opponents of the right-wing historiographers in the Historian Controversy, whom he accused of wanting to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime, in the interests of normalizing West German foreign policy. More recently he has engaged in debates around gene technology and their threat to our self-understanding as autonomous moral persons. He has been true to his own view that the task of the public intellectual is to “stir up critical developments when everyone else is still doing business as usual.” Philosophers should do more of that. As a bunch, we tend to be too inward looking.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Gordon Finlayson.

A science of concepts would be like a science of Tuesdays. As you can imagine, not all psychologists are thrilled!

But this view has a silver lining for psychologists. If I am correct, there are a bunch of exciting empirical questions that have been ignored by psychologists, and that should be tackled urgently. These include, How are the concepts organized? Do some concepts have priority over others? How are resulting conflicts resolved? Are they triggered in different contexts? And what is the relevant mechanism? How are different types of concepts acquired?

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Edouard Machery.

Hegelian scholars have often divided themselves between “metaphysical” and “non-metaphysical” readings of his work. This distinction is misleading. It leads to the mistaken view that non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s work deny there is metaphysics to be found. A further problem is that “metaphysical” readings will often overemphasise Hegel’s views about Geist and religion – as if their opponents deny their relevance – which defend a reading of Hegel’s text at the expense of making them more penetrable or defensible. “Non-metaphysical” readings typically overstate other elements presenting a reading perhaps more philosophical defensible, but at a lack of deep connection with the text. Too often a claim about “Hegel’s theory of x” is perhaps more a reflection of “my new theory of x” concealed behind the illusion that Hegel argues for the same.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Thom Brooks.

And perhaps there are different sorts of prerequisites for other forms of understanding: perhaps volitional or emotional prerequisites. Tolstoy for instance once claimed that “without love there is no understanding.” I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, but perhaps it is the idea that without love, or sympathy, or something along those lines, you cannot truly understand another person. Similarly, St. Augustine was fond of saying “unless you believe you will not understand,” suggesting that there is a kind of volitional aspect to certain sorts of understanding, and perhaps especially to religious understanding.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Stephen R. Grimm.

This work is analogous to An Mhuir and Cheilteach and An Mor Keltek and Ar Mor Keltiek and La Mer Celtique and the Celtic Sea that hoves off the Atlantic and the south coast of Ireland, bounded to the East by St George’s Channel with stranger limits over again at the Bristol Channel, the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, Wales, Cornwall, Devon, Brittany and the Continental Shelf that just falls to immense depths. Its best understood if you turn your map so that North is where you usually have East. His story is a submerged energy. It is a trap disguised as a benign aside.

Richard Marshall and a détournement on Tony White‘s Shackleton’s Man Goes South.

A body of despair has been assembled. Never has solipsistic terror been so crowded. It has manifest arrangements. Atomic loneliness engulfs us as if parodying our vast populations. Hopes for even timid liaisons diminish in paradox. We recognize that the best times for such hopes are when alone. Loneliness will always have an obscure history. If it led to easily discerned conclusions then it would be less so. But we refuse obedience to the logic of ending it, aping willpower though powerless. We continue with the hubris of the lonely. This is when the ego strives to stay at least at stalemate and refuses suicide. That is the absurd ground. What are we to make of this attachment to our calamity? Schopenhauer’s question hovers around this: why not self-annihilation given so much agony?

Richard Marshall on a Nietzschean Beckett.

After the opening epoch we confront a ‘dense matrix of overlapping and interacting actors and forces – the infrastructure of network protocols, hardware and standards, activist groups, hackers, lawyers, demography – with feedback loops , arms races, struggle over resources, and reinventions all going into making spam.’ This epoch is about developing threads of the concept of community, entwining the capture of attention with making money, collective organization and the law. Spammers of this epoch ended up badly. They tended to be shallow and damaged people. In this time spam feigned respectability and in the end failed.

Richard Marshall reviews Finn Bruton’s ‘Spam: A Shadow History Of The Internet.

I like, and have quoted, a remark that David Lewis made in the introduction to his first collection of papers: “I should have liked to be a piecemeal, unsystematic philosopher, offering independent proposals on a variety of topics. It was not to be.” He tried to be a fox, but couldn’t help turning into a hedgehog. I suspect that the best hedgehogs – those that are not blinded by their big idea – come to their systematic theory in something like this way, and that the best foxes see the interconnections between their different projects, and the general ideas that motivate them, even if they resist building them into one grand system.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Stalnaker.

Juan Manuel Bonet says that ‘’methods of teaching art are in need of oxygen.’ Black Mountain College was an open-air American Bauhaus with plenty and then some. It lasted twenty-three years, from 1933 to 1956. It gave us Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Dorn, Levertov , Rauschenberg, de Kooning, Motherwell, Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, Noland, Greenberg and a whole bunch of other astonishments.

Richard Marshall reviews Vincent Katz’s Black Mountain College. Experiment in Art.

A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a ‘downwards’ causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David Papineau.