July Hols

Published on 21 June 2009 ago in Current Events. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’m getting really excited about my upcoming British Isles tours.  In one and a half weeks, the madness games begin. First up in July is my wife’s friend from uni is coming to do her own tour of the British Isles. She arrives on a Thursday and will be switching planes here in Glasgow for a weekend trip to Ireland. We’ll be centering ourselves around Belfast on the recommendation of some colleagues here. I’ve planned two separate day trips, one to Giant’s Causeway and another to Newgrange and Knowth. We return to Glasgow late on Monday. Then, our friend takes a trip to England for a few days in the week and returns for the weekend (while my wife and I work). The second weekend of July, we’ll be traveling to see a few castles (possibilities include Scone, Stirling, and Glamis). Then, our first visitor leaves on the following Monday.

Our second set of visitors is my wife’s mother and youngest sister. They arrive on the Friday of that same week (giving us a few days to finish off work, clean up, and tie up any loose ends). It also happens that our anniversary (has it only been four years??) falls between these two visits, so I hope to do something for that in the in-between time. Their first weekend will be a little tamer than our first visitor’s, as we’ll be staying around Glasgow for that weekend. However, once the weekend’s over, we’re heading up north into the Scottish Highlands. We’ll spend a night in Carbisdale Castle, followed by a run through Loch Ness, Skye, Oban (with a photo stop at Castle Stalker), Iona, and Loch Lomond before returning to Glasgow a few days later. We’ll spend the weekend recovering from that run, but it won’t last long.

Part three of our month will be a raid into English territory (finally). We’ll first make a run to London through the eastern part of England, passing through Leeds and Nottingham to see Fountains Abbey, Herriot country, and Nottingham Castle (with the Sherwood Forest). After a few days in London, we’ll begin our journey back through the western part of England (sorry, no Wales this trip), passing through Stonehenge, Avebury, Bath, Manchester, Carlisle (and the Lake District), Hadrian’s Wall, and possibly Edinburgh before returning to Glasgow. With July over, our visitors will return to the New World and leave us to hibernate in the quickly growing night that is winter in the north (we’ll lose two hours of daylight between now and the time they leave in August).

Needless to say, I’ll be very sparse in July.

http://www.oban.org.uk/index.php

All about names

Published on 4 June 2009 ago in Rants. 0 Comments

Recently, Brian Leiter (of Philosophical Gourmet Report fame) wrote a simple post on his blog about the lack of open-access journals in philosophy. A fellow postgrad student in a solid programme at Dundee commented that there are some good OA journals in recent continental philosophy. By the end of the conversation, Leiter has stood his ground by dismissing (1) that student as not being knowledgeable about his own field, (2) those journals for being “of poor reputation.” Leiter then closes with a grandiose sentiment of “I’m writing/editing a book about continental philosophy and I know what I’m talking about.” Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

As a result of Professor Leiter’s rudeness, the drama has continued. First, Graham posted an example of Leiter’s callousness regarding Derrida’s death. Not to be outdone, Leiter sends off retorts to Graham as well as Michael (the postgrad student). It’s great to stand one’s ground, however name-dropping and appealing to a reputation league table (which Leiter himself organises!) isn’t the best argument. We all know that good things only come out of the top 10 philosophy programmes in anglo-american analytic philosophy. We all certainly know that Leiter is the authority for reputation throughout the philosophy world, as he himself has demonstrated by naming people who he considers good sources…even if half of them are unheard of at continental programmes.  That’s probably because those programmes are ranked low on Leiter’s scale and therefore cannot be considered good sources of continental philosophy. Next, we’ll be hearing that Deleuze isn’t a major figure in recent continental thought. Go figure.

Atheigulous

Published on 25 May 2009 ago in Current Events, General and Religion. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I recently watched Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous. I had been interested in it for a while because I have a good deal of respect for Maher and both of his TV series (Politically Incorrect and Real Time). In one aspect, this show did a great analysis of the fundamentalist variety of religion. However, Maher also extends this analysis to all varieties of religion; and this argument follows the same reasoning that he criticises.

I take the main focus of the film to be that religious faith and objective science is incompatible. In fact, religious faith is now an absurdity in these modern times. Maher travels quite a bit throughout the US, Europe, and Israel interviewing people who would generally be classified as fundamentalists in their approaches to theology. At one point, he is interviewing Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum fame). He takes Ham to task in resolving huge differences between scientific evidence and the “common sense” literal reading of creation espoused by young Earth creationism. From my perspective, Ham’s creationism here has already lost its sense of direction by adopting the language and system of scienctific observation that negates the teleological goal of creationism. In oversimplified terms, Ham’s creation science is much like trying to raise freshwater fish in salt water; the freshwater fish behave at the cellular/organic level differently than saltwater fish. The language and goals of the creation story in Genesis, much like the stories of Christ in the Gospels, are not meant to adhere to modern-day scientific (or biographical) literature. In this respect, Maher is spot on with his critique of faith. If one holds religious faith to be coterminal with empirical science, faith will always lose because it centers on phenomena that exceed the bounds empirical science has made for itself.

On the other hand, Maher’s critique is the the “atheist version” of the very thing he critiques. In one segment, he is asking a few Muslims (including an imam) about the Qur’an. His questions fall along the lines of “the Qur’an says to kill infidels, is this true?” Every Muslim asked answers the question along the lines of “that is not how we interpret that text because it was linked to a particular historical context that no longer exists.” Maher pushes his point by denying the possibility of interpretation, setting himself up as the more accurate interpreter than the believers who study the text! This is the same thing that he critiques people such as Ken Ham (and others). In other words, Maher wants religious/theological hermeneutics to be a closed event ripped from any context and made into an absolute ideological framework in order to reject religion. He then rationalises his work by claiming its standpoint of doubt is the best position.

Ironically, it is here that Maher again falls prey to the very thing he criticises. If doubt is the best place to stand, he hasn’t doubted enough! The “true” sceptic is the one that doubts everything, not just what one is prejudiced against. Maher emphasis empirical science as the strongest evidence for his position, yet he never doubts the framework of assumptions that undergird the empirical sciences. He never suggests that empirical evidence itself may be already tainted by a predisposition to certain beliefs (namely, that an external world exists and is discernable). Obviously, then, Maher should insist that some kind of belief is “acceptable” without entering into fundamentalism or scepticism. It seems, then, that the rational position is somewhere between the fundamentalism he decries while using and the scepticism he touts while evading.

One last thing of interesting note is that Maher suggests in his film that science has discovered a gene that is linked to belief in God. Ironically, the original researcher said that it was linked to spirituality and “feeling God’s presense” and not to simple belief in God. Further, these findings were never published in peer-reviewed literature. Even more striking is that this gene can also be associated with the feeling of beloning to a political party. In other words, it isn’t a very strong theory and it doesn’t suggest that belief in God is a genetic trait. Perhaps if Maher had utilised more of his “scepticism,” he would have noticed that.

Summer plans

Published on 20 May 2009 ago in General and Lists. 0 Comments

I used to make lists for every term of the year as a point of focus for my activities. While I tend to fail miserably at achieving those goals, I felt that the list provided some clarity for my directions. Having noticed a few people around me making lists for their summer projects, I’ll throw my own up here. I guess time starts about last week and will run through September.

Writing

  • Finish up the 5000 word excerpt of my thesis for my annual review.
  • A conference paper on Deleuze’s Logic of Sense as it relates to theological hermeneutics (which overlaps a bit with the previous item)
  • A review of Adam Kotsko’s Zizek and Theology
  • An additional 15k-ish words of my thesis working on ontology and metaphysics and their relationship to hermeneutics and symbolism

Reading

  • Badiou’s Being and Event
  • Badiou’s Logics of Worlds
  • Zizek’s Parallax View
  • Milbank and Zizek’s Monstrosity of Christ
  • Levi Bryant’s Difference and Givenness
  • Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks

Errata

  • Update a few PHP scripts that I’ve been meaning to do for nearly a year
  • Step down from my PHP scripting roles as I don’t have the time anymore (sorry guys!)
  • Spend a month inundating myself with every tourist spot in Great Britain (and many in Ireland)
  • ConnectDeleuze conference in Cologne
  • “Brush up” on my French and German
  • Added late: switch server hosting to a simpler plan

Which way? Which way?

Published on 11 May 2009 ago in Philosophy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .
This is part 4 of 4 in the Logic of Sense series

Deleuze immediately makes clear the infinite regress of sense. Carroll’s work is insightful because it makes us confront “a synthesis of the heterogeneous; the serial form is necessarily realized in the simultaneity of at least two series” (36). the infinite regress of sense is itself a series, a series of multiple series that each inhere on each other–a synthesis of series. The two series operate different: one as signifier and the other as signified. The direct result of these two inhering on each other is a disequilibrium created by the excess of one in the other. The signifier series manifests as an occupant without a place, a supernumerary object in the signified series. This signified creates an empty place within the signifier. The excess of each series manifests as both esoteric and exoteric words in paradoxical forms in which each exists “only through the relations they maintain with one another” (50).

magnetThese relations, then, create singularities–that is, points of turning, inflections, tears, fusion, etc. Each of these “correspond to each one of the series of a structure” and is “the source of a series extending in a determined direction right up to the vicinity of another singularity” (52-3). Visually, these singularities create sets of divergent and convergent lines like that of a magnet.  Singularities form ideal events. With regards to time, events in their purest forms are never actualities. They are only tales and stories, events which are about to happen and those which have just happened. They are never in the present, never happening.

The disequilibrium of sense, which Deleuze points to through the various dualities (e.g. empty square and supernumerary object), is always in relation to itself as the paradox of nonsense (66). Nonsense, however, is not the lack of sense. The relation between sense and nonsense is not simply a copy of that between true and false. Instead, there is an original relation between the two. Sense is always produced, an effect of the relation between the signifier and signified. The paradox of sense is that nonsense is also present within sense and within the event of signification. Nonsense must be understood as being opposed to the abscense of sense because it produces sense in excess.

Sense should not be confused with “good sense.” “Good sense” always come second to sense as it presupposes a distrubution of sense. It, like the arrow of time, determines the direction which sense runs. The paradox of sense, though, is that it goes both directions simultaneously. Common sense identifies the objects within a language. Yet in Alice, identity is completely lost. The paradox is this reversal of both good sense and common sense. Alice discovers through the looking glass that common sense has long disappeared. Yet, at this very point where language itself seems impossible, “having no subject which expresses or manifests itself in it, no object to denote, no classes and no properties to signify according to a fixed order,” that the gift of meaning occurs before all good and common sense (79). With the passion of this paradox, language reaches the height of its power. The two directions of sense, of becoming-mad, are represented in by Carroll’s doubles. The pair of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare each live in one direction, the two inseparable from one another. Each direction segments itself to “the point that both are found in either” (79). The Hatter and Hare killed the present which survives only in the Dormouse. The present subsists only as the abstract moment, infinitely subdivisible into past and future. The maifestation of sense is always a fragile one within and without the abstract moment of the present.