@Philosophim Just a reminder that you forgot to respond to my post:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1027962

If you'd rather not navigate back to an old page, I can lay it out for you afresh if you like.

Conventional how? Many of your choices seem pretty far out to me, based on your descriptions. Those of them I've read, I like: Asimov, Clarke, Mieville, Le Guin. I think The Lathe of Heaven is very uderrated in comparison with the Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed (not that it's better).

Adrian Tchaikovsky (or Czajkowski as Jamal's wife might spell it.) — T Clark

She spells it Чайковский. Czajkowski looks like the Polish version.

The new archive site presents all discussions with less than 1000 posts in the form of a single page:

https://tpfarchive.com/

The data is a couple of months old now; I'll be updating it next month, prior to the move to the new platform.

:up:

I should point out that these ones are idiosyncratic choices:

• Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany
• Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
• The Doomed City, Strugatsky Brothers

(Roadside Picnic or Hard to be a God would be the normally recommended Strugatsky novels)

• Ubik, Philip K. Dick
• A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
• Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany
• Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
• The Doomed City, Strugatsky Brothers
• The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells
• The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

There's no philosophy in this discussion. To the Lounge it goes.

I suppose that when it comes to this sort of literature, you need to calibrate your expectations and approach it with a bit of an anthropological spirit in order to appreciate it. — SophistiCat

Certainly, but expectation-calibration can only do so much to mitigate intense displeasure. (And I secretly suspect there is literature written around the same time (and long before) which doesn't suffer from the same faults or has a more lasting power.)

I liked her sister's signature work a lot more, for all that it is more than a little unhinged — SophistiCat

Still haven't read Wuthering Heights. It does sound more promising.

---

Right now, some Russian holiday reading:

Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin.

'm assuming it didn't really "fulfill" or hit any note as far as what people tend to expect from novels? Emotional validation, validation of the human spirit, essence, struggle, experience, etc? You were left unfulfilled at the end of it, as if you wasted your time reading it, I imagine? — Outlander

I wouldn't say I'm ever interested in validation. That doesn't seem like a good expectation when reading fiction.

But I see what you're saying: yes, it didn't interest me and I found it cheaply melodramatic and sentimental.

Like, at what point would you say it took a dive for the worse and became "unsalvageable"? — Outlander

Good question, and I can answer very specifically. The thing is, I liked it quite a lot when it was just Jane against the world, but when Mr. Rochester appeared it was all downhill. Jane lost her independence and interest and Mr. Rochester was a charmless, boring boor who the reader was, I suppose, meant to fall in love with along with Jane.

I didn't read many novels this year, because of all the philosophy. Under the Skin by Michel Faber was interesting and memorable. Jane Eyre was bad. The best fiction I read was probably in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro — Manuel

I read this in the late nineties when I was totally unprepared for experimental literature, so I was quite confused. Even so, I think I probably read it in the first place because I'd heard it was weird. I found it fascinating and compelling, moving and haunting, and it's stayed with me. I've been meaning to read it again, although I fear it will hit much harder now.

Christmas reading:

Moth­er­land: A Fem­i­nist His­to­ry of Mod­ern Rus­sia, from Rev­o­lu­tion to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe.

After the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion of Octo­ber 1917, Sovi­et women gained the right to vote, no-fault divorce, child sup­port, and free high­er edu­ca­tion. Abor­tion and birth con­trol were soon legal­ized. ... Life was a “fairy-tale” for women in the first coun­try to legal­ly eman­ci­pate them, rev­o­lu­tion­ary Alexan­dra Kol­lon­tai would claim. — review

Those gains were real, though Stalin partly reversed some of them. And due to war, terror, and economic hardship, the result was hardly a fairy-tale.

Also some fiction:

Malarkoi by Alex Pheby
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel by Quentin Tarantino

:up:

I banned @Bob Ross for homophobia. He posted a topic claiming that...

• Homosexual orientation is a defective state of being, a "privation of human nature".
• Homosexual acts are immoral in virtue of that privation.
• It would be better for homosexuals not to exist as such, and that they should be cured if possible.
• Society should not treat homosexuality as morally neutral or good.
• It should be illegal to advocate or "evangelize" in favour of homosexuality.
• Children should be taught that homosexuality is bad or immoral.
• Homosexuality is akin to alcoholism, schizophrenia, brain tumours, and other pathologies.

Despite all Bob's disclaimers, this is homophobic. It promotes a moral framework that classifies a group of people as defective, disordered, and in need of correction. It's in clear contravention of the guidelines:

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.

We have been very tolerant, and Bob was warned many times, but he persisted in advancing racist, homophobic, and transphobic positions.

I really love Richard Pryor.

I also love Bashkortostan!

I'll respond openly instead of deleting the topic, because it has already been up for many hours, and it does make an explicit effort to avoid racism. After posting, I'll close the discussion again, leaving the topic in place so that everyone can see where TPF stands on the subject.

The central problem is that the OP takes race essentialism seriously, as a legitimate philosophical starting point. Precisely this presupposition makes it fall foul of our guidelines. And the issue isn't tone or intent, but the metaphysical approach whereby patterns of biological variation are treated as racial groupings which are morally or conceptually significant.

In particular, race is treated as equivalent or analogous to family, disregarding established distinctions in moral philosophy between kinship relations and abstract categories of population. These are conflated, which effectively opens the door to the justification of racial preference. The result is to normalize racial discrimination, even though it's just a thought experiment (thought experiments are not innocent).


Turning now to a more general issue, I want to address accusations made in various posts and PMs regarding censorship and the the ostensibly anti-philosophical nature of the restrictions in operation at TPF.

I know I've quoted this before, but it's worth reading the relevant part of the guidelines carefully:

Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them. — Baden

This is not rhetoric. It reflects a substantive judgment about what does and does not count as a legitimate object of philosophical debate.

Every intellectual community draws boundaries around admissible positions. Refusing to treat certain views as worthy of debate is the baseline judgment that makes good philosophical debate possible.

TPF is not a platform for discredited intellectual frameworks, particularly those belonging to a long line of justifications for racial discrimination. Views which presuppose racial essentialism, whether framed biologically, metaphysically, or in thought experiments, fall well within the category of those positions we do not consider worthy of debate.

Future posts treating race essentialism as a legitimate philosophical position will be removed without warning.

Frank flexing his programming skills on the Synclavier in 1986. I've loved this tune since it came out.

2007. What was that like 5 years ago? Come on man. Imagine if we judged every artist by his or her first work. Imagine the kind of world we would be living in. — Outlander

I didn't judge him or his work on the basis of the one book of his I read. I explicitly did the opposite. Also, you appear not to know what you're talking about, since the one I read was one of his later works. I get the feeling that you join these conversations not because you find them interesting or have anything to say, but because you have nothing else to do.

Do not say "come on man" ever again to me, please.

The notion that science is the only path to knowledge is, of course, silly. HIstory (including case histories) is never repeatable. Even scientific experiments are not repeatable -- all are unique events.

The history of psychology and psychoanalysis is replete with meaningful and insightful works that are not "scientific". Freud revolutionized how we see ourselves and our subconsciouses, but his psychoanalyses have not been found effective in treating psychological disorders. Does that mean they are worthless? Freud was, if no more, a literary genius. "Totem and Taboo" is not, perhaps, an accurate history of totemism. Instead, it is a myth -- deeper and more meaningful than history. Sacks books may not have been quite at that level, but they are both insightful and brilliant -- whether or not they contain a few "stretchers".

"Show me a man who does not lie, and I'll show you a man who hasn't much to say," wrote Mark Twain. Sacks certainly had a lot to say, some of it controversial. — Ecurb

:up: Well said, and welcome to the forum.

On the other hand, I never managed to find the insightful and brilliant in his books, because the first one I read was so dull it put me off reading any others: Musicophilia. My loss, I suppose.

The Barbican Estate is one of my favourite places in London. It's peaceful and pleasant just to walk around it, even without going inside the Barbican Centre. It was built for people and it feels like it.

I'm moving this to the Lounge. I don't see any political philosophy.

“The Game,” with Michael Douglas. An underrated David Fincher movie. They currently have it free on YouTube. — Mikie

Yeah I like that one.

I'm thinking there's a movie subgenre, or sub-subgenre, that nobody has identified before: secret organization approaches main character at a crisis in their life and either invites them to employ their (mysterious) services or otherwise begins a program of obscurely guiding their life. Other examples are Seconds from 1966 (recommended), The Adjustment Bureau, and maybe The Substance fits too—it uses a similar structure though it's tonally completely different, delighting in body horror.

For some reason I did not receive a notification of a reply — Leontiskos

I assumed you’d slunk away defeated and whimpering, your tail between your legs.

Anyway, thanks Leon, I appreciate the magnanimousness of your response.

I don't see that Adorno succeeds in brushing away the self-refutation of relativism. What does he do? He calls the objection "wretched," gives a single sentence of justification, and then moves on to a critique that he likes better. And his critique is fine as far as it goes, but he doesn't provide any argument for why the less "fruitful" objection is "wretched." This is probably because he doesn't have one.

[…]

I don't think this is right, but neither you nor Adorno are offering much to respond to in the way of argument. Obviously the person who thinks relativism is self-refuting would say that the "critical vs positive" distinction is _ad hoc_, and therefore it is hard to believe that this is a serious attempt to point up some problem with that objection. Indeed, if by "wretched" Adorno means something like, "The interlocutor would not be amenable to this objection," then his own objection surely suffers from the same problem, no? — Leontiskos

Maybe it’s best not to interpret him as offering a standalone refutation of the charge of relativism’s self-refutation. It’s better to see him as briefly indicating that this charge conflates the logical form of an assertion with the immanent critique of the conditions under which assertions claim universality. The self-refutation charge treats the latter as if it were the former.

In a general sense Adorno's quibble is usually taken into account by speaking about performative self-contradiction rather than simple self-contradiction, and that would include the relativist's belief that he has license to argue "critically" rather than "positively" in order to avoid the matter of applying his own criteria to himself. But in a more general sense, there is a strain of continentalism that sees simple arguments as passé. Like the basketball player who loves to dazzle with complicated plays and maneuvers, they have a disdain for the simple layup, and would almost argue that it should not count. Yet even if such individuals must label it "wretched," it still nevertheless counts. In some sense it counts more, because even (especially?) the uneducated can see that it is correct. — Leontiskos

Your reading takes his critical vs. positive distinction as an evasion, whereas I think what he is doing is describing an actual difference in the form of the claim. That distinction may be rejected, but I don’t think it’s just a hand-wavy gesture.

This is of course related to our differences over validity vs. genesis, direct engagement vs. metacritique, and justification vs. genealogy. Adorno, in the context of the section of ND under the heading “Against Relativism,” is much more interested in the latter of these pairs, because he thinks it is neglected by the focus on formal consistency, refutational success etc.

So in this respect he belongs to a tradition, which includes Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault, for whom insight, interpretation, and experience are modes of philosophical cognition, not reducible to argument or refutation. They are not rejecting reason, but rejecting the idea that reason is identical with formal validity. It’s an expansive concept of reason, a lot like the one explicitly set out in Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and implicit in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I’m sympathetic to this tradition. This might be a fundamental difference between us, although you seem quite far from the ahistorical tendencies of some Anglo-philosophy.

Incidentally, this tension is one of the fascinating things about Negative Dialectics: he is very sensitive to the suspicion that his emphasis on the philosophical centrality of spiritual experience, insight, and rhetorical expression might be interpreted as irrational. So he spends a lot of time explaining why Bergson, for example—who valorizes intuition over reason—is not where it’s at (despite having sympathies).

Puzzles about the one and the many are very old, and there is an established school of thought that favors the universal over the particular. Still, I worry about thinkers who wish to reconfigure the relation of the one and the many based on a practical aim; or who wish to reconfigure speculative reason on the basis of practical reason. To make the truth subservient to our desires is truly wretched, even where those desires are noble. Obviously I am not a Marxist. — Leontiskos

The point is that the division between theoretical and practical reason is itself historical, and that it breaks down historically—after Auschwitz. We can no longer take seriously the idea of purely speculative thought. But this is not the same as subordinating truth to our desires. Adorno is trying to show that the Enlightenment’s own conceptual scheme produced blind spots that had catastrophic consequences.

You seem to be worried about some ideological corruption of philosophy. It’s as if you’re advancing a more philosophical version of the “facts don’t care about your feelings” critique of the Left. I think this is misplaced, not least because much of what Adorno wrote is not easily packaged in terms of ethics; is difficult for the Left to swallow and is written off by most Marxists as pessimistic and counter-productive; and explicitly goes against many of the tenets of revolutionary politics. The whole point for Adorno is how to reach truth—not how to ground a political or ethical project and the truth be damned. The truth is that people suffer and they ought not to (he rejects the complete separability of facts and values).

Well, there are two things at play here. I never thought Adorno's opposition to identity-thinking was a first principle or originary ground, and yet this does not mean that he is not monomaniacal. To be possessed by a singular idea or ideational current is monomaniacal whether or not that singular thought is seen as originary. So Adorno may or may not be monomaniacal, but I don't see that your argument here is to the point. — Leontiskos

If the possession of a singular idea or ideational current is the criterion, then many of the great philosophers become monomaniacal. The distinction Adorno draws is between a fixation that hypostatizes a principle, and a critical focus that traces a structural feature of conceptual thought.

EDIT: Correction: it's not a distinction Adorno draws, but one I am drawing. If Adorno were monomaniacal about identity-thinking, it would be a fixation that hypostatizes the principle that identity-thinking is bad or whatever; whereas I think it's more like "a critical focus that traces a structural feature of conceptual thought."

The critique of identity thinking is not a doctrine, but is the confrontation with the historically dominant form of conceptual mediation, which any immanent critique must confront all the time, simply because it’s so ubiquitous. Calling that “monomania,” despite what you say, does seem to mistake the object of analysis for the ground of a system.

As for totalitarianism, I think it's too easy, or perhaps superficial, to say that an anti-totalitarian philosophy might itself become totalitarian if it goes too far. — Jamal

But wouldn't you agree with someone who says that? — Leontiskos

Sure. The point of my comment was that this truism is not a good criticism of Adorno. There is no totalizing program in Adorno.

I grant that the danger you describe is real: becoming so horrified by X that one becomes doctrinal in opposing X. But Adorno actually resists that move by refusing to convert catastrophe into the foundation of a system or determinate political programme. Instead he is arguing for a particular kind of attentiveness, because philosophy cannot proceed as though nothing happened.

As an auxiliary point, I favor traditions of philosophy over novel, heroic individual efforts. Philosophizing within a tradition (and in relation to other traditions) helps smooth out rough edges and avoid the monomaniacal tendencies I alluded to. This is another reason why I am generally skeptical in cases such as these. But I might be wrong. — Leontiskos

Adorno is steeped in tradition and is alive to both its importance and its dangers. He comes out of Kant and Hegel while also analyzing the genesis of their ideas to reveal their constitutive blind spots. So he is both traditional and anti-traditional.

And like you, he is significantly suspicious of the heroic individual in philosophy. Contrast him with the “heroic” Heidegger (who he hated). Heidegger sought to sweep it all away and start again from the pre-Socratics, and Adorno put a lot of effort into exposing this as a fantasy—the fantasy of starting fresh (one which expresses ideological commitments and presuppositions).

As evidence, two observations:

1. Adorno doesn’t reject the subject-object structure. He doesn’t think we can step outside it or replace it with a better alternative, by fiat.
2. The method of immanent critique depends entirely on inherited concepts and categories and would be impossible without them. The whole point is to interrogate our inherited concepts from within.

EDIT: I missed an important one:

3. Consciousness. He doesn't abandon the Kantian notion of consciousness, which many later thinkers dropped (and criticized Adorno for not dropping).


So I think Adorno is to be commended for his restraint. Even though he has the intellectual range and imagination to attempt a Heidegger-style heroic rupture, he refuses.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon — Jamal

I'm sad to report that after a great first half, I got really bored with this and dropped it.

It's like a spinoff from Against the Day, in the style of Inherent Vice, but without the bite of either. I wouldn't have expected to be wishing, during the reading, that the protagonist did not go to central Europe and had instead stayed in Milwaukee. The Milwaukee section is great fun; the ocean voyage and Hungary become super-zany but lack any real texture or substance.

But maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

I think there's a view you're not considering, one which is probably closer to the way @T Clark sees things. I mean the view that sees the idea that sex is dirty or that the animal in us is something to be ashamed of or to transcend—that this idea itself is what is offensive, rather than sex or the "bestial". In other words, it is disgusting that people find sex disgusting.

The idea that our animal nature is "base" and "dirty" has deep links with philosophy and religion, of course. That's a problem for philosophy. If this discussion could go in that direction, that might be enough to raise it up out of the Lounge.

The traditional scheme is that the good is what is eternal, necessary, pure, and rational. The contingent, mutable, finite, passionate and affective—like life and love (real love, with sex and everything)—are relegated to inferior status, as belonging to the wordly realm that philosophy is meant to transcend.

I am very much against this binary scheme, and I like the philosophers who have challenged it. Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Adorno. Generally, 20th century scepticism towards reason, and its inclusion of the body, saved philosophy from becoming a complete idiot.

One interesting angle is the possibility that a neurotically adolescent view of sex, as expressed in the OP (which is not to say it's unusual), might actually be founded on a long-standing philosophical tradition going back to Plato and Siddhartha Gautama.

Cool. I don't want to always sound like I'm taking a pro-AI stand in a new culture war, but it is worth pointing out that he is against the bubble more than AI itself, against capitalism more than the technology:

AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of. — Cory Doctorow

But then, in his call to action, he conflates anti-AI-bubble with anti-AI, thereby undermining his whole point or at least confusing his audience:

To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.

Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it's worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls will high-tech asbestos.

EDIT: It's more sloppiness than contradiction. In the second quotation, "AI" means the project of monopoly capitalism now underway, whereas in the first quotation it means the actual technology. This is such an important distinction that the sloppiness is unforgivable.

I've ensured that the archive won't be indexed by search engines until we close this site, so at least for the next couple of months, nobody should be able to find a story by searching in Google or whatever.

I could only recall @hypericin and myself being concerned about the visibility of stories, and we're both ok with things as they are, but I can remove any story from the archive on an ad hoc basis—so let me know. I'm not taking any content over to the new site.

I don't know. I'm out of steam. Over to someone else.

e

Ah, it's intelligent.

:groan:

Enlightened.

o

:chin:

s

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Interesting. It might even be interesting to see if crip theory and some kind of Aristotelianism might be reconciled, though on the face of it that seems a bit mad.

As a programmer this is the only feature of Cursor that I use. I've never once asked it to generate code for me. I'm stubbornly old-fashioned. — Michael

I'm not. I've used AI a lot for coding in the last couple of years, maybe because I've mostly left behind coding as a career. Using AI in this context can be frustrating but it ultimately saves time and avoids tedium. It's also a very direct and fast way of understanding the ways that LLMs get things wrong generally.

I haven't used Cursor though, just copilot and externally with DeepSeek and ChatGPT. I guess I'll end up trying Cursor to get it all integrated.

What I've enjoyed about using LLMs in coding is that I can quickly build small, clean applications with very few dependencies and no bloat.

But I don't think this is a "social construct" model. The latter is too ontologically dualist, whereas this view is relational. So maybe it fits disability. — Jamal

I just did some light googling and inevitably it turns out there's a lot of work been done around this, all of which I'm ignorant of. For example, there have already been proposed social-relational models of disability, and maybe that's close to what I was getting at (though no doubt mostly without my Adornian dialectical framing).

So it’s not their body that is disabling so much as its interaction with its environment. — Banno

the social model; the view that disability is largely created by architectural barriers, institutional practices, and social attitudes that fail to accommodate human variation. — Banno

That rather than being inherently negative, having a disability is just one more way of being a human, not inherently a disadvantage or a negative, but treated as such by many in the community. — Banno

I see a parallel in depression. A person with depression, it could be argued, is not incapacitated by a biomedical abnormality but by a disconnect between themselves and the social world. Depression is the lived form of the contradiction between human needs (for meaning, purpose, agency, etc.) and a society of alienation and domination. This contradictory interaction is constitutive of the personal "condition".

But I don't think this is a "social construct" model. The latter is too ontologically dualist, whereas this view is relational. So maybe it fits disability.

:up: