Abstract to Limited Horizons: The Habitual Basis of the Imagination

My editor asked me to write an abstract; I share the draft with you.

This essay on pragmatist aesthetics explains how imagination extends the environment into the possible.  While there is no lack of pragmatic theories claiming that imagination extends the environment, few explain how.  After discussing the incompleteness of Mark Johnson’s scholarship on this question, I engage and expand upon Thomas Alexander’s work in John Dewey scholarship to construct a novel Deweyan-pragmatic view of the dynamic structure of imaginative function that emphasizes continuity, temporality, and the emergence of meaning.  I conclude by challenging Dewey scholars to address the question of how, else they are blind to the limitations of imagination while making Oedipal promises on its transformative power.

Feel free to suggest edits.  This will be published in the Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society, which is a pragmatist journal.

A Contradiction in Onticology

Someone should feel free to either point out what I am missing or confirm that I am correct.

Is not Levi's post on A-theology contrary to his recent post on substance and process?  I think so.

Just like when I used to correspond with him, we would have moments of concordance and divergence, and now I am wondering if he is his own worst enemy or if he is being contrary on purpose.

For instance, if he pushes the externality of objective relations, but then admits of endo- and exo-relations, he appears to either contradict himself or perhaps equivocate.  When I pushed him on this months ago, he insisted on the substantial nature of objects, but then appears to take it away when calling objects "time worms" in a different post.  There might be a way to square this, and I did try hard to find a way, and now I wonder if someone would like to point it out.  I say this not because I think that I am mistaken--I think I am correct--but I cannot claim not to have seen such contradictions resolved by unforeseen moves before.

In my own work, there is the distinction between the continuity of nature vs. logical relation vs. causal relation, etc.  In short, everything must be continuous so as to be related in some sense, or they could never share a causal relation without making appeals to ex nihilo causation that is excluded in naturalism.  But continuity is not causality, and the logic of continuity is not the same as that of causation.  That difference has confused many who have misunderstood process thought by think that all relations must be causal or predicate-subject relations.

I would ask that contributions to the conversation be constructive and not airing of grievances.  Likewise, my aim is to be constructive, and I hope to learn something from the conversation.  Despite all my disagreements with Harman, I can say that I admire his work and have learned from it, which I think is higher praise than my believing in its veracity.

Musing upon teaching philosophy

I have been teaching based on a pedagogy that goes against many of his instincts.  That is, be as open, informative, and explicit as possible. Why is that against my instincts? Because it feeds into student's prior "training" to memorize and regurgitate material without understanding ... although they tend to fail the tests as I write them such that pure regurgitation will only give one the feeling that one is correct without actually being so, which surprises many like a sucker punch when they receive their grades. I have yet to reconcile my instincts with my pedagogical concerns, and my repeated warnings that they will feel sucker-punched if they do not really engage the material has not been well-heeded.

Currently, I am attempting to make the arguments as accessible as possible.  Since I teach first and second-year introductory courses as history of philosophy courses, e.g., we read Plato, Aristotle, the moderns, etc., accessibility is an issue.  Only my logic course is contemporary.  I hope that going over the material will make it understandable and inspire most to greater engagement.  However, to exhibit the instinctual tension I feel, I tell you that I provide far more written presentation material, office hours, and take-home guides than I ever received in my own training at two institutions, and it is the prevalence of material that worries me.  Few learn without the effort of discovery, and I worry that I have become too much a mediator of the ideas such that the students are not able to grasp them without my mediation.

Bah, the internal monologue of a junior professor....

Query to Readers: Enactivist, Embodied Theories of Mind

Given the recent post at Archive Fire concerning enactivist, embodied theories of mind, I am considering engaging such literature.  Regular readers should know that much of my work is in pragmatic theories of representation, phenomenology, and the process metaphysics to get such projects off the ground.

Are there readers out there quite familiar with the strain of neopragmatism that addresses these issues?  I would welcome any thoughts or advice.  For my part, it would require bridging the neopragmatic (them) vs. neoclassical pragmatic chasm (me), which is also the difference between highly appropriative analytic philosophy versus pragmatist and Americanist philosophy.  They are two utterly different traditions of philosophy, which is something that I rarely see analytic neopragmatists appreciate.

What would I offer? The process metaphysics necessary to achieve a realist phenomenology, which is compatible (translatable?) with post-Husserlian phenomenology and contemporary science.  To be honest, many of the basic moves of enactivist, embodied theories of mind are a century old, and much of that work is a return to what began during classical pragmatism's time.  Yet the return is usually an appropriation without a full understanding of classical or neoclassical (contemporary) pragmatism.

I need a good dancing partner...

Immanence AND Transcendence: Response to A-Theology

Recently, Levi Bryant of Larval Subjects posted on “A-theology” per the subject of immanence and transcendence.  Matt of Footnotes to Plato responded.

To both of these gentlemen, who are on opposite sides on many issues, I ask the question

Immanent to what? 

Why must we sling around a relational term without explaining the relateds?

I respond that the answer is “nature.”  But then I say that nature is both immanent and transcendent … to itself.  How?  Nature is generative, and time and chance are real.

I presume that Matt knows this angle and neglected to mention it, as he has posted much on this.  Levi’s commitments are less clear, and I will respond to him in the remainder of this post.  In short, my comments amount to the statement, “but almost no one holds the positions that he is against!”  The reader should not be lead into thinking that Levi’s opponents actually hold the positions that he launches a polemic against, because they do not.

First, his description of “immanence” and “transcendence” is partial, and he knows this, so I am just drawing attention to a few points that his readers might overlook and that make his claims problematic.  His insistence on “immanence” implying “external relations” and “disjunctive diversity” never explains the problem of change, i.e., how change is possible.  It’s a basic logical problem that one falls into whenever one champions pure externality.  In fact, it seems very, very odd to be quoting Whitehead throughout that section, as Whitehead would never agree with that view.  Second, he appears to then embrace internal relations when discussing “entropy” despite his insistence that it is “opposite of the logic of conjunction found in holisms.

This is where I remind the reader that western philosophies that maintained pure internal relations disappeared nearly a century ago, and thus Levi is not targeting serious contemporary discussions.  I add “serious” because we should be able to find a people people still maintaining a simplistic doctrine.  To forestall the obvious, no, Western process thought and Buddhism are not doctrines of “pure internal relations.”  Process thought was never that, and Buddhist views are far more nuanced depending on the school.

The problem that is most obvious to me about Levi’s view is its atemporality and this its myopic view of transcendence.  Like “internal relations,” relatively few philosophers would accept his definition of “transcendence;” he’s targeting a minority segment that may not even represent his interlocutors.  When he discusses transcendence, he engages in mereology again, and I presume that his understanding of mereology, especially when it comes to temporality, is too simplistic.  I see little recognition of constitutive part-whole relations, e.g., of the sort made famous in Hegel’s phenomenology.  But let me move on to my last point on temporality rather than be mired down.

While the existence of entities as such is independent, it is at best only independent from an atemporal point of view.  Time and change are two sides of the same coin.  Seen from a temporal (historical) standpoint, entities’ existence as such is not independent, because any entity is not self-sufficient in its own being over time.  It might appear like that from an atemporal perspective.  Pointing out that objects are dynamic systems, autopoetic, etc. does not solve this problem.  This is why I have not been supportive of object-oriented ontologies; it’s neo-substance talk with so many bells and whistles that distract from the fact that it does not resolve the classical counter-arguments against substance metaphysics, e.g., the problem of change and temporality.  Harman has a solution to this that is clearly worked out, in which case it is just creatively implausible.  Levi can do no better than Harman, no matter all his appropriations from other philosophies, until he deals with this problem.  This is why so many OOO bloggers jumped onto the idea of contingent withdrawal some weeks ago; it’s a recognition of the problem.

Some advice.  Start by working the problem of temporality and be sure not to spatialize time.  Moreover, embrace asymmetric mereological relations, e.g., meditate upon Hegel, which will help understand where recent views of temporality are coming from.  And bring me a hamburger and fries while I am busy pontificating.

Apologies that I cannot be more detailed in my discussion, as I lack the time.  Regardless, I'm not really saying anything new.  What I say just does not appear to stick.

CFP: International Conference on Rethinking Pragmatist Aesthetics

International Conference “Rethinking Pragmatist Aesthetics”

*August 31-September 2, 2012*

*Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Campus in Wroclaw (Poland)
*

** Theme: Pragmatist aesthetics is a rich theoretical tradition which has
its beginnings in the work of classical pragmatists (most notably, John
Dewey’s 1934 book Art as Experience), and which was rejuvenated in the 80s
and the 90s by such scholars as Richard Rorty, Joseph Margolis, and Richard
Shusterman. The latter’s 1992 book Pragmatist Aesthetics can be seen as a
symbolic moment in the emergence of the second wave of pragmatist
aesthetics, and today, twenty years after its publication, it is perhaps
the right time to rethink pragmatism’s contribution to aesthetic theory.

** The aim of this conference is to reflect on pragmatist aesthetics’
history and current condition, but also on its potential to address the
most pressing problems of contemporary philosophical aesthetics, and to
project the future avenues for its progress. In particular, we welcome
submissions that: provide historical accounts of pragmatist aesthetics’
development; address aesthetic themes in the work of classical pragmatists
(Peirce, James, Dewey, F.C.S. Schiller, etc.) and/or neopragmatists (Rorty,
Goodman, Margolis, Shusterman, Putnam, et al.); deploy a (neo-)pragmatist
perspective in addressing a given aesthetic problem or in interpreting
concrete works of art; provide a comparative analysis of pragmatist
aesthetics and aesthetic theories developed in other philosophical
traditions or in different disciplines – for instance in analytic
philosophy, continental and post-continental thought, evolutionary
psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.

Keynote speaker: Richard Shusterman (Florida Atlantic University)

** Abstracts of between 350 to 500 words and a short author profile should
be sent to prof. Leszek Koczanowicz (leszek@post.pl) or dr. Wojciech
Malecki (wojciech.malecki@wp.pl) no later than May 15th, 2012. The
conference language is English.

Backing Away from Object-Oriented Discussion

I was talking to a friend about object-oriented philosophy who precisely encapsulated my misgivings with it.  He wrote,

"They seem intent on systematization of their viewpoint, but don't seem willing (or able) to acknowledge the shortcomings in their position."

While I applaud so much of the work in systematizing the position, especially because it is often uncelebrated work, even among those who have solidly constructed it I note a failure to acknowledge the shortcomings.  After months of engagement as I learned more and more of the field in general and several thinker's positions in particular, I have backed away.  Given that I have no interest in helping members of the field ticker with the internals of their viewpoint, I have little to say.  My critiques have been made, and I see not value in repeating them unless I were to become a specialist in the field and a dedicated critic.  Construction rather than destruction is my vocation.  I hope to engage with speculative realism more generally, as it is one of the few contemporary discussions of non-reductive realism.

To give ammunition to my supposed opponents, I think that one reason I am not compelled by object-oriented thinking is that I am not beholden to the concerns of contemporary continental philosophy, and thus the solutions that OOO provides are answers to questions that I am not asking.  I now have enough familiarity with OOO to know that I would not ask those questions that we do not have in common.  I do think that much may come of the new tradition, and I have a bit of advice.  Do not confuse systematizing your viewpoint with philosophical advance in general.

I still enjoin discussants to come chat, but I will in general keep the quiet on that subject that I have maintained for some time already.  Hopefully I will have much more to say about Americanist positions in the future.