I’ve been putting off posting to this blog because I wasn’t sure how much thought I should put into each post. If I put in too much it could become a distraction, or else I never end up posting because the task is too daunting. Too little thought and I risk embarrassing myself. So I’m going to risk embarrassing myself.
This post is just a general summary of what I’ve been up to so far this term and things I’ve been thinking through. I’m working on my Aristotle research project, which is taking shape, and taking a seminar on Critical Theory. I also have an Irad Kimhi reading group starting up soon. (Sorry for the potentially misleading title; I’m not going to be thinking those three things together… yet).
Aristotle
The Aristotle project is becoming scary because I don’t have a conclusion yet. But I keep reminding myself that this is better than having a conclusion and forcing my research to confirm it. I’ve found that research like this requires having faith that once I work through everything something interesting will bubble up. It always has in the past, but for some reason those experiences don’t make new projects any easier.
As I touched on in my last post, my Aristotle project is largely focused on the Topics and a problem of disagreement that I’ve constructed in relation to it. Though I’m not an Aristotelian, the challenge is to construct a model of disagreement that coheres with Aristotle’s ontology and philosophy of language.
What this has led to is an evaluation Aristotle’s concept of signification. The basic chain of reasoning is this: genuine disagreement requires non-homonymy, and non-homonymy requires that two utterances of a word both signify the same thing. Establishing non-homonymy is also a condition of two interlocutors “thinking about the same thing.”[1] So, there must be a connection between two utterances signifying the same thing and the two speakers “thinking about the same thing” when they make those utterances. So, figuring out the nature of Aristotelian signification and its relation to thought is foundational to constructing a coherent model of Aristotelian disagreement.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, considering this will give me more to write about), what exactly Aristotle means by signification is contentious. Terrence Irwin maintains it is, typically, a relation between words and essences.[2] Christopher Shields maintains it is, typically, a relation between words and meanings.[3] My gamble, then, is that by working through these contrasting interpretations of signification in Aristotle I’ll reach a point where I can show that either Irwin or Shields cannot account for the possibility of disagreement, and so the other’s conception of signification is likelier.
Or maybe both will be able to account for it. In that case I’ll need a contingency plan. Possibly develop two contrasting models of disagreement based on either conception.
On the surface it seems neither account works. If signification is a relation between words and essences, then it seems non-homonymy requires interlocutors having the same essence in mind when they utter a word. If that’s true, then disagreement about essences is impossible. The interlocutors would be talking past each other. Likewise, if signification is a relation between words and meanings (whatever “meaning” means), then thinking about the same thing would be thinking about the same meaning. But, again, that would seem to disallow for disagreements about essences insofar as an essence is what a term, e.g “human,” means.
I think both of those arguments are flawed, but showing where each fails and what the consequences are for the structure of disagreement is a task I’m still working on.
Critical Theory
This Critical Theory seminar is more in the spirit of Critical Theory than to the letter. We’re not reading anyone properly in the Frankfurt School and the focus is on history, time, and justice.
We started outside of philosophy, reading a selection of Berber Bevernage’s book History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence, in which he suggests that the “time consciousness” of victims of state sponsored violence during transitions from dictatorial regimes to democratic ones demands a rethinking of our conceptions of time, the past, and history.[4] We read Jean Améry’s essay “Resentments” where he argues that maintaining his resentment against the Germans preserves the “moral truth” of the Holocaust.[5] We then read a play: Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, which also deals with transitions from dictatorship to democracy and a woman who finds herself confronting a man who may or may not have been her torturer.[6] And this week we read Nietzsche’s essay on “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.”[7]
I’d read the Nietzsche essay in undergrad and, at the time, was uninspired by it. And I’ll admit reading it again didn’t invigorate me much. Though I think this time around I got a better sense of its importance and the position Nietzsche is taking up.
Of the readings so far, Death and the Maiden provoked me the most. Which is odd, since I often don’t know what to do with fiction. Out of the play I began to develop a concept of what I’m calling torture epistemology. I want to write more about torture epistemology, but its development as a concept requires a fairly intense discussion of torture, rape, and gendered violence, so I want to take some time to think about how best to approach it. In general, what I find important about thinking torture in terms of epistemology is that it forms a concrete connection between knowledge and desire, and brings to light important ethical issues surrounding the conjunction of the two. I don’t know why I had to take this detour through fiction to establish the connection—the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is “All men by nature desire to know,”—but for better or worse this is the path I took.
Another thing torture epistemology is helping me develop is an idea of a colloquial use of the term “epistemology.” People sometimes talk about their “philosophy” of, say, business or fitness or whatever, by which they mean their systematic approach to understanding it, or the principles underlying their practice. I think there can be a similar use of the term “epistemology.” If everyone has a desire to know, then everyone must have something like an epistemic threshold: how much evidence is enough to satisfy one’s desire in a given circumstance. Someone reading a murder mystery might have a very low threshold for epistemic satisfaction (e.g. reading the ending and finding out who the murderer is), though that satisfaction might still be disappointed if the ending isn’t coherent enough given the clues presented throughout the novel. On the other hand, a scientist attempting to demonstrate a hypothesis might have a very high threshold for epistemic satisfaction. And of course some philosophers have thresholds that are bafflingly high. How does torture epistemology fit into this? Well, without going too in-depth, it suggests that gendered (and perhaps even sexed) violence can affect one’s threshold for epistemic satisfaction in specific circumstances.
That’s all I want to say about torture epistemology right now. I still need to develop this, and hopefully not only using male authors. Though, unfortunately, the only further research directions I can think of right now are all writing by men. Nietzsche, in the uses of history essay and in other places, also posits this fundamental connection between knowledge and desire and rails against the facade of disinterested knowing. I also think Sade combines desire and epistemology in “Philosophy in the Bedroom,”; something about the pleasure of epistemic domination through using pain to produce involuntary movements in a body. I also suspect there might be a connection between my thinking here and John Stoltenberg’s essay “Rapist Ethics” in Refusing to be a Man. Lots of threads to follow, but so little time.
Other Stuff
That’s all for current projects. On the horizon I have a reading group starting later this month on Irad Kimhi’s fairly recent book Thinking and Being. I’ve dipped into the book a bit. It’s engrossing and complex. One of Kimhi’s unpublished works ended up getting me invested in the history of Analytic philosophy and logic in ways I didn’t think possible, so I’m looking forward to having a chance to work through his first real publication. I don’t want to say much about Kimhi now, since my understanding of his position is still a rough outline, but in general his project seems to involve a rejection of Frege’s force/content distinction and an attempt to construct a new way of thinking about assertoric force.
- It’s unclear whether Aristotle thinks non-homonymy is a necessary or sufficient condition (or both) of interlocutors thinking about the same thing. This might be a problem I’ll have to address later. ↩
- Irwin, Terrence. “Aristotle’s Concept of Signification.” Language and Logos, edited by Malcolm Schofield and Martha Craven Nussbaum, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 241–66. ↩
- Shields, Christopher John. Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999. ↩
- Bevernage, Berber. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice. Routledge, 2012. ↩
- Améry, Jean. “Resentments.” At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld, Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 62–81. ↩
- Dorfman, Ariel. Death and the Maiden. Penguin Books, 1994. ↩
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 57–123. ↩
FAT WORM OF ERROR 