Archive for the ‘ Philosophy ’ Category
The internet grants an unusual insight into abstract pleasures: pleasures that are neither physical and sensual, spiritual, or even intellectual — that are not related to the experience of a given faculty of the mind or the body; that have neither the duration of sensation or contemplation, and yet also have no relation to the [ READ MORE ]
The entire argument of After Finitude is built on a subtle, but all the more commonplace misinterpretation of Kant. Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” did not institute ”correlationism.” Rather, it showed the way out of the ”correlationism” that tacitly determined every traditional metaphysics, and that, in fact, rendered vain the pursuit of metaphysical (ontological) truth. The structure of knowledge, [ READ MORE ]
The most difficult thing is to find the point at which the impossibility of individual and historical existence converge. Very few have found this. Most have retreated to a terrain where thinking is still easy, or at least possible. But it is with this double impossibility — the impossible thinking of the impossibility of existence [ READ MORE ]
It is no accident that so many reality shows begin with 12 contestants. One genealogy of the reality show might indeed trace it back to the jury system, and the odd practice, so characteristic of the anxieties of liberal democracy, of sequestering. The reality show, indeed, brings to its breaking point a paradox endemic to modern [ READ MORE ]
Watching an American detective show with Korean subtitles, set in the Korea town of Las Vegas, I became witness to a most remarkable sleight of hand: the name 박 (Pak), anglicized into “Park,” became “바크” (pak’ŭ). A slight difference shatters the propriety of the proper name: a most remarkable property theft. Having passed through [ READ MORE ]
I remember the following description of a raccoon trap from a book I read as a child: a narrow tube, just wide enough for the animal’s clenched paw to pass through, opens out into a slightly larger cavity where a shiny piece of metal has been placed. The raccoon reaches inside, unclenches its paw to [ READ MORE ]
It will be necessary, above all, to understand the relation between power and language. This is not the same as the relation between power and discourse. The most important point is that power produces a language of power, since the operation of power and the operation of a certain kind of language formation coincide and [ READ MORE ]
Scientism cannot let go of the belief that a claim is legitimate only if falsifiable. But where there is no evidence that is not thoroughly suffused by theory and open to infinite dispute — and this must be the case in philosophy — falsifiability can take only one form: a claim is falsifiable if another philosopher can [ READ MORE ]
This common-sense philosopher goes out of the way to avoid contradiction. Yet his description of thick and thin relations is both …thin and thick[ READ MORE ]
The oddest effect of the internet has been to restore a conjuring power to the name. Thus the name “Martin Hägglund” has brought many comers, and perhaps a few revenants as well, to Wozu. Why is this? Certainly, more would have been interested in Paris Hilton, Tyra Banks, Sarah Palin (if not what was said [ READ MORE ]
