**Links to**: [[06 Principle of Sufficient Interest]], [[Leibniz]], [[Spinoza]], [[Schopenhauer]], [[Deleuze]], [[Kant]], etc.
### [[Postulate]]/[[Question]]: _Whence?_
**Attention**: this entry is a series of notes and not an argument or anything that makes an attempt at any particular order or narrative coherence, sorry about that. #todo
### In the beginning
The well-scratched itch is that if everything is causally connected and materially-given, we need only go back to the beginning of things in order to understand how we have arrived _here, now._ If we want to go back to the beginning of the universe as an _explanation_ of our current state, then good. It seems fair. But: whatever we seek to find can only be a model (abstraction, reduction, retelling) because a total account does not fit within the universe, as we understand the spatiotemporal logic of the universe to be right now.[^1] This can be understood to mean that something will always be missed. Or does it? From these speculations follow ideas about matryoshka-like layers of simulation, which we might get into later when discussing Isaac Asimov’s “[[The Last Question]]”, which is an interesting title, in the context of this _principial_ question here that is the PSR.
The PSR questioning begins here: why is there something and why is it so? These are two questions. In a comparable way that we have the need for the [[Explanandum]] and the [[Explanans]], the explained and the explanatory, they can be understood in different ways: asking for reasons, asking for causes, legitimizing themselves by assuming there are such things, etc.
### The rationalist need for closure, oneness, perfection, etc. (i.e.: total prediction and therefore control)
Why is perfection something Leibniz assumes in rationality/God? Go(o)dness aside, the logic of Leibniz’s and other rationalist arguments for _cognitive peace_, _explanatory simplicity_, etc., are obviously circular. And the circle, say many, is the most perfect form. Perhaps this is the beauty-simplicity-goodness they unconsciously intuit and attribute to different principles. I am joking, of course, but bear with me. Spinoza, in proposition 11 in the first part of the _Ethics_, gives us proof of the existence of God through his version of the PSR. God’s essence is to exist, says Spinoza, abusing [[Substance]]: if there is such a thing there can only be _one_. We go back to the circle, in circles.
Write more about this #todo.
### _Satz vom Grunde_
(Where _Satz_ can denote different things: fact, ground(s)).[^2] Kant reformulated Leibniz’s principle as the ‘principle of determining ground’ in ‘New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition’”(This is noted by [[Christian Kerslake]] Kant + Deleuze book, p. 13). Kant explains, also, that Spinoza’s “essence of God”[^4] is logically-skewed, because existence isn’t a predicate. When David van Putten talked about this observation in relation to the PSR, he gave an elucidating example of the Kantian reproach, that of: “100 dollars in my pocket are the same as 100 dollars that don’t exist, same amount.”
But, staying with Spinoza’s God: if it knows everything, and therefore everything is reasonable: we do not _have_ these ideas, we do not think outside them: we are God’s ideas, and cannot say to have mastery over what we do. The learning universe as our experience, through God, are these ideas effectuating themselves: the 100 dollars are the 100 dollars.
... #todo : there are a lot of notes I need to upload here, Schopenhauer, etc.
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- First kind of knowledge is the worst, third is the best, says Spinoza.
First: two subdivisions; universal notions, particular things represented; cognition from experience; the recalling of things we have encountered. First kind is imagination, second is opinion.
David’s example: everyday you get three visitors: Peter, Paul, Simon, this keeps repeating. And suddenly someone else appears instead of Simon. This confuses you. How do you make sense of this? How do you get “adequate knowledge” from this?[^3]
- This explains what the problem is between Spinoza and Descartes: for Spinoza doubt is a symptom of not having adequate ideas.
- [[Interview questions No.]]: quote from Spinoza "I'll explain all these with a single example. Three numbers..."
-
### Some notes on my supervisor’s (Sjoerd’s) PSR thoughts
These notes are based on a class he taught at EUR, which some of us PhDs contributed to.
The Anthropocene marks a seismic shift in the relation between thinking and being. In the face of the many threats to what we consider ‘reasonable’, this module revisits the first principle of ‘modern’ rational thought and deliberation, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR): the demand for an intelligible ground for every fact. It has long been understood as the theoretical a priori through which human thought grounds existence in thought itself. Galilei suggested that all of nature obeys mathematical laws; Spinoza demanded that God coincides with his understandability; Hegel claimed that ‘the real is the rational and the rational is the real.’ In this perspective, we would always have lived in an idealized Anthropocene, and consciously so for at least half a millennium!
The irony is that, in the real Anthropocene, human reason and the material conditions of its existence are seen to diverge. From the brain to AI and from the economy to the planet at large, we are beginning to realize that the mind inhabits grounds that are not ‘for us’ and that can exist without us. The growing a-synchronicity between human beings and ever more captivating and pervasive technologies renders obsolete the enlightenment ideal of the human as self-aware, knowing, thinking and feeling ‘I’. What counts as reasonable – and what circulates as ‘reason’ – in this new state of nature mediated by technology and capital?
According to Kant, the PSR, which has been ‘often sought, but always in vain’, has passed through three historical stages: dogmatism, skepticism, critique. But do recent developments in science and technology studies, feminist ethics, community organizing, and environmentalism not rather indicate that we have entered a fourth, contemporary stage in the life of the mind, that of care?
The aim of this course module is 1) to become acquainted with the main critiques and traditional defenses of the PSR as well as 2) to explore possibilities for reclaiming it. It will involve guest lectures, close-reading and ample room for debate.
1. In the first part we explore an internalist interpretation of the PSR, in which the ground is posited as internal to reason, the PSR is really the principle of necessary reason (PNR). This interpretation is introduced through the classical interpretations by Heidegger, Derrida and Lyotard as well as through recent takes in analytical philosophy. It is then developed historically through readings of Spinoza and Hegel, and subjected to critique through readings of Marcuse and Deleuze.
2. In the second part we develop a less known, externalist interpretation, according to which the PSR finds its necessity in the experience of groundlessness (insufficient reason), in situations where there is no evident answer to questions such as ‘why this here now?’ or ‘by what right?’ We initially look for this interpretation in the work of Whitehead and Stiegler, then develop it historically through readings of Leibniz and Schelling, in order to ultimately wrap up this new sense of the PSR with Serres and yours truly.
### Schopenhauer
On the fourfold root of the PSR
_becoming, knowing, being, acting_
_Becoming_: difference between cause and reason. Aristotelian (poterior analytics): knowing and proving that something exists is not the same as proving why it exists. Cause is knowledge of why, and reason is the motive. PSR is the law of causality in becoming. State-change consequences show cause-effect relationships, which demand a this _becoming_ root of the PSR. Schopenhauer thinks that the form/quality of objects cannot be used as a simple cause to (sun-lens-burning, etc.), the clouds moving or the sun's rays or etc. cannot explain. Matter can be altered: clay to brick: no matter is introduced, only changed. This is why this is a becoming, matter changing form/quality. "Its application always presupposes an alteration".
_Knowing_: Humans, as opposed to animals, have concepts. Abstraction is the cause of our suffering, as well. We alienate ourselves from animals. Thinking (representation: images and symbols for Schopenhauer). However, my dog handles in symbols too, and anybody who tells me otherwise can come check it out. Jugdments with symbols are certainly advanced abstractions, leading to _reason_ as knowing how to read knowledge off of a statement or an argument. Knowing the grounds of a judgment, knowing it as true, demands a PSR.
_Being_: we do not require reasons for a priori spacetime intuitions; this is the ground of becoming. Intuitions in spacetime just _are_. Left and right, e.g. for Kant, this basic differentiation is a basic orientative situation. Numbers, similarly, appear as some sort of intuitive given, as an abstraction sitting on top of the passage of time. The relation between cause and effect (becoming) or ground and consequence (_ratio ascendi_, knowing). Seeing a sunset may be the becoming of the Earth's motion, or knowledge of the end of the day, or an intuition of being: something we see.
_Acting_: our relationship to being, becoming and knowing. Employing concepts in order to know implies that we set up a differentiation between ourselves and the thing observed. We do not experience the event directly, but represent it. The willing heart is largely (though not entirely) disconnected from our willingness for it to beat: _explanandum_ and _explanans_ remain in friction, but not in communication. "Motivation is causality seen from within." Causality in this case is the motion of the _will_. The will is privately moved by drives, and publicly guided and monitored by _interests_. And this is where we begin.
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### https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/
"The term “Principle of Sufficient Reason [_principe de raison suffisante/principium reddendae rationis_]” was coined by [[Leibniz]], though [[Spinoza]] is thought by many scholars to have preceded Leibniz in appreciating the importance of the Principle and placing it at the center of his philosophical system."
Sonia's first thought ever upon encountering the PSR: logically useless because it demands explanatory [[Infinite Regress]] (Human [[Halting Problem]]), the last thing to be answered would always be "why the [[Universe]]?" So far it doesn't seem likely we'll get close to an answer. (SEP: "Among the alleged consequences of the Principle are: the [[Identity of Indiscernibles]], [[Necessitarianism]], the [[Relativity]] of space and time, the existence of a self-necessitated Being (i.e., [[God]]), and the [[Principle of Plenitude]].") Also: "Axiom 7, to which Spinoza appeals in the explanation, is a variant of the “_[[Ex nihilo, nihil fit]]_” (“from nothing, nothing comes”) principle, and stipulates that an existing thing and its perfections (or qualities) cannot have nothing or a non-existing thing as their cause." Aristotle says the the _why_ should stop at a certain point.
"But what kinds of [[Fact]]s demand an [[Explanation]]? Do _all_ facts—including the most ordinary ones—demand an explanation? If you accept an unrestricted form of the _Principle of Sufficient Reason_ (= PSR), you will require an explanation for _any_ fact, or in other words, you will reject the possibility of any _brute_, or unexplainable, _facts_.
The two straightforward formulations of the PSR according to the _SEP_:
"(1) For every fact _F_, there must be a sufficient reason why _F_ is the case.
The term “fact” in the above formulation is not intended to express any commitment to an ontology of facts. Still, if one wishes to avoid such connotations, the principle can be formulated more schematically:
(2) For every _x_, there is a _y_ such that _y_ is the sufficient reason for x. (formally: ∀x∃yRyx, where “Rxy” denotes the binary relation of **providing a sufficient reason**)." My emphasis in bold."
This modal expression Rxy only makes the definition of "providing a sufficient reason" all the more urgent; as it requires strict definitions of what _provision_ and sufficiency for obtaining _satisfaction_ would entail.
"A modally strong version of the PSR will take the Principle as necessary and obtaining in all possible worlds, while a weak modal version will present the Principle as merely contingently true. ... A proponent of the regulative variant of the PSR would argue that an empirical falsification of the PSR makes as little sense as an empirical falsification of the [[Law of Non-Contradiction]]. Encountering a fact which _seems_ to have no explanation, the proponent of the regulative variant would respond by insisting that we must keep searching for an explanation." --> Cf. [[Buddhist logic]]
"One of the most interesting questions regarding the PSR is why accept it at all. Insofar as the PSR stipulates that all things must be explainable, it seems that the PSR itself demands an explanation. Several modern philosophers attempted to provide a proof for the PSR, though so far these attempts have been mostly unsuccessful. Another important question related to the PSR is the possibility of self-explanatory facts and self-caused entities; particularly, one might wonder how these are distinguished from unexplainable, brute facts and uncaused entities. One might also wonder whether the PSR allows for any _primitive concepts_ that cannot be further explained.
A third crucial problem for proponents of the PSR is how to address the [[Agrippan Trilemma]] between the apparently exhaustive three horns of: (i) acceptance of brute facts, (ii) acceptance of an infinite regress of explanation (or grounding), or (iii) acceptance of self-explanatory facts. _Prima facie_, each horn in the trilemma undermines the position of the proponent of the PSR."
# [[Spinoza]]'s PSR:
Nothing exists of which it cannot be asked, what is the cause (or reason) [_causa (sive ratio)_], why it exists.
In a brief explanatory note to this axiom, Spinoza adds:
> Since existing is something positive, we cannot say that it has nothing as its cause (by Axiom 7). Therefore, we must assign some positive cause, or reason, why [a thing] exists—either an external one, i.e., one outside the thing itself, or an internal one, one comprehended in the nature and definition of the existing thing itself. (Geb. I/158/4–9)
Sjoerd says: this means that there do not exist "possibles", only actual not possible things. A sufficient reason for Spinoza is a necessary cause for explanation.
"Recently, Michael Della Rocca argued not only that the PSR “provide[s] the key to unlocking many of the mysteries of Spinoza’s philosophical system” (2008: 9), but that Spinoza requires the reduction of the most basic philosophical concepts to reason or intelligibility. This alleged “double use of the PSR” stipulates (1) that everything must be explainable, and (2) that it should be (ultimately) explained in terms of intelligibility. Hence, according to Della Rocca, Spinoza reduces his major philosophical concepts—existence, causation, rightness, and power—to intelligibility (2008: 8–9). While this is a fascinating and bold reading of Spinoza’s metaphysics, it seems to contradict his crucial doctrine of the causal and conceptual barrier between the attributes (E1p10 and E2p6). The reduction of any non-Thought item to intelligibility (presumably, a feature of the attribute of thought[6]) undermines the barrier between the attributes, and with it the entire edifice of Spinoza’s ontology (see Della Rocca 2012: 12–16; Melamed 2012a; and Melamed 2013a: xv and 196 n. 84)."
See: [[Triangle]].
[[Infinite Regress]]: "The ultimate reason for the instantiation of such an infinite chain of contingent beings must, claims Spinoza, be a being whose existence is not contingent (for otherwise, the chain will remain merely contingent and its instantiation in reality would not be sufficiently explained). Thus, Spinoza allows for an infinite regress of causes (or explanations) as long as the entire infinite chain is grounded in a being which exists by virtue of its mere essence."
# [[Leibniz]]'s PSR:
"He was the first to call it by name and, arguably, the first to formulate it with full generality.
...
Leibniz often presents it, along with the [[Principle of Contradiction]], as a principle of “reasoning”. For example, in the [[Monadology]] he writes:
1. Our reasonings are based on two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge that which involves a contradiction to be false, and that which is opposed or contradictory to the false to be true. [[Paradox]], [[Contradiction]]
2. And that of sufficient reason, by virtue of which we consider that we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us. (G VI, 612/L 646).
[T]he principle of sufficient reason, namely, that nothing _happens_ without a reason. (G VII 355; LC L2; AG 321, our emphasis)."
[[Difference and Repetition]], pp. 11-12: "The relation of a concept to its object under this double aspect, in the form that it assumes in this memory and this self-consciousness, is called representation. From this may be drawn the principles of a vulgarized Leibnizianism. According to a principle of difference, ![[Pasted image 20221114173629.png]]"
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### Define principle
First, elementary, etym: ""fundamental principles," c. 1600, plural of Latin principium "a beginning, origin" (see principle (n.)). Especially as the short form of the title of Newton's book (published 1687). Hence principles "earliest or elementary parts of a subject" (1530s)."
### Define sufficient
Etym: "early 14c., from Old French soficient "satisfactory," or directly from Latin sufficientem (nominative sufficiens) "adequate," present participle of sufficere "to supply as a substitute," from sub "up to" (see sub-) + combining form of facere "to make, to do" (from PIE root *dhe- "to set, put")."
Sub - facere: undermade; [[Ground]]ed.
### Define reason
Etym verb: "c. 1400, resounen, "to question (someone)," also "to challenge," from Old French resoner, raisoner "speak, discuss; argue; address; speak to," from Late Latin rationare "to discourse," from Latin ratio "reckoning, understanding, motive, cause," from ratus, past participle of reri "to reckon, think" (from PIE root *re- "to reason, count")."
### Define define
Etym: "late 14c., deffinen, diffinen, "to specify; to fix or establish authoritatively;" of words, phrases, etc., "state the signification of, explain what is meant by, describe in detail," from Old French defenir, definir "to finish, conclude, come to an end; bring to an end; define, determine with precision," and directly from Medieval Latin diffinire, definire, from Latin definire "to limit, determine, explain," from de "completely" (see de-) + finire "to bound, limit," from finis "boundary, end" (see finish (v.)). From c. 1400 as "determine, declare, or mark the limit of.""
What does it mean to do "offline" mental manipulations of reality, about reality. Why does it feel like this thinking is happening offline or inside? The sounds I'm making are neither here in my mouth, nor in your ears, there's a continuum between how i have learned these words, stored them, changed them, translated them again into sounds and now they enter your thoughts as if by magic.
Do the Protevi pause and ask them to reflect on how they expected something else: there must be a reason i stopped, you cannot just accept, you need to understand
Use from [[Bergsonism]]: "When we ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" or "Why is there order rather than disorder?" or "Why is there this rather than that (when that was equally possible)?" we fall inot the same error: We mistake the more for the less, we behave as though nonbeing existed before being, disorder before order and the possible before existence. As though being came to fill in a void, order to organize a preceding disorder, the real to realize a primary possibility. Being, order or the existent are a truth itself; but in the false problem there is a fundamental illusion, a "retrograde movement of the true," according to which being, order and the existent are supposed to precede themselves, or to precede the creative act that constitutes them, by projecting an image of themselves back into a possibility, a disorder, a nonbeing which are supposed to be primordial. This theme is a central one in Bergson's philosophy: It sums up his critique of the negative and of negation, in all its forms as sources of false problems." p. 18.
Connect to the invention of probability and [[Pascal’s wager]], [[Ian Hacking]] note on this. "And one of the most insistent questions in Heidegger's meditation is indeed that of the long "incubation" time that separated this origin from the emergence of the principle of reason in the seventeenth century." [[Derrida]] PSR Text p8.--> relate to the invention of probability, calculus, how something new changes the way we change; behavioral contamination.
"Beyond all those big philosophical words-reason, truth, principle-that generally
command attention, the principle of reason also holds that reason must be rendered. (In French the expression corresponding to Leibniz's reddere rationem is rendre raison de quelque chose; it means to explain or account for something.) But what does "render" mean with respect to reason?" p.8. [[Derrida]] [[Principle of Sufficient Reason]] --> Relate to intuitionism and parsing, what is happening inside your head when you render or parse a truth statement?
Relate to [[Gödel's ontological proof]]
Explain how easy it is to derail into madness. What keeps you together? All these daily repetitions, when are they functional and when are they ideological?
I feel a bit like the machine that cannot stop: every word is such a commitment. Look at Heidegger's analysis of nihil es sine ratio: first of all, the conflation of reason with ground, but also: NOTHING, we know nothing, nothing here is in fact used to express everything. This is the real negative. But also, let's look at nothing...
Using ONE word can become a vector through which you peer into an entire vantage point of possibilities; practical, metaphysical, etc.
[[Arthur Schopenhauer]] "the world as idea subject to the PSR" quote Vedas
If we define [[Reason]] as "abstract statements made on sufficient grounds" (Schopenhauer) then AI is definitely reasoning, or perhaps, as I like to call it; reasonable. In the sense that: _we_ are able to say it can be interpreted _by us_.
In some ways, however, this is questionable; the intricacies of this are a matter of the perception of time. The AlphaGo move that beat Lee Sedol was unreasonable from a human perspective in the moment it happened, because humans cannot parse such huge chunks of time, however upon later inspection it was clear that the move was instrumental towards the machine beating of Lee Sedol. So, humans could make the machine's decisions reasonable, they just needed more time. This is the problem of behavioral contamination that I wanted to talk about later; the interfering senses of time. But also relates to the pausing of time that concepts do.
Look into [[Gravity]] and [[Gravitas]] for more stuff for the presentation
[[Arthur Schopenhauer]]; if the PSR is obvious in our experience of spacetime, of the continuity of stuff, of things following from one another (and he says we can clearly observe other animals besides ourselves have this capacity), then perhaps we can expound from this the simple statement that memory is a requisite for reason. But what of radical breaks from memory (creativity, revolution, etc.)? Or what of...
maybe? https://www.edge.org/conversation/dan_sperber-the-function-of-reason
[[Farewell to Reason]] [[Paul Feyerabend]] maybe?
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There is a _reason_ for why we consume information the way we do. Let's look at a philosophy paragraph (take Whitehead/Stiegler): there is, first of all, the background knowledge, the context about this, the idea of a book, of a chapter, of a paragraph, words, letters, ink/a screen, etc.
Now, with AI we are capable of a few new ways of parsing information: a) we do away with context, and need to invent a whole new context, b) we can discern patterns we were unaware of, c) we invent a new idea about what interpretation is, we interpret interpretation under new constraints. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is. The shame is the rampant unawareness of this in the current paradigm: "bias" etc. have crept in as concepts that signal the possibility of an objective reality, where interpretation doesn't exist, and all we have is factual information. This is rarely the case, in reality, so why is this ideology so deeply entrenched in modern technoscientific rationality? (use this for [[C Metaphor paper]])
[[Alfred North Whitehead]]:
Q. for students: About satisfaction and emotional resentment in light of things that help/hurt a method: do you need to like your ideas? Can you work with ideas you _vehemently_ dislike? -- would this contradict the very nature of philo-sophy itself, as the love of knowledge?
"There is clear evidence that certain operations of certain animal bodies depend upon the foresight of an end and the purpose to attain it." p. 16 --> AI as a teleology of the not yet attained artificiality and not yet intelligence, all concepts are bets on the future, all concepts are not-yets; semantic attractors (check [[Aesthetics of Noise talk Cecile Malaspina, Mattin, Miguel Prado, and Sonia preparation notes]] and Juarrero notes)
The expansion of memory: a cell cannot contain much more than its DNA as memory, but larger systems (Stiegler protension memory; Bergson Matter and Memory) control larger and larger chunks of spacetime by way of memory. Memory is, of course, not just an awareness of what has happened but importantly: an awareness of what is possible. So AI brings with it a new moment: a memory we possess but cannot exactly access/understand. Reason completely outside of itself.
"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study." p 16 --> amazing quote, go into it.
"To live, to live well, to live better." --> Does Whitehead bypass the ahistorical teleology towards freedom? I think so. The statement is atemporal and amoral.
"Mental experience is the organ of novelty, the urge
beyond. It seeks to vivify the massive physical fact,
which is repetitive, with the novelties which beckon.
Thus mental experience contains in itself a factor of
anarchy. We can understand order, because in the
recesses of our own experience there is a contrasting
element which is anarchic." p. 33
"The secret of progress is the speculative interest in abstract schemes of morphology." wow -- p 73
[[Highlights for The Function of Reason by Alfred North Whitehead (hilites)]]
[[Concept]] of [[Nature]]: events events events: like in Bergson, we experience duration, not the abstract entities we call "objects" or "time" or "space" divided from each other.
Look for evidence of this: Difference with Bergson is that Bergson says you can't attain the whole, and Whitehead is sure thru cosmology you get something useful.
Mention how my AI project is to show, like Whitehead shows in Function+Concept, that all our language is metaphysics, no way to get around it. maybe relate to [[The Ister]]
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Not happy about [[Bernard Stiegler]], roundabout, tedious, whining, lacking in clarity and delivery. Too many puncepts, thrown around way too often and uncarefully. He doesn't seem to go in depth on anything, it's just a long grandpa rant. There's a slap in your face paradox about the activism aspect of his work: he's preaching to the converted, as in: I think there are perhaps 0.01% people in his audience who might need some convincing about the perils of capitalism and its saddled up global warming, yet with these phrasings and methods he reaches nobody. I am much more happy with an approach like Mark Fisher's, in that respect.
I do agree with the anglophone criticism that he doesn't add anything Husserl, Derrida, Deleuze, Kittler, Luhmann, Simondon or Heidegger already did. Things like extended-mind theory, theoretical psychoanalysis, PP, 4E, media studies/philosophy, and critical theory are better at addressing these issues.
Philosophically, he doesn't add anything new, just reintroduces old binaries and redresses them with new terminology. What is more: he doesn't analyze any concept in depth, he just pastiches it all around. Ethically: he is a terrible downer, nobody gets a boner from this stuff. His criticisms of profit-driven computational practices are but the mere starting point of most thinkers in this field, I don't understand how this adds anything worth reading. Full of fallacies of equilibrium, which he constantly tries to get at by using the concept of a double-edged pharmakon.
Maybe Bernard would be happier to call these new developments in collective individuation [[11 Post-Control Script-Societies]]
He 'assumes' everyone reading understands the disruptions of "the four horsemen", but he doesn't provide any delineated analysis of them, and puts all four in a bag as if they were the same thing. There's a _massive_ difference between Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, each contributing to different types of disruptions and honing in at different aspects of the market, which is why they can exist as an ecosystem alongside each other.
This is the kind of stuff that turns young philosophers to analytic philosophy; that births and fuels monstrosities like Jordan Peterson; and that makes people like Alan Sokal do the stupid hoax experiment.
_The Automatic Society 1_:
“All noetic bifurcation, that is to say all quasi-causal bifurcation, derives from a _cosmic potlatch_ that indeed destroys very large quantities of differences and orders, but it does so by projecting a very great difference on another plane, constituting another ‘order of magnitude’ against the disorder of a _kosmos_ in becoming, a _kosmos_ that, without this projection of a yet-to-come from the unknown, would be reduced to a universe without singularity. A neganthropological singularity (which does not submit to any ‘anthropology’) is a negentropic bifurcation in entropic becoming, of which it becomes the quasi-cause, and therein a point of origin – through this improbable singularity that establishes it and from which, intermittently and incrementally, it propagates a process of individuation” [p. 246].
Just, please, tell me what this means. I don't like the feeling of having to do so much translation and mental acrobatics before I get to the meaning of what an author is trying to say. It's hard enough to interpret 'plain' language.
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Speculation and the Mirror (image)
Mention Rage Alongside the Machine
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Class 3rd January 2022:
Sjoerd:
- Ok, we saw Kantian stages of reason (Dogma, Skep, Critique). But has critique run out of steam?
- Sloterdijk critique of cynical reason
- What remains of critique? it continually transforms itself dialectically
- What is the meaning of reason nowadays if critique is not sufficient?
- Finality of thought has become something else, sovereignty in the anthropocene doesn't really work anymore
- Fichte piece of lava on the moon; Kant takes subjectivity for granted, but Fichte says we are constantly constructing it. It is easier to think of ourselves as a piece of lava on the moon as than as a self-positing subject
- The critical gesture of saying "I am more than the things I am, objectified to be" in critique, doesn't realize how the thing is also always more than you realize it to be
- The mind cares for its relation to the ground, and care is a new paradigm in general about the grounds of reason (Sonia: care and Shell example of carbon footprint)
- What is grounding: a plastic continuum of care; philosophy as pedagogy of response-ability
- Negations, Marcuse, negation not necessarily as powerful perhaps Hegel posited it, as the negative defining thought
- Like Latour says in Critique Out, you cannot individuate starting from critique or deconstruction. Latour talks about matters of fact and concern, but he doesn't yet call it care.
- Post-critique: critique lacks a sufficient reason
- Sonia: my initial proposal for care when I was still doing the MA was 'caution'
- Externalist interpretation of the PSR: to think is to care for the ground; radical opportunism: without principles? Pragmatism; that's why we're reading Whitehead
- Let's reinterpret the PSR as a threefold principle of care: P of repoliticization (matters of concern, of care); P of non-externalization (anti-reductionism; the truths of eg economics determine how everything else is approached; nature, resources, social dynamics, etc.); P of commonality (critique is about subjectivity and autonomy, but we need to reorient ourselves towards the commons; care).
- Maybe there are no principles, principles were first grounds, terms of order
- So:
## Two modes of thought:
Critique, internalist, reductionism, idealism, economism, truth as a criterion: functionally grounded in self, autonomy (soverignity); principles, reflectivity, facticity as necessity of contingency, truth, entropy, not yet (demand)
Care, externalist, irreduction, ecology: Functionally grounded in other, attachment, consequences, feedback facticity as contingency of necessity, relevance, negentropy, still (perishing)
- Question from Sonia: but the obligation you mentioned, minimize your demands and maximize your responsibility; how is this not almost a 1to1 to the categorical imperative?
### Pragmatism
- Dewey: 'Mind is primarily a verb' (2005: 274); noting caring liking
- Whitehead: the task of reason is to create negentropy. "Actual entities are the only reasons: so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities." (Process and Reality p. 24)
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[[Sjoerd van Tuinen]] PSR lecture 1:
- Mentioning [[What is grounding]] [[Gilles Deleuze]].
- Wants to go from an _economical_ to an _ecological_ PSR.
- Wants students to compare Deleuze, [[Heidegger]], continental PSR to analytic PSR.
- [[Alfred North Whitehead]] and "Logic is a mistake" --breaking away from Russell, anal. at large.
- Principle to function in Whitehead; the rise of cybernetics, automatization, contingency (no reason), speculative philosophy, etc.
- [[Hannah Arendt]]: "The Human Condition"; the loss of ground for our condition; literally jumping off the Earth; going to space, apocalypsis: the Earth is vanishing under our feet.
- Sjoerd: "The anthropocene marks a seismic shift between thinking and being. [[Hegel]]'s thought it always alienated, trying to find itself in being, subjectivity or freedom being a goal. The anthropocene does the reverse: human agency exerts such an effect on the environment that it leaves a mark on the Earth. It's no longer clear what belongs to history or reason. If, traditionally, the task of thought has been to ground: now these grounds have developed in a way that thought only lags behind. Man is obsolete."
- Sonia: but reason has always lagged behind, unless it was obscured by [[God]].
- Sjoerd: the self-legitimating meaning of reason, the self-sufficiency of this is gone. What do you think reason is? Students answer: ability to make value-judgments, explaining motivations, causal thinking, etc. Sjoerd: historically Logos, ratio, reason, Vernunft: calculating/reckoning, proportion or relation, explanation, intellect, discourse. Different between Kantian public and private reason. When you read Spinoza it's all about ratio: how do modes relate to each other; parts may change but the ratio stays the same: composition. Hegel would criticize redenering as endless discourse. For Kant you're born with faculties, but these need to be trained, you need Bildung to become reasonable; pedagogy and education. Nietzsche would say it involves punishment; it's only through pain that you become an animal that can make promises; rationality is really only the name of the order of relations/proportions that is set by whoever our masters are. For Nietzsche the basis for our reason is unreasonable; it's wild, it's anarchic. Heidegger will say the same.
- Until Kant, everything was theological reason. Then Kant shifts this: humanist reason is the new norm. Ideas don't lose their infinity, but they become human projects. For Hegel, freedom, the ultimate idea of reason, is the ultimate project, it's unattainable but it continues to give meaning to our actuality. The self-realization of the subject is driven by the infinite idea of freedom. Kant also describes a whole lot of ways in which reason becomes pathological, runs into antinomies, and becomes, in the end, not so reasonable at all.
- The PSR: _archai_, _principia_: initial capture; architectonic: terms of order (that's what Cedric Robertson's book on anarchism calls a _principle_, lack of orientation), Aristotle's Metaphysics book V. The starting point of (rationalist) philosophy? The problem of where to begin, Nietzsche 'to see reason in reality -- not in "reason"' (TI Ancients 2), Zizek "the principle of insufficient reason".
- Sonia: the problem of [[00007 Incomplete information]], of where to begin, requires [[Confidence]], requires imagining that you are able to go through, in your head, what somebody else has gone through. The blessing and curse of language: not knowing whether this is possible, yet pretending that it is (reminds me of "As if"). Sjoerd: that's why the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, because it discovers what was already there, Sonia: but time needs to have passed for this perspective to be created.
- Meillassoux: claims to finally have gotten rid of the PSR: necessity of contingency. Contingency is necessary, there is no reason. Something rational resists becoming reasonable. "The great outdoors" --> uncapturable, contingency always preceding necessity. "Principle of non-contradiction" A =notA is contradictory. But, as Leibniz says, the PSR precedes the principle of non-contradiction, to claim on the grounds on reason is to be abiding to the PSR, so in the eyes of Leibniz what Meillassoux does is illogical, it's still PSR.
- Zizek's PiSR: even with all the wind against (e.g. being in love with someone that I think is bad in many ways): still in love. Love is an expression of freedom because it goes against reasons. Empirical grounds are always insufficient.
- Kant end of 1st critique says PSR knows 3 stages: regulative ideas
- Empiricism, Hume: we have no understanding of causality, no approach, all there is is induction
- Schelling's inverted transcendentalism: reason is not a prison, it is has always been something that is outside of itself. This also happens in the 3rd critique with the notion of the sublime, right? Stormy skies above us and the moral law within. What allows Schelling with immanence, with the exteriority of reason, is something that, to me, goes further than that. Non-stable forms of ground. Where is the anarchic moment in the PSR? Starting with Whitehead, we can see it as if there was no moment of a prison of reason.
- Heidegger in light of Darwin: what drives evolution is not reason but contingency. Bergson, Husserl, same thing. The development of the feeling that it's not human subjectivity that is the subject of sciences, humanity cannot emancipate itself or find a grand narrative (Lyotard) it's no longer rational to think that they world is transparent (the second moment of the Kantian PSR, where it's reasonable to be skeptical), simply: the old ideas, even that of freedom, has run out of steam. Heidegger is one of the first ones to talk about that, Schurmann, a student of Heidegger and sponsored by Arendt, "On being and acting: from principles to anarchy": how principles are built up and then crumble.
- The problem of thinking after Auschwitz (Adorno) "Whoever supresses every claim to reason. only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in trances and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality. Philosophy which presents reality as such today only veils reality and eternalizies its present condition" (brrrp find this quote and correct it). Sonia: relates to my oft-made comment: nobody's head fits inside anybody else's head. #idea
- #lookinto Rationalist transparency versus Chinese indirection (F Jullien)
- Black reason [[Achille Mbembe]] "On one level, then, Black reason consists of a collection of voices, pronouncements, discourses, forms of knowledge, commentary, and nonsense, whose object is things or people "of African origin". ... "Black reason" names not only a collection of discourses but also practices -- the daily work that consisted in inventing, telling, repeating, and creating variations on the formulas, texts, and rituals whose goal was to produce the Black Man as a racial subject and site of savage exteriority, who was therefore set up for moral disqualificaiton and practical instrumentalization. We can call this founding narrative the _Western consciousness of Blackness_ ... in response came a second narrative, one that saw itself as a gesture of self-determination, a way of being present to oneself and looking inward, and as a form of utopian critique ... Through it the Black Man affirms of himself that he is that which cannot be captured or controlled the one who is not where they say he is, even less where they are looking at him. Rather, he exists where he is not thought" ([[Critique of Black Reason]], p. 28). --> Sjoerd: so, Reason never does what it pretends to do, it's always hypocritical. Sonia: maybe similar to what mathematician says about mathematics being "unreasonably effective". #lookinto
- Sjoerd: Automatization (I think this is what Sonia is going to talk about). Modernity 4.0:
- orality
- grammatization
- print
- the digital
- consequences for the "use of public reason"?
- Externalization of intelligence: from dialectics to smartness; cybernetics revolution; instrumental reason (Adorno)
- [[The Postmodern Condition]], what does 'knowing' mean when information has replaced Bildung? '"Along with the hegemony of [[Computers]] comes a certain [[Logic]], and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as "knowledge" statements, speculative or humanistic philosophy is forced to relinquish its legitimation duties, which explains why philosophy is facing a crisis wherever it persists in abrogating such functions and is reduced to the study of systems of logic or the history of ideas where it has been realistic enough to surrender them" (Lyotard 1984: 4). [[Fact]] Sjoerd: optimization becomes the new norm, there's always a new demo, it's all about ranking, performance, etc.
- "Planetary-scale computation is both something that demands governance and something through which governance knows and acts. The very notion of "climate change" comes from the sensing, modeling, and calculation of the measurable change in a planet in ways well beyond direct human reckoning. The simulation of the past, present, and future becomes collective intelligence, both voice and tool for governing intervention based on its implication. if advertising is the negative example, the Earth Sciences is one positive model for what planetary-scale computation is actually for. "Control...".... "(finish quote, [[Benjamin Bratton]] --> Sjoerd is asking students to compare this view with Heidegger's text. #todo --> Sonia didn't read it yet!!
## Sjoerd: SEP localizes the PSR in Spinoza, but Heidegger on Leibniz. What are the implications of organizing it in this way? Do they mean the same thing, Leibniz and Spinoza?
-
- _______________
# Lecture 2, 06-12-2021:
## Sjoerd:
- Pierre Macherey "Hegel or Spinoza"
- What Heidegger is interested in is that both that ground and reason rest on the same circularity: crisis of legitimation; something else is always possible. This is what Sjoerd calls the "Minor" moment of reason, reason in a minor key.
- Spinoza and Hegel are known as optimist philosophers: they believe in reason, and the capacity for reason to find itself in the world. They are, obviously, of the rationalist tradition.
- Two classical questions of the PSR: Why is there stg rather than nothing? and why is there this instead of that? Heidegger says Leibniz explains this in the Theodicy: best of all possible worlds.
- The defense of God against the skeptics is the task of this kind of rationalist philosophy.
- Philosophy as a tool to become more reasonable (as understood by Spinoza or Hegel)
- Reason externalizes itself through the state, all writing, reason objectified, alienated from itself, becomes opaque to itself, but it overcomes this in its full realization in the world.
- Today [[AI]] can be seen in this regard as a realization of Western metaphysics; reason as a matter of automated sequences; reason has been fully realized, it's fully objectified. The autonomous reason of systems is no longer at risk to be brought down by monarchs or nation states. At the same time, this program means the end of philosophy; so the end of reason. The [[Autonomy]] of the subject has been surpassed by the automated. This was seen by Heidegger in cybernetics, then Lyotard, etc.
- The systems themselves legitimate themselves; _we_ can no longer legitimate; we are no longer capable of raising the question of the PSR because now things had become a question of optimatility, efficiency, etc, no longer criticality or contemplation.
- [[The Cunning of Reason]]
- The question of right, related to the question of ground. Do we ground reason in nature or in something else? Machery points out: we look at this in terms of a circularity between nature and right. Not an identity of nature=right, but a constant co-production of the two. This is what Macherey calls the end of history.
# 10/01/2022 Class Leibniz, Schelling
>Questions Sonia:
>Can a philosopher actually have confessions? (Augustine, Leibniz) Shouldn't they always be confessional? (this relates to my question last week of "do you need to like your ideas?")
>But how can a mind know other minds? see below
>How has Leibniz dealt with the approach of negative theology? [[Apophasis]]
So thinking about my question of last week, can you work with ideas you don't like, and today thinking about "confessions" (con fateri; admitting, speaking with). Is that which is artful capable playing with the unground, the abyss...
Sjoerd:
- Reason's task is to affirm every moment of history as a progress towards freedom (Hegel)
- Hegel: those who complain remain stuck in [[Unhappy consciousness]], Hegel is the optimist, major key philosopher, Schelling minor key.
- "Dissolve into the ground" #lookinto (Hegel, Schelling and Heidegger all use it)
- Leibniz quote about dissonance; a composition with only major keys is boring [[Resonance presentation]]. Leibniz also says you should never introduce something that breaks too much with established sentiments; otherwise it won't work; you cannot take care of the consequences of your introduction, if you don't have oversight of how it will be received [[Resonance presentation]]. "The problem designated by thLeibnizian constriant ties together truth and becoming, and assigns to the statement of what one believs to be tryue the responsibility not to hinder becoming: not to collide with established identity led them to refuse, combat, misunderstand" (Stengers 2000: 15). -->Sonia: but how can a mind know other minds?
-
# Third class, Marcuse, Adorno-Horkheimer and Sverre Raffnsoe
13-12-2021
### Sjoerd:
How does automated decision making render anything transparent?
The state of the university today
Reason comes out of nowhere, as Adorno says, the rational act self-legitimates.
The end of philo, for Heidegger, how far are we from Spinoza and Hegel today, in terms of reason?
Common sense and reason: what's the difference between these?
STS and the production of a certain type of reasonability or another
What holds all the texts together for us in this course: Looking at reason's classical promise, and then its critique
# Kantian readings
[[Dogmatism]]: grasp onto something solid, yet rigid
[[Skepticism]]: (Hume), similar but the other way around, grasp onto nothing, too rigid
[[Critique]]: reason setting limits to itself; the paranoia of reason, paranoia about its own tendency to exceed its boundaries.
"Beauty; judgements of taste are always without concept, for Kant"
In "[[What is enlightenment]]?" Kant shows how legislation, God, public sphere, etc. stand in relation to each other; in particular religious [[Authority]] and governmental authority. This demarcates [[Modernity]]. What is the meaning of reason? Kant identifies critique.
For Foucault, the critical attitude, critique, emerges as a response to the attitude of care; for a very long time care is the notion of how to keep things together: feudal power relationships; pastoral power; priestly power; managing a city in times of the plague, etc.
But acc. [[Foucault]], the centrality of care of already dislocated with [[Descartes]]. The care of the truth and the self coincide, they're always practical, since [[Delphi]], as a spiritual commitment. But for Descartes "Truth cannot save the subject". [[Care]] becomes governmentalized, bureaucratized. Here is also becomes scrutinized and resisted; e.g. with [[Protestantism]]; the reformation, Mendehlsson. For Foucault, early modernity marks the explotion of techniques.
"How not to be governed like that, for that, by that...." (Foucault 2007, 106) Same question that is going to be questioned by the [[Frankfurt School]].
For [[Sartre]]: "How to make something out of what we have been made into?" (by the power of the bureaucracy of care).
[[Problem]]: [[Neoliberalism]] and [[Critique]]: "But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingen, and the product of arbitrary constraints?" (315)
If [[Critique]] is always a form of self-[[Discipline]], then it's always a [[Function]] of [[Autonomy]], whereas care was always a function of [[Obedience]]. That is the distribution of attitudes that Kant introduces, and Foucault upholds too.
Critique is a "Reflected intractability"; in Zizek's words: Tarrying with the Negative; Obstinacy.
Conspiracy theories: critique has turned into skepticism with a vengeance. (Sjoerd says in Kant's words)
Response to [[Neuro]] [[Reductionism]] "we are our brain" etc.; no we are not our brain! [[Fichte]]: wegdenken: it is easier to think of man as a lump of lava on the moon than as a thinking I. Thinking everything that something is _not_ is how you find something in the world. You never fall in love for rational reasons alone, there's always something else, the reflexive moment in the subject, a distance from what is given.
Kant's three stages of the PSR; dogmatism, skepticism, critique: -analytical philo, continental philo, - public discourse: oscillation between necessitarianism and relativism
And btw, SEP entry on PSR: Reason and causality presented as the same thing, so PSR is more like PNS; Principle of Necessary Reason.
[[Internalism]]: Ground is reduced to reason (subjectivity)
Skepticism returns with a vengeance.
Philosophy needs nothing but the presupposition of history (Hegel)
Critique actually never overcame skepticism, Kant claims to want to do this, and he has an idea of progress, but he says there are things we cannot talk about, and this makes him a skeptic. It is Hegel and Schelling who want to return to the Absolute, of the coincidence between being and the idea; they claim a strong version of the PSR. We can only recognize this, of course, in restrospect.
In Kant you have to stick with what you have: moral law within, categories of the understanding, necessary principles; but you cannot have the absolute.
Adorno: Hermeneutics of arrogance; anything that supports my autonomy is enough to say it is the way it should be.
Marcuse: the workers and the students share a cause, he was a big leader behind the thought of May 68.
[[Hegel]]'s encyclopedia; absolutist impetus but also critical because it never arrives; it is negative w/ regard to the given. [[Horkheimer]] and [[Adorno]] see the problem turning into [[Positivism]]; the promise that it arrives, this is the metamorphosis of critique into affirmation. Affirmation cannot replace critique though.
Marcuse: Burgeois society contained the promise of utopia, but it never delivered. Marx would agree.
Sorrow is the basic affect, for Marcuse, the affective ground for critical theory. The situation of inheritance.
Main Marcuse concepts: [[Repressive Tolerance]]; repression in the form of 'tolerance', [[One-dimensional man]]; the reduction of people to simple ideological modi operandi, [[Repressive Desublimation]]; auhoritarianism.
What is, is to be submitted to ought, acc. Hegel and Marx.
Marcuse would say: the result would be fully automated luxury communism: because bourgeois society constantly produces needs and scarcity, etc. Any form of knowledge that discerns only necessities; and scarcity is the ultimate necessity. The abstract principle of equality should have long been realized. Why has it not happened?
In Marx; truth is the proletarian revolution. Truth is the struggle itself.
As long as reason is only speculative, its ideological; it comes after, like in Hegel; owl of Minerva: if we can look after, yeah, then it's ideology.
[[Speculation]] and the Mirror.
- #idea Sonia: difference between [[Cause]] and [[Reason]] by looking at the PSR in Spinoza, emergence [[Anil Seth]] and [[Transfer entropy]] and [[Alicia Juarrero]] etc. (look at this idea in context in David's lecture).
Also, cause and reason: [[Donald Davidson]] [[Paradox]]es of [[Irrationality]]: "But we also see that Freud can be defended on one important point: there is no inherent conflict between reason explanations and causal explanations. Since beliefs and desires are causes of the actions for which they are reasons, reason explanations include an essential causal element." Page 142, Essential Davidson, Oxford 2006
PSR = _Satz vom Grunde_ in German. Satz is many different thing, among which, also "[[Ground]]s", so, interesting. [[Principle of Sufficient Reason]]
Use [[Arthur Schopenhauer]]'s Fourfold Root of the PSR, where he calls Hegel a charlatan and he tries to distinguish between reason and cause.
Use quote from Brouwer "you must know God very well", to explain how I see the early PSR, negative theology. Use from the Brouwer lecture a bit more, how is the square root of two rational? Continuity and discreteness one and the same, Leibniz and Brouwer doing the same thing, infinity and freedom
_____
Relate learned helplessness and PSR for Schopenhauer as "PSR is easy to see:you just watch time happen, things happen one after the other", same with Sapolsky: "what happens to something determines what it does/is"
Maybe title for something would be "what came before"
__________
[[Pre-Socratics]] [[Sophists]], [[Gorgias]]:
- [[Helen of Troy]] is not to blame for the Trojan War: "She did what she did either because of the whims of fortune, the decisions of the gods and the decrees of necessity, or because she was abducted by force, or persuaded by speech, or overwhelmed by love’ (DK 82 B11, 21–4)" (quoted in [[Anthony Kenny]], AP, p. 31) [[06 Principle of Sufficient Interest]]. Kenny continues: "Gorgias goes through these alternatives in turn, arguing in each case that Helen should be held free from blame. No human can resist fate, and it is the abductor, not the abductee, who merits blame. Thus far, Gorgias has an easy task: but in order to show that Helen should not be blamed if she succumbed to persuasion, he has to engage in an unconvincing, though no doubt congenial, encomium on the powers of the spoken word: ‘it is a mighty overlord, insubstantial and imperceptible, but it can achieve divine effects’. In this case, too, it is the persuader, not the persuadee, who should be blamed. Finally, if Helen fell in love, she is blameless: for love is either a god who cannot be resisted or a mental illness which should excite our pity. This brief and witty piece is the ancestor of many a philosophical discussion of freedom anddeterminism, _force majeure_, incitement, and irresistible impulse." Love being like [[Cortisol]], for my argument.
- - [[Negation]]: _On What is Not_, "three sceptical conclusions: first, that there is nothing; secondly, that if there is anything it cannot be known; thirdly, that if anything can be known it cannot be communicated by one person to another. This suite of arguments has been handed down in two forms, once in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise _On Melissus_, and once by [[Sextus Empiricus]].
_________
### Literature suggested by Sjoerd for course
Week 1 The Principle of Reason (29 November, 15:00-17:45)
A.
-Martin Heidegger, ‘The Principle of Reason’, in: M Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. R. Lilly, Indiana UP, 1972 , pp. 117-29. (Martin Heidegger, 1997 [1957], Der Satz vom Grund (Neske): Vortrag ‘Der Satz vom Grund’, pp. 189-211.
-Yitzhak Melamed, ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/archives/sum2014/entries/sufficient-reason/
Recommend readings:
-Heidegger, ‘Vom Wesen des Grundes’, in: Wegmarken, 177-202.
-Heidegger, 1997 [1957], Der Satz vom Grund (Neske), pp.11-188.
-Catherine Malabou on anarchy and philosophy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=pxHeRqphOzg&feature=youtu.be
-Reiner Schürmann, From Principles to Anarchy: Heidegger on Being and Acting, 1982
Recommended for fans of analytical philosophy:
-Dasgupta, S. (2014). Metaphysical rationalism. Noûs.
-Pruss, Alexander R., 2006, The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -Belot, Gordon, 2001, “The Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Journal of Philosophy, 97: 55–74. -Cover, J.A., and O'Leary-Hawthorne, John, 1999, “Sufficient Reason and the Identity of Indiscernibles,” -Hitchcock, C. (2007). Prevention, preemption, and the principle of sufficient reason. The Philosophical Review, 495-532. -Smith, Q. (1995). A defense of a principle of sufficient reason. Metaphilosophy, 26(1‐2), 97-106.
B.
-Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principe of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’ Diacritics 13.3 (1983), 2-20, https://www.jstor.org/stable/464997
Week 2 Major Reason: From Spinoza to Hegel (6 December, 15:00-17:45)
A.
-Spinoza, ‘Letters to Blijenbergh’ and ‘Emendation of the Intellect’
Recommended:
-Boehm, O. (2014). Kant's critique of Spinoza. Oxford University Press.
-Deleuze, Spinoza Practical Philosophy, chs. 3 and 5.
B.
- G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), Introduction, II ‘Reason in History’ and III ‘Freedom, the Individual, and the State’, pp. 12-56.
-Pierre Macherey, ‘Spinoza, the End of History, and the Ruse of Reason’ in: In a Materialist Way, trans. Ted Stolze (London/NY: Verso, 1998), pp. 136-58.
Week 3 The Critique of Reason (13 December, 15:00-17:45)
-Herbert Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, in: Negations (Mayfly, 2009 [1968]), 99-117.
Recommended:
-Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, esp. chs 1 ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ and 3 ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’.
-Paul Giladi (ed.), Hegel and the Frankfurt School (Routledge, 2020)
-Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, in: Negations (Mayfly, 2009 [1968]), 65-98.
-Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3-29. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/reason/reason-and-revolution.pdf
-Sverre Raffnsøe, “What is Critique? Critical Turns in the Age of Criticism,” Outlines: Critical Practice Studies 18.1 (2017): 28–60.
B.
-Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Image of Thought’ in: Difference and Repetition, ch.3.
Recommended:
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, transl. Laurent Dubois (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2017).
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008.)
Week 4 The Function of Reason (3 January, 15:00-17:45)
A.
-Immanuel Kant, fragments on the ‘schematism’: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1996), A137/B176-A148/B188 + ###.
-Alfred North Whitehead, ‘The Function of Reason’ (1929), https://archive.org/details/functionofreason031865mbp/page/n9/mode/2up
Recommended literature:
-Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy.
-Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
B.
-Bernard Stiegler, Die Aufklärung in the Age of Philosophical Engineering, in: M. Hildebrandt et al, Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2013, ###
-‘The Anthropocene and Neganthropology’ (ch1) + ‘Escaping the Anthropocene’ (ch2) in: The Neganthropocene, trans. Daniel Ross (Open Humanities Press, 2018), 34-63, http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-neganthropocene/
-The Nanjing Lectures, 2016-2019 (Open Humanities Press), esp. the 2016 and 2019 lectures, http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/nanjing-lectures/
Recommended:
-Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow. Epigenesis and Rationality, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
-Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool.: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
Week 5 Minor Reason: From Leibniz to Schelling (10 January, 15:00-17:45)
A.
-Leibniz, Confessio philosophi
-On Freedom and Possibility, in: Philosophical Essays, edited by Ariew and Garber (AG), 19-22
-On Contigency 1686, AG 28-9
-To Arnauld, esp. AG 69-77
-On Freedom, AG 94-7
-The Source of Contingent Truths, AG 98-100
-Dialogue on Human Freedom and the Origin of Evil, AG 111-6
-Letter to Coste, On Human Freedom, AG 193-5
Recommended:
-Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy (Edinburgh UP, 2009).
B. -Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Love and J. Schmidt (SUNY, 2006).
Recommended:
-Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).
Week 6 Post-foundational eco-logy (17 January, 15:00-17:45)
A.
-Edmund Husserl, ‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature’, trans. Fred Kersten, in Edmund Husserl, Shorter Works ed. P McCormick and F A. Elliston) (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 222-33.
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 1 juni 1960 ‘History, transcendental geology, historical time, historical space’ (pp. 258-9)
-Michel Serres, ‘Science, Law’ in: The Natural Contract, trans. E. MacArthur and W. Paulson (Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 51-96.
B.
-Tuinen, Sjoerd van (2019). “Common Sense: From Critique to Care (Arendt beyond Arendt)” in: Joke Brouwer & Sjoerd van Tuinen (eds.) To Mind is to Care (Rotterdam: V2 Publishers), pp. 124-57.
-Maria Puig de la Bellacasa & Sjoerd van Tuinen (2019). “Care in Spite of Carelessness” in: Joke Brouwer & Sjoerd van Tuinen (eds.) To Mind is to Care (Rotterdam: NAi/V2 Publishers), pp. 24-41.
Recommended:
-Bernard Stiegler, ‘What is Called Caring? Thinking beyond the Anthropocene’ in: The Neganthropocene, trans. Daniel Ross (Open Humanities Press, 2018), ch 13, pp 188-207.
Guest lecturers
-David van Putten: 2 A
-Sonia de Jager: 4 B
-Joost De Raeymaecker: 5 B
### Footnotes
[^1]: Think about [[Cause]] and [[Reason]] by looking at the PSR in Spinoza, emergence in [[Anil Seth]], [[Transfer entropy]], [[Alicia Juarrero]] etc.
[^2]: Wittgenstein actually considered titling the Tractatus “Der Satz” (“Note on the Discovery, Reconstruction and Interpretation of a Missing Folio at the beginning of Wittgenstein's MS 104”, Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, author and date missing for now, apologies.)
[^3]: David also gives the example: Freud: magical thinking is about association; someone is stabbed and in order to cure this we have to find the knife used and burn it.
[^4]: Stuart Hampshire: “what is common to Spinoza’s use and to our contemporary use of the word is simply that a cause is taken to be anything which _explains_ the existence or qualities of the effect; but the two senses of explanation are widely different, following the differences in the pattern of scientific knowledge envisaged. To Spinoza (and by definition to all rationalist philosophers) to ‘explain’ means to show that one true proposition is the logically necessary consequence of some other; explanation essentially involves exhibiting necessary connexions, and ‘necessary connexion’ in this context means a strictly logical connexion’ to be discovered by logical analysis of the ideas involved.” Stuart Hampshire, _Spinoza_ (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 35. Emphasis added to passage, accessed here: https://faculty.fiu.edu/~hauptli/Spinoza%27sEthicsLectureSupplement.htm#_ftn2, Feb 24 2024.