January 27, 2015

Valerius de Saedeleer (1867 - 1941)

From Ravenna DiagramHenry GouldBlackbox Manifold

UP NORTH A fleet of ragged little cedars harbored on a rugged point of land (fog- bound, sometimes – til it clears). Wind skims burning through their microscopic needle- calipers. Draws cheerful tears – ski-trails thatching frozen air. Mnemosyne Point, on Lake Vermilion (up north). Time’s wooden (4th grade) ruler. Not to break. The placeness of quiet places. Watercolor (frail, subdued). No wide-lens tin-pan mood music. Glinting silver traces plowlines, old broken ground. Maybe a shimmer of poplar at the road’s end... where sea-muck molds copper marshland. One saturnine pedestrian paces out the strand. His word mutters a round solitude – heartbroken yoke. Ultimate weight. Lifted; torn from the soil toward his own snowbound wedding band (galactic, Galilean). Sand underfoot. The stream’s bright ford.

The Skirts of a Wood 1825Samuel Palmer b. Jan. 27, 1805

For Non-Ideal Philosophy Justin Erik Halldór Smith

A great many of the features of human existence --the fact that we are haunted by dead ancestors; that the soil is made up of the rotting bodies of living creatures like and including ourselves; that there is not just a question of whether we are bodies, souls, or body-soul compounds, but also of how different parts or regions of our bodies represent different dimensions of what we take to be ourselves; that we live through cycles of night and day and different things seem possible at different moments of these cycles-- are habitually left out of the accounts of human existence offered by philosophy. The great victory of philosophy, in fact, is often held to be that we have got down to the very most basic structure or framework of human existence, from the perspective of which our earth-boundness, or our bipedality, or our diurnality, come to appear contingent.* We take space and time as such to be categories of the understanding, but not the past of the ancestors or the heavenly realm of the angels. For much of the history of philosophy, the basic orientating points of reference that gave life and sense to human thought were considered alongside the very most abstract frameworks that, one hoped, made this life and sense possible: not just the moral law within, but also the starry heavens above. Aristotle and Kant both, who gave us the most influential categorial schemes, also considered it an integral part of their projects to describe the rich diversity of things given in experience to which these categories apply. Leibniz's entire philosophical project, in turn, might be described as an attempt to show, once the austere metaphysical scaffold has been established, how we get the rich variety of bodily, world-bound experience we do. But something has gone wrong along the way.

Valerius de Saedeleer

MonologueNovalispresented by spurious

There is really something quite mad about speaking and writing: the proper conversation is a mere play on words. One can only be amazed at the ridiculous mistake that people make when they believe that they are speaking about things. Nobody knows the greatest hallmark of language: that it is concerned only with itself. That is why it is such a wonderful and prolific secret: that when one simply speaks for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid and original truths. But if one wishes to speak of something particular, the capriciousness of language lets one say the most ridiculous and perverted things. It is from out of this that a hatred of language grows in some serious people. They notice its playfulness, but they do not notice that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language.

Philosophy is one way in which ordinary language– which is one form power takes –is made to stutter. Like the poet, but a poet that has a taste for mathematical demonstration and formalism, good philosophy strives to be tectonic with respect to the plates that compose ordinary language. Larval Subjects, Philosophical Language

History set into motion again Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

Abstract It is believed to be common knowledge that history (in the sense of things done, in the sense of a collective singular) is suspended, that history is doomed to remain motionless. What's more, we all - or at least many of us - tend to believe that this precisely is how it should be: history, if such thing exists at all, has to stand still. It is against this backdrop that I wish to point out that there is a cultural phenomenon we should not leave unnoticed, namely, that a new quasi-substantive philosophy of history - operating with the notions of commemoration, trauma, and the sublime - sets history into motion again. It sets history into motion by reclaiming the monstrosities of the world, that is, by compensating for the rather one-sided attention paid to language in the last decades; and it sets history into motion despite the respect it seriously pays to the primary suspension of history.

The papers being offered look severely cool. As you all know, I think it's pretty much a no-brainer that these are the issues of our day. Even if you hate the stuff, think my worst case scenario is flat out preposterous, these remain the issues of our day. Everywhere traditional philosophy turns it will be asked why its endless controversies enjoy any immunity from the mountains of data coming out of cognitive science. Billions are being spent on uncovering the facts of our nature, and the degree to which those facts are scientific is the degree to which we ourselves have become technology, something that can be manipulated in breathtaking ways. And what does the tradition provide then? Simple momentum? A garrotte? A messiah?R. Scott BakkerThree Pound Brain

Valerius de Saedeleer

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