Blog Schmog
By Jon Cogburn Slavoj Žižek has a characteristically interesting criticism of the version of object-oriented ontology in Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects HERE. Graham Harman shares some preliminary thoughts HERE. Harman is currently writing a book on critics and commentators of object-oriented ontology called Skirmishes. It's currently slated to cover Tom Sparrow, Steven Shaviro, […]
By Jon Cogburn In Michael LaBossiere's post on H.P. Lovecraft's racism he considers and critiques three arguments attempting to exculpate Lovecraft: (1) that his racism was unremarkable for a person of his time, ethnicity, and class, (2) that he had other qualities that offset the racism, and (3) that Lovecraft was an all purpose hater […]
By Jon Cogburn Some chunk of the facebook discussion about my post earlier today on Kant consisted in explaining basic facts of Kripke and/or Kant to me that I'm already familiar with and that moreover seemed at least to me besides the point.Yes I know there is a difference between empirical and pure intuitions. Yes […]
By Jon Cogburn [Update: Please see Nick Stang's "Did Kant Conflate the the Necessary and the A Priori." Stang argues against one of my key claims, but (in addition to advancing it) his paper shows really well what the debate is in the secondary literature.] I'm not a historian of philosophy and I only know […]
By Jon Cogburn One of the thrilling things in Graham Harman's Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy is how he instantiates what he terms "the method of ruination": By discovering how a given passage might be made worse, we find an indirect method of appreciating its virtues. This ties to a discussion of the paraphrastic fallacy […]
By Jon Cogburn This semester, I'm re-reading Descartes' Meditations for the first time in I think over twenty years, and it's a vastly weirder book than I remember. The letter of dedication of the work to the University of Paris' Faculty of Sacred Theology is a masterpiece of Eddie Haskel style passive-aggression. Descartes' response to […]
By Jon Cogburn In Sartre's 1946 Existentialism lecture he memorably recounts his inability to advise a student who was deciding whether to try to attempt to join the Free French forces and avenge his brother's death. It's a very compelling piece of prose, so well written that one loses sight of the weirdness of the […]
By Jon Cogburn Well, by any reasonable criterion of ontological commitment, Obscurantism, According to Analytic Philosophers must clearly be a thing, as there's a sub-section of a wikipedia article on it. Many of the usual suspects comprise the sub-sub-sections (Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Lacan). And, earlier in the article the wikipedia authors do a […]
By Jon Cogburn 1. The Reverse BB Thesis In analytic epistemology there's a longstanding debate about whether or not knowing that a proposition is true entails knowing that one knows the proposition is true (henceforth, "the KK thesis"). I'm not up to date on this literature, so as far as I know what I'm about […]
By Jon Cogburn One of my fundamental life experiences happened right after high school when, over a few weeks in 1987, I helped to build a small church and medical clinic in the Dominican Republic. We stayed in a little compound and walked through the countryside to the building sites every day. There was running […]