Month: January 2015

Colloquium Series starts at MUN tomorrow

First up, I’m working through Schelling’s later writings to scope out his account of the real and the temporal (with mentions of freedom and the decision in there, too). Here’s the line-up for the semester:

1. [20 Jan] Peter Gratton, “Schelling, Derrida and Freedom: Thinking without a
Theme”
Commentary: Kyla Bruff

2. [27 Jan] Michelle Rebidoux, “Persons, Community, and the Mystic Body: Towards
an Evolutionary Christian Personalism”
Commentary: Patrick Renaud

3. [3 Feb] Peter Harris, “Collingwood, Fackenheim and Bradley on Metaphysics and
Historicity – A Report”
Commentary: Gil Shalev

4. [10 Feb] David Thompson, “Origins of Objectivity”
Commentary: Sarah Messer

5. [24 Feb] Suma Rajiva, “Rationalism and Subjectivity from Descartes to
Leibniz”
Commentary: Finton Neylan

6. [10 March] Walter Okshevsky, “Evan Simpson on Reasonableness, Truth and
Disagreement in Moral Judgement: A Habermasian Critique”
Commentary: Aaron O’Brien

7. [17 March] Scott Johnston, “What was Transcendental Idealism? Transcendent
and Transcendental Arguments in the Metaphysik Vigilantius (1794-1795)”
Commentary: Vahid

8. [24 March] Jennifer Flynn, “Naturalism and Bioethics”
Commentary: Shannon O’Rourke

9. [31 March] Sean McGrath, “The Late Schelling on the Trinity”
Commentary: Michelle Mahoney

Günter Figal resigns over the Black Notebooks

Daily Nous story here, which has a link to the German story here. (Also see here.) I must admit, I thought the publication of the Black Notebooks was the least surprising thing to come out of the archives. While I thought it a good opportunity to explore this element in Heidegger’s thought and to think once more about its relationship to key parts of his overall works, it was also repetitious of previous Heidegger controversies, which spring up, as if anew every few years. Yes it’s good to have it in his words his anti-Semitic beliefs, but his actions in the 30s were long known and evident enough–evidence apparent to Husserl and Levinas in the 30s, to Sartre in the 40s, to his first readers in the English-speaking world in the 60s (even if apologized for), etc. Yet oddly, here is Figal declaring he can’t help lead a society since this reveals Heidegger to be more deeply “involved in Nazism” than before? In that case, I guess it is good to have this controversy every few years for those who seem to have missed the news.

 

Badiou’s supposed travel diary from New Zealand

Here.  “He” provides some notes on his lecture there as well as some comments on the scenery. There’s this nice nugget:

My work always depends on a principle of French Philosophy of maximizing obscurity: never say clearly what you can say much more obscurely. Being obscure can make you famous and give you lots of interpreters. If one is clear, no one cares…. Now maximize obscurity and say: the possible is made so by the real of the impossible. Voilà! The impossible makes the possible! This is the delicious dialectic of the possible and the impossible.  It is the beauty of French philosophy that it makes the totally obscure dialectic as clear as crystal. Merde!