Rolling Philosophy

http://www.source101.org/images/HFTNPD65.gif

i don't really understand what the guy is saying tbrr

Dr Kennedy discovered that some key phrases, themes and words occurred during regular intervals throughout, which matched the spacing in the 12 note scale.

hmmmmmmm

He argued that Plato did not use the code for pleasure, but instead for his own safety after his teacher was executed for heresy.

does he say what the secret message is?

xp
yeah, I'm not greek enough to subscribe to clear distinction between content and form, but I think calling identification of extra structural features in plato "finding hidden meanings" is nonsense. he seems like a nice guy.

idg how the interval between words 'matches' the spacing of the 12-note scale, though im pretty dumm

the lengths of speeches, the position of speeches within the
dialogues, the location of significant turns in the arguments, and the
absolute lengths of the dialogues all provide evidence for an underly-
ing stichometric organisation and, in particular, for the importance of a
twelve-part structure.

his points, when they are non-ridiculous and not about the golden ratio, are about the structure mirroring the content w/ forms that are maybe pythagorean. not sure how he's going to turn this into a best-selling book, esp if the jpeg upthread is anything to go by.

Anyone who reads Plato seriously knows that there's a lot of form/content games going on in the dialogues. So while I'm open to there being some musical connection with this, calling it a "secret code" is silly.

"The code supposedly hides Plato's dangerous idea, that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, not according to the whims of Zeus. But the celebration of mathematics is in plain view throughout the dialogues."

good takedown here, titled "Wanna crack the Plato code? Read Plato":

http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2010/06/30/Plato-code

i decided i would read history of sexuality vol. 1 again, and maybe someday i'll get to vol. 2

vol. 2 is a little nuts iirc

the hidden musical messages in vol 2 are better

needs more reverb imo

but just the right amount of flange

1 is so classic but 2 is confusing but worth it

xp bravo

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

hello science welcome to the 21st century

lolz. Finally the obscure ideas of a little-known fella called Nietzsche are gaining some momentum.

what y'all reading at the moment? I've momentarily given up on my Francophone and Francophile bros to read Peter Kivy's Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience - very clever, precise, and thorough, but a bit on the dull side. Reasonably successful at avoiding that typical analytic philosophy of music thing of only being applicable to classical and early romantic music (even though that's pretty much all he's talking about), though, so there are flashes of excitement in there.

omg the title of that piece

i sorta love those kind of trend pieces--helps when i try to convince students that philosophy is cutting edge.

what y'all reading at the moment?

I still really want to read "After Finitude," but currently planning to use precious reading time on the new translation of Isabelle Stengers' "Cosmopolitics" and very excited about it.

ah yes that looks interesting. Someone had better translate her Penser avec Whitehead soon or I'll be forced to finally learn French.

cosmopolitics looks interesting. I'm now reading marshall mcluhan's understanding media which is an unexpected&has a huge explanatory power which surprised me. among the many strands he ties together is stuff on language&maths not dissimilar to the maxticle, but historicised & treating the phonetic alphabet/finger-counting &c. as technologies w/ concomitant effects on 'ratios between the senses' & broader socio-economic patterns. full of artfully deployed amazing facts and I'd strongly recommend to anyone remotely interested despite not being philosophy.

oh i want to read that. def on my long list of classics to read.

he does what I'd hoped phenomenology might do in terms of tying/blurring thought&practice/inner&outer, BUT he does it as a way of making sense of societal change, and in turn uses his understanding of that macro-level of technological change&media to make sense of how people engage/perceive/act in&think about the world. love the guy & find his explanations of why things&ppl necessarily developed as they did really convincing. lots of stuff on electric lighting, the phonetic alphabet, villages&roads, and zero. written w/ unusual sense of style and restraint&slow to digest because of that but so worth it.

what is the meaning of life?

http://bananafishmagazine.com/Book%20Images/Man%27s%20Search.jpg

(Just read that for the first time last week, btw.)

thanks that cleared it up for me

np

search for Meaning = belief in teleology imo

mcluhan is really great, I need to pick up that rerelease of understanding media

not necessarily xp

like all overmen i create my own meaning

i fashion it out of the skulls of my enemies

currently reading Susan Buck-Morss's book on the Arcades Project, along with a random smattering of Benjamin (just finished the Baudelaire essay); want to add Adorno's book on Kierkegaard to the mix at some point, too. sometimes I think I could spend the rest of my life reading early-20th-century eurobros on mid-19th-century eurobros.

the Susan Buck-Morss book is great, tho her whole reading of dialectic images is kinda unpopular (lol inside-benjamin academic baseball)

what don't people like about it?/what is the 'right way' to read dialectical images? (funny question)

soft silly music is meaningful magical, iirc

deeeeeep

xp as far i remember it, it's an argument over whether it's an actual image or not -- buck-morss says it is and i think basically everyone else says it isn't

Robin Hanson always rocking it: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/brave-position-club.html

lot of discussion of moral realism, meta-ethics, on the blogs at the mo, mostly sparked by Sam Harris' TED talk. I think I'm a knee-jerk moral realist, but feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew about the subject, struggling to deal with even the basics.

Harris:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html

today's reading:
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2077
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/its-a-contingent-fact-that-we-care/

we are against any current philosophy that is not based in principles from evolutionary or cognitive science.

feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew about the subject, struggling to deal with even the basics.

I've been reading Structural Anthropology and I ran across a passage that's a little cryptic for me and was hoping one of you guys could contextualize it for me (google has already failed me):

These attitudes, far from automatically reflecting the nomenclature, often appear as secondary elaborations, which serve to resolve the contradictions and overcome the deficiencies inherent in the terminological system. This synthetic character is strikingly apparent among the Wik Munkan of Australia. In this group, joking privileges sanction a contradiction between the kinship relations which link two unmarried men and the theoretical relationship which must be assumed to exist between them in order to account for their later marriages to two women who do not stand themselves in the corresponding relationship.

Basically up until here he has argued that there is a terminological kinship (the linguistic level of kinship like father/mother/etc) and an attitude kinship (how one acts towards their father, for example). He is now showing that something the attitude kinships actually resolve tensions in the terminological kinship (showing that they are two distinct system of kinship), and is using the Win Munkan as an example. However, outside knowing who wrote about the Wik Munkan (Ursula McConnel), I don't know enough about them to understand how the 'joking privileges' between two unmarried men resolve the problems of the terminological relationship between them and their later marriages -- how does this all work, basically?

just looked up the article mentioned in the endnote on jstpr and it is a+

the wik munkan word for penis is, apparently, 'kuntj'; the word for clitoris, meanwhile, 'po'o ka', lit. 'vagina nose'.

anyway the bit about special kinship relations is written rather unclearly and i'm not sure i understand it the same way as l-s! As far as I can work out, exchanging slightly ritualised obscenities in public is encouraged between distant relations, while taboo increases with closeness of relation. So you have different 'joking privileges' with different relations or people who are in the position of a relation while not being related to you.

e.g. you're meant to not exchange many obscene remarks with your mother's elder brother (and you're not meant to talk to her younger bro at all). But if there's a 'crooked' (intergenerational?) marriage, so that your older maternal uncle's wife and your wife are in a different generational/kinship relation, you and the older man enter into a different type of joking relationship in which a great deal of licence is expected. The original kinship relation is superseded by the later one.

so the joking relationship, which is the attitude 'stylized, prescribed and sanctioned by taboos or privileges and expressed through a fixed ritual', is the more flexible relationship, the one that changes to reflect changes in people's circumstances, and the one that has more of a relevance to their everyday.

also, the wik munkan word for 'labia minora' translates to 'vagina ears'.

Thank c sharp -- the article is really excellent but like you noticed, even reading the article it's not so clear exactly how Levi-Strauss' point is functioning here. But your answer makes sense (even if it's still pretty vague -- I'd love to know exactly how these relationships work, and what exactly is the contradiction being sanctioned? that they have competing kinship relationships? why is that more of a terminological problem but not an attitude problem? couldn't terminology be something like, "the brother of my mother who is also my wife's uncle" or whatever?).

in our culture doesn't it often seem the other way around, that the terminal kinship smooths over the attitude kinship? for example, you have a difficult relationship with your mother, but "she's my mom." it could go both ways. am I misunderstanding?

c sharp was just giving an example -- it seems like there are very close relationships that are vulgar. Primarily the non-vulgar relationships are an older person who you need to show respect to. But a sibling is probably an opportunity for some good vulgarity.

we are against any current philosophy that is not based in principles from evolutionary or cognitive science.

― rage for the machine (banaka), Friday, 27 August 2010 02:00 (4 days ago)