How Normative Is the Greek Chorus? Spinoza, Rorty, Davidson and Sophocles

Geometry of Know A passing comment recalled to me a certain conceptual break through. I was studying Davidson’s “Three Varieties of Knowledge”which presents his theory of Triangulation while at the same time studying narratology, and looking into Bakhtin. For some reason discussion of mimetic and deitic elements suddenly struck me as revealing of the elemental [...]

Differences in the World as Organs of Perception

Organs of Perception In my last post I began reasoning how the usually assumed limits of an organism (a physical boundary to which other boundaries are thought to more or less correspond) might be extended far beyond where skin, bone, nerve ends, each organism expressing itself to an outer-limit of an Exowelt. In this approach I [...]

A River Runs Through it: Scotus, Spinoza and then Davidson

    In recent conversation the connection between contemporary philosopher Donald Davidson and Spinoza has come up, a connection which I have felt runs in several directions. Previously the only thing I had strictly read on this is Davidson and Spinoza: Mind, Matter and Morality by Floris van der Burg, which in my view aside from [...]

The “Picture” behind Intention: What Lies at the Center of Perception

Some Considerations of Objecf-Object Oriented Philosophy Recent engagement with Graham Harman’s “Object-Oriented Philosophy” as it stems from Brentano and Husserl, stirs in me a terrible disagreement (I use “terrible” in the Greek sense). It comes from the “picture” that for me lies behind phenomenological preoccupations with the object, and I think also is core to [...]

The Trick of Dogs: Etiologic, Affect and Triangulation Part IV of IV

[Finally posted, the meta-epistemic (is that what we call it?) conclusion of my engagement of Witttgenstein via Davidson and then Spinoza, (and back again). This final part is continued from Part III; and here is part I and part II]   I would like to end with a rather obvious example of a mental predicate attribution [...]

Davidson’s “Three Varieties of Knowledge”

Here is an on-line copy of Donald Davidson’s remarkable 1991 essay “Three Varieties of Knowledge”. As far as contemporary philosophical essays go, it is perhaps the finest, far-reaching essay in my memory. In terms of style it employs a jargon-free, clear language approach reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s straightforward  problem solving (without the hypnotic aphoristic gloss over of aporias). In terms [...]

Davidson, Spinoza, Aristotle: Veridicality and Organs

A ruminating thought floats behind these considerations. Is there a connection between a). Davidson’s world thought to be the cause of our beliefs which assumes an inherent verdicality of belief, making of a triangulating community of language users a kind of organ of truth, b). Spinoza’s (proposed) expectation that interactions with his Ethics, that would cause increases in our [...]

The Trick of Dogs: Etiologic, Affection and Triangulation, Part I of IV

[Part II here] Intentions: Deceiving Dogs, and Pretentious Infants …and so it seems that, even though they themselves cannot know, they nonetheless wish to be known.  Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, Book XI, chapter 27             The purposeof this study is to investigate the possible connections between Wittgenstein’s [...]

Skepticism refuted in Under Ten Minutes

Philosophy is part performance (as much as it would like to purge every element of the contingent from its expression). Without the performative of bodies, and affects of words, images, metaphors, analogies, meanings would circulate airlessly. Convicition is performed, and Peitho was a goddess. Watch Randy Helzerman “disprove” skepticism using Davidson’s notion of a Principle of Charity like [...]

Spinoza’s Human Core: Proposition 27, Ethics Third Book

Spinoza wrote, founding his theory of social effects upon a rationality of imagination. It is an underestimated, yet profound, significant observation (brought to the fore in analysis by, among others, Balibar in his excellent Spinoza and Politics). This is called the affectuum imitatio, the “imitation of affects.” When combined with Davidson’s theory of triangulation, it produces a plane of communication which is hard [...]