Philosophy + Critical Theory in the Age of Now, and Those of Before

Yesterday the podcast Embrace the Void gave a fascinating interview of a fascinating thinker, Lilian Cicerchia. Cicerchia, co-host of the excellent podcast What’s Left of Philosophy , is quickly establishing herself as a formidable Marxist thinker and a remarkably insightful analyst, and her hugely illuminating recent paper “Why Does Class Matter?” Ought to, and I believe will in time, become required reading for any Marxist. One remark in the interview, however, brought back to mind an ongoing reflection on Marxist discourse I’ve been meaning to flesh out. I’m not sure she’d disagree with me on any of this or that my reflection amounts to a critique of her meaning—nonetheless I intuitively bristled against it, and I want to explore here why that is. Cicheria’s comment was one staunchly critical of the notion of “going beyond” class politics (understood here as essentially Marxist critique of political economy). This notion, as Cicheria noted, is indeed one that has enormous purchase ...

This critical examination of a very interesting, but mortally flawed, emerging theoretical framework in the area of climate change, technology and political theory is largely based on this interview . All direct quotes are from the interview. Benjamin Bratton is, in my view, an overlooked figure in philosophy, especially in the areas where philosophy join up with political theory, and, at his best, with practical philosophy. An art theorist by training, it's undeniable that his recent work reaches, at many points, the grand systematizing heights of philosophy. We can quibble on that: at any rate, his work is enormously provoking, politically and ethically serious, sometimes tantalizing, and robustly informed by an eclectic yet coherent array of disciplines and sciences. He proposes a "planetarity," or ultimately a new sort of ontology of Earth, a new way of understanding what the planet could be. He expounds this new view in terms of a kind of Hegelian  becoming-other , b...

Philosophy can be autonomous, totally distinct from the hard sciences and other areas of research, and there is no good reason why it shouldn’t be. The importance of the autonomy of philosophy is hardly damaged by Analytic claims about philosophy’s necessary relevance to science. That is, unless their use of “science” describes a particular “aggregation” of established work, or worse yet, a discipline itself, however broad. But if the criterion of scientific relevance refers only to the imperative that philosophy not be unscientific , that it not present claims directly at odds with what is known about the structure and components of reality, it is perfectly permissible for philosophy to deal in conceptual spheres that do not appear within science—and even permissible for philosophy to deal in constructs of its own making from top to bottom .  What philosophy often does is try to describe what is experientially ineffable, from an ordinary subject’s point of view. Science does not ...

Susan Wolf has a really novel contribution to action theory (free will, determinism, etc.), a fact I've just now noticed after sort of half-paying attention to her work in the Free Will class I took at Catholic U. My friend "Crisp" (not using real names) is working on a paper on Wolf's famous "Moral Saints" piece, and I've always been into analytic action theory as one of a handful of side-pieces to my German continental malarkey, so I read her piece "Asymmetrical Freedom," and it really stuck with me. Key parts of it--parts I think are central to the piece and not ancillary--suggest novel commitments to certain normative ethical theories. I'll get into the Marxian part of this later on, and hopefully I will be persuasive enough that readers will be relieved to see I am not predictably "shoehorning" my politics into a poorly-matched area of philosophy again. *** Commitment to normative ethical theories is something that is not oft...