Friday, July 20, 2012

The audio version of Catherine Malabou's inaugural address at Kingston University. Malabou presents a hypothetical dialogue between the Continental philosopher( Foucault) and the cognitivist Thomas Metzinger. She reads Foucault's "What is Enlightenment" against Thomas Metzinger's Being No One: The Self Model Theory of Subjectivity. Malabou uses her signature concept of 'plasticity' to argue for a renewed engagement between continental philosophy and the neurosciences. While the concept of plasticity seems almost voluntaristic when compared to the Metzinger's radical destabilizing of the subject, Malabou ends with showing the paradoxical link between "being no one" and "plasticity.

For Malabou
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/02/catherine-malabou-continental-philosophy-and-the-brain-towards-a-critical-neuroscience/

For Metzinger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Begun reading Animal Philosophy:Ethics and Identity. First set of readings-- Nietzsche and a supporting piece on Nietzsche by Alphonso Lingis. Excerpts of Nietzsche taken from Thus Spake Zarathustra, Genealogy of Morals and Human All Too Human. Points to take away- 

  1. " All Socratic virtues are animal" The entire phenomenon of morality is animal.
  2. Man faced with the burdensome prospect of "bearing themselves"... reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating, cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures reduced to their consciousness, their weakest and most fallible organ. ( On the Genealogy of Morals)
  3. The nobility of man thus resides in the ability to heed to the demands of the physis. ( The Gay Science) Does N transform the anthropomorphism of morality to a theriomorphic one? The demands of physis is borne from a complex ethology. 
  4. How does this essay help me think about animal ethics. In attempting to bypassing the human 'man' it privileges the 'animal'. Why does it want to bypass ''man'? In that attempts to locate a "strong" thought, as Lingis points out, does it not reinforce something like a humanism? It is in its 'rejuvenating' thought that it seems humanist?