Philosophy

Listening to a podcast from the BBC program In Our Time about Henri Bergon’s ideas on time. Some ideas I found noteworthy:

• The historical background of thinking about time during the 19th century. The appearance of timelines, focus on time, influence of trains, timezones.
• The measurements of time and links with looking at it as space. And that then the lived experience falls out of the equation.
• Coexistence of past and presence.

Mooie inaugerele rede¹ van Prof. Annemarie Mol over “Wat is Kiezen?” waarin ze in een empirisch filosofische manier niet vraagt naar “wat kiezen in wezen is, maar wat het is in enkele van zijn talrijke, gevarieerde verschijningsvormen”. Haar nadruk ligt ook dat technische artefacten nieuwe keuzemogelijkheden schept en verborgen keuzes kunnen bevatten:

Als iemand zich bijvoorbeeld in een situatie bevindt waarin ze individueel moet kiezen voor of tegen deze of gene medische ingreep, dan is het ook goed dat zij zo nauwkeurig mogelijk geïnformeerd wordt. Dat is geen kwestie van persoonlijke smaak en het is evenmin een universele waarde. Deze moraliteit is in de betreffende situatie ingebakken. Hij zit eraan vast, net zoals er aan kiezen een autonoom subject vastzit, en een rekensysteem, en een gestold object van keuze.

I have been getting into the ideas of critical theory with some great podcasts and videos. Stephen West from Philosophize This did an extensive 7 part series on The Frankfurt School, with a large focus on Herbert Marcuse. I especially liked his introductions of Marcuse’s works and the parts on culture industry. I also watched this interview Bryan Magee did with Marcuse in 1977 for his BBC program. In the interview Marcuse gives an overview of the thoughts of the members of the school and his involvement with the New Left movement. The whole discussion with Magee is great as can be expected from him and who also very critical. And lastly I listened to an episode of The Philosophers Zone titled “Are we enlightened?” that came out today by chance. In the short timespan of thirty minutes the podcast provides a fanstatic overview of critical theory and, as the title suggests, focuses on the theory’s roots against enlightement style thinking.

A recent article from Kudina and Verbeek¹ explores a different strategy to deal with the ‘Collingride dilemma’, a double-bind problem which roughly states that the impacts of new technology cannot easily be anticipated until the technology is developed, but that it hard to change the technology then. While in earlier stages it is easy to change the technology, but then we don’t know yet what it’s impact will be. The authors focus on the ethical variant of this dilemma which states that our value frameworks to evalue the technologies also change because of the technology:

(…) when we develop technologies on the basis of specific value frameworks, we do not know their social implications yet, but once we know these implications, the technologies might have already changed the value frameworks to evaluate these implications (p. 293)

They claim that the technical mediation approach can help with this dilemma by studying at an earlier stage during the technological development how “normative frameworks develop in interaction with technologies”:

It makes visible that the values used to evaluate technologies are not independent from these technologies but rather are co-constituted by them. A better understanding of these dynamic human-value-technology entanglements can substantially contribute to a more responsible design and use of technologies.

Fantastic podcast from France Culture’s “Les chemins de la philosophie”. Professor Patrick Wotling discusses on the podcast the philosophy of Nietzche and how forgetting can be a condition for the well functioning of social life:

Nietzsche nous apprend que l’oubli est positif, s’éduque, peut se contrôler et surtout qu’il est la condition qui rend possible énormément de choses, comme la vie sociale : le second traité de la “Généalogie de la morale” est fondé sur cette affaire de la tendance à l’oubli qui est une régulation fondamentale du vivant et la manière dont cette tendance à l’oubli peut être régulée, éduquée, contrecarrée, canalisée, représente pour Nietzsche le fondement même de la possibilité d’une vie communautaire. L’oubli est vraiment un processus positif si on le comprend bien.

Listen to the full podcast here.

This is enlightening talk from 1976 with philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Bryan Magee on fundamental questions such as “What is philosophy?”, “Why does it matter?”, and “Why should anybody be interested in it today?”.

Happy to learn more about Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers. Learn more about her here in an introduction by Bruno Latour.

Isabelle Stengers has chosen to look for a touchstone distinguishing good science from bad not in epistemology but in ontology, not in the word but in the world.

If scientists are surprised by the ways she demarcates good from bad science, the many people who, from the ranks of feminism, ecology, leftism, think she is their allies should brace themselves for some hard lessons, more exactly, from the lessons she keeps drawing from hard sciences. Going from science to politics is not, for her, going from stringent constraints to more relaxed ones, but keeping exactly the same objectives with a total indifference to what is science and what is society. Domination in politics has many of the same ingredients it has in the laboratory, that is, the unability to let the people one deals with any chance to redefine the situation in their own terms. If this principle subverts so many disciplines from the inside, it subverts even more political stands from the outside, and especially so many of the “standpoint politics” where the outcome of the analysis is entirely determined from the start by the position of the speaker.