Why have the average number of visits to this blog tripled in the last four or five days? Does it have anything to do with the fact that Brian Leiter is stepping back from his blog a bit?
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
My Stuff
https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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- GOOD FOR MY MENT\AL HEALTH
- HERE I AM AGAIN
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
31 comments:
It's not as if thousands of people are thinking 'Well, I can only visit one philosophy blog today; since Leiter's idle, it'll be the sage of North Carolina'. Also, it seems to me that the pace, quantity, and kind of content Leiter is posting right now is not terribly different from his previous summers' blogging.--Internet-savvy people have told me that the way to increase 'traffic' is to link it to popular issues (really 'keywords'). Your three most recent posts feature the words 'Trump' and 'indicted/indictment'.
I don't know why your traffic is up, but I'll take some of the overflow over at my blog. (I have a new post almost done, but I can't get motivated to post much in the absence of any traffic.)
I don't know what percentage of readers check out the comments section. I always do in all blogs that I visit.
If a lot of readers do, the increased number of clicks could be related to the fact that a certain person is no longer monopolizing the comments section with lengthy narratives about his legal exploits and about who won a certain TV game show.
The comments section now flows and that probably does attract some readers.
I also note that some more leftwing readers (that is, left of the mainstream Democrats and of the Holy writ of CNN) are commenting again, without fear that the individual mentioned above will insult them with long and cliche-ridden harangues.
Agreeing with s. wallerstein that there may be a correlation to the fact that the comments will likely be much more worthwhile to look at with the absence of multiple 1k word comments by 1 person.
LFC
I didn't realize that you had a new blog. I've now pinned Surmises and Suspicions (great name!) to my bookmarks and will be following you regularly.
Maybe because you posted something after not doing so for a while.
David P.,
Thanks! In general I don't post all that often, but at the very bottom right-hand corner of the blog there's a "follow" button, and if you click on it and enter your email address you'll get notified of new posts.
I hope I am not too late with this, but the comment section is vastly improved by your recent pruning of unruly growth!
I’ve been checking in more frequently because of trump’s latest indictment and curiosity about your take!
LFC
I don't see the "follow" button anywhere. At the extreme bottom right, there is a "close and accept" button for cookies, but that's it. Above that there there is only the Meta list.
David Palmeter,
The easiest thing to do is to comment and then click the space that says you want to receive
new posts.
This is like the third or fourth time in as many years that the annoying lawyer has either announced that he's leaving or has been asked to leave by Professor Wolff. Susselman is the philosophy blog version of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the same. He'll be back to tell us all about his "briefs" and his idiosyncratic neoliberal theories of the universe in no time.
Susselman has been a valuable contributor to this community. Even though he was given to intemperate language in reacting to others, his point of view was useful in the mix here.
David Zimmerman,
Susselman basically repeats what the mainstream liberal media, especially CNN and the NY Times, say. At times he veers to the right as when he asked "how many jobs has Immanuel Wallerstein (no relation to me) created"? He also asked the same rightwing mentality question in relation to Theodor Adorno.
You (Zimmerman) once accused me of "being too sensitive". I googled "can you be too sensitive?" and discovered that you can't be according to psychologists, but anyway, I am sensitive and I would bet, without any scientific evidence, that there are more sensitive souls on the left than on the right and in the mainstream center.
Several times, being sensitive, I hesitated before commenting anticipating the invective and the insults that I would inevitably received within an hour from Susselman. That same sensitivity may also have inhabited others from commenting.
FORGET SUSSELMAN!!!
David Palmeter @10:36 a.m.
If you go to the blog site and do not start scrolling down -- i.e., leave the cursor at the top of the page -- you should see a small rectangular box in the bottom right with the word "follow".
If that isn't working for you, you can take s.w.'s suggestion and leave a comment of some kind, prob can be very brief if you prefer, even a word or two. Since it's the first time you will have commented, I think I may have to "approve" it, which may take a little while. After that, you can click on the "receive new posts" thing and should be good to go.
Further questions/problems related to any of this may be sent to my email: Lfc08 [at] verizon.net. Thanks.
[at] = the at sign @
s. wallerstein, lfc
Thanks for the the info. I've just posted a brief comment.
I check the blog from time to time, but usually came away disappointed at the sheer amount of work to avoid tangential multi-part comments I had no interest in reading. Still I live(d) with the hope of finding more actual philosophy discussed, perhaps even beyond Marx. Seems like there’s a lot of interest in rehearsing current events, obsessing over Trump, rehashing the tired debate over 3rd parties - all of which seem like a perfect recipe for hopelessness and helplessness. In that case be my guest; I’d rather pass.
I had hoped when ChatGpt and AI came up in a post a short while ago that we might have a larger discussion about the subject in the context of philosophy of mind. I brought up Hubert Dreyfus remembering how Professor Wolff said he’d at least crossed paths with ‘Bert’ Dreyfus at one point. I’d love to hear more about that and related matters. Of course it may only be of interest to me. That’s fine, too.
To Anonymous SrVidaBuena:
I too would like to read some discussions of issues in the philosophy of mind, perhaps in relation to AI, perhaps just more generally (the mind/body problem, the nature of intentionality, the "hard problem" of consciousness, etc.). I am not sure what a suitable entry point to these issues would be in the context of Professor Wolff's blog, but will give it some thought. Perhaps he could start us off.
David Z.,
Prof Wolff might be open to your writing a guest post on some or all of those topics, which would then serve to kick off discussion. I have a couple of thoughts, but am a bit reluctant to broach them in this thread. I'm also somewhat hesitant to tread into these waters bc, as I've said about a zillion times, I'm not a philosopher. Of course, that's never really stopped me from expressing a view but it does make me hesitate in this context where at least some philosophy students and/or professional philosophers are reading and/or commenting.
I second what Comrade LFC says.
I probably will not comment on the above topics, but I would love to pick up a bit more
philosophy late in life and I know from prior experience that Comrade Zimmerman is an excellent teacher.
Professor,
What do you predict will happen with respect to those extreme supporters threatening violence in breitbart, fox news and other right-wing outlets because of the indictment? Also, since a bunch of the commenters in this blog are retired, I would encourage you to visit this right wing websites and promote non-voting if they actually believe that the previous election was rigged and if you have more patience (I don't) then maybe talk some sense into them.
I was in a semester-long seminar focused on The Critique of Pure Reason. We read the whole thing. The idea of transcendental analysis blew my mind at the time. Only 5 of us in the class - this was one of the benefits of a small liberal arts college. Later I read Dreyfus and Searle and some others for my senior ‘thesis’ on artificial intelligence. At the time I had no idea Dreyfus was known for his work on Heidegger as well. I failed utterly to understand what Heidegger was up to when I was younger. Connecting Dreyfus on AI and on Heidegger I began to get the connection and a better understanding of both subjects. It deepened my appreciation for what could be the elegance and depth of philosophy of mind, beyond what I had been attracted to as an analytically-minded undergrad.
This documentary on Dreyfus, Heidegger (and more) breathed new life into the subject for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_in_the_World
@MAD
A sociological theorist who talks with me sometimes, at the time of 1/6 assured me that civil wars only happen when there's a rift in the military.
So you'd have to rephrase your question: will all this Republican trash talk lead to a rift in the military.
It could lead to violence I'd guess but not all violence counts as a civil war.
I mean who knows, but people have studied these sorts of situations.
It's new for America.
Professor Collins wrote a novel gaming the possibility of a Civil War
Our imagination isn't the same as reality.
My guess regarding extra readers on this blog would not be related to anything Brian Leiter is doing, it is more likely a group of students in some higher education group using your introduction to philosophy text or other writings in a radical philosophy class, and the professor has told the students to learn something about writing like a philosopher by observing you in action on your extensive blog (I have done this in the past in my classes, but I am on sabbatical now until Sept 2024). The blog really is a giant work of very strenuous philosophical composition exercises from which observers can gather many insights about writing better in philosophical contexts and not being a political bullshitter. That is probably a utopian interpretation however. It could have happened in the past.
A more realistic guess is that the spooks-in-triaining in the intelligence community are trying to figure out what the anti-Trump resistance movement are thinking or contemplating, and so the CIA university trainees were sent to explore the dangerous depths of your radical blog. You tell it like it is, so it would be a radical reality check for educational purposes for persons being trained to keep America's secrets from loose cannon Presidents like Trump in the future. Spies have to learn how to think like radical philosophers who want to re-write the American constitutional narrative and turn its history upside down due to its racial contract, settler contract and social contract misrepresentation in general.
I have been reading the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber and he details how many people are bored and use social media like blogs to fill their empty work lives. So it could be any large group of bored people "searching for wide reflective equilibrium" perhaps online and never finding it because it's an idealistic myth.
But it is better to think CIA must be watching for signs of domestic terrorist philosophy and don't know where to look so they send their robots everywhere in the blogosphere. So the way to interpret spies getting educated about what the radicals want to do about Trump's political resurrection and indictment possibility is that they realized they had a bullshit job predicting what so many angry Americans were planning to riot about this summer of war, and they asked Google for directions, and the AI robots searched online, sent the spies who found your writing educational but also amusing distraction from the political poison on less evolved social media blogs which nauseates them by contrast. Whatever the contingent cause, I would bet that it was educational and that is a good thing even if this is nonsense. The CIA never watches radical philosophers at work or play.
SW’s humorous, vocative use of “comrade” put me in mind of an episode (“Comrade Bingo”) of the BBC/PBS 1980s comedy series “Jeeves and Wooster” in which the entitled lounge-lizard Bertie Wooster (with aid from his omniscient valet Jeeves) tries to pass himself as a 1930s English communist in order to help another aristocratic lounge-lizard friend (Bingo) woo a socialist girlfriend. The dinner scene in this hilarious episode (in which Jeeves uncharacteristically slips and refers to his boss Wooster as “Comrade Sir”) is one of the funniest (and most well—done) comedy scenes I’ve ever watched and listened to. Surprisingly, this episode is on YouTube, probably temporarily just beyond the clutches of the intellectual property lawyers. So, if you haven’t seen this sardonic show, it’s easy enough for the time being to watch it before the BBC (or whoever) shuts it off. I don’t see how it’s lasted this long in the public-domain fringe. It’s worth watching/listening to—there’s a lot of aesthetic value in it, even if the underlying art deco social philosophy of the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves relationship may not sit well with people on today’s Left. One other thing, since a commenter mentioned Hubert Dreyfus, Dreyfus and Daniel Dennett, some years back, actually had a short debate on the mind and computers on the PBS Newshour. That episode may be on-line (I don’t know). Dennett sounded like he was really up on his Scientific American reading, while Dreyfus sounded like he had drunk too much Heidegger. From what I vaguely remember the two came across like they were talking past one another. But—again, this was years ago—PBS presented a debate between two philosophers, which is not something I’d would expect the New Hour to do today.
The uptick is due to an excommunicated commenter's obsessive browsing.
Howie and @MAD
There is a statistical measurement that is useful with respect to talking about the current extremely high level of political violence. it's called dw-nominate. It showed that the mean ideological positions of the two parties has been for several years running greater than that it was during the Civil War. Various militias are now supporting the anti-abortion movement and are increasingly present at pro-abortion rallies. Of course, they show up armed. Whatever the cause of the next wave of demonstrations, there will be armed militia at them. There is solid evidence that if armed counter demonstrators show up the risk of violence increases.
I keep reminding myself that there are 100+ House members who supported sedition. So, this ain't over yet
@Howie
I am not really worried about a civil war. I am worried about terroristic attacks and the effect they will have on the politics.
@Christopher
Curious what you have to say regarding Professor Collins' perspective. He is sure civil wars happen only when there is a breech in the military. Though he is yet to blog on that topic, he has on 1/6
Here is that blog http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2021/01/assault-on-capitol-2021-1917-1792.html
re: Howard and MAD
If the government continues to survive after the 2024 elections then I would expect an uptick in terrorist attacks. As well armed as they are the militias can't take on the military in direct action. I doubt we would have a typical civil war, where armed forces split and take sides.
The 1/6/ insurrection looks to me to be an attempted coup d'etat. There is certainly a presence within the armed forces and police that support the republican fascists and the split is vertical. If memory serves me, the national guard assigned to keep the peace at a BLM demonstration had to be purged of known white supremacists, and Gen. Flynn (brother of the convicted and pardoned Flynn) may well have played a role in delaying mobilization of other forces.
We have a volunteer army, with significant minority representation in both the ranks and the officer's corp so I don't see the armed forces splitting. Facing a fascist insurrection, I would expect the armed forces will retain its loyalty to the current government. I guess that in the long run we will face terrorism fromm the right.
History offers so many examples of civil war, coups, uprisings, revolutions, etc. that I just wanted to note that the forms they take are so varied that I would hesitate to assume that there are universal characteristics to types of political violence.
And sorry for the delay in responding, life has been chaotic the past few days.
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