This is going to be one of those minimal, opening-up sorts of posts. I’m going to lay a couple of quotes out without any commentary, and see what people make of them.
The first is from a recent post by Levi on translation:
On the one hand, my initial thought is that it is not for philosophy to answer how translation takes place in any specific relation between objects. Initially this response might look like a dodge; however, it is premised on a distinction between the sort of thing philosophy does and the sort of thing other disciplines do.
The second is from Graham Harman’s much-talked-about causation essay:
For several centuries, philosophy has been on the defensive against the natural sciences, and now occupies a point of lower social prestige and, surprisingly, narrower subject matter. A brief glance at history shows that this was not always the case. To resume the offensive, we need only reverse the long-standing trends of renouncing all speculation on objects and volunteering for curfew in an ever-tinier ghetto of solely human realities: language, texts, political power.
Any thoughts?
[UPDATE: Harman’s recent reference to the “Neurology Death Cult” might also shed some light on this subject. Graham would seem to be pointing to Brassier’s “wing” of SR. See Reid Kane’s thoughtful response here.
I joined a Neurology Death Cult once. Every Thursday we’d get together and do fMRIs on Orange Vampires to find out why they were so dismissive of other people’s ideas. We also came up with this great pudding based on glial cells. It was like Kheer, except more chunky.]