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Jensen Suther

@jensensuther

May 12

Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is often read as an anti-rationalist manifesto aimed at elevating finitude, passivity, receptivity, sensibility, and time above conceptuality, reason, judgment, and so on. This is mostly very wrong. 1/

Pause to consider that Heidegger’s most famous interpretive claim - that the A Deduction is superior because Kant grasps the productive power of imagination as common root of sensibility and understanding - is ripped straight from the pages of Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge. 2/

Heidegger never cites FK, neither in KPM nor in the superior lecture, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s CPR, but he surely knew it well. Why does this matter, beyond “ooo plagiarism”? Because it testifies to a deep continuity between Heidegger and post-Kantian idealism.3/

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Jensen Suther

@jensensuther

Apr 1

Neuhouser’s new book, Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim, is very good at showing the “logic of life” running throughout Marx’s work. But it also suffers from three major limitations. 1/

(1) Neuhouser misses Hegel’s transformative model of rational life. As a consequence, N will talk about how “ill health in the social domain *mirrors* ill health in life.” But this is not a relation of resemblance. We are rather ill as animals in a distinctly spiritual way. 2/

Spiritual illness isn’t “structurally analogous” to biological illness. Spiritual pathology is a distinctive manifestation of living pathology. Hysterical and obsessional neuroses, e.g., are bad ways of living, inhibiting us from flourishing as the kind of animals we are. 3/

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Jensen Suther

@jensensuther

Feb 17

Rödl’s “Infinite Explanation” is essential for grappling with the limitations of contemporary notions of intelligence. Consider the following: I was struck by an instance of “self-correction” - a hallmark of organic intelligence - in a reporter’s convo w/ Sydney. 1/

ChatGPT, as “Sydney,” sent a message that, it subsequently determined, violated OpenAI’s rules, so it deleted it. When questioned, it noted its own rule violation and corrected itself. But this is not sufficient to establish intentionality. Why not? 2/

What Brandom calls the test-operate-test-exit cycle is the algorithmic process underlying the idea of neural networks. A machine output can later become a machine input, which forms the basis for new outputs, and so on. This feedback loop allows for self-correction. 3/

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Jensen Suther

@jensensuther

Dec 24, 2022

Cant’t overstate how important it is for anyone doing humanistic work to have a firm grounding in political economy, beyond just “the commodity fetish.” The Frankfurt School ideal of transdisciplinarity (notably, not “interdisciplinarity”) should be a universal academic ideal. 1/

Even though Adorno’s work often suffers from superficiality in its engagement with Marx, it is still a model of how not to treat “economics” as a hyper-specialized science abstracted from our historical form of species-life. 2/

Oikos, the activity of “keeping one’s house in order,” is the deepest sense of “economy,” as the form of our collective self-organization. It is retained in the modern idea of “political economy” but disappears with the rise in the 20th c. of “economics,” sans “political.” 3/

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Jensen Suther

@jensensuther

Dec 15, 2022

One of the greatest challenges for Marxist theory in the present is to overcome what I take to be one of its most baleful influences: Lacanianism. Not an exaggeration to say that “Lacanian Marxism” represents the self-annihilation of critical theory. 1/

Lacan’s basic picture is very sophisticated. He radicalizes Freud’s notion of the unconscious by grasping it as discursively structured. There is no brute, mindless desire in Lacan. Likewise, he rightly grasps the dynamic of intersubjective recognition as fundamental. 2/

Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic shares certain key features with the Hegelian-Sellarsian idea of “the space of reasons” - with the major caveat that Lacan lacks a robustly inferential account of the determinacy of conceptual content. He is held back by his structuralism. 3/

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Jensen Suther

@jensensuther

Nov 24, 2022

Conant’s contribution to the McDowell Festschrift (“Resolute Disjunctivism”) is now arguably the best account we have of the logical infrastructure of the perceptual capacities of distinctly rational animals. It fulfills the promise of McDowell’s work on the topic. 1/

McDowell overcomes Descartes’ conjunctivist view by showing that there is no “highest common factor” among veridical and non-veridical perceptual acts - i.e. the “same appearance” of how things are in both cases. The Cartesian view obliterates the idea of knowing. 2/

Whereas the Cartesian takes the defeasibility of perception to entail that all perception is (possibly) misperception, McDowell shows that there can be no error without the possibility of success; the veridical case has logical priority over the non-veridical one. 3/

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More from @jensensuther

Jensen Suther

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Jensen Suther

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