Jerry Monaco's List: philosophy

• Althusser was offered and accepted the post of agrégé répétiteur (director of studies) at the ENS whose responsibility it was to help students prepare for their own agrégations. In this capacity, he began offering courses and tutorials on particular topics in philosophy and on particular figures from the history of philosophy.
• As he retained this responsibility for more than thirty years and worked with some of the brightest thinkers that France produced during this time
• (including Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault),
• through his teaching Althusser left a deep and lasting impression on a generation of French philosophers and on French philosophy.
• French psychiatry. Begun to treat recurrent bouts of depression, this last affiliation continued for the rest of his life and included frequent hospitalization as well as the most aggressive treatments post-war French psychiatry had to offer such as electroconvulsive therapy, narco-analysis, and psychoanalysis.
• his almost total inexperience with women and by her being eight years older than him.
• she was also embroiled in a dispute with the Party over her role in the resistance during World War II.
• During the 1950s, Althusser lived two lives that were only somewhat inter-related: one was that of a successful, if somewhat obscure academic philosopher and pedagogue and the other that of a loyal Communist Party Member.
• by engaging closely with classic philosophical texts and with contemporary philosophy and social science.
• in 196
• “On the Young Marx,
• continuity of Marx's oeuvre
• Althusser changed his teaching style at the ENS and began to offer collaborative seminars where he and his students attempted a “return to Marx” and to Marx's original texts. In 1965, the fruit of one of these seminars was published as Reading Capital.
• a faction within the French Communist Party composed mostly of young intelligentsia to try and force change within the Party. This gambit to have the Party directed by theorists rather than by a Central Committee whose Stalinism remained entrenched and who believed in the organic wisdom of the worker met with little success. At the most, he succeeded in carving out some autonomy for theoretical reflection within the Party.
• the French Left's and the Communist Party's electoral defeats in the 1978 elections, Althusser's bouts of depression became more severe and more frequent.
• In his writings from the 1940s, for instance, his method and conclusions resemble those of the Marxist Humanists of whom he would later be so critical, while texts from the 1950s deploy without irony the Stalinist shibboleths he would later subject to such castigation.
• between 1946 and 1951, where Althusser explores possible rapports between Christianity and Marxism.
• “The International of Decent Feelings,”
• recognition of our equality before God with our equality before the fear of death
• In that it does so, it is twice anti-Christian. For, in addition to the sin of idolatry (death equals God), it fails to acknowledge the existence of a particular class, the proletariat, for whom anguish is not its lot and who is actually capable of delivering the emancipation from fear by re-appropriating the products of human production, including the atomic bomb.
• “A Matter of Fact,” continues in this vein, suggesting the necessity of socialist means for realizing Christian ends.
• he argued that the sole possibility for realizing Christian values is through communist action.
• Catholic values and modes of reasoning inform all of Althusser's philosophy
• , or exegetically, in terms of examining what possibility Hegel's metaphysics, logic, politics, epistemology, and understanding of subjectivity offer to those interested in understanding and encouraging societal transformation.
• 1947 thesis “On Content in the thought of G.W.F. Hegel.”
• the Young Hegelians, then, Althusser uses Hegel's dialectic against itself to criticize claims like the one made in The Philosophy of Right
• Instead, he contends that Marx is guilty of committing the same error as Hegel in mistaking historical content for the fulfillment of the dialectic. Because all knowledge is historical, Althusser argues, Marxists can only correct for this error by appeal to the idea of the dialectic and to its end in the absolute and the eternal, to a time “when the human totality will be reconciled with its own structure” (1947, 156)
• a critique of the empiricist tendency in Marxist philosophy.
• argued that the post-war mania for Hegel in France was only a bourgeois attempt to combat Marx.
• Hegel is left behind and that, afterwards, Marx forged his own original concepts and methodology
• follows the Party line, insisting that Marx reversed the Hegelian dialectic,
• hat historical materialism is a science
• that the sciences verify dialectical materialism
• that the proletariat needs to be taught Marxist science from above.
• recognizable Althusserian themes
• about the quasi-transcendental status of present scientific knowledge.
• future concerns in their speculations about the ideological character of current scientific knowledge and in their incorporation of ideas from Mao about the relationship between theory and practice.
• philosophical figures who preceded Marx.
• Feuerbach
• insofar as Montesquieu studies the “concrete behavior of men” he resists idealism and inaugurates the study of history as a science and that, insofar as Montesquieu accepts past and present political formations as delimiting the possibilities for political life, he remains an idealist, is one that will find echoes in Althusser's study of Marx during the next decade.

• inaugurated in 1961 with his article “On the Young Marx.

    
• his debts to contemporaneous theorists and to philosophical predecessors such as Spinoza

• the uniqueness of his contributions to hermeneutics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, historiography, and political philosophy.

    
• Europe in the late 1950s saw a blossoming of political and philosophical alternatives to the version of Marxism-Leninism promulgated by the Soviet Union.
• in France, was widely disseminated via Communist Party schools and literature.
• “On the Young Marx” (1961), which sought to demonstrate that this method of looking to Marx's early work for the key to his philosophy was methodologically suspect and ideologically driven
• an alternate method of investigation or “reading” that would allow Marx's true philosophy to be revealed
• purity
• a new philosophy, Dialectical Materialism
• a new science, Historical Materialism
• Althusser says quite a bit about the nature of knowledge and the general relations between philosophy, science, politics, and ideology.
• argue against what he labeled “empiricist” understandings of Marx.
• a “symptomatic reading.”
• explaining away contradictions within it
• Althusser argued that Marx's true philosophy was largely absent from his work prior to 1845. Even in mature texts such as Capital, Althusser maintained that Marx's philosophy remained largely implicit, as the background system of concepts which allowed the scientific work Marx was involved in generating to take place.
• symptomatic method of reading was designed to make these concepts explicit
• “to establish the indispensable minimum for the consistent existence of Marxist philosophy“
• Spinoza
• three inspiration
• gave for this interpretive method
• Lacan
• French tradition of historical epistemology
• similar to the way in which Spinoza argued in the Theological Political-Treatise that by engaging in a materialist historical study of the Bible one could disentangle those prophetic laws and commands which were merely the result of temporal exigencies and the prophet's imagination from those which represented the true word of God, so Althusser argued that one could disentangle those concepts which were merely ideological in Marx's texts from those which comprised his true philosophy.
• However, inasmuch as this early work was seen to espouse a telic view of humanity in which the individual and society was said to undergo a necessary historico-dialectical development, Althusser identified it as fundamentally Hegelian.
• “theory of the break,” which held that Marx's early work was Hegelian and ideological and that, after a decisive rupture in 1845 and then a long period of transition between 1845–1857, his work became recognizably Marxist and scientific
• in his post-1857 writings, Marx provides no systematic exposition of his epistemology or his ideas about social structure, history, and human nature, all of which were necessary for Marxist philosophy's consistent and continuing existence.
• t the models provided by psychoanalysis and by Marx's own critique of classical political economy come to inform Althusser's overall hermeneutic strategy
• though Marx was recognizably engaged in the work of Historical Materialism in Capital, the philosophical theory or background conceptual framework that allowed this investigation to proceed was not fully articulated.
• was to make these fundamental concepts explici
• The explicit project
• where a philosophical concept had to have been in use but was not made explicit, and by noting and explaining where and why one theoretical pronouncement is in contradiction with itself or with another passage.
• such areas of Marx's text are “symptoms,” in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, of the necessary but unarticulated philosophical framework
• Althusser also acknowledged that some of the concepts found latent in these texts were derived from and consistent with his philosophical and social scientific contemporaries as well as with those of Spinoza.
• authors and readers are always said to think with concepts borrowed from or supplied by the problematic that they inhabit
• there is no such thing as an innocent or objective reading

• it is apparent that the model for knowledge acquisition that is developed in Reading Capital owes much to Spinoza and to the French tradition of historical epistemology.

    
• This mistake was, fundamentally, an epistemological one: each cast Marx as an empiricist.
• variants of the Hegelian claim that there is a reason to history.
• as each ascribed to Marx a theory of knowledge in which the subject, by means of a process of observation and abstraction, comes to know what an object really and truly is, according to its essence
• . In the case of Humanist Marxism, the object that comes to be known by its essence is the human subject in its full freedom.
• It does so by means of critique and by creatively overcoming that which is alien to it or “merely historical.” In the case of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, this object is the economy, the reality that underlies, causes, and can explain all historical structures and transformations. The economy comes to be known as it truly is only by the proletariat, by those whom the historical process has endowed with an objective gaze and who possess the ability to make this truth objective.
• Althusser proposes that true or scientific knowledge is distinguished from ideology or opinion not by dint of an historical subject having abstracted the essence of an object from its appearances. Instead, this knowledge is understood to be produced by a process internal to scientific knowledge itself
• e. Rather, specific sciences start with pre-existing concepts or genera such as “humors,” “unemployment,” “quasars,” or “irrational numbers.” These genera may be ideological in part or in whole. Science's job is to render these concepts scientific. This labor is what Althusser terms “theoretical practice.”
• Scientific knowledge is produced by means of applying to these genera the body of concepts or “theory” that the science possesses for understanding them.
• , the sum of the individual concepts that this theory consists of delimits the possible ways in which the genera that a science begins with can be understood.
• When applied, a science's theory weeds out ideological notions associated with the original concept or genera.
• the transformation of the “ideological generality into a scientific generality
• Once generated, such scientific concepts inform regular scientific practice, allowing specific research programs within an individual science to progress. Althusser himself gives examples of three such major transformations.
• Each of these foundings is marked by what Althusser terms an “epistemological break,” or a period when ideological concepts are replaced by scientific ones. Any similarity here to Kuhnian ideas about revolutionary and normal science is not surprising. Both Canguilhem and Bachelard, from whom Althusser drew inspiration for his theory, were part of a dialogue that took in the work of Alexander Koyré on scientific revolutions, a thinker from whom Kuhn, in turn, drew his inspiration.
• For Althusser, Marx's founding of the science of history is crucial not only to politics (as will be addressed below) but also to understanding all of human activity, including scientific activity. That there is a circular logic to this epistemological theory, Althusser readily admits, for it is only the science of Historical Materialism that allows us to understand scientific practice in general. Althusser, though, is comfortable with this circularity. This is because, insofar as this understanding of scientific practice in general allows us to understand how individual sciences produce their knowledge, Historical Materialism is a science that functions like any other.
• the concept that helps to produce this understanding of scientific practices is that of the “mode of production.”
• With it, he argues, Marx supplied theorists with an idea sufficient to comprehend the way in which we materially produce our selves, our environments, our knowledges, and our histories. Indeed, this concept makes it possible to analyze all of our activities in their specificity and to understand them in their relation to the totality of which they are a part.
• as one aspect of the total mode of production,
• Added by Althusser to these two aspects of the mode of production are those of ideological, political, and philosophical production, among others.
• a specific mode of production, some form or forms of labor uses the existing means of production to transform existing materials into new products.
• scientific production, for example, thinkers use existing theories to transform existing concepts into new, scientific concepts.
• it is not the case that the analysis of any one mode of production within the totality of productive practices is capable of generating an understanding of the way in which all rest of the productive processes are causally determined.
• parallelism
• each process can only be understood in terms of its unique causal structure.
• each productive process is understood to stand in relation to and play a part of a complexly structured whole, none of which is reducible to being the simple or essential cause of the others.
• human activity as consisting of material processes of production and reproduction
• philosophy is closely related to science and because it is charged with a task that allows the production of knowledge about the other socio-economic practices to be generated, it is probably best to start with Althusser's understanding of philosophy as a material practice of production before proceeding to a discussion of how Althusser understands the other practices listed above.
• most activity labeled “philosophy” is really a type of ideological production.
• most philosophy reproduces, in highly abstract form, notions about the world whose effect is to sustain existing socio-economic relations.
• , for Althusser, genuine philosophy functions as a “Theory of theoretical practice” (1965b).
• an aid to scientific practice by distinguishing between ideological concepts and scientific ones as well as by clarifying and rendering consistent the scientific concepts that enable a science to transforms existing ideas into scientific knowledge.
• In fact, scientific activity often proceeds without a clear understanding of the concepts that allow it to produce its knowledge.
• efinition of philosophy as the Theory of theoretical practice,
• re-reading of Capital and other texts was philosophical insofar as it was able to name and distinguish the concepts that allowed Marx's scientific analysis of history to proceed.
• latent concepts
• the practice of symptomatic reading
• Marx's philosophy
• constitute the theory of Dialectical Materialism
• Marxist science, or Historical Materialism
• concepts made explicit
• e better analyses of specific modes of production and better understandings of the opportunities that specific modes of production presented for political change.
• plays a part of a complexly structured whole
• none of which is reducible to being the simple or essential cause of the others
• the idea of “structural causality.
• , is closely related to the idea of “overdetermination”
• constituting a historical moment is determined by all the others.
• the logic of a specific mode of production is that of “contradiction.”
• any given period, multiple, concrete and definite practices take place within a mode of production.
• at the same time as peasants holdings were being expropriated in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries by a nascent bourgeoisie, the church and the aristocracy were passing laws against this appropriation. Any isolable element of the total structure, be it a person, a social class, an institution, or the state, in some way reflects and embodies these practices and these antagonisms and as such each is said to be “overdetermined.”
• the development of productive practices within a specific mode of production is often “uneven” in addition to possibly being antagonistic.
• the Marxian concepts of structural causality, contradiction, uneven development, and overdetermination is that of the
• concept designates that major element in a structural whole that tends to organize all of the other practices.
• “structure in dominance.”
• However, in another era and in other places, it may be the production and dissemination of religious beliefs and practices that dominates and organizes the socio-economic structure.
• with the idea that human individuals are merely one of the sites at which the contradictory productive forces that characterize an era are enacted
• primary object of social philosophy is not the human individual.
• the state produced by political activity is merely one productive process among others
• the primary element in political philosophy is not the state
• Apart from the necessity of human beings to engage in productive relations with other human beings and with their environment in order to produce their means of subsistence, there is no human nature or essence. This is the core of Althusser's “anti-humanist” position.
• the science of Historical Materialism has revealed the desire for such orders to be historically generated along with the ideas about human nature that justify them.
• the ideological role of our conceptions of human nature and of the best political arrangement
• rejects the simple understanding of causality
• Althusser, however, argues against the idea that history has a subject (such as the economy or human agency) and that history has a goal (such as communism or human freedom). History, for Althusser, is a process without a subject. There are patterns and orders to historical life and there is historical change. However, there is no necessity to any of these transformations and history does not necessarily progress. Transformations do occur. However, they do so only when the contradictions and levels of development inherent in a mode of production allow for such change.
• critics who judged his work to be idealist, Stalinist, dogmatist, or excessively structuralist, among myriad other charges
• he had ignored much of what Marx had to say about his own logic and concepts.
• idealist or “theoreticist” tendencies in his reading of Marx
• relationship between theory and practice was indeed under-developed,
• these revisions represented a politically motivated betrayal of his theoretical accomplishments. For others, they simply revealed his project as a whole to be untenable and self-contradictory. Some recent critics, however, have argued that these revisions are consistent with and necessary to the development of what they view to be the overall goal of Althusser's work: the development of a materialist political philosophy adequate for political practice.
• a renewed attention to the works of Leni
• Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1967a)
• Althusser's abandonment of the Spinozistic claim that the different levels of theoretical practice were autonomous
• no criterion sufficient to demarcate scientific from ideological concepts and that all theoretical concepts are marked by ideology.
• tended to generate better understandings of things than were available intuitively.
• , where and how some of the concepts scientists employed were ideological.
• . Though he did not argue that there was a way to leave ideology behind and to reveal the good in itself, he did maintain that science could help to correct ideological thinking about political means and ends.
• a human being becomes a self-conscious subject
• “ideological interpellation.”
• a larger essay essay titled “On the Reproduction of Capitalism.”
• not only an analysis of the state and its legal and educational systems but also of the psychological relationship which exists between subject and state as ideology.
• maintain control by reproducing subjects who believe that their position within the social structure is a natural one.
• Specific socio-economic structures, however, require particular ideologies. These ideologies are instantiated by institutions or “Ideological State Apparatuses” like family, schools, church, etc., which provide the developing subject with categories in which she can recognize herself.
• successfully “hailed”
• “interpellated
• a Dictatorship of the Proletariat is necessary so that Ideological State Apparatuses productive of the bourgeois subject can be replaced with those productive of proletarian or communist subjects.
• or the idea that history has a goal
• a Marxism which endorses the scientific method as the best way for understanding ourselves and our potential but that also understands that this method is fallible.
• a Marxism which does not subscribe to any philosophy of history and which certainly does not maintain that capitalism will inevitably lead to communism.
• that guarantee a scientific analysis.
• Variously labeled a “materialism of the encounter” or “aleatory materialism,”
• the method which he uses to articulate this philosophy is to simply comment upon works by philosophers who exemplify this current and to point out where, how, and to what extent they do so.
• Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.
• dismissal of
• the idea that the universe or history has an origin or an end
• Philosophy is therefore not a science
• the truths it produces are contingent and are offered in opposition to other competing truths.
• First among them, following Democritus, is the thesis that matter is all that exists. Second is the thesis that chance or the aleatory is at the origin of all worlds. That the patterns which constitute and define these worlds can be known, described, and predicted according to certain laws or reasons is also true.
• Third, new worlds and new orders themselves arise out of chance encounters between pre-existing material elements. Whether or not such orders emerge is contingent: they do not have to occur.
• the propositions which have explanatory value at the level of ontology and cosmology also have value at the level of political philosophy.
• the origin and continued existence of political orders is contingent,
• The anti-teleological, scientistic, and anti-humanist, Marxist philosophy
• “Montesquieu:  Politics and History”
• On The Reproduction Of Capitalism: Ideology And Ideological State Apparatuses
• Badiou, Alain, 2012, "The Recommencement of Dialectical  Materialism"
• Balibar, Étienne, 1994. “Althusser's object,”

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• (What motivates the enterprise in the absence of anomalies are the remarkable successes of QM and GTR, coupled with the fact that there are situations in which both apply.)
• The aesthetics of the mathematics is one answer given (e.g., Greene 1999). Self-deceptive 'groupthink' is another (e.g., Smolin 2006).
• a 'post-empirical' methodology

  • This in-itself should condemn the project.
• But how could these constraints ever be adequate to narrow the field down to a unique theory? The standard responses to the question are familiar: pessimistically, accept underdetermination as a limit on knowledge; more optimistically, argue that underdetermination rarely arises in practice; or retreat to extra-empirical criteria such as 'maximizing' simplicity or explanatory virtue. The problem with the latter two more epistemically optimistic views is that of unconsidered alternatives: perhaps there is no known alternative because of a lack of ingenuity; and how can we tell that a theory is 'best' without explicit comparison?
• Dawid's answer is that we would have to be justified in constraining the range of possible theories to the point at which it is probable that T -- or rather, any theory agreeing with T up to level n+1 -- is the only theory satisfying the constraints. In this way, T can be confirmed even in the absence of relevant empirical data; hence 'post-empirical' confirmation.
• Hacking claimed that 'sprayable' entities

  •  Whereas traditional scientific realism argues that our best scientific theories are true, or approximately true, or closer to the truth than their predecessors, entity realism does not commit itself to judgments concerning the truth of scientific theories. Instead, entity realism claims that the theoretical entities that feature in scientific theories, e.g. 'electrons', should be regarded as real if and only if they refer to phenomena that can be routinely used to create effects in domains that can be investigated independently. 'Manipulative success' thus becomes the criterion by which to judge the reality of (typically unobservable) scientific entities. As Ian Hacking, the main proponent of this formulation of entity realism, puts it (referring to an experiment he observed in a Stanford laboratory, where electrons and positrons were sprayed, one after the other, onto a superconducting metal sphere), "if you can spray them, then they are real."[2]
• First, string theory is an extension of the quantum field theory program of high energy physics (HEP), and so bound by the methodological constraints of that program: for instance, candidate theories lie within the framework of path integral QM developed by Richard Feynman, and utilize the ideas of gauge symmetry arising from Noether's theorems. Second, Dawid argues that in the history of HEP, theories (a) for which no alternative was known, after searching, and that (b) give explanatory unity to a range of physical systems, have turned out to correctly predict the next generation of phenomena (for instance, the electro-weak theory, confirmed at CERN in the 1970s and '80s). A 'meta'-induction on the success of the HEP methodology leads to the conclusion that a theory that satisfies the HEP constraints will make reliable predictions about the next generation of predictions. And, says Dawid, string theorists correctly identify string theory as such, and so are justified in their confidence.
• First he explains that string theory completes a trend in twentieth century physics towards ever more inaccessible phenomena -- hence to 'post-empirical' science. Second, he argues that similar methods are in fact to be found to greater or lesser degree throughout the history of physics, and in other sciences, for instance, paleontology. He accepts that testing by novel prediction is the gold standard of scientific testing but argues that in many cases the methods he has described must be used -- so to reject them would be to reject a large part of what we count as scientific knowledge.

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