Alfino

• Alfino - Fall 2016 - Work on Self and IF
• Alfino - Fall 2016 - Work on Philosophy of Food

Notes for Seminar Discussions

SEP 27 - Hadot, Pinker, Dennett, Crawford

• Hadot - "ethics of discussion" -

• Pinker - note intersection of discussion of classical style and obscure styles. p. 29 Implications for style/method.

• Chapter 2: up to 38, a discussion of classical style, then sections on "metadiscourse", signposting, hedging, spologetic language, excessive abstraction (nominalization and passives)

• Crawford - Chapters 3, "Virtual Reality as a Moral Ideal"

• child will vs. adult will. situated, freedom of modern self depends on being insulated from contingency by layers of representation.
• Mouseke-doer -- "Oh Tootles!" The Handy Dandy machine. focused on adjustment, 72 q. to become an adult you need to be subject to the "heteronomy of things"
• Keep the world from challenging the self is something narcissists do.
• Kant: does this in his moral theory -- 73: quote -- context -- concern about the status of free will
• To be rational, for Kant, is to NOT be situated in the world. Choice as expression of the unconditioned will.
• 77: interesting connection to problem of the modern self -- kant's model of the self leads to a self that is fragile, can't tolerate contingency, seeks to be comfortable in a "me-world" of manufactured experience. (this might be the kind of self that demands insulation for it's views and identity. freedom from conflict.
• thesis (he's heading toward): There is freedom and individuality in the world beyond your head, but only if you acquire the skills.

• Crawford - Chapter 4, "Attention and Design"

• Mercedes "brake assist" - fetish of automaticity -- product of capitalism. fake engine noise 85
• "The World is its Own Best Model" - embodied representations vs. symbolic representations. importance of "cross modal binding" 83.
• problem at the end - does a world of symbolic representations undermine real choice? Is capitalism designing things to foster disengagement (autism)? (counter argument - aren't we developing skills with virtual reality? symbolic reality?

• Dennett, Chapter 3

• Section 9. Three species of Goulding: Rathering, Piling On, and the Gould two-step.

• "rathering" - really false dichotomy with a rhetorical flourish, "rather" - nice mix of informal fallacy and rhetoric.
• "piling on" - example p. 50. exaggerating the alternative that he wants to dismiss (false dichotomy mixed with straw man"
• "two step" - creating a straw man version of an opponents argument and then treating the author's actual position as a grudging acceptance that the author really sees the problem with the straw man version.