The To-Read List

[Balder]

This thread is for listing books or essays you intend to read or would like to recommend to other members of the forum.  Separate threads can be started to discuss any particular book or essay in detail; this thread is just a resource page.

[Joseph Camosy]

More books on my reading list:

[Balder]

Awesome.  You got Shaviro's book fast!

[Balder]

Checking out this book tonight - which I was happy to find freely available as an e-book through my university library:  Fred Dallmayr's Integral Pluralism. It touches on some of the themes of (largely dissatisfactory) monism and pluralism that we've discussed here many times, and offers its own way forward drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Panikkar, James, Heidegger, Taylor, and others.  

A brief quote:

"[P]luralism harbors a danger that, curiously, approximates it ... to the monistic temptation.  Carried to the extreme of radical fragmentation or dispersal, pluralism -- despite its protestations -- shades over into an assembly of fixed and self-enclosed monadic units exhibiting the same static quality as its counterpart.  For this reason, it seems advisable to differentiate, at a minimum, between genuine "pluralism" and empirical "plurality," where the latter signifies a mere juxtaposition of existing units and the former implies a measure of mutual engagement, interrogation, and relatedness.  Actually, more is involved than mutual relatedness (which still carries overtones of plurality.)  In many ways, it seems preferable to speak of a mutual embroilment, interpenetration, and contestation, of a differential entwinement without fusion or segregation.  It is this kind of entwinement that I designate "integral (or holistic) pluralism."  Using an image employed previously, one might say that, whereas in traditional monism (as well as dualism) the unifying structure is imposed from the top down, the linked quality of integral pluralism emerges from the bottom up -- in a way that can never be fully predicted or exhaustively mapped."

[Joseph Camosy]

Looks interesting.

IMO, the KEY to avoiding radical fragmentation and thus polarization and conflict is to find a way to shift these many perspectives from operating as a metonymy (fractally propagating as a sliding chain of infinite fragmentation) and see them as constructing a metaphor.  This is to execute the shift from "part-to-part" and find a way to go "part-to-whole" while avoiding the binary polarities that typically thwart the process.  This is not only a shift in perspective, but a practice as well.  I think you know what I'm talking about.  :-)

[Balder]

Yes, I think so -- I'd like to read more of your fleshed-out thoughts on this, when you have them ready.

[Layman Pascal]

Reading is for chumps -- not champs! 

(I'm not sure where chimps stand on the subject...)

But assuming I heard some jackass say:

"[P]luralism harbors a danger that, curiously, approximates it ... to the monistic temptation.  Carried to the extreme of radical fragmentation or dispersal, pluralism -- despite its protestations -- shades over into an assembly of fixed and self-enclosed monadic units exhibiting the same static quality as its counterpart.  For this reason, it seems advisable to differentiate, at a minimum, between genuine "pluralism" and empirical "plurality," where the latter signifies a mere juxtaposition of existing units and the former implies a measure of mutual engagement, interrogation, and relatedness.  Actually, more is involved than mutual relatedness (which still carries overtones of plurality.)  In many ways, it seems preferable to speak of a mutual embroilment, interpenetration, and contestation, of a differential entwinement without fusion or segregation.  It is this kind of entwinement that I designate "integral (or holistic) pluralism."  Using an image employed previously, one might say that, whereas in traditional monism (as well as dualism) the unifying structure is imposed from the top down, the linked quality of integral pluralism emerges from the bottom up -- in a way that can never be fully predicted or exhaustively mapped."

I would say: Duh. 

Obviously Pluralism (meaning something specific) different than, say, knowing that a bunch of stuff exists (pluralities).  It is sort of the Symbolist art movement.  All art uses symbols so we know immediately Symbolism must be an alternative to the normal use of symbols. Pluralism cannot be thought except as an alternative to normal concepts of plurality.  And the most normative concept of plurality is that a set of independent units.

Now, with my hammer in hand, I will observe that Pluralism has three identifiable intensities of enactment.  Each level of the Metaphysics of Adjacency represent a tighter proximity of the variables that are linked-separated by a gradient of contextual splicing. 

So we do not need to separate real (integral) pluralism from mere plurality.  We need to observe how, obviously ignoring mere plurality posing as pluralism, actual pluralism exhibits functional variations in how much "entwinement" is operative between the apparent types and categories of the entities involved.

Same & Difference (being two) are small example of plurality.

Same vs. Different is already a small degree of entwinement.

Same-and-Different are a structurally stabilized increase of entwinement.

Same-difference is a pre-entwined concept.

[Balder]

Sometimes you're a real chump and jackass, LP!  MOA, MOA, blah, blah, blah....

[Balder]

The excerpt here is brief, so some of the important context is missing.  I don't think he's saying much different from you (though he doesn't, to my knowledge, describe three separate levels of entwinement).

Dallmayr's point is that some folks who identify with the term, pluralism, actually enact what he would consider a counterfeit of it, in that their commitments -- say, to incommensurability, radical particularity, the lack of any possible shared vocabularies or master narratives, etc -- lead to a pluralization of static entities which amounts to little more than a mundane endorsement of 'pluralities' (and a mirror of the 'static monism' it critiques). For him, genuine pluralism must involve modes and intensities of entwinement and embroilment, and the "pluralism" (as mere pluralization and dispersal) endorsed by thinkers such as Lyotard falls short of this.  

In other words, he's not ignoring plurality posing as pluralism, but rather is critiquing it for posing as pluralism.  So, he's not really interested in separating integral pluralism from plurality, per se, but from the "pluralism" which is blind to entwinement and so which endorses mere plurality.

[Joseph Camosy]

Latest arrival, thanks to Bruce:

[Joseph Camosy]

Really looking forward to reading this one.  The book explores the links between philosophy and technology. Could there be one "map" behind them both?

[Ambo Suno]

Joe, do you read fiction? Have you read Neal Stephenson? He wrote the Baroque Cycle trilogy and various other semi-mind-blowing stories of their times. Some of these scientifically empassioned characters who you refer to, show up in these books. Pax vobiscum.

[Joseph Camosy]

Ambo,

Not familiar with that author, but I'll check him out.

Tanks!