https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/the-po...mes-series
INTRO: Paul Livingston is interested in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, phenomenology, metaphysics, and political philosophy from a perspective grounded in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, analytic and continental. Here he discusses new collective directions or ways of living that make sense, realism, the politics of logic, why he's not a linguistic idealist, set theory and ontology, the formalism of formalism, the Buddhist tradition, Badiou, the foundations of authority and the constitution of power, Carl Schmitt, the importance of Frege, Russell, Godel and Cantor, truth and temporal change, realism about time, being and their relationship, sense, realism and ontological difference, and Michael Dummett... (MORE - the interview)
EXCERPTS: '... it seems to me that if we want to get at “metaphysical structure” we need to say something about what kind of thing that could be and how it relates to the logic of truths, and this has to go beyond just appealing to naturalism or the continuity of philosophy with natural science. Just appealing (for example) to primitive “naturalness” or “carving at the joints” doesn’t seem to me to say much. I’m also not sure we’re trying to find out “facts about the world” or what that would mean, if it’s not what physicists or other natural scientists are supposed to be doing, rather than philosophers or logicians.'
'I want to say that my point in appealing to Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s proofs -- and maybe better even than those to Tarski’s results – is not to say that a formalism of the whole, or a formalism that will be complete in relation to its intended domain, is impossible. It’s rather, and this is important, to say that if it is complete in this sense it will be inconsistent.'
'... realism is a matter of the objective determination of claims as either true or false, tertium non datur . This is good both because it brings in the structure of truth centrally and explicitly, and because it isn’t in any sense a formulation in terms of the opposition between “subjects” and “objects” or the “mind-dependence” or “independence” of things. Rather than presupposing that kind of dichotomy, I find it much more useful to think about it in Dummett’s way where we are essentially considering whether there is always a way that sense is determined by us through the contingency of our practices or our abilities – which is to allow that truth goes only as far as we have determined or are in an idealized way capable of determining given our epistemic capacities (the anti-realist view) – or to refuse any such picture and say truth is determined just by the way things are and that sense goes as far as this.'
INTRO: Paul Livingston is interested in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, phenomenology, metaphysics, and political philosophy from a perspective grounded in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, analytic and continental. Here he discusses new collective directions or ways of living that make sense, realism, the politics of logic, why he's not a linguistic idealist, set theory and ontology, the formalism of formalism, the Buddhist tradition, Badiou, the foundations of authority and the constitution of power, Carl Schmitt, the importance of Frege, Russell, Godel and Cantor, truth and temporal change, realism about time, being and their relationship, sense, realism and ontological difference, and Michael Dummett... (MORE - the interview)
EXCERPTS: '... it seems to me that if we want to get at “metaphysical structure” we need to say something about what kind of thing that could be and how it relates to the logic of truths, and this has to go beyond just appealing to naturalism or the continuity of philosophy with natural science. Just appealing (for example) to primitive “naturalness” or “carving at the joints” doesn’t seem to me to say much. I’m also not sure we’re trying to find out “facts about the world” or what that would mean, if it’s not what physicists or other natural scientists are supposed to be doing, rather than philosophers or logicians.'
'I want to say that my point in appealing to Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s proofs -- and maybe better even than those to Tarski’s results – is not to say that a formalism of the whole, or a formalism that will be complete in relation to its intended domain, is impossible. It’s rather, and this is important, to say that if it is complete in this sense it will be inconsistent.'
'... realism is a matter of the objective determination of claims as either true or false, tertium non datur . This is good both because it brings in the structure of truth centrally and explicitly, and because it isn’t in any sense a formulation in terms of the opposition between “subjects” and “objects” or the “mind-dependence” or “independence” of things. Rather than presupposing that kind of dichotomy, I find it much more useful to think about it in Dummett’s way where we are essentially considering whether there is always a way that sense is determined by us through the contingency of our practices or our abilities – which is to allow that truth goes only as far as we have determined or are in an idealized way capable of determining given our epistemic capacities (the anti-realist view) – or to refuse any such picture and say truth is determined just by the way things are and that sense goes as far as this.'