Object-Oriented Philosophy

A couple of tweets tonight pointed to some old dialogues on the web that I had with Mark Fisher (a.k.a. “k-punk”). I can’t remember what I said in them, and am not in the mood to reread them now, so soon after Mark’s death. But those who are interested can find them as follows:

•A dialogue on Capitalist Realism, Mark’s extremely successful and interesting book. If memory serves, this started as an email exchange between us and Mark later suggested we post it online, to which I had no objection. HERE.

•A dialogue with multiple participants on the 2010 World Cup, HERE. Mark insisted on including me because of my sportswriting background, though I was actually out of my depth (I am a casual soccer fan at best). The others really carried the conversation.

Reader T.H. writes to call attention to a mistake I made at the very end of my 2011 article “The Problem with Metzinger” (and in fact, I repeated this mistake in some lectures afterward).

“Just a note to say you seem to have gotten your facts wrong about Fodor (unless he has massively contradicted himself somewhere). From his well-known LRB piece ‘Water’s water everywhere’:

‘Royalties aside, what have they got that we haven’t? It’s not the texture of their prose I shouldn’t think, since most of us write better than most of them. (I don’t include Kierkegaard. He was a master and way out of the league that the rest of us play in.)'”

Here’s the context. In Fodor’s article, which can be read HERE, he begins by complaining about the massive book sales of many continental philosophy authors compared with analytic philosophers.

I emphatically disagree with Fodor that his “most of us” write better than “most of them” (i.e., continentals). As I have claimed in a number of places, the fact that analytic philosophy has a great number of clear writers does not mean that it has an abundance of good writers. Clear writing is generally better than unclear writing, but it takes an awful lot more than clarity to be a good writer. One needs to be vivid and interesting, as well as the ability to present ideas with a certain degree of drama.

That said, my memory was playing tricks on me when I said that Fodor called himself and his friends better writers than Kierkegaard. He explicitly excludes Kierkegaard from his judgment, as the quote from reader T.H. accurately shows.

My apologies for the error.