Midsummer is a time of year I often find myself taking stock of what I'm doing, listing it out, attempting somehow to unify it by summarising it. So:
I'll be incorporating the final copy edits on my book, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (Princeton) in August, and then submitting the final proofs at the beginning of November, for a publication date of January, 2019.
Rodolfo Garau and I will be completing a full translation of Pierre Gassendi's 'Logic', Part Two of the Syntagma Philosophicum (1658) by the end of July. We will be circulating it to Gassendists, Latinists, and other interested parties at the beginning of August, with an eye to submission for publication at Oxford University Press by the end of the year.
Stephen Menn and I will be completing a full translation of Anton Wilhelm Amo's two treatises, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734) and the so-called 'Meiner Dissertation' (1734), by late October, in time for the Halle Amo conference (see below), as well as a draft of our introduction tracing out his biography, his intellectual context, and his legacy. We hope to submit this work for publication in 2019.
I have a feature piece on Palaeolithic cave art appearing in the September issue of Art in America. I am working on final revisions right now. This follows some months of research and of visits to the (accessible) caves in the Dordogne region.
I have an essay on the history of the beaver --both the European and American species-- as a moral and political exemplum from Pliny the Elder to Walt Disney, appearing in Cabinet Magazine.
I am working, with Graham Burnett, Jeff Dolven, and Catherine Hansen, on an article outlining the theoretical dimensions and the historical development of what we are calling 'documentary parafiction', some of whose precedents include Borges's Ficciones, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars, Han Shaogong's A Dictionary of Maqiao, Jean D'Ormesson's La gloire de l'empire, etc., etc.
Perhaps relatedly, our work also proceeds apace on In Search of the Third Bird, written under the collective name of ESTAR(SER) (Esthetical Society for Transcendental and Applied Realization (now incorporating the Society of Esthetic Realizers)).
I am writing a novel, Moses and Wilhelmina, and will have a complete draft by sometime next year.
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On 2 October I will be giving two very different talks at Princeton University. The first will be for the doctoral students in the IHUM program, and is entitled, "Experiments in Artificial Human Intelligence." The second will be in the Philosophy Department, and it will be on Leibniz on species and teleology.
5 and 6 October I will be back in France, hosting a conference I've co-organised with Noga Arikha, taking place at Columbia University's Reid Hall in Paris, on "The Tripartite Soul in the History of Philosophy and Medicine." We've put together an eclectic mix of scientists, physicians, historians of philosophy, and littérateurs, including a number of people whose work I admire very much, not least Siri Hustvedt and Katie Tabb.
At the end of October I will be participating in a conference at the University of Halle on the philosophy of Anton Wilhelm Amo. This event is largely the result of the incredible organisational work of Dwight Lewis, a doctoral student at the University of South Florida and at Emory.
In November I will be back in Germany for a workshop at the Humboldt University of Berlin, bringing together the collaborators for the Oxford Philosophical Concepts volume on The World Soul, edited by James Wilberding. I'll be commenting on Alison Peterman's contribution.
From 15 to 19 November I'll be in Brazil, where I'm invited to give a talk at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial. I'll be speaking on perception and attention as natural phenomena.
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I am aware that the world is in severe crisis, and some would say that this is no time to be dithering with such trifles as I have outlined. I disagree with this view, and insist that it is precisely the time to be dithering with such trifles.
That said, I am hoping to do what I can to work for the good of the United States and the world in the 2018 midterm elections. I no longer believe that voicing one's opinion in the media, and a fortiori in the social media, as I did so much from 2015 to early 2017, can even in principle do any good. In fact I think it can only help to feed the great algorithmic beast, which is about 80% responsible for how we got into this fucking mess in the first place, and which has as its natural and inescapable condition a perfect homeostatic stalemate. I would rather like to volunteer for some sort of task that can be completed from a distance, for the campaign of a Democratic candidate for the Senate or House whose victory is by no means certain. Beto O'Rourke in Texas, perhaps? I am open to suggestions, and to strategies. I should add, finally, that I am skeptical of the usefulness of doing what many Americans living abroad do, and helping to organise other voters outside the country. Over the years I've found many good reasons to think that absentee ballots in US elections cannot make a crucial difference. I want to volunteer within the United States, even if I am not physically there.
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