Is it literally the case that Alexander Galloway associated "object-oriented philosophy" with "object-oriented programming"? Is that fantastically the case, argument by homonym?
So I can say that Marxism has to do with suspiciously enormous mustaches and eyebrows, because of a shared name?
Or that Schelling has to do with rifles and is thus complicit with weapons manufacture?
Or that Derrida is about deriding things?
(And Foucault is about **** all!)
This is a whole lot of fun. This is a whole new level of stringency for peer reviewed essays.
Ah, umm, err, Tim, you guys realize you're being played, don't you? Galloway's at NYU, no? Well, who else is at NYU? Alan Sokal, that's who. It's obvious that Galloway's a zombie operating under Sokal's command.
ReplyDeleteI left this remark (among others) at Agent Swarm:
I tend to think these attempts to construe Being on a mathematical model are idealist on the face of it regardless of whatever else is brought to bear in the subsequent argumentation.
I'll also note that, when that sort of thing comes up, I get a lot of "cross talk" from the sort of argument mathematician and software entrepreneur Steven Wolfram has made in A New Kind of Science. He's arguing that the world is computational in nature. The argument is very abstract but, I don't think, intended as analogical. The cosmos IS computational, and Wolfram offers his best guess at what the algorithms are. He's not the first to make such an argument, but, at this point, he's the most visible proponent of such a view.
FWIW, I've been aware of Gödel's proof and the like since my undergraduate days and of Cantor's work since graduate school. I haven't gone the full technical distance on those ideas, but I've spent time talking with people who have and they've played a role in my thinking. But I wouldn't want to hoist a metaphysics on them.