Skip to main content

My lectures on Gora philosophy at the University of Madras



Unbelievable? St Thomas died quite here in Chennai.

On the 21st of February, I'll deliver my open talk here in Madras called Towards a Tantric Ontology. It's going to be about urges and my take on what I call the underlying tectonics of the events. Meanwhile, they asked me to deliver some general lectures about contemporary Western philosophy. As I'm thinking a lot about the saga of correlationism, this is what I decided to do: a course on the tension between correlationism and the metaphysical endeavour. This is the programme for the 7 lectures - the first one was this morning:

1.Hume and the content of perceptual experience. Powers, generalization and habit. Hume´s actualism. Kant and the synthetic a priori. The Copernican revolution. The transcendental distinction. Correlationism.
2.Hegel and the absolute. Absolute correlation and the return of a reason-based jigsaw picture of the world. Intuitions bound to concepts. Correlation made necessary. Determinate negation and difference.
3.Carnap vs Quine: experience and human sovereignty. Our image of the world as a pale gray fabric, black of facts and white of conventions. Descriptive metaphysics. Quine and the impossibility of translation.
4.Will, life and thought: generalizing the correlation. How far can correlationism be stretched? Going beyond ourselves by considering us as an example. Whitehead's point against our specificity; lakes, mountains and us.
5.Structuralist challenges on the human. Correlationism without the us? The criticism of the autonomy of the subject. Wittgenstein's Lebensformen: the situated subject and the force of hinge propositions.
6.One or (too) many correlations? The dissolution of the unifying subject. Davidson's argument for (some) public knowledge: an argument against correlationism or just more generalized correlationism?
7.The speculative turn and its fight against correlationism. Meillassoux's attempt to respond to correlationism while accepting its main tenets. A metaphysics of generalized contingency: back to Hume?

Comments

  1. Composing9 February 2011 at 01:35

    I'd love to see these. Can you video them and put them on YouTube?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dismantling absolute contingency

I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
6 comments
Read more

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory Assemblages out!

  Memory Assemblages is out at Bloomsbury This is the book I wrote during most of 22 and 23. It proposes a spectral realism based on the idea that archives are ubiquitous - I call this pan-mnemism. It offers a conception of how memory related deeply with persistent addition of new events, thoughts and circumstances and this addends concoct varying assemblages of what is retained and what brings this archives to the fore. It also rejects the idea that there is an archeology to the archive - or an ontology to hauntology. Even if it boils down merely to postulate traces or forms. I have neglected this blog for a while and I don't expect myself to be very much back to it soon. But I will talk about the book in my youtube channel, in an English language playlist called "On Memory Assemblages" .  
Post a Comment
Read more