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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

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