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Showing posts from August, 2011

My talk at the Ontology and Politics workshop in Manchester: The Polemos, or politics and ontology meet on fire

it depends whether our passions reach fever heat and influence our whole life or not.  No one knows to what he may be driven by circumstances, pity, or indignation; he does not know the degree of his own inflammability Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, 72 Politics and ontology meet on fire. A blow. Events catching other events like fuel. Both ontology and politics dwell on collision and urges. Nothing is beyond the ever-living fire and its contagions, its combustion, its bursts. Nothing is beyond the reach of its reshaping capacity. Neither the remotely small components of an atomic particle, nor a car parked at Clarence Road, Hackney. They meet in fire, and yet they are not just fire. Ontology and politics are about the lack of stable reductions. Inflammability. Fire in its advance will judge and convict all things, says Heraclitus (66). But fire mingles with spices, he adds, and takes the flavour of them. It hides underneath any establishment. Inflammability is the source

Objects and modes of presentation

Discussing with Tom Beament the fourth feature of intentionality in the Brentano-Molnar approach. Physical intentionality requires ice and liquid water to be taken as two modes of presentation - or an apple and an apple pill with all of its chemical components. Tom argues that in cases of (non-physical) intentionality, differences in modes of presentation - take Hesperus-Phosphorus and Superman-Clark Kent as the typical examples - have nothing to do with what can be described in terms of the directed object. It is not a physical difference, I think he wants to say. I'm convinced that it is enough, for Molnar to have his way about a significant similarity between Brentano's features of intentionality and his physical intentionality, that at least some cases of differences in modes of presentation can be understood in terms akin to those used in the examples of physical intentionality (say the ice example or the apple pill example). That is to say, at least in some cases, d

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev