Skip to main content

Aenesidemus of Knossos and the ontology of doubts



I am in a small conference in honor of Porchat, a Brazilian Neopyrronist. I’m proposing (in my paper today) a reading of Neopyrronism. I maintain that common sense claims (together with some commonly accepted scientific theories or commonly known philosophical disputes) can be accepted by the sceptic only in order to fuel his exercise of doubting. The Neopyrronist takes something like the opposite of a speculative flight. She accepts a basis of science or common sense in order to doubt further. The goal is to maximize doubts. The basis (the Neopyrronist phenomenon) is contingent, it can be anything because any determination can enable further exercises of doubt to take off. Instead of flying towards broader vistas, the Neopyrronist strives to gain further and deeper doubts. She aims to apply her strategies for epokhé further and, in that sense, harbors an atitude where doubts are more worth seeking than belief. She craves to make more use of her weapons that include her doubting machines - say, the modes of Aenesidemus and Agrippa which enables her to suspend the judgement over all kinds of issues. She engages in a flight towards the heights of suspended judgement. It is a speculative flight, but towards a proliferated landscape of doubts and uncertainties. This Neopyrronist is a kind of the opposite of the knowledge seeker - or rather the devil of any knowledge seeker: she aims at spreading consistent and well-argued ignorance.

I contrasted this version of Neopyrronism with my ontology of doubts. Surely, the sceptic can challenge the ontologist of doubt by questioning the belief that there are doubts out there. The sceptic suspends judgement concerning the ontological status of doubts (whether they are out there, in here or in a special substance, a res cogitans). The sceptic is noncommittal concerning doubts and determinations and
takes the ontologist of doubt to work with a fixed determination, a fact of the matter concerning doubts. (The supposed reply of the ontologist of doubt is that there would be no alternative to either an ontology of doubt and an ontology of fact and, facing this tertium non datur, it is better to embrace the former). The sceptic then calls the ontologist of doubt to a battle in open field where the nature of doubts (and determinations) is also there, up for grabs. Both act as if they should look for doubts - the ontologist because she seeks knowledge, the sceptic because she seeks to dismantle all sorts of knowledge claims. The Neopyrronist makes use of some determination to unveil further doubts.

Concerning the ontology of doubts, I was told that Aenesidemus of Knossos (one of the classical sources of sceptic modes, mentioned by Sextus) moved on to follow Heraclitus and the polemos. Aenesidemus became then somehow an ontologist of doubts. Maybe then he is the missing link between the sceptic challenge on justification and the Heraclitean challenge on determination. (See photos above)




Comments

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