Skip to main content

A biographical remark on the up for grabs

Ever since I started concentrating in metaphysics I have been focusing on alternative modalities (or, rather, in movements in the modal hexagon of oppositions involving possibility, impossibility, necessity, possibility that not, the absolute and the nabla). First I wondered whether dispositions could be taken as a modality that cannot be reduced to any other - and what would happen if we think in terms of dispositional connections instead of necessary connections. Then I met the Speculative movement and became slowly more confortable with Humean accounts. I thought that there is more to metaphysics than what would have our vain criticism of necessary connections. Things could be up for grabs - in themselves. When I read some process philosophy (and consequences thereafter including OO ontologies and materialist takes such as Bennett's), I thought there would be a way to make the for-us/in-itself distinction (connected to substantiality, see the previous post) itself not necessary. More and more things could be thought as up for grabs and yet not dependent on the human ways. But speculative realism was more than process philosophy - it also involves those who defend the absolute facticity and those who defend the historicity of contingency (both called speculative materialists). In all cases, it somehow seems to draw on a message that I would call generalized Darwinism.

I thought metaphysics would have to deal with the main issue of Book Epsilon of Aristotle's Metaphysics - no episteme (pratike, poietike or theoretike) deals with symbebekos. There is no science of the accidental. Or is it? I thought this is what informed Kant's Humean misgivings with the standard form of doing metaphysics - no necessary connections to be found, nothing to be done. Meillassoux, in fact, hinted quite in this directions with his speculative argument for the principle of facticity. But the issue is, what can be done with the accident? Is there a way to bring it to thought? Is there at least a thought of the accident? Maybe it has to do with indexicality, with singularity, with being among concreta. Or maybe it has to do with what is we engage when we know things by heart (Lucian Freud once said he prefers not to know more than few things, but by heart, as I said in a previous post). I then started gathering resources to conceive this episteme of the symbebekos (floors, plans, spaces of suneches - pure contact, see Metaphysics Delta 1016a7 -, linguistic contact, exceptions etc.) The tool kit to conceive what is up for grabs.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Meta-m

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I