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Showing posts from October, 2016

Contingency and hospitality

Attempting to understand a connection between the contingent and a decision concerning what is not determined (i.e. not decided) in the sense that nothing else could replace this decision. Contingency is the plural of necessity but also its offspring and one that is keen on parricides. This is my recent philpercs post about this .

The ABC of Agency, Being up for grabs and Contingency - ABC + process philosophy conference this week in Liverpool

I'm being thinking a lot about agency and contingency - and how agency requires the contrast between the contingent and the non-contingent along the lines rehearsed in Being Up For Grabs. Contingency itself is a departure and as such it is an opening to what lies beyond - to a commencement. In any case, below is the text I will be in principle reading at the ABC + Process Philosophy do in Liverpool: Process philosophy is to a great extent about agency. If it is about seeing reality through the processes that constitute it and not through the constituted products, agency is brought in as the instance where processes start. To be sure, one can then wonder how to best understand agency. Does it require intentional action directed to an objective or could it rather to be found in any act that determines any other without being at all determined? Is intentionality necessary for agency and, for that matter, is it sufficient (is any intentional act an act of agency)? I will not proceed

A sketch of a Manifesto for Polystylism in Philosophy (in its very first draft)

When speaking in an International Colloquium on Philosophy and Anthropology in October 1968 Derrida started bringing into question the politics of any international colloquium as such. The idea of the colloquium was to think the human through together with the anthropologists and therefore Derrida moves quickly towards what he takes to be the contribution he could give to the event: address the question of the human as it was conceived and discussed in France at the time (his contribution was called "Les fins de l'homme" and was published in Marges de la philosophie )). The idea that was behind his choice of subject - and it is interesting that his main concern is the insufficient and inattentive reading of German philosophers in France - was that he was going to provide some kind of account (not a report, but still a piece of news) about how philosophy has been done in the country where he comes from. It does sound as if the philosophical endeavor, in its most basic leve

Deconstruction as process philosophy

Following the lines of the last post , I read Mooney's article "Whitehead and Derrida". He argues that there are important similarities between Whitehead's philosophy and deconstruction in Derrida. Specially when it comes to deal with substances, complete presences and contingency. Derrida's conception of writing as leaving traces agrees well with the idea of prehension as a perception that could live aside some things while keeping in them somehow what was not considered. The greatest contrast are precisely when it comes to Whitehead's subjective ends - the entity's agenda - that condition the action and cannot be set aside. What is interesting is that Mooney portraits Derrida as unhappy with what is presented in Whitehead because every code can be rewritten by adding supplement, and this is always done in reading itself. The limits to supplementing code is really justice: and that shows up in the form of a conversation (or a negotiation) among subjective

Towards a non-ontologist monadology

I'm thinking how to develop the monadology of fragments, presented in Being Up For Grabs , which is described as a monadology of hospitality as it avoids what I call the problem of the selfish monad in the recently written book Diáspora da Agência (hopefully out next year). The problem of the selfish monad can arise when we consider Levinas criticism of Husserl's alter ego in the fifth Méditation . Shaviro, in the first chapter of The Universe of Things considers a similar problem when he contrasts Whiteheadian satisfaction and Lebinasian concern. The general problem, as I see it, is that monadologies and process philosophy are often done from the point of view of the agenda of the agents. Whitehead, for instance, builds a lot on subjective aims that are taken as conditioners of the life of an actual entity. There is a zeal with oneself present in each monad (and each actual entity) that cannot be completely taken away without making it perish. In Modes of Thought 8 ("Na