No Borders Metaphysics

Our script for The Birth of Phtonosophy (mine and Carol Barreiro's) is out in VIS. Here it is: Cena 1: Alpendre. Lá está o primeiro anjo, gordo, com uma roupa de terreiro e com um sorriso de quem deitou-se na rede o dia todo. Ele abre os braços, se alonga com demora e, sorrindo, murmura: ANJO: Ai que preguiça. Preguiça do amor bom. Preguiça do amor tributável. Preguiça do amor que admira sem arrancar pedaço. Preguiça do amor que é caridade e não dilaceração. O anjo deita na rede vermelha, trançada, cheia de óleos esparramados e, com a voz de uma heresia gnóstica cáustica: ANJO: Eu sempre amei essa coisa disforme, fugidia, levada, precária, indisciplinada, transformista, safada e violenta que é a sabedoria. O anjo se balança na rede enquanto levanta as pernas roçando uma na outra. Aparecem agora apenas suas pernas, seus braços do lado de fora da rede vermelha. Aparecem cinco pernas, cinco braços rodando por cima da rede como um carrossel – o anjo agora é um Nataraja cheio...

Co-existence (and genuinely meeting something) has to do with experience: the impact of what we meet can only be accesses in a posteriori manner. If to be exist is to co-exist, to exist is to be in the plan of experience (to exist is like, as I said in one of my posts yesterday, being in a crowd). This plan of experience is where something encounters something else and whatever is encountered is a pole in the subject-superject structure of a proposition, according to Whitehead, and therefore an actual entity. Whitehead takes perception to be the metaphysically cement of the world - it should replace substance. As a consequence, as he puts it, the genetic story about an actual entity precedes the morphological story - actual entities are detected by perception and then located in the organization of space. The genetic story - where prehensions and their capacity to bring in novelty takes place - is where experience takes place; it is a story of perceptions of all kinds and what acts as ...

I gathered Figal is quite a well-known person in the Heideggerian circles. Don't know him but I liked his attitude of resigning the presidency of the Martin Heidegger Geselschaft for it seems that one has to be more faithful to philosophy than to any philosopher. This is an interview with him. Whether or not he knew the content of the Black Notebooks beforehand is an issue but not a crucial one, I guess. It is unlikely, as a chair, that he didn't have privileged access to this writings of Heidegger. But still, he did what seems to be the right thing making clear that he believes that one doesn't think the way Heidegger does (in the Black Notebook), not if one is a philosopher.

Been thinking a bit about this idea that came to me lecturing on Whitehead last year: to be is to be part of a current agreement ("être est entente"- call it "EEE"). Sponsoring something is a way to make something exist as the agreement has to be enough to make something come into being (or bring something about, or "instaurer"). I hope to soon spell out details of a sponsoring account of truth, that is part of the broader EEE thesis, in terms of contributors as articulators of truth-makers. I also hope to soon articulate EEE in terms of the structure of a proposition, and adopt a Whiteheadian take on it by considering the subject and the supraject (and how they have meet up in some sort of copula). EEE is an ontological thesis that fleshes out the idea that to exist is more like being part of a crowd - where nothing subsists on its own - than to have a property of existence - that could be reached by being for instance the most perfect - or to have be a p...

I draw from Latour a slogan about how to conceive ontology from the point of view of politics: look at the realpolitik . It is as we were invited to look at a realontologie , something that goes beyond laws and principles while taking them as part of the landscape.Interestingly, von Rochau, who created the term realpolitik defines it as focused on: "the powers that shape, maintain and alter the state [a]s the basis of all political insight" and that it "leads to the understanding that the law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world". Ontology is not about the execution of general principles or the instantiation of laws but rather it is about what is made to generate, discard and circumvent these laws. Latour talks about the practice of the real politicians, how they do their petty negotiations in parliament, in think tanks, in lobbying institution and inside palaces. They knit a network of agreements that range f...

I've been reading Anne Sexton and Peter Handke. Sexton's Death Notebooks and Handke's Essay on tiredness . While writing something on pictures in my Buca L'Ombrello blog , I had some thoughts about how I understand philosophy. I self-quote some bits: > I then proceed to say that I think in pictures, in plots and not in oppositions: to affirm rather than to dwell in contrasts. To investigate a picture, as Handke puts it, seems a good methodological guideline for metaphysics. In the book I wrote this year, hopefully to appear soon, I present three ontologies under the name of ontoscopies . They are pictures of things driven by fragments, doubts or rhythms. They are pictures: perceptions of what there is. But, maybe because, as Whitehead would insist, perception is constitutively creative, they contrast with each other. What I try to do there is to explore the pictures - something emerge not from the picture, but to its investigation. Hence, for instance, intuition...

I think there is a lot to unpack in Latour's observations about truth. I think his thoughts here are in the right directions. For example, in Irréductions 2.4.8. he goes: Une phrase ne tient pas parce qu'elle est vraie; c'est parce qu'elle tient qu'on la dit vraie. Elle tient à quoi? Mais, justement, à beaucoup de choses. Truth is what is maintained - it supervenes on its truth-makers, on what contributes to it. I wonder whether I can understand truth in terms of supporters, of what holds a relation of instauration , of sponsoring the true proposition (or belief, or statement, or sentence). My model is that of an agreement, but not only with the human agents but between a sufficient number of relevant actants. If it is so, the truth-bearer is somehow a truth-maker, a contributor. Truth could then be taken to be a report on the agreement between sponsors. Truth lies in the agreement between sponsors – but it is always subject to new tests of resistance, as L...