Skip to main content

Oriented metaphysics

Been thinking a bit about orientation, inspired by Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology. Orientation is maybe a very interesting idea to import from phenomenology as there is no composition without orientation. In fact, the very notion of home (and the alien) is central to debunk a view from nowhere: there is no view without orientation - that is not blind, or mute... Orientation is provided by forms like space and time or by concepts that would allow us to recognise the traces of our pets or the smell of our workplace. But orientation is not concept-driven. (Yet, it is not enough to provide full-fledged content). Ticks, mammals, trees, salt, planets, train tracks and fire have orientation. It is, also, a way to think of the double modes of existence of properties (or features, or affordances) suspected by C. B. Martin: dispositional and categorical, functional and manifest. Something can be oriented towards a squared wood surface either as a categorical square or as a component for a fitting table.

In fact, orientation is related to directedness, what Molnar sees in intentionality. But it generalises the idea somehow. And provides a way to put together indexicality and perspectives (or dispositions, thought in terms of intentionality): Perry's essential indexical is the irreducible orientation. If all thought is de re, all thought is crucially and irreducibly oriented (or orientated). To think of oriented objects is to think about de re objects: like me, like here, like hot, like liquid. It is an ontology of neighbourhoods: anything is a bundle of its neighbours. This is maybe what interests me: an ecological element to everything, what always responds to their surroundings throughout. Relations of neighbourhood (contact, contagion, immanence) are the origin of any causal power - and this is how I am somehow attracted by occasionalist attempts to vindicate some mitigated form of actualism.

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
1 comment
Read more

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. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more