No Borders Metaphysics

Sometimes I find myself still a Davidsonian with respect to how to things thinks through. I felt like that when we were working on qualia qua qualitons and I do now, working on physical intentionality without priority monism. The idea is that what is intended is always a type, while relations between objects are external ones. This gets us world holism (the internal relatedness of all things) without monism. Objects could be common to everyone (to every object) but types are not common. Maybe mental causation could then be thought of as a special case of intentionality based internal relatedness of things without internal relations between objects. Maybe physical intentionality entails no more than an anomalous monism...

Been neglecting this blog for more than a week. In fact, my previous post was mostly concocted more than a week ago before meeting Manuel to write a paper on Schaffer's priority monism. Our take was roughly that the step from the internal relatedness of all things to priority monism (there is something that everything depends on and that doesn't depend on anything - for him, the cosmos) is not warranted. In order to do that we developed a notion of internal relatedness of all things (what we call world holism) that clearly entails nothing like a cosmos, or a whole. After that, I came to Efes to be part of this film on Heraclitus. Today we are going to do some unarcheology, bury a stone carved with two recent fragments of the Obscure close to Artemis' temple. One fragment is: in order to understand the logos we ought to be like rolling stones. The other one, however, is quite more to the point of our argument against priority monism as a consequence of world holism: while th...

Interestingly the discussions at the Object-Oriented event and my current enthusiasm for a possible Millnong project led me back to the old preoccupations from the time of my 2008 black book. There I draw both on Kripke's move away from descriptivism and from Lévinas' move away from thought that does no more than fit the other on the same. In both cases, there is an appeal to an other beyond our descriptive thought - some kind of transcendent other. It brings back Meillassoux to my mind, when he insists on making room for the different in nature that cannot blend into a monism of the all too human. I think most process philosophies – including the ontology of fragments – can be seen as having problems with the transcendent other. One possible line to take is to exorcise the craving. I myself feel the attraction of a transcendent other – and the craving for some room for that is in the kernel of my sympathy towards Kripke (and to Lévinas, and to Meillassoux). But I'll try t...

OBJECTORIENTED We are a group of artists, philosophers and programmers who have been meeting up to share our thoughts on art objects, object oriented programming and object oriented metaphysics. The event we are organizing at Leighton Space combines an exhibition, talks and one workshop; we would like it to be an informal forum to reflect on the many ways objects can be perceived, used, made, thought and studied. Phil Jones has been a musician and software developer for nearly 20 years. As the former, he's composed music to accompany ballet, poetry recitals and gallery exhibitions, as well as exploring a number of interactive compositional toys. As the latter he's developed everything from social networks for social entrepreneurs, through industrial scale materials management software for Brazilian pharmacies, to desktop applications in Java. Phil is now a full time student on the MFA in Computational Studio Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. ( http://www.synaes...

Tomas is having problems posting things as comments on this blog, so I paste it here. In any case, what he writes is too important: I believe your question about the possibility of pointing at nonexistents points in the right direction. I think that is what asking if there can be direct reference to nonexistents, the core question of the Millnong project, really amounts to. At first sight, it might seem clear that there can be no such a thing as direct reference to nonexistents. This sounds natural, since there can be no causal relation between utterances of names and nonexistent objects and it happens that the causal chain theories of reference, despite its problems, are the main option to Millianism. But this reasoning is not quite right. Causal chain theories are theories of reference transmission only, that is, they are accounts of how reference is passed on from one utterance or speaker to another. The baptism of an object itself need not be explained as a causal event. Surely, in...

Can nonexistent items be pointed at? Can there be ostension of things that don't exist? I guess an affirmative answer to this questions would be the starting point of a conception of nonexistent objects that would not make them hostage to descriptions. This would be the goal of The Millnong Project I concocted yesterday with Tomas: Mill for names as tags and nong for Meinongism. This would be the way to clarify how far can our Donnellan-like intuitions about the non-attributive role of language dealing with non-existent can go. What is the equivalent of presence when we move to nonexistence? On the other front, that of putting together my anti-desciptivism and my ontology of fragments I thought about using the notion of composition a bit more heavily. The same composition could be viewed differently in different perspectives - individuation precedes the individual composed. Once individuation is done - an object is brought about - we can try and have a firm grip on Kripke's int...