No Borders Metaphysics

Been lecturing about themes in my novel Southern Pacific. Yesterday we went into the discussion between Cook and Meinong (two characters of the novel) concerning the unicorn they find in the island where everything written takes place (as well as everything said and everything thought - but all in different regions of the island). The unicorn is a kind of character, in that sense, they cannot really interact with it because it by, for example, touching it because it responds only to what is written about it. The upshot of the discussion is that one can refer to the unicorn by pointing at it by one is only pointing at the descriptions that the object in the island satisfies. There is nothing apart from the satisfaction of the description. This is where I find a Meinongian approach to meaning deeply unsatisfactory (as much as Markus Gabriel's fields of sense): reference is necessarily tied to descriptions and no referential use can be even conceived. Of course I tried to think of a d...

The première of ROO had to be in a Performance Philosophy conference. Guildford, on the 11th this month. Performance is here

Started my course on Aristotle's Metaphysics. We're discussing a book each week. Yesterday my reading of book Alpha focused on the four primordial causes postulated by Aristotle as four requisite stages where every metaphysics has to play. These four stages are 1. The sphere of ousia or quiddity (the realm of forms or formal causes), 2. The sphere of hypokeimenon or yle (the realm of the substrata), 3. The sphere of the engine, or the realm of modification (where efficient causes are located) and 4. the realm of ends (and final causes). A metaphysics cannot be complete without having something to say about these four spheres - not enough to present the constituents of things, it has also to state how things develop into each other, how they fold, how they reduce to each other, how movement takes place in to what aim. These are interesting dimensions to consider different metaphysics; in particular 1 and 2 that don't need to be understood in terms of matter and form, bu...

Much as there is a danger of loosing the specific dimensions of time by making it spacial (as Bergsonians keep pointing out), I always wonder how far can we stretch analogies that go from time to space. I believe there is a McTaggartian element to space where locations are relative to indexicality and distances play the role of events. I was wondering that the multiplicity of spaces - when we move from an image of geometry filled with physics to an image of a plurality of topologies where multiple spaces intertwine with no space in particular playing the part of the purely formal - could be transfered to time. A multiplicity of temporalities, of chronologies as opposed to a fixed calendar providing the merely formal element for other events in time. The calendar is not fixed once and for all but rather is relative to other chronologies by providing a fixity that is needed for time to have a sense of future - the repeated. The repeated is not something independent of any other process b...

Been in the conference of the Performance Philosophy folks. Talked about rhythms and intensive time, see previous post. Thinking about objects and rhythms. Objects, understood in terms of rhythms (and not only in terms of palpable shapes but also in terms of all sorts of properties in their dispositional dimensions), are affordances. Objects have a rhythm associated to them - they crystalize some of the rhythms of their constituting matter. The reduction of objects to rhythms can be thought in terms similar to that of sequences in Kolmogorov complexity. The question that arises is: are there objects without rhythms? (Objects that cannot be reduced to affordances by some other objetcs?). The question is similar to the one about random object. No recursive procedure can decide whether a sequence is random. Random objects can appear, but they are not treated as objects as such. Surely, because rhythms are nested, we can grasp rhythms in bits of the sequence - objects are what appear as o...