No Borders Metaphysics

Williamson defines contingentism as the opposite of necessitism and both as follows: Call the proposition that is necessary what there is necessitism and its negation contingentism. In a slightly less compressed form, necessitism says that necessarily everything is necessarily something; still more long-windedly, it is necessary that everything is such that it is necessary that something is identical with it. ( Modal Logic as Metaphysics , 13 - Oxford UP). In still other words, necessitism takes existence as necessary while contingentism has that what exists is contingent on something and could be otherwise. Following contingentism, what exists could be dependent on whatever else exists. This is the sort of contingentism a monadological approach (which I would find in Leibniz but also on Tarde, Whitehead, Latour and maybe others) would embrace. In fact, contingentism seems to follow from Leibniz' law - things are what they are necessarily but they don't exist necessarily (...

Echoes of the dialogue between Whitehead and Kant that goes on often in my mind: ... Alfred: I actually would like to restate something I said before, and correct what I now think was too much of a concession from my part. I previously said I would start out endorsing your first Critique and then proceed speculatively thereafter. I now think the speculative flight I like to take would be taking off too late if the Critique in its entirety is accepted - and the flight won't go high enough. What I do like in the Critique is that it establishes that experience brings in the concrete (extension and contemporaneity) - it adds movement to the world. Experience is what requires space and time. There is a constitution of space and time - what I call concrescence - for experience. Plus, it also brings in substantiality which cannot be placed by in a transcendental sphere, in a sphere that makes experience possible. Substances are there for experience and in fact I would say that they ar...

In June 2013 I wrote a post in this blog called A-ism blues . There, I tell all my despair in the classroom trying to defend any of the versions of A-ist realism that Kit Fine mentions in his "Tense and reality" (in: Modality and Tense , Oxford UP 2005). Fine presents a great analysis of reality and how it could be conceived as not neutral, not absolute and not coherent. I think it is a good way to view the problems, especially when related to possible worlds or first and third persons. But it is, as far as time is concerned, too much of a B-ist way. That is, a presentist view of time is a view where time doesn't passes, a perspectivist view is one where there is no process of changing between different perspectives (but only successive tense perspectives) and a fragmentalist view is a perspectivist view which conceives additionally an über-reality where there is neither time nor tense. These three alternatives make for an important cartography on the way reality is conc...

Finally, our first paper on galaxies is out . We're somehow far from it. I'm now interested in studying small and large galaxies: the ones with just one possible world, for instance, and the one with all but one possible world. What would be the relation between the two associated logics?

Elizabeth Povinelli invokes the issue of what makes Chippel, a rock formation at Karrabing, a form of life. It seems like in our naturalist constitution where Nature and Humanity are the guiding entities (very different from each other), life has a special status of something that is natural but with deserving some special normative attention ("it is really guided by a mechanism, even though it it is a complex one..."). The Karrabing community, however, involves Chippel - she cannot be counted out by a mining company. Povinelli argues that we should get out of what she calls the carbon imaginary that drives a line between the geotic and the biotic. Deleuze and Guattari's third plateau (The geology of morals) describes the interesting double articulation where at the same time substances make form (through sedimentation) and form makes substances (through orogenesis, folding). They are at the same time a double articulation of the molecular and the molar and a description ...

Estas são os textos dos dois primeiros encontros do ciclo animismos e teologia política. A primeira é Política e ontologia: quem distingue quem do que e a segunda é Animismos: ameríndio, moderno, futuro .