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Showing posts from November, 2015

Freedom and indifference

One of the main targets of Leibniz's criticism (directed to Bayle) in the third part of the Theodicée is the idea that freedom involves indifference. Both in the case of God's free (and wise) choice of one among infinite conceivable possible worlds and in the case of human freedom moved by reasons fully known by God. In paragraph 288 he considers that the three only necessary conditions for freedom are intelligence (distinct knowledge of the object of one's choice), spontaneity (absence of external imposition) and contingency (absence of a logical or metaphysical necessity conducting the course of action). (Incidentally, at least the two last conditions can be ascribed to any agent - or actant - that is not subject to further command either by other agents or by necessities.) Indifference, on the other hand, is both non-existent both for God and any substance (including Buridan's ass) and an anathema to wisdom - God acted wisely, this is why some potentialities were al

Intuitions need conversations?

Expanding on my previous post, I wrote a post in PhilPercs about the project of understanding propositions as irremediably dialogical. Perception is therefore always two-handed, something is perceived while being perceived, in a conversational structure that cannot be rendered in terms of sheer description.

Celan and deconstruction

In La bête et le souverain 10 Derrida makes a close reading of Celan's Büchner prize acceptance speech Le méridien showing what is at stake when Celan invokes the voice and the time of the other that constitutes his poetics. Few years before receiving the prize, Celan wrote a short prose called Entretien dans la montagne which introduces the issue of the voice of the other. Celan makes a distinction between the language said to no one, that language without me and you, and the discourse addressed to someone, said to someone. Stéphane Moses, commenting Celan's text, compares his distinction with the one by Benveniste, récit and discours , the latter being the language of the dialogues where voices are coupled one to the other and the former that language of the impersonal description. In the text, two Jews, Gross and Klein meet up and talk. At some point they consider the earth and the language used to talk about it: "un langage qui n'est fait ni pour toi ni pour

Externalism about experience

Being talking to Carol Marin about current debates in philosophy of emotion. We were considering whether it is still aptest to make the distinction between cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches. Maybe the central issue is really around coordination - those who believe emotions are co-ordinated with the rest of one's psychic lives (like most cognitivists but also Gibbard) on the one hand and the Humeans on the other. Also, the issue is that since Aristotle's De Anima (where he separates the animal sensation from the vegetal development) and mostly after Descartes it is common to believe experience (or sensations, or sense impressions or the deliverances of the senses) in a way that is fully distinguished from emotions (or feelings, or sentiments, or affections). This split in the realm of sense and sensibilia shaped our philosophical panorama for centuries. Hence, emotions are irrelevant for empiricism and sense impressions are not emotions and both for no good reasons.

Interactions, intra-actions and the present time

Beginning to get acquainted with Karen Barad's notion of intra-actions. The issue that comes to my head is the timing of action in intra-action. Is it the present time of events - that is contemporary to us because it shares our sense of present - or rather is it a presence beyond all present time - a sort of previous time or maybe no time at all? Much of what goes on in process philosophy - and specifically in monadologically conceived process philosophy, like in Tarde, Latour and Whitehead - is the redemption of the present time as the time where determinations take place. The present time replaces structural relations or ready-made substances. So, in Leibniz's monadology, the presence of God and the interaction between monads take place outside the present time. Relations between the different substances are not necessary ones, as it is not necessary that the world is the way it is. That means that the world and the relation between different substances are not given by re