No Borders Metaphysics

Asking people around here in Brazil what was worse for the country, 1964 or 2016. Folks who were alive and grown enough around 1964 are mostly depressed and discouraged - most of them say that 2016 was worse. Of course, these are people I know, and of course are mostly commies or otherwise anarchists or lefties. But this is what matters in my question which can be formulated like this: for those who were utterly aghast and outraged by 1964, how does 2016 feel. One of the reasons why 2016 was worse is that in 1964 there were right-wingers against the coup. In 16 we had none of that. Such polarization left the country without common principles around which to fight and no institutional common denominators. To be sure, it is too soon to make a comparison. But it does feel pretty bleak around here now.

Brazil is quickly turning back into a plantation. The open scars of Latin America carry on being wide open and infected. It has always been also a lab for other endeavors of power elsewhere - it will continue like this. What is the way out? I've been taken by Pasolini last texts (at around 1974/5). In his last text, a discourse that was meant for a Radical Party convention, he distinguishes between communism and extremism. The latter is the goal of expanding the form of life of the white (male, heterossexual) borgeoisie to the subaltern classes because the privileged know better, live better, plan better, feel better and think better. As Pasolini says in his Unhappy Youngsters , the idea is that poverty (and deprivation of bougi goods) are the worse of all possible evils. Since his death, as he feared, the left became more and more extremist (cultural wars, political correctness in language) and with extremism the left discourse and gesture became tamed. Everyone was invited (or ...

The hand-out of my presentation: Algumas observações sobre a metafísica da contingência O problema de Xandoca: Pode haver a metafísica tratar da contingência? Ou esta seria apenas uma metafísica negativa no sentido de que ela não trataria da contingência (a contingência é o que é deixado de lado pela metafísica)? Um tratamento metafísico da contingência não a tornaria não-contingente? O problema da metafísica com a contingência: 1. (Aristoteles) A metafísica procura encontrar conexões necessárias no concreto (no sensível). O conhecimento (metafísico) é conhecimento do necessário (e do permanente). 2. (Heráclito/Platão/Hume) Pode ser que não haja conexões necessárias no concreto (ou não haja conexões necessárias que possam ser detectadas, ou nenhuma conexão necessária dê forma ao concreto). Uma conclusão: (Kant) A metafísica deve procurar conexões necessárias em algum outro lugar (por exemplo, entre normas transcendentais ou regras semânticas). Outra conclusão: A metafísica dev...

A lot of the metaphysical development since Descartes can be expressed in terms of the Aristotelian notion of substance. Descartes showed that substances could be conceived without ousia prote , without substratum - nothing is beyond the predication associated to it. So, the thinking substance is nothing beyond thought. Leibniz drawn on that to postulate infinite substratum-free substances and proposing what became known as the law of Leibniz. Each simple substance is just its predicates, nothing beyond it, no underlying substratum that would hold together all the predications. If we take (some) developments in process philosophy to be neo-monadological in the sense that Leibniz is a key influence, we can see how, for example, Whitehead's actual entities (which are not substances) are also substratum-free: they are individuated and identified by their relations, perceptions and concrescence - roughly by their predications. (In contrast, we can posit substance-less substrata that wo...

In his Mathematical Review piece on my paper with Alexandre and Edelcio on galaxies that appeared in Studies in Universal Logic in 2015 , Andrzej Indrzejczac briefly analyses the content of the paper and diagnoses it as "no more than a manifesto". I guess the paper is a manifesto and we need then whenever new directions are possible or required. We sensed that the research in universal logic was unknown to those doing metaphysics in a (broadly Lewisian) framework of possible worlds and that state of affairs could and should be remedied. Our paper intends to set the stage for a possible metaphysics that considers possible worlds together with logical diversity. It offers a programme and start implementing it. The idea that a logic can be given by pointing at a set of possible worlds - which is proposed but not developed - is itself a glance in the power of diversity in logical systems. In that first paper we wanted to present the idea: that a metaphysics could be informed by u...

Thinking about communities like those of Cádiz or Saint Josse in Brussels and many others that cannot exercise hospitality because of national borders. They right as communities (and as households) are severed if they cannot decide about their guests. They become like confined and controlled societies within their national borders - they cannot decide who they are going to host. They are confined because they are under surveillance, forced to have a lower intensity agency.

Three years after this post and the discussion on Optimaes I realize how much I changed my views on the topic. I do tend to believe in agents although they ought to be infinitely responsible. I still believe erosion is the way to go but suspect capitalism has always been reactionary. I now tend to grant more force to the second alternative among the three I sketched. Still, there are many things I still agree. In the meantime (and I guess ever since the crisis of 2008) the devastating, totalitarian, conformist and hypocritical nature of capitalism has been more disclosed. Here is the 2013 response to Phil in Optimaes: Interesting way of putting things. Now, Phil and I in conversation considered responses to the (pro-capitalist, maybe libertarian) challenge that can be expressed like this: “to be against capitalism is to be a conservative”. This challenge can responded in three different ways that we can sketch like this: Bite the bullet and embrace a conservative discourse (tryin...

I was wondering, in my thinking about co-existence and hospitality, of how much the idea of a family works as ersatz self-sufficiency. In other words, how the crucial link between an existent and its co-existents is replaced by a pre-figured circle of co-existence in such a way that such a circle (such a sphere) replaces the individual existent becoming a unity of co-existence. Familism is the idea that infinite responsibility for the other can be confined to a sphere - so, for instance, familism but also Tardean societies that make molecules or microbes respond almost only to social groups of their own. Familism is the assumption of a sort of a co-ontological short circuit where the family and the larger group (including the community, societies and the species as providing a sense of belonging) can be somehow like an individual of greater size. In terms of Simondon, we can think of familism as the drive for fixed individuals, for ready-made units indifferent to the processes of indiv...

Yesterday I presented Being Up For Grabs in the University of Granada, in Spanish. Because I had troubles translating a lot of expressions, the hand out (below) was in English. Discussions revolved around the varieties of ontologies of doubt and the notion of fragment and whether it points at a genuinely different mode of existence within the monadology of fragments. The problem: 1. Metaphysics aims at finding necessary connections among concreta. Metaphysical knowledge is knowledge of the necessary (and the permanent). 2. There are no necessary connections among concreta (or no necessary connections that can be detected there, or no necessary connection shape up the concreta). One conclusion: Metaphysics should look for necessary connections and necessity in general somewhere else (for example, in transcendental norms, or in semantic rules). Another conclusion: Metaphysics should look at concreta even if there are no necessary connections there. Trouble for the latter: Can the...

The general image that seems to emerge from a project like this is that agency involves a degree of solitude with one's actions and therefore agency involves a degree of hospitality. In terms of the monadology of fragments ( Being Up For Grabs , chap. 3), agents are composers but also fragments in the hands of other composers: they are subjects to other agencies they encounter - they are up for grabs. (See the very last section of the book where the monadology of fragments is connected to the ontoscopy of doubts and the rhythm-oriented ontology.) They are therefore subject to contamination, to contagion. Their poiesis is somehow tied up with other agent's poiesis - and this gets us close to hospitality. It is an affair of rhythms: agents are affected by the pace of things around them. That is, they are at the mercy of the events that take place independently around what they are up to. This introduces a Deleuzian element to the project. In fact, the general form of hospitality ...

J'ai écris ça comme une idée générale du livre que j'essais d'écrire (en français). Maintenant il s'appelle "L'interruption - hospitalité et la métaphyisique des autres": Qu'est-ce qu'une véritable interruption ? L'idée même peut seulement s'expliquer par rapport à quelque chose d'extérieur à une démarche. L'interruption est l'épisode où un autre se fait présent : un bruit, le voisin, un autre désir, un souvenir, quelqu'un qui demande, l'ordre du jour de ceux qui arrivent, un accident, des conséquences imprévues, le climat qui change, Gaïa. Pouvoir être interrompu est être avec des autres – être à disposition de ce qui co-existe, mis en jeu par ceux qui ont leurs enjeux dans un espace d'événements partagé. L'extérieur d'une démarche est ce qui interrompt ; et l'extérieur est l'étranger, l'étrange à un cours d'actions, l'exotique qui se détache et se présent comme arraché d'un proces...

Voici le texte de ma présentation aujourd'hui au Séminaire Leibniz à la ULB, invité par Arnaud Pelletier: Est-ce que la monadologie (et la néo-monadologie) suffit pour une philosophie des autres? 1. Leibniz : interdépendance et action Si on est intéressé aux liens métaphysiques entre l'existence et la co-existence, l'idée d'une monadologie est un point de départ. Leibniz a conçu ce qui existe (sauf Dieu) comme impossible sinon comme une partie du monde – ce que n'existe pas dans le monde, ne peut pas exister. La co-existence est la mesure de l'existence. Ce qui est partage un monde et ce qui ne partage pas le monde n'existe pas. Cette mesure est centrale pour la monadologie. La conception leibnizienne de la substance, bien comme ses notions de mondes possibles et du monde actuel, ne peuvent pas être compris sans cette mesure de l'existence. Premièrement, ce qui existe doit appartenir a un monde possible puisqu'il n'y a pas de substance p...

Been thinking in what I'm after in terms of alternatives to factism. Roughly speaking, and to begin with, factism is the thesis according to which there are atemporal, impersonal, reachable (albeit not necessarily ever reached) facts in the world independent of time, tense, rhythms, personal engagements, subjectivity and query strategies. In other words, it implies that things are the way they are independently of any agent, of any approach, of any way closeness one is to them. Anti-factist positions, of course, can be full-bloodedly realist in the sense of the existence of an out-there however complex and processual. Anti-factism is a form of process philosophy because it postulates many commencements and rejects the claim that things are made at some point once and for all. There are many avenues to anti-factism. I've been exploring three of them, that maybe have to do with my three ontoscopies in Being Up For Grabs (Fragments, Doubts, Rhythms). The first one is through a ...

I wrote in philperce about my project with Aharon for the Hamburg Performance Philosophy gig. It is about exchanging and donating one's citizenship.

Attempting to understand a connection between the contingent and a decision concerning what is not determined (i.e. not decided) in the sense that nothing else could replace this decision. Contingency is the plural of necessity but also its offspring and one that is keen on parricides. This is my recent philpercs post about this .

I'm being thinking a lot about agency and contingency - and how agency requires the contrast between the contingent and the non-contingent along the lines rehearsed in Being Up For Grabs. Contingency itself is a departure and as such it is an opening to what lies beyond - to a commencement. In any case, below is the text I will be in principle reading at the ABC + Process Philosophy do in Liverpool: Process philosophy is to a great extent about agency. If it is about seeing reality through the processes that constitute it and not through the constituted products, agency is brought in as the instance where processes start. To be sure, one can then wonder how to best understand agency. Does it require intentional action directed to an objective or could it rather to be found in any act that determines any other without being at all determined? Is intentionality necessary for agency and, for that matter, is it sufficient (is any intentional act an act of agency)? I will not proceed ...

When speaking in an International Colloquium on Philosophy and Anthropology in October 1968 Derrida started bringing into question the politics of any international colloquium as such. The idea of the colloquium was to think the human through together with the anthropologists and therefore Derrida moves quickly towards what he takes to be the contribution he could give to the event: address the question of the human as it was conceived and discussed in France at the time (his contribution was called "Les fins de l'homme" and was published in Marges de la philosophie )). The idea that was behind his choice of subject - and it is interesting that his main concern is the insufficient and inattentive reading of German philosophers in France - was that he was going to provide some kind of account (not a report, but still a piece of news) about how philosophy has been done in the country where he comes from. It does sound as if the philosophical endeavor, in its most basic leve...