No Borders Metaphysics

I'm beginning to engage more directly with the Travis-McDowell controversy on the content of perceptual experience and on having the world available in experience (Travis: "Unlocking the outside world", "The silence of the senses" and "Reasons reach", McDowell: "Avoiding the myth of the Given"). I'm doing that trying to look for broadly Whiteheadian elements to illuminate the debate. Travis makes use of Frege to somehow craft a direct realist position according to which the environment is open to one's view in perception. Through this account, it is possible to conceive of perception as an opening to the world and experience as a source of warrant that is completely different from what is justified (inferentially) through beliefs. McDowell responds to Travis position - more than to any particular argument he finds in his texts - with sympathy: he feels urged to move away from his Mind and World position according to which perceptual

Few years back, in 2013, Simone Lima, Lorraine de Fátima, Denise Agustinho, Valesca Zanello and others were involved in concocting a collective book proposal on animal ethics inspired by Circe. Nothing, as far as I know, came out of it. What has happened? What should we rather do? Below is the proposal we wrote. Ethica Circea The transgressive virtues of transforming animals The idea of this book arose from a group of researchers coming together to try and think of the ethical perspective of animals. The group composed by biologists, psychologists, philosophers and classical scholars felt that most recent work on animal ethics is done from a human perspective and no effort is done to consider what could possibly be the animal point of view. The overall consensus was that the endeavor to think about ethical issues concerning animals should start with considering features of their life and embodiment. And, in fact, such starting point should exorcize the many forms of appeal to g

Elizabeth Grosz, in her "Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom"(in New Materialisms , ed. by Coole and Frost, 2010, Duke), draws on Bergson to explore the notion of freedom to, a predicate of acts that involves the capacity to move in an unconstrained way. She cites Bergson (on page 148) saying that the "absence of any tangible reason is the more striking the deeper our freedom goes". She understands freedom as something positive, akin to what Deleuze had in mind when he insisted on a connection between freedom and movement (see my previous post on freedom to ). It interesting to compare Bergson's notion, under Grosz' lenses, with the analysis Leibniz offers in section 288 of the Theodicy. There he considers freedom to be composed of intelligence, contingency and spontaneity - but not of indifference. Indifference, Leibniz claims, has nothing to do with freedom, it is just nonsense to assume that there are real clinamina, swerves, in the world like the Epicuris

Depois de alguns dias na Serra da Capivara, um rápido encontro com a arqueóloga que descobriu tudo em sua casa em São Raimundo Nonato. Começa aqui e segue aqui.