Skip to main content

Rethinking BUG's monadology of fragments

In my contemporary philosophy class, I'm approaching Meillassoux's book and diagnoses through some traditions of Kantism in the XXth century, especially post-Sellars. Yesterday I was speaking about the two response-dependence alternatives conceptions of the content of the perceptual experience put forward by McDowell in, respectively, Mind and World and "Avoiding the Myth of the Given". In both case, one needs to be prepared to exercise receptivity, and this preparation involves being able to become a human perceptual reporter. In both cases, the espontaneity involved in the exercise of conceptual capacities ties the perceiver to self-determination as a human subject, capable to recognize the authority of concept and to formulate empirical judgments in perceptual experience. The response-dependence itself, though, is a broader strategy to avoid the Given - the idea that something can be given to me without any contribution of anything that needs to be acquired. In Whitehead, that is unrelated to human perceptual reporters: there cannot be anything captured through perception that is not co-ordinated to whatever else has been acquired and, to be sure, to what matters from a particular perceiver's point of view. The monadology of fragments, in my forthcoming Being Up For Grabs, inherits these features for no composer - this is the way perceivers are labeled - can avoid existing at the same time as compositions and as fragments. To compose is always also to attend to its composition.

The monadology of fragments, on the other hand, can also be thought as the flip side of the ontology of doubts, also in the book, where doubts and indeterminations are part of what the world is. The ontology of doubts is motivated by a possible interpretation of the modes of Aenesidemus and Agrippa that contrasts to the one Sextus puts forward and embraces the idea that the epockhé reveals something about the world, and not only about the way we fail to commit to any belief. But the neo-pyrrhonist epoché has itself two interconnected sides: the rejection of a content as worth believing and its acceptance as a phenomenon. Phenomenon, for Sextus, is not restricted to what the sensibility gives us, it is not in itself an episode of the Given. The ontology of doubts takes doubts to reveal the indeterminacies of the world. It could also take phenomena as constituting the world - they are appearances informed by a perspective that are directly perceived. There could be nothing beyond the phenomenon and in that case it appears as a composition (which is also a fragment and a composer). In other words, if we take the epoché not as a strategy to manage one's cognitive content but as a line of access to things - much like a direct form of cognition - then doubts are part of the world and phenomenons are always composed but could also be part of what there is.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more