No Borders Metaphysics

Been thinking about Levinas´ appeal from the Other in terms of what inculcates in me a decision that is not a product of my freedom but an imposition from justice coming from the Other. When an appeal is made, I endowed with responsibility, as the need to respond. Thought like this, responsibility is not about spontaneity or self-determination because it is responsibility for the Other. It is heterological: it is placed in me by the Other, it is basically the result of a vulnerability and a plea. The Other inculcates a decision in me, a decision I´m not free to discard; not because I am a being-for-freedom or because I live in the open, but because I have been under the appeal of the Other. Once this appeal is made, it is out of my reach to get out of the decision - the decision is imposed on me. Now, if we take this scheme to be something general about the Other, the decision situation is brought about by an Other and arguably agency derives accordingly from alterity. In other words...

Tristes tempos de golpe em uma terra de golpes. Neste país em que os Guarani algum dia formaram uma sociedade que perseguia com determinação qualquer forma de instituição estatal, agora são todas as instituições estatais que perseguem as sociedades. As sociedades de pessoas, as associações de pessoas com plantas, as associações de animais, as aldeias, os quilombos, as comunidades, as redes de computadores e muitas outras estão as voltas com essa perseguição. Perseguição de controle, perseguição de morte. E aqui mesmo por essas terras por onde andavam os Guaranis - ficar parado atrai os estados de Estado - as instituições estatais se proliferam. Elas se espalham como uma praga descontrolada: os três poderes deles se capilarizando em muitos guardas da esquina que ocupam os vãos onde crescia grama, a mídia cobrindo os passos de quem se move no espaço do estado, os aparelhos ideológicos do estado cada dia mais ideológicos em favor dele e cada dia mais aparelhados e mais parecidos com apa...

Been going through some elements of Heidegger's Destruktion in Being and Time to present a link between Husserl's phenomenology and Harman's withdrawal for my contemporary philosophy course. Heidegger's destruktion is operated by time and reveals it as the bouncer of what comes-to-being and what goes- from-being as gignomenon , and all of its existential effects, is a key to understand that there is a genuine gap that brings about the ontological difference. The role of time in this difference is not that difference is itself temporal or takes place in time, but that time reveals something structural about what exists, the ontological difference; time is a means of uncovering it, a guide or perhaps a symptom. It is, in a sense, a condition of possibility for us to access the ontological difference. In fact, what makes us arrive at the difference is our life in time, the analysis of Dasein as a creature entangled in time. The existence of Dasein is what opens to us ...

Been teaching Husserl's Cartesian Meditations with an eye on what matters to Levinas' criticism of the idea of an alter ego and another eye (prompted by the students very much into looking for variations of correlationism) on Meillassoux's conception of the correlate. Husserl posits a primordial sphere where there is nothing but the transcendental Ego's intentional acts, a sphere where anything else is accessed through my intentional acts and partly enable them to have the content they have (as intentional acts include that of having an evidence). This primordial sphere ensures that our access to noemata is apodictical and the world is bracketed in order for the objects of our thought to be safe. This sphere makes sure everything else appears to me as correlate of my intentionality. On the other hand, the other is to be described as a source of intentional acts, as the other cannot be anything but an alter ego. The other is a correlate of my intentional acts to whom I a...

I'm thinking about my old infinite sequence of justification again: Oliver Black (1996, 2003) has been arguing that the common tendency to dismiss any appeal to infinite sequences of justification is at least too steady. He points out that the existence of infinite sequence of justifications can be made plausible by the following argument (A) from 1,2 and 3 to 4 (Black 2003): 1. A belief is justified only if a justified belief is a reason for it. 2. There are justified beliefs. 3. The proper ancestral of the reason-relation is irreflexive. 4. There is an infinite sequence of justified beliefs each of which is a reason for its predecessor (he calls such sequence a J-sequence). This argument, however, is often put aside because 4 is taken to be implausible. Black takes 4 to be dependent on two other issues: Q1. Does there exist an infinite sequence of beliefs held by the same person? Q2. If so, can such a sequence comprise only justified beliefs? Of course, Black is supposi...