Skip to main content

Indexicalism in contrast to Hegel and Whitehead (a project)

In the study group around Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik the topic of the universality of negation and the exercises of the content (as opposed to the fixed and determined categories of Kant) often comes out. Determinate negation and concrete universals provide content with a dynamics that is not determined (in any of its particular movements or arriving points) and yet necessary.

Today it occurred to me a direct contrast between
a) Hegel's general doctrine that conceptual content drives the process of things in a somehow necessary way as negated content gives rise to all things concrete;
b) Whitehead's pan-perceptualism according to which perception in its different forms drives the process of things in a way that is open and yet oriented by the capacity of the perceiver to be lured - a view that spreads agency beyond the limits of concepts and understand contents as responding to something that is genuinely exterior and
c) Indexicalist as the view that the drive of things is neither perception nor conceptual content but rather the deictic friction between what is indoors and what is exterior.

Indexicalism (see here) draws on a Kripke-Perry-Kaplan understanding of indexicals as involved with something exterior to cognition and intention and hence independent of the whereabouts of conceptual contents and of perceived forms - without falling into a myth of the Given and its corresponding problems with the immediate. Indexicalism improves on Whitehead's pan-perceptualism because it postulates exteriority as absolute and therefore as beyond what attracts perception. Both indexicalism and Whitehead can be understood to depend on the way paved by Hegel in his attempt to take (conceptual) content as a dynamical force that drives things beyond the subject's pale.

Comments

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

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. ‘Meta-m

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