This piece features samples from a recent lecture by Iain Hamilton Grant, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE, which beautifully interlaces the Platonic analogy of the sun with the ideas of a powers ontology – ‘You cannot separate this power from the entity. Being is power’ – while taking his students on a virtual walking […]
Tag: Ontology
Posthumanism and Subtraction
In Being and Event Badiou proposes to unbind Being from Leibniz’s dictum that ‘What is not a being is not a being’ (2006, 53). Where traditional thought sees beings as wholes, Badiou argues that the whole is derived from an operation, a ‘count’ applied to an inconsistent (non-unitary) multiplicity that cannot be described by ontology […]
Note on Machine Phenomenology and the Politics of Sounds
The ontological question: What is sound? is typically inflected in a Platonic fashion. It asks after the unitary nature of audibilia. Main Kinds of Auditory Ontology Proximal – sounds are private, non-representational sensations or qualia Medial – ‘sounds are compressive waves in an elastic medium’ (Locke) Locative – sounds are ‘found where they are heard’ […]
Framing and the Ontology of the Art Work: Kendall Walton and Jacques Derrida
In his 1977 paper “Categories of Art” Kendall Walton argues that aesthetic categories like “piano music” or “bust” determine how an audience ascribes aesthetic significance to the non-aesthetic properties of the work such as their shape, matter or sound. Walton calls the perceptible properties that determine whether it belongs to a given category of artwork […]
Iain Grant on "The Great Cake of Being"
A wonderful presentation by Iain Hamilton Grant which takes flight from the Kantian principle that we can only understand something if we can synthesise it. This is not a problem in geology or chemistry when we are dealing with the synthesis of particulars from other material components. But what are its implications for our understanding […]
Pluralism, Good Manners and The Idea of a Common World
People and cultures have some non-overlapping beliefs. Some folk believe that there is a God, some that there is no God, some that there are many gods. Some people believe that personal autonomy is a paramount value, while others feel that virtues like honour and courage take precedence over personal freedom. These core beliefs are […]
Autonomous Systems Quotes
“Unlike physical or chemical dissipative structures, in which patterns of dynamic order form spontaneously, but whose stability relies almost completely on externally-imposed boundary conditions, autonomous systems build and actively maintain most of their own boundary conditions, making possible a robust far-from-equilibrium dynamic behavior.” “A big stone in the river holds water from flowing, and some […]
Aristotelian Posthumans
I’ve argued e that posthumans would have to be, in some sense of the term, “autonomous entities” capable of operating outside the scope of the socio-technical network I refer to as the Wide Human (Roden 2013). A being is autonomous if it is self-governing. According to the modern practical philosophy that follows Rousseau and Kant, autonomous beings […]
Internal Realism and Correlationism
Over at Agent Swarm, Terrence Blake claims that Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of correlationism is excessively narrow since it disqualifies realist positions which respond to worries about access, objectivity and truth raised by transcendental philosophers from Kant through to Husserl, and Heidegger. I’m not sure if Meillassoux’s speculative solution works and I share his worries about Harman’s OOO. But I don’t see any reason to doubt […]
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