Immanent Transcendence

Immanence AND Transcendence: Response to A-Theology

2012-02-24T08:24:00.000-06:00

Recently, Levi Bryant of Larval Subjects posted on “A-theology” per the subject of immanence and transcendence. Matt of Footnotes to Plato responded.

To both of these gentlemen, who are on opposite sides on many issues, I ask the question

Immanent to what?

Why must we sling around a relational term without explaining the relateds?

I respond that the answer is “nature.” But then I say that nature is both immanent and transcendent … to itself. How? Nature is generative, and time and chance are real.

I presume that Matt knows this angle and neglected to mention it, as he has posted much on this. Levi’s commitments are less clear, and I will respond to him in the remainder of this post. In short, my comments amount to the statement, “but almost no one holds the positions that he is against!” The reader should not be lead into thinking that Levi’s opponents actually hold the positions that he launches a polemic against, because they do not.

First, his description of “immanence” and “transcendence” is partial, and he knows this, so I am just drawing attention to a few points that his readers might overlook and that make his claims problematic. His insistence on “immanence” implying “external relations” and “disjunctive diversity” never explains the problem of change, i.e., how change is possible. It’s a basic logical problem that one falls into whenever one champions pure externality. In fact, it seems very, very odd to be quoting Whitehead throughout that section, as Whitehead would never agree with that view. Second, he appears to then embrace internal relations when discussing “entropy” despite his insistence that it is “opposite of the logic of conjunction found in holisms.

This is where I remind the reader that western philosophies that maintained pure internal relations disappeared nearly a century ago, and thus Levi is not targeting serious contemporary discussions. I add “serious” because we should be able to find a people people still maintaining a simplistic doctrine. To forestall the obvious, no, Western process thought and Buddhism are not doctrines of “pure internal relations.” Process thought was never that, and Buddhist views are far more nuanced depending on the school.

The problem that is most obvious to me about Levi’s view is its atemporality and this its myopic view of transcendence. Like “internal relations,” relatively few philosophers would accept his definition of “transcendence;” he’s targeting a minority segment that may not even represent his interlocutors. When he discusses transcendence, he engages in mereology again, and I presume that his understanding of mereology, especially when it comes to temporality, is too simplistic. I see little recognition of constitutive part-whole relations, e.g., of the sort made famous in Hegel’s phenomenology. But let me move on to my last point on temporality rather than be mired down.

While the existence of entities as such is independent, it is at best only independent from an atemporal point of view. Time and change are two sides of the same coin. Seen from a temporal (historical) standpoint, entities’ existence as such is not independent, because any entity is not self-sufficient in its own being over time. It might appear like that from an atemporal perspective. Pointing out that objects are dynamic systems, autopoetic, etc. does not solve this problem. This is why I have not been supportive of object-oriented ontologies; it’s neo-substance talk with so many bells and whistles that distract from the fact that it does not resolve the classical counter-arguments against substance metaphysics, e.g., the problem of change and temporality. Harman has a solution to this that is clearly worked out, in which case it is just creatively implausible. Levi can do no better than Harman, no matter all his appropriations from other philosophies, until he deals with this problem. This is why so many OOO bloggers jumped onto the idea of contingent withdrawal some weeks ago; it’s a recognition of the problem.

Some advice. Start by working the problem of temporality and be sure not to spatialize time. Moreover, embrace asymmetric mereological relations, e.g., meditate upon Hegel, which will help understand where recent views of temporality are coming from. And bring me a hamburger and fries while I am busy pontificating.

Apologies that I cannot be more detailed in my discussion, as I lack the time. Regardless, I'm not really saying anything new. What I say just does not appear to stick.

CFP: International Conference on Rethinking Pragmatist Aesthetics

2012-02-20T07:53:00.001-06:00

International Conference “Rethinking Pragmatist Aesthetics”

*August 31-September 2, 2012*

*Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Campus in Wroclaw (Poland)
*

** Theme: Pragmatist aesthetics is a rich theoretical tradition which has
its beginnings in the work of classical pragmatists (most notably, John
Dewey’s 1934 book Art as Experience), and which was rejuvenated in the 80s
and the 90s by such scholars as Richard Rorty, Joseph Margolis, and Richard
Shusterman. The latter’s 1992 book Pragmatist Aesthetics can be seen as a
symbolic moment in the emergence of the second wave of pragmatist
aesthetics, and today, twenty years after its publication, it is perhaps
the right time to rethink pragmatism’s contribution to aesthetic theory.

** The aim of this conference is to reflect on pragmatist aesthetics’
history and current condition, but also on its potential to address the
most pressing problems of contemporary philosophical aesthetics, and to
project the future avenues for its progress. In particular, we welcome
submissions that: provide historical accounts of pragmatist aesthetics’
development; address aesthetic themes in the work of classical pragmatists
(Peirce, James, Dewey, F.C.S. Schiller, etc.) and/or neopragmatists (Rorty,
Goodman, Margolis, Shusterman, Putnam, et al.); deploy a (neo-)pragmatist
perspective in addressing a given aesthetic problem or in interpreting
concrete works of art; provide a comparative analysis of pragmatist
aesthetics and aesthetic theories developed in other philosophical
traditions or in different disciplines – for instance in analytic
philosophy, continental and post-continental thought, evolutionary
psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.

Keynote speaker: Richard Shusterman (Florida Atlantic University)

** Abstracts of between 350 to 500 words and a short author profile should
be sent to prof. Leszek Koczanowicz (leszek@post.pl) or dr. Wojciech
Malecki (wojciech.malecki@wp.pl) no later than May 15th, 2012. The
conference language is English.

Backing Away from Object-Oriented Discussion

2012-02-19T14:38:00.001-06:00

I was talking to a friend about object-oriented philosophy who precisely encapsulated my misgivings with it. He wrote,

"They seem intent on systematization of their viewpoint, but don't seem willing (or able) to acknowledge the shortcomings in their position."

While I applaud so much of the work in systematizing the position, especially because it is often uncelebrated work, even among those who have solidly constructed it I note a failure to acknowledge the shortcomings. After months of engagement as I learned more and more of the field in general and several thinker's positions in particular, I have backed away. Given that I have no interest in helping members of the field ticker with the internals of their viewpoint, I have little to say. My critiques have been made, and I see not value in repeating them unless I were to become a specialist in the field and a dedicated critic. Construction rather than destruction is my vocation. I hope to engage with speculative realism more generally, as it is one of the few contemporary discussions of non-reductive realism.

To give ammunition to my supposed opponents, I think that one reason I am not compelled by object-oriented thinking is that I am not beholden to the concerns of contemporary continental philosophy, and thus the solutions that OOO provides are answers to questions that I am not asking. I now have enough familiarity with OOO to know that I would not ask those questions that we do not have in common. I do think that much may come of the new tradition, and I have a bit of advice. Do not confuse systematizing your viewpoint with philosophical advance in general.

I still enjoin discussants to come chat, but I will in general keep the quiet on that subject that I have maintained for some time already. Hopefully I will have much more to say about Americanist positions in the future.

Conference: New York Pragmatist Forum

2012-02-19T12:53:00.004-06:00

NEW YORK PRAGMATIST FORUM

Fordham University at Lincoln Center - Lowenstein Building 708
Columbus (9th) Avenue at 60th Street
New York, New York, USA

Friday, February 24, 2012
5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

“Pragmatism and Sociology”
- - - - - - -

Charles C. Lemert, Senior Fellow,
Center for Comparative Research/Sociology, Yale University

“The Dilemmas of Social Theory: Can Pragmatism Help?”

David W. Woods, Southern Connecticut State University
Author of Democracy Deferred: Civic Leadership after 9/11
(Palgrave Macmillan, March 2012)

“George Herbert Mead and the Social Bases of Democracy”

Judith M. Green, Fordham University
Co-Editor of Pragmatism and Diversity: Dewey in the Context of Late Twentieth Century Debates (Palgrave MacMillan, January 2012)

“Cultivating Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism:
Democratic Local-and-Global Community amidst Diversity”
- - - - - - -

Celebratory Refreshments Will Be Served

Temporality and Imagination

2012-02-18T12:46:00.000-06:00

Though I have not had time to post regularly, I do with to comment on the ongoing discussion at Archive Fire, Knowledge Ecology, and Footnotes to Plato.

I argue that imagination is an emergent feature of nature whose principle root is the temporality of nature. Human imagination dilates the present moment and manipulates its temporality, i.e., manipulates the inter-relations of present, past, and future. Human imagination’s primary function is the projection of the anticipated consequences of an action, i.e., the meaning of an action by definition (cf. Peirce), and thus imagination allows us to make the anticipated future part of the present. To the extent that we may anticipate the consequences of our transactions with the world, we may render it comprehensible.

I am arguing for a kind of naturalism, but not scietnfic or reductive naturalism. E.g., I hold that imagination is an extension of and continuous with the basic anticipation of any homeostatic organism, though it is not reducible to it. I may explain this in more detail, but let me say that a reader without familiar with the process metaphysics and emergent naturalism supporting this view cannot take my words at face value, as they will likely misjudge the implied arguments. I can supply a short annotated bibliography upon request in addition to my own work.

Some technical points about the above. Yes, I take phenomenological temporality to be continuous with natural temporality, which is a major deviation from the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology. Screw Kant and his insistence that time is the inner form of representation; we can do without that presumed dualism of body and mind. The utter lack of the concept of continuity is part of the Americanist rejection of many post-Kantian philosophies, especially in metaphysics and phenomenology. This is also part of my own hesitance to accept object-oriented ontology insomuch as it rejects continuity. (This seems to vary depending on which OOO-thinker we are talking about.)

Ecstatic Naturalism Conference

2012-02-16T20:28:00.001-06:00

EN 2012 Conference Schedule

Second International Congress on Ecstatic Naturalism

13–14 April 2012, Drew University, Madison, NJ USA

conference link

Friday, 13 April 20122:00-5:00: First Session: Aesthetics and Semiotics
Martin Yalcin, “Orpheus and the Aesthetic Character of the Sacred: Can We Replace Religion with Art?”
Inna Semetsky. “Reading Signs: Peirce, Deleuze, Hermeneutics”
Michael Raposa, “What may lie hidden in the icon: On boredom, ecstasy and the limits of semiosis"

Commentator: Nick Wernicki

6:00 PM: Dinner

7:00 PM: Keynote Presentation by Robert C. Neville with an introduction by Robert Corrington

Saturday, April 14th7:30 AM: Breakfast

8:30 AM – 11:30 PM: Second Session: Education, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis
Darryl De Marzio, “On the Unity of Eros and Agape: An Ecstatic Naturalist Perspective on the Dynamic of Love in Education”
Kwang Yu Lee, “What Ecstasy is to Shamanism, Manic-Depression is to Ecstatic Naturalism?”
Lydia York, “Abyss and Ground: Expanding Ecstatic Naturalism’s Material Maternal with Psychoanalytic Object-Relations Theory"

Commentator: Theresa Ellis

11:45-12:45PM: Book Celebration Panel: Nam T. Nguyen’s Nature’s Primal Self: Peirce, Jaspers, and Corrington and Leon Niemoczynski’s Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature.

Commentators: Wade Mitchell and Todd Willison

Respondents: Leon Niemoczynski and Robert Corrington (on behalf of Nam Nguyen)

12:45 – 2:30 PM: Break

2:30 – 5:30 PM: Third Session: Nature and Metaphysics
Guy Woodward, “Cleaving the Light: The Necessity of Metaphysics in the Practice of Theology”
Jea Oh, “Nature’s Spontaneity and Intentionality: Ecocracy, Doing Non-Doing Principle of Donghak [Eastern Learning]”
Leon Niemoczynski, “Speculating God: Meillassoux, Whitehead, Corrington”

Commentator: Karen Bray

6:00 PM: Dinner

8:00 PM Performance

CFP: Speculative Realism and Religion

2012-02-15T13:24:00.002-06:00

Thinking the Absolute:

Speculation, Philosophy and the Endof Religion

June 29^th – July 1^st 2012,Liverpool Hope University

Keynote speakers

CatherineMalabou

Iain HamiltonGrant

Levi Bryant

Ray Brassier

‘Thecontemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being sceptical, could only bea religious end of metaphysics.’

QuentinMeillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay onthe Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008), p.

Meillassouxidentifies the ‘turn to religion’ in contemporary continental philosophy with afailure of thinking. The Kantian refusal to think the absolute leads to scepticismabout reality in itself. Ironically, this lends itself to ‘fideism’, thedecision to project religious meaning on to the unknowable beyond. According toMeillassoux, a philosophy obsessed with mystery becomes the accomplice ofirrational faith. The solution is to find ways of once more thinking the absolutein its reality, severed from its dependence upon a knowing subject, or uponlanguage and social norms. At the same time, new possibilities for thinkingreligion (exemplified by Meillassoux’s own DivineInexistence) are emerging.

This conferenceinvites proposals which critically consider this speculative turn in philosophyand its implications for thinking about religion. To what ‘end’ is speculationleading? Does it simply announce the closure of religion and its subordinationto a philosophy of the absolute, nature or the ‘All’? Can it open new lines fora philosophy of religion which is not wedded to the Kantian horizon? Isspeculation itself open to Kierkegaardian critique as yet another move toposition and reduce ethical and religious claims, sacrificing the future on thealtar of abstract possibility? Does renewed attention to the canon ofspeculative idealism offer a way beyond the impasse between relativism anddogmatism?

The organiserswelcome proposals which examine the roots and extensity of recent speculativethinking, and which critically consider its impact – direct and indirect - onphilosophy of religion. Relevant thinkers and themes might include QuentinMeillassoux on God and the absolute, Alain Badiou’s ontology, Catherine Malabouon Hegel and plasticity, Francois Laruelle’s ‘future Christ’, Iain HamiltonGrant on Schelling’s Naturphilosophieand the thinking of the All, Ray Brassier’s nihilism. However, we areparticularly looking for contributions which creatively use or depart from thespeculative turn to offer original insights into the nature and content of thefield.

CFP: Summer Institute in American Philosophy

2012-02-09T07:48:00.001-06:00

2012 Summer Institute in American Philosophy

The 2012 Summer Institute in American Philosophy will be held at the
University of Oregon from July 16-21, 2012. The deadline for this year’s
call for abstracts is April 15, 2012.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION
This year's summer institute will feature a number of plenary seminars
including: ‘(Re)Reading Dewey’s Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy’
(Larry Hickman, Tom Alexander, Phillip Deen), ‘(Re)Reading Dewey & Addams’
(Marilyn Fischer, Amrita Banerjee), ‘Critical Pragmatism’ (Leonard Harris,
Jacoby Carter, Lee McBride), and Crossing Disciplines: Pragmatism in
Philosophy & Political Science (Christopher Ansell, Gerry Berk, and others
TBA). We are excited to announce that our featured keynote speaker will be
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Professor Emerita at Purdue University.
Professor Seigfried’s two keynote lectures will address the idea of the
social self in the work of Jane Addams.
Further information, including a conference registration form, is available
at <http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/siap/siap_2012.html>. This website
will continue to be updated in coming weeks.

CALL FOR PAPERS/ABSTRACTS (Deadline: April 15, 2012)
We invite submissions to present papers in any area of American Philosophy
at SIAP. (As with last year, we are inviting a variety of types of
submissions again this year.) Presentations may either be Traditional
Conference papers or one of a variety of In-Progress presentations.
Submission Instructions: Please specify in your submission the type of
presentation from the list below, according to instructions. Email your
submissions to Colin Koopman at koopman@uoregon.edu. The subject line of
your email should read: "SIAP 2012 Submission: [format type (e.g.,
Traditional Paper, Dissertation-In-Progress)]. Please include the complete
text of your submission in the body of your email and do not include
anything as an attachment. The submission deadline is April 15, 2012 with
decisions to be made no later than May 4, 2012. If you absolutely need an
earlier decision for the sake of securing institutional funding, please
contact Colin Koopman beforehand, and we will see what we can do.

* Traditional Papers: Papers in all areas of American philosophy are
welcome, but we will particularly favor papers whose topics are related to
the themes of the plenary seminars and the work of our keynote speaker.
Instructions: Please submit an abstract of 500 words describing the paper
in detail. Final papers should be of a length suitable for a short
presentation of 15-25 minutes.

* Books-In-Progress Submissions: Those working on book manuscripts in some
area of research pertinent to American philosophy are invited to discuss
their idea with seminar participants. This includes fresh ideas for books
just underway as well as books nearing completion, but does not extend to
author-critics sessions on recently-published books. Instructions: Please
submit a 500 word abstract describing your book manuscript, the content of
your presentation, your ideas for the format of the presentation.

* Dissertations-In-Progress: Graduate students preparing dissertation
proposals, in the dissertation-writing phase, or approaching their
dissertation defense are invited to present their work at special
dissertations-in-progress sessions. This is a regular tradition at SIAP
and one of the most exciting venues to showcase new work that is being
developed in American Philosophy at various graduate programs across the
country and internationally. Instructions: Please submit a 500-word
abstract describing the content of your dissertation. We will work with
you in advance of the session on general guidelines for preparing the
presentation and what to expect. In addition please note: we have a
limited number of travel grants available to graduates at the conference
who will be presenting, so please indicate if you would like to be
considered for a travel grant which will cover the entire cost of
room/housing as well as registration fees. These grants are generously
funded by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. (See
below for more information on the grants).

* Experiments-In-Progress: We invite presentations on projects,
collaborations, group work, public philosophy forays, field philosophy
work, and other philosophical experiments for the purposes of discussion at
SIAP. Some examples: Michael Eldridge’s 2009 group discussion of Obama’s
Pragmatism (and see the most recent issue of Contemporary Pragmatism for
papers on the topic, some of which were initially formulated at this
session), Donald Hood and Eric Weber’s 2011 presentation on pragmatism as
public philosopher, a presentation on some in-progress interdisciplinary
research collaboration including reflections on what is going right in the
project and what unexpected blockages have come up, a roundtable
presentation concerning the development of open access scholarship in
American philosophy, discussions oriented toward the design of advanced or
introductory courses in pragmatism using online resources and collaborative
assignment. These sessions will be limited in number and are intended to
provide opportunities for innovative forms of work, thought, and
scholarship in the American tradition. Instructions: Please submit a
500-word abstract describing your project, the content of your
presentation, your ideas for the format of the presentation, a
justification of the project terms of larger issues of outreach and
scholarship, and any a/v needs you might have.

GRADUATE STUDENT PARTIAL TRAVEL GRANTS
We have a limited number of travel grants available to graduates at the
conference. Priority will be given to graduates who are presenting their
work and who have not previously attended. In your submission, please
indicate if you would like to be considered for a travel grant. Grants
will cover the full cost of on-campus housing (on a shared room basis) as
well as registration fees (note that travel expenses, airfare, fuel, &c.,
will still need to be covered independently). These grants are being
generously funded by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.

CFP: Ender's Game and Philosophy

2012-02-07T15:42:00.000-06:00

Call for Abstracts

Ender’s Game and Philosophy

Edited by Kevin S. Decker

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please contact the Series Editor, William Irwin, atwilliamirwin@kings.edu

If you have comments or criticisms for the series, please read “Fancy Taking a Pop?” at

http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/55564/fancy-taking-pop.pdf

Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: “A Childhood Deferred?”: the ethics of hyper-specialized training for the very young; “The Military and their Monitors”: issues of privacy and civil rights during wartime; “All-Out War”: just war theory and the ethics of total mobilization of Earth society against the buggers; “We Know What You Think”: how and why monitors could be used to keep track of individuals’ inmost thoughts and desires; “They Aren’t Normal; They Act Like—History”: Hegel and the cunning of reason in history and future wars; “The Hook and the Raft”: does the I.F. “System” colonize the human and bugger “Lifeworlds”?;“The Giant’s Drink”; Ender’s training is a simulation, but are we living in one?; “Know Your Enemy”: the strategic philosophies of Sun-Tzu and Ender Wiggin; “Ender’s Game and the Problem of Dirty Hands”; “Constructing Subjects in Space”; Foucault and Ender’s military leaders; “Bugger All!”: when cultural incommensurability turns into conflict; “Wiggin’ the Dog”: ethical and political dimensions of stage-managed wars; “Down with the Warsaw Pact!”: the epistemology of blogging; “Locke and Demosthenes”: ‘virtual’ politics with false personas; “Of Bachelard and Battlerooms”: philosophy of bodies in space; “Peter’s in the Mirror Again”: virtual simulations and artificial intelligence; “Valentine’s Day”; philosophy of emotion in Ender’s Game;“Like a Gun”: is Ender responsible for the terrible consequences of his actions, or has he been a pawn for the I.F.?

Submission Guidelines:

1. Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CV(s): March 19, 2012.

2. Submission deadline for drafts of accepted papers: June 18, 2012.

Kindly submit by e-mail (with or without Word attachment) to: Kevin S. Decker at kdecker@ewu.edu

CFP: German Idealism, Romanticism, and Poe

2012-02-07T08:38:00.001-06:00

CFP: “Theory Mad Beyond Redemption”: The Post-Kantian Poe

call for papers for a special issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review, forthcoming in Fall 2012, and guest-edited by Sean Moreland, Devin Zane Shaw, and Jonathan Murphy.

The editors invite original essays that address the influence of German Idealist and Romantic thought upon Edgar Allan Poe. While it has become a critical commonplace that Poe both makes use of and mocks many elements of German Idealism, there has been scant discussion of the specificities of Poe’s complex, and often vexed, treatments of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Poe studies enjoyed a brief revival of the “French Poe” following the psychoanalytic and deconstructive interventions of Lacan and Derrida, but the anti-theoretical backlash of the past two decades has tended to extradite Poe back to his country of origin, restoring his “American Face” at the cost of recognizing the transatlantic influences that indelibly shaped his writing. This collection will focus on Poe’s indebtedness to, as well as his critical distance from, the German Idealist and Romantic writers, but its intent is not to delineate, as Hansen and Pollin (1995) have done, the “German Face” of Poe, so much as it is to reintroduce the theoretical aspect of Poe’s artistry back into the critical conversation.

We especially welcome papers that consider the relationship between Poe’s reception of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy (including Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, and the Schlegels) and that of his American literary contemporaries (including Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Melville); articles that examine the role of Coleridge and Carlyle, Cousin and de Stael in disseminating German idealism upon American shores; and essays that interrogate more recent peregrinations of German philosophy in Continental theory, especially as they pertain to a reconsideration of Poe’s literary legacy.

We require a 250 word abstract and a brief bio by no later than April 30, 2012, and the finished paper (Chicago-style, no more than 9000 words including endnotes) by July 15, 2012. Abstracts, papers, and questions should be directed to: theorymad@gmail.com.

CFP: Transactions Issue on Ransdell

2012-02-07T08:15:00.000-06:00

*CALL FOR PAPERS:*

*Special Issue*

*“The Meaning of a Thought is Altogether Something Virtual”: Joseph

Ransdell and His Legacy*

*Editors:** *
*Catherine Legg, University of Waikato, New Zealand*
*Gary Richmond, LaGuardia College – City University of New York*

*Joseph Ransdell (1931**-**2010),** based for most of his career at Texas
Tech University, offered a highly original and focused challenge within
academic philosophy at the end of the Second Millennium. His guiding
philosophical passion was truth-directed communication. This led him to
think deeply about the Platonic Socrates and the Socratic Plato, and the
problematics of early modern philosophy. Most of all, however, he claimed
that the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce held the key not just to
endorsing truth as a regulative ideal, but to showing how the ideal might
be worked out in practice by means of a community of inquiry exercising
critical self-control.*

*From early in his career Joe was concerned that professional gatekeeping
was hindering progress in philosophy, and was unafraid to speak about it.
From the initial evolution of the Internet he grasped its potential as
a**place “where people can and do critically question and challenge
one another without the usual protections of office, rank, agenda, and official
moderation”, something that he argued had “all but disappeared from public
life — including intellectual life — in the U.S. and many other countries
as well during the 20th Century”.*

*Thereafter he threw enormous effort and enterprise into realizing this
vision, swimming against a rising tide of other kinds of institutional
reward. This resulted in the email list and online community peirce-l,
which he founded in 1993 and moderated in unique style until his death, and
the accompanying website that he beta-launched in 1997 and called
Arisbe,after the house where Peirce lived during the later years of
his life and
dreamed of establishing a research centre. *

*Joe’s exceptionally conscious and critical approach to nurturing online
communication may be seen in the “How the Forum Works” guidelines that he
wrote for peirce-l: http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm. Much
there now seems prescient in the light of subsequent developments on the
Internet, whereby ordinary persons build public knowledge resources with no
thought of monetary reward. A key example is of course the astounding
Wikipedia, whose success was also arguably due to its open, self-correcting
development of its own processes (and who would have guessed that so many
would gather there and freely give so much energy to help others learn
**-**except perhaps Charles Peirce?)
***

*Many felt that the mores Joe charted for peirce-l made it a unique and
valuable place to do philosophy. Another noteworthy feaure of the list was
the way in which its composition mirrored the polymathic and international
outlook of Peirce himself. One might find, for instance, a semiotician, a
theologian, a computer scientist, and a book translator discussing Peirce’s
relation to Leibniz. *

*We are interested in papers which record, honour, explicate, and
critically appraise Joe’s published writings, his online efforts and their
ongoing legacy, and the relation between the two. In keeping with the
spirit of peirce-l, we welcome submissions from a wealth of disciplines,
although we expect philosophy to make a prominent showing. *

*All papers will be blind-refereed, and should be prepared as such.
Submissions should follow the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Societymanuscript guidelines, online at:
http://www.peircesociety.org/contributors.html. They may be submitted by
email to Catherine Legg at clegg@waikato.ac.nz. The deadline for
submissions is September 1st, 2012.*

Analysis of the Dao De Jing

2012-01-28T11:34:00.001-06:00

Anvikshiki has begun an analysis of the Dao De Jing. He also has amazing astute American political analyses as part of his regular posting.

I recommend his brilliant thought and remind readers that this is primarily a blog of Americanist and cross-tradition thought, although I've been much caught up in Americanist and Continental metaphysics in the last 6 months.

That said, I will be teaching a class in "World Religions" next semester and am glad for the opportunity to revitalize my memory.

Precarious Causation

2012-01-25T19:43:00.002-06:00

Michael of Archive Fire has an excellent post here.

I am pleased to see that someone more knowledgeable than I is repeating some of the criticisms that I have leveled, as it tells me that I was on the right track.

CFP: Contingency at the International Philosophy Colloquium

2012-01-24T18:19:00.001-06:00

18th International Philosophy Colloquium Evian:

Contingency – Chance, Luck, Haphazardness

Evian (Lake Geneva), France
July 15-21, 2012

We invite proposals (maximum length: one page) for presentations, along with a short CV (maximum length: two pages), by March 15, 2012. Please send these documents via e-mail to the following address:
evian@philosophie.fu-berlin.de

A detailed exposition of the topic and all relevant information concerning the character and history of the colloquium as well as matters of accommodation and costs can be found on our website:

http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/eviancolloquium/

Contingent is what could be otherwise or not exist at all: It is thus what is neither necessary nor impossible. What is contingent is that which is not completely determined by logical or metaphysical principles, or else by fate or divine providence. That is, what is contingent belongs to the realm of what is changing or changeable; it is, therefore, a realm into which human actions inherently fall. Because human actions take place in the realm of the contingent, every practical self-reflection is confronted with contingency as an inherent problem. Practical reason, rational planning, and free deliberation are bound up with the uncontrollable contingency of chance, luck, and haphazardness: chance, because the consequences of action cannot be completely anticipated or explained given the unforeseeable effects of accidental causes that condition or help to shape the outcomes of our actions; luck, because the realization of intended goals or attitudes can often come about only with the world playing along, i.e., only through the coincidence of events behind the backs of agents; and haphazardness, because the good life itself, framed by the decisive or fateful events of birth and death, always has to reckon with the happening of events large and small that continually break into our lives and affect them going forward, so that one needs luck (fortuna, Glück, chance) for attaining happiness (beatitudo, Glück, bonheur) in a way that challenges our conceptions of virtue and justice.

What is the significance of contingency for the self-understanding of human beings in their practices? The 18th International Philosophy Colloquium Evian invites philosophers to come to the shores of Lake Geneva to examine the concept of contingency in all the different and possibly incompatible ways in which this concept can be considered and determined. The International Philosophy Colloquia Evian welcome philosophers who are interested in engaging in discussion across traditional disciplinary boundaries. They are conceived particularly as a place where the divide between continental and analytic philosophy is overcome, or at least where their differences can be rendered philosophically productive.

Passive comprehension of all three languages of the colloquium, namely French, German, and English, is a prerequisite for all applicants.

Organisation: Georg W. Bertram (Berlin), Robin Celikates (Amsterdam), David Lauer (Berlin)
In cooperation with Karin de Boer (Leuven), Karen Feldman (Berkeley), Jo-Jo Koo (Montreal), Christophe Laudou (Madrid), Jérôme Lèbre (Paris), Diane Perpich (Clemson), Hans Bernhard Schmid (Wien), Chris Doude van Troostvijk (Strasbourg)

Contact: Prof. Dr. Georg W. Bertram, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Philosophie, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, D-14195 Berlin, Germany

CFP: Feminist Interpretations of William James

2012-01-24T12:32:00.003-06:00

* Feminist Interpretations of William James *

[For a conference panel and edited volume]

“The world experienced…comes at all times with our body as its center,

center of vision, center of action, center of interest…”

–William James, Principles of Psychology

“Out of whose subjectivity has this ideal [of objectivity] grown?”

–Lorraine Code, What Can She Know?

The American Pragmatist philosopher William James was in many respects

ahead of his time, emphasizing attention to the situated and bodily

character of knowledge and value before the advent of standpoint theory, as

well as the concrete consequences of philosophizing in a way that

pre-figures recent feminist efforts to investigate the troubling collective

habits that academic philosophy has helped to perpetuate. Although James’

own status as a feminist is dubious, his work, many have argued, is ripe

with resources for contemporary feminist epistemology, ethics,

phenomenology and philosophy of psychology.

We seek scholars interested in contributing to a panel discussion on

feminist readings of James to be held at the Society for the Advancement of

American Philosophy meeting in the spring of 2013, and ultimately, to the

anticipated edited volume, Feminist Interpretations of William James (to be

submitted to Penn State Press’ “Re-Reading the Canon” series, ed. Nancy

Tuana). Any and all feminist approaches to and/or criticisms of James are

welcome.

* Please respond to Shannon Sullivan (sws10@psu.edu) or Erin C. Tarver (

erin_tarver@georgetowncollege.edu) to express your interest in

participating in the panel and/or the volume by February 17, 2012. *

For now, we hope to hear from people who are interested, possibly

interested, gently persuadable, and/or have questions -- no firm

commitments are needed at this time, in other words. Abstracts (of no less

than 600 words) or full papers (of no more than 3500 words) for the SAAP

panel will be due to Shannon and Erin by August 1, 2012. We hope that the

discussion generated by the SAAP panel will help spark new ideas for

feminist engagements with James, but you need not participate on the SAAP

panel to contribute to the Re-reading the Canon volume later on. Detailed

information on submitting to the Re-reading the Canon volume will be

forthcoming in 2013, after the annual SAAP meeting in March.

Mobilization in the OOO DMZ? A Response to Harman's Review

2012-01-23T08:43:00.000-06:00

Anthony Paul Smith responds to a blog post from Harman about Anti-Badiou.

I'll ask the same question I asked there. What's behind this bit of hostility? I have a feeling that I brushed against the DMZ (de-militarized zone, e.g., like the one between North and South Korea) again and didn't realize it.

New Journal Issues!

2012-01-22T14:50:00.001-06:00

New issues of the Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy and Pragmatism Today have just come out. Peruse the links on the right side of my blog for access.

Dewey and Hegel

A review of my good friend James Good's most recent book (with John Shook), John Dewey's Philosophy of Spirit was reviewed in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. I do concur with his argument that Dewey was and remained far more Hegelian than has been admitted by historic or contemporary philosophers. This oversight is primarily a matter of academic politics, e.g., "Hegel" and "idealism" became "bad words" and were not to be uttered with sight of a Dewey text. It has lead to terrible misunderstandings of his work for generations even among his own scholars.

APA Joint Session: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty

2012-01-19T08:25:00.001-06:00

JOINT SESSION, CENTRAL DIVISION

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2012

7:40-10:40 P.M.

THE PALMER HOUSE HOTEL—CHICAGO

(Room location given out with conference program at registration)

A DISCUSSION BY AUTHORS AND CRITICS OF A NEW BOOK, NATURE AND LOGOS,

“THE INFLUENCE OF ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD ON THE THOUGHT OF MAURICE
MERLEAU-PONTY”

William Hamrick (author), SIU-E, “The Creative Becoming of the Flesh.”

Scott W. Sinclair (discussant), St. Louis Community College—Forest Park,
“Nature and Logos, Appreciation and Extension.”

John Cogan (discussant), Independent Scholar, “Ruminations Across Borders.”

Jan Van der Veken (author), Katholike Universiteit Leuven, “Meeting
Merleau-Ponty.”

CO-PRESENTED BY THE SOCIETY FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF CREATIVITY AND THE
SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF PROCESS PHILOSOPHIES

CFP: European Conference on Pragmatism and American Philosophy

2012-01-19T08:24:00.000-06:00

FirstEuropean Conference on Pragmatism and American Philosophy

Venue: Rome, University of Roma Tre

Date: September, 19-21, 2012

The Italian Association Pragma and theNordic Pragmatist Network are pleased to announce the first European Conferenceon Pragmatism and American Philosophy. The conference will be held in Rome onSeptember 19-21, 2012 and will gather the most prominent scholars in the field.Invited scholars include: Patrick Baert, Mats Bergman, Rosa M. Calcaterra,Ramon del Castillo, Daniel Cefai, Umberto Eco, Rossella Fabbrichesi, RobertoFrega, Mathias Girel, Christopher Hookway, Sandra Laugier, Giovanni Maddalena,Jaime Nubiola, Sami Pihlström, Emil Visnosky.
The Conference language will be English.

With this call for papers we invite European and non European scholars toparticipate to the conference. The focus of the conference is on a betterunderstanding of the relevance of American philosophy in general, andpragmatism in particular, to contemporary philosophical debates. Americanphilosophy is here considered as a proper tradition of philosophy,distinguished from, and capable of dialoguing with, any other tradition ofthought. Papers are expected to illuminate both differences and convergences aswell as new creative perspectives stemming from the background of pragmatismand American philosophy in any possible field of philosophical relevance.

We are accepting submissions for contributed papers. Please send an abstract of500 - 1,000 words to europeanpragmatism@gmail.combeforeApril 1, 2012. Notification ofacceptance will be done by May 31st. Accepted papers will have to be receivedby August 31st. Papers must not exceed 4,000 words in length and be adequatefor a 40 minutes presentation.
Attendance to the conference is free.

For more information on the conference,please contact one of the organisers, Roberto Frega (fregarob@gmail.com),Giovanni Maddalena (maddalena@unimol.it),Henryk Rydenfeld (henrik.rydenfelt@helsinki.fi)or visit the conference homepage

at http://www.nordprag.org/epc1.html.

Symbolic Shutdown To Protest SOPA

2012-01-17T19:43:00.000-06:00

I cannot shutdown my blog to participate in the protest, as I have not the power, captain! I will do so symbolically, and since Google is also a signatory, they might do so as well. It starts tomorrow!

For those not aware, or perhaps not in the United States, the U.S. Congress has been debating an article of legislation that would make any site any allows user-uploaded content impossible to maintain against legal liability. It is insanity.

For more on the protest, see:

http://sopastrike.com/

On Harman's 'Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos"

2012-01-17T13:03:00.002-06:00

This article was recommended to me to address my questions about temporality. It does not address those questions; Guerilla Metaphysics is a far better source. Regardless, I will post some thoughts.

It is rhetorically aimed for a continental audience. The problematics and their dynamics, though recognizable, fall on deaf ears in my case since they are not shared problems. If those aren’t my problems, I will not be much motivated by their solutions, e.g., discussion of causality has been rampant in analytic, and the human-world relation is not so large an issue in pragmatism. Why mention this to a general audience, to you? To tone down the presentation; its pathos speaks to a need that I and other philosophic discourses do not have.

Harman begins with his creative re-reading of Heidegger. Since I do not agree with his characterization of Heidegger, which is far from a standard reading, I will treat it as a new offering to philosophy. His reading of Heidegger’s tool analysis is soo far from a standard reading, e.g., Heidegger is “against relationality per se” and must be for “substance” that I will not grant him the prominence of Heidegger’s ediface; he will have to pull his own weight. If someone can convince me that the semiotics of worldhood implies that, they are welcome to try to get me to accept the following.

“But there really are autonomous objects that withdraw from all interaction, just as occasionalists think. I base this on the authority of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, which really needs to be read in the way that I have described.”

That said, I agree with Harman’s warning against reading Heidegger as a “pragmatist” in which case he mirror Dewey. E.g., Dewey’s theory of continuity and realism is irreconciliable with Heidegger.

By the way, my dissertation was originally a comparative of Heidegger and Dewey, but I realized that Dewey scholarship was not ready for the comparison that I wanted to do (cf Bill Blatner’s book on it), and thus I settled for working a realist, pragmatist phenomenology within the topical domain of ethics. Oh, and Dewey was not a Lockean of Humean empiricist, but a neo-Hegelian one, which has lead to generations of misreadings.

When Harman enters into his exposition of Heidegger’s tool analysis, I can only say that it’s interesting but is not Heidegger. This is not a problem, but it also means that he’s unhitched his wagon from the most formidable horse of the 20th century. It appears that he’s 1) taken the revealing/concealing of a phenomenon that generates the hermeneutic circle, 2) ontologized that mechanic, and 3) severed it from phenomenology. He may not have intended it, but that’s what “withdrawal” looks like. Just add his analysis of relativity and some salt. Ok, some special mereology sauce to build his objects into something big enough for my appetite.

Since I do not find this compelling, I have little more to write about it. It tries to scratch an itch I don’t have. And if I wanted anything like this, I would look to Americanist scholarship, e.g., Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne, etc. That said, he is offering something to continentals who wish to remain within that milieu.

OOO and Materialism

2012-01-16T19:40:00.000-06:00

This is a recap of prior conversation and a response to Levi's Bryant's recent post. First, the recap and setup....

The blogosphere has been talking about object-oriented ontology and materialism lately. As I suspected, it appears that there's a wide range of what writers mean by the term. See Adam Robert at Knowledge Ecology; Hilan Bensusan at No Borders Metaphysics has 1, 2 , and 3; Matt Segall at Footnotes to Plato has 1 and 2; my own which is a response to Leon at After Nature; and the most recent by Levi Harman at Larval Subjects. Apologies for those I've left out, and for some of the older posts concerning Jussi Parikka's provocative post, see Been Woodard's links at Naught Thought and a belated response to Jussi by Ian Bogost.

Now my thoughts. First, the "materialisms" that are gettting thrown around what I expected, and I should have known better. I now realize that I was thinking of materialism from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy, which they are more likely to call "physicalism." Thus my own contribution above may not be on target, and will now speak to that in the context of my prior post.

Leon argued against the "pure immanentism" of materialism. Part of my response wherein I disagreed with him includes:

"I am not certain that pure immanentism is a problem. It depends on what that means, and my first hypothesis is materialism. If all reality is material, then transcendent identity is impossible. That is, if identity has no fixity other than momentary configurations, then we are at best in a materialist version of Heraclitean flux."

This addresses the differences between Harman and Bryant that the latter mentions, and the difference appears to be the necessity (or not) of transcendent identity:

"Harman seems to argue that for the materialist, if the parts change then the entity is no longer the same entity. Yet this would only hold if the being of the entity were individuated solely by the parts of which the entity is composed. If, by contrast, entities are individuated by both their parts and organization, then so long as that organization is maintained, the entity persists. All that’s required is that that organization be embodied in some way."

Bryant has not completely addressed the issue. If individuation occurs through 1) parts and 2) parts-whole relationships or organization, then 1) plus 2) equals 3) an individuated unity that is greater than the sum of its parts. If it were anything less, then it would be reducible, and we would have an infinite regression of objects. The usual problems of regression ensue, and this also threatens the irreducibility of objects. If individuation is more than 1) and 2), then what is it? Bryant mentioned emergentism, and that would be my solution to that kind of problem; "there’s no inconsistency between materialism and theories of emergence."

The unity that is an individual is more than either the parts or organization since, as implied above, it constitutes a third thing. Hence, contra Bryant, it's possible that "if the parts change then the entity is no longer the same entity" because any change to a part also changes the whole. Changes to a part may not be significant to the whole, however, as it is possible for multiple changes in parts to recreate a virtually identical whole. E.g., moving the chairs on the deck of the Titanic doesn't change the fact that it is sinking. This is how an emergent phenomenon is not reducible eitehr from a metaphysical or epistemic perspective.

The ultimate issue to be addressed is an old one, what is identity?

Musing upon Scientific Naturalism

2012-01-16T11:37:00.000-06:00

Rene Descartes proposed that we need to find the limit of human understanding so that we may restrict thought within those limits. He thereby launched the modernist period in philosophy, especially for British/Scottish empiricism. I propose thinking scientific naturalism as a legacy of this circumscription of thought.

Scientific naturalism, as a metaphysical thesis, holds that what is real are the objects of science, and science studies nature. Many distinctions may be made, but for the most part and in this context, objections are reducible to this point. In Cartesian terms, I would characterize scientific naturalism as limiting proper thought to what contemporary science can best prove, which is what I take to be its paradigmatic trait.

A problem with this is that separations between vetted thought and actual thought cannot de facto occur and de jure should not be attempted, because we then misunderstand the nature of thought and the basis of scientific claims. In essence, scientifical naturalism is not coherent or even self-consistent if we measure recent neuro- and cognitive science against the self-assured claims of scientific naturalism. It’s an ideal that we cannot hold and is not a good regulatory ideal. It ensconces false notions of human powers and systematizes hubris. This is not a new claim, and has been made from many traditions of philosophy. My personal favorite expressions of this critique are Helen Longino’s Science as Social Practice (analytic), John Dewey’s Experience and Nature (pragmatism), and the pair of Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Martin Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” (continental per phenomenology).

I prefer the former two, though I grant the theoretical powerhouses of the latter two, because Dewey and Longino share an emphasis on practice as a solution. I would rather affect positive change than be intellectually justified. The former is more difficult and more valuable, but the latter is something accomplishable upon one’s own merits and without so much good fortune.

A Field Theory of Experience

2012-01-15T22:54:00.000-06:00

Musing upon and working up to it.

Another way of explaining Dewey’s theory of experience is to call it a “field theory” of experience, which he did in Experience and Nature. Human experience is a field of interaction between the organism and environment from which all distinctions are made. Distinctions are made at the level of physics, of biology, of the body and its habitual and homeostatic activities, of consciousness, and of mind; making distinctions is a dividing up of the field of experience that occurs at all levels, but not in the same way. At the level of mind there is explicit signification, the taking of this quality to indicate these possible consequences of those possible interactions with it; i.e., there is meaning.

James Gouinlock puts the notion of taking distinctions well in John Dewey's Philosophy of Value:

“the organic unity of subject and object is such that the distinction between them is perceived by deliberate analysis and is not found in immediate experience itself” …. A red object is red, for example, because certain of its properties interaction with certain of those of a subject; and the subject experiences red because certain properties of the subject interact with certain of those of the object. The red is neither ‘in the subject’ nor ‘in the object,’ nor even in an exclusive relation between antecedently determinate subject and object. Rather, it is a feature of the situation itself, which is inclusive of subject and object; what are called subject and object are two functional constituents of that entire set of relations constituting the situation” (18)

“Situation” is the name given to the local field of experience. The “traits of experience” are the “traits of nature” that emerge under certain interactive or transactive conditions. Experience is real and of nature, not an epiphenomenon.

Continuing,

“The experience of a red object is an outcome of all the various functional constituents of the inclusive situation. In this situation—that is, in this set of relations—the object is really red, and it is this object which is experienced.” (18).

Rather than agree with Locke that “primary qualities have “powers” that produce sensual “secondary qualities,” Dewey understands “quality” to be participative. The thing really does have a potentiality, but redness is a fusion of many potentialities and not just those attributed to the red object. The difference between appearance and reality is, then, a demarcation of natural conditions and not between experience and world.

Hey, didn’t I say that I’d talk about a field theory of experience? Well, what do you think a dynamic “fusion of many potentialities” is? A field. For the adventurous, I offer an insight into how I visualize human experience as a field.

I visualize it as a a collection of 5-dimensional graphs like so many I saw when I was earning my degree in math (3 spatial dimensions, time, and telos—potentiality to be). Note that this visualization is only an aid, as it spatializes time, and reduces the significant factors just to their telos and thereby also privileges futurity. Why would I simplify an n-dimensional field to 5? Because its close to how we actually live experience: what’s going on around me, how is it changing, and what do I anticipate happening.

Much more to come...

CFP: Workshop on Teaching Philosophy

2012-01-15T11:32:00.001-06:00

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Deadline February 9, 2012

The American Association of Philosophy Teachers
THE NINETEENTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP-CONFERENCE ON TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
St. Edward’s University Austin, Texas July 25 - July 29, 2012

Proposals for interactive workshops and panels related to teaching and
learning philosophy at any educational level are welcome. We especially
encourage workshops and panels on the following topics:
• innovative and successful teaching strategies
• professional issues connected to teaching
• how work in other disciplines can improve the teaching of philosophy
• engaging students outside the classroom
• innovative uses of instructional technologies
• the challenge of teaching in new settings
• methods to improve student learning

PROPOSAL GUIDELINES
Send Submissions, via email, to Russell Marcus: rmarcus1@hamilton.edu.
Submissions should be received by February 9, 2012
Each submission must contain, as attachments, both a proposal and a cover
sheet in Word (.doc or .docx), PDF (.pdf), or WordPerfect (.wpd) format.
Please label attachments with your name (e.g., Doe- Proposal.doc and
Doe-Cover.doc).

The Proposal should include:
• the session title
• a one-to-three page description of what the presentation will cover,
what participants will do during the session, and what the session seeks to
achieve
• a list of references, especially to relevant pedagogical literature
• descriptions of any useful handouts to be provided
• a list of equipment needed
• To facilitate blind review, no identifying information should appear
in the Proposal.

The Cover Sheet should include:
• the session title
• a 100-200 word abstract for use in the printed conference program
• each presenter’s name, institutional affiliation (if any), and contact
information
• the length of the presentation (60 or 90 minutes)
• the format of the presentation (workshop, panel, discussion, or
demonstration)

Dancing in Time, Singing in Tune: Harman and Temporality

2012-01-14T18:39:00.000-06:00

Ian Bogost, in response to my question about temporality in a comment, gave me some references in Bryan and Harman. Ian, thanks, as your citations are extremely helpful. Below is my response, which is a quick exposition of Harman.

The most appropriate part of that selection is the first full paragraph of p. 249:

“The question can be rephrased slightly to ask whether time and space are autonomous substances or only interlocked systems of events. When stated in this way it forms an exact parallel to the question of whether objects should be regarded as indivisible and substantial ultimates, or whether they are merely a nickname for a certain series of tangible effects or bundle of qualities. In the case of objects we were forced to reject both alternatives, since both turned out to be exaggerated and untenable. For precisely the same reason, we must reject both the Leibnizian and Newtonian views of space-time . On the one hand, we must agree that space and time cannot be empty objective containers, and that all of the paradoxes Leibniz ascribes to absolute space and time remain insoluble. On the other hand, it cannot strictly be true that space and time are merely relational: this is at best a half-truth, for if the whole of space and time were relational, all objects would be sucked into these relations entirely and could not be carved up into districts in any way at all. Sheer relation without barricades and boundaries would mean the pure totality of apeiron, and this is not what experience shows us. If space and time are relational in one sense, there is another sense in which they must be anti-relational, since we can easily speak of parts of space or eras of time in the plural.” (249, emphasis omitted throughout)

Ha, “apeiron” comes up again. I’ve been talking about that on the blog for the last day. I wholly agree with all these points and love to see them, as it makes going through this more interesting (for me). Then he writes,

“Time is the strife between an object and its accidents or contiguous relations. Time is black noise: not the con dition of possibility of this noise, nor the ecstatic structure through which humans encounter it, but simply this noise itself.” (250)

Here, we have an answer to the question of what is time for Harman; “time is black noise.” The first discussion of the three forms of noise and black noise in 181-183. I have to hand it to Harman; he’s such an excellent writer. I appreciate such summaries as [first form of noise] “Here we have nothing less than a duel between the thing and its notes (or substance vs. quality)” (182), [second] “…there is the thing as composed of all its notes, and on the other the various fluctuations that play on their surface (or substance vs. accident)”. [And the third form] “We can call this the duel between an individual thing and all else that inhabits the field of experience (or substance vs. relation)” (183). Finally, “black noise” is the dual “cloud of qualities surround such an object” and the “kind of a black hole whose interior has receded infinitely from view, but which also leaks a certain amount of radiant energy … inscrutable holes of withdrawn energy that somehow still emit fragrance or radio signals…” (183-184).

Much of this clarifies my earlier question of time and generativity. I do not immediately see anything that I would critique, and on the face of it this definition is worth interrogation.

Functional Hiding: How Does Nature Hide from Itself?

2012-01-14T10:37:00.001-06:00

A anonymous poster said that "functionality would fully temporalize it" ["hiding out" in reference to whether nature "hides" itself]. The assertion, as I understood it, was that functionalizing the concept would solve a lot of problems. Let's run with this.

Let us distinguish between “substantial” and “functional” definitions. I will subsequently apply this to the word “object.” A substantial definitions defines or distinctly characterizes something in terms of what it is by itself, e.g., its substance, essence, quiddity, Platonic form, Aristotelian ousia, etc. A functional definition defines or distinctly characterizes something in terms of how it functions, e.g., its activity, dynamic structure, pattern of effects, etc. The thing literally is its function and ceases to be when it stops functioning or functioning in that way. Hume famously claimed in Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals that justice was such a thing. As I told my Ethics class last semester, there is no justice in Mad Max’s dystopian world, since the social patterns that would give justice its utility and therefore existence would not be operative. This is only one understanding of a functional definition that is either a formal distinction or at best a real distinction, but has no real referent or extension.

Consider the difference between a functional description and a functional definition with real referent or extension. In the former, the description is an analytic tool vs. a definition. “Just think of it this way” is the former, while “it really is this way” is the latter.

Is an “object” a substantial or functional term in OOO, and its it descriptive or definitional? I believe the answer varies depending upon which OOO. It's something to think about if one wants to functionalize OOO. In my own pragmatism, it's all functional, which goes along with processive, but is sometimes descriptive and sometimes definitional depending upon what we're talking about.

Pragmatism: Another Solution for Correlationism

2012-01-13T18:09:00.001-06:00

I was reading Meillassoux's "Potentiality and Virtuality" in Collapse II when something hit me.

His criticism of Nelson Goodman's solution to the problem of causality in Hume does not address the solution of classical American pragmatism. Recall the problem.

We experience a "cause" and "effect" whenever we experience concurrent events in which case a psychological habit assigns one the title of "cause" and the other of "effect." What we experience is a sentiment from which we tacitly infer this relation. But there is no necessity to this relation other than an arbitrary psychological one that can be rescued only by assuming the uniformity of nature, etc. I will presume that the rest of the story is known.

One way of putting the Peirce or subsequent Deweyan solution is to say that by analogy they ontologize habit. That is, the connection of events is not merely a psychological habit, but a cosmic one. Nature itself has "habits," and in that consists the uniformity of nature. However, this is temporal and historical self-similarity rather than identity. Moreover, "psychological habits" that allow us to experience "causes" and "effects" are not identical with the cosmic habits.

However, this does not solve the original problem, but restates it, which might appear to be the "abandonment" and "reformulation" of the problem that Meillassoux derides. It is not. Rather, all the assumptions that lead to the problem, most of the modern tradition, are abandoned. Experience is not representational. Experience is not even, prima facie, something humans do. Rocks can experience. I will leave that part of the story untold, especially since I have addressed it numerous times on this blog.

Hence, the problematic that Meillassoux elaborates dissolves:

"Can we prove the effective necessity of the connections observed between successive events? The presupposition made both by Hume and by Goodman is that, if we cannot, then any ontological treatment of what is called real necessity (that is to say, of the necessity of laws, as opposed to so-called logical necessity) is consigned to failure, and consequently must be abandoned." (58)

Real necessity is either a posit or a myth. It's contingency all the way down, but contingency does not mean arbitrariness. One need only accept the problematic if one accepts the Humean premises, but classical pragmatism does not. It's another way out of the problem ... by avoiding it entirely. One need only work around a problem that is placed in one's path, or one can take another path.

Hence, Meillassoux's claim is old hat to classical pragmatists:

"the ontological approach I speak of would consist in affirming that it is possible rationally to

envisage that the constants could effectively change for no reason whatsoever, and thus with no necessity whatsoever; which, as I will insist, leads us to envisage a contingency so radical that it would incorporate all conceivable futures of the present laws, including that consisting in the absence of their

modification." (59)

We're a small group. I don't think anyone noticed we were left out.

Continuing, on this view, the principle of sufficient reason, that everything occurs according to some necessary logos, finds its analogue in the notion that every cause has a natural history, though perhaps not necessity. In his defense, this position might not qualify as "metaphysics, any postulation of a real necessity" (61). Metaphysics becomes reformulated as an abductive entreprise, wherein what is really real is experience and not the theory of experience. (See above: "experience" is not just something humans do.)

I would continue, but I wanted to make a small but important point. It seems that Meillasoux's concerns about the "pragmatic" moves of Nelson (Editor Mackay first called it "pragmatism") have nothing to do with the tradition of classical and neoclassical American pragmatism. Road less travelled and all that.

CFP: la Société de philosophie des sciences

2012-01-13T09:20:00.000-06:00

The Société de philosophie des sciences launches its journal!

Call for papers for issues 1 and 2

Lato Sensu: revue de la Société de philosophie des sciences

Journal Description:

The Société de philosophie des sciences was founded in 2002, with the

aim of promoting philosophy of science in the wide sense (comprising

such fields as epistemology, philosophy of mind and language,

philosophy of medicine and clinical ethics, as well of course as

philosophy of social sciences and the closely related areas of

rationality, social choice, law, environmental ethics, etc.). Its

intended constituency includes scholars working in totally or

partially French-speaking countries, as well as those who are

interested in interacting with those or in working on authors writing

in French. It is thus an international learned society, based in

France. Our website provides a more detailed view of its goals and

activities, such as the biennial congress, the Duhem Lectures and the

yearly Young Scholars’ Prize:

http://www.sps-philoscience.org/

The Société has founded a peer-reviewed, open-access, web-based

journal. Entitled Lato Sensu, Revue de la Société de philosophie des

sciences, it will appear two or three times a year and will publish

texts in French and in English. The main publication criterion will

be, of course, scientific excellence, evaluated according to criteria

in effect in international journals; particular attention will be

given however to originality. Different kinds of contributions,

besides the standard paper, such as state-of-the art surveys,

positions papers, debates, thematic ensembles, will be considered. We

believe this will make the journal more dynamic, more attractive, more

useful. . Lato Sensu will be advised and supported by a prestigious

international Advisory Board, composed in equal numbers of

philosophers and scientists.

How to submit:

No length limit is imposed, however the editors could refuse papers

judged too long. No element of style or format is imposed for a first

submission, except that the manuscript must be anonymous. Therefore

the author must avoid any reference that could help the two referees

to identify him/her. If the paper is accepted, the author will have to

provide a version of the paper in the style required by the editors.

Until the journal's website is launched, all submissions (joined with

an abstract) must be sent, as an attached PDF file, to Alexandre Guay

at the following address alexandre.guay@u-bourgogne.fr

The deadline for submissions for the first issue is April 25, 2012.

Editorial Advisory Board

Renée Baillargeon (Univ. of Illinois), Arnaud Basdevant (Univ. Pierre

et Marie Curie), Alexander Bird (Univ. of Bristol), Paul Humphreys

(Univ. of Virginia), James Lennox (Univ. of Pittsburgh), Richard

Lewontin (Harvard Univ.), Paolo Mancosu (Univ. of California,

Berkeley), Denise Pumain (Univ. Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Alex

Rosenberg (Duke Univ.), Carlo Rovelli (Univ. de la Méditerranée Aix-

Marseille 2)

Consulting Editors

Claudia Bianchi (Univ. Vita-Salute San Raffaele), Catherine Dekeuwer

(Univ. Jean Moulin Lyon 3), Paul Égré (Institut Jean Nicod), Alexei

Grinbaum (CEA), Max Kistler (Univ. Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Jean-

Pierre Marquis (Univ. de Montréal), Gloria Origgi (Institut Jean

Nicod), Julian Reiss (Erasmus Univ. Rotterdam), Stéphanie Ruphy (Univ.

de Provence), Christian Sachse (Univ. de Lausanne), Mark van Atten

(IHPST), Pierre Wagner (Univ. Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Director: Daniel Andler (Univ. Paris-Sorbonne Paris 4)

Editor: Alexandre Guay (Univ. de Bourgogne)

Managing editor: Pierre Uzan (Fondation Santé des Étudiants de France)

Phenomenological Intentionality: Realist, Processive, Pragmatic

2012-01-12T10:47:00.002-06:00

I would like to reintroduce my realist and pragmatic theory of phenomenological intentionality based on the processive emergent naturalism of John Dewey. This should serve as an introduction to those unfamiliar with the classical and neoclassical pragmatist tradition, and I invite questions, clarifications, and criticisms (always).

John Dewey holds an unconventional model of thought clearly articulated in his How We Think. It is called the “problematic situation” model that has three steps. 1. Something arrests our ongoing activity and forces us to resolve a “problem.” Our autonomous bodily and unreflective activity is insufficient to re-establish its prior dynamic equilibrium. 2. A “problem” summons reflective thought (cognition), and the contours of the “felt difficulty” guide thought about the “problem” so that it may be identified. At the outset, we experience only a peculiar quality of resistance to whatever we were doing. 3. The “problem” is resolved when we examine our experiences and ideas about what is going on and conduct an inquiry into the matter.

This model has many consequences that are not immediately obvious. One is that reflection and conscious intentionality, i.e., experiencing or thinking about something, is not a singular activity or agency of the subject. Rather, the thing itself provokes consciousness of it. By “thing itself,” I mean neither phenomenon nor noumenon, but simply an existential encounter with something in nature. The encounter summons attention and reflection, and as the encounter unfolds it guides the interaction. See Heidegger’s Being and Time and compare the ready-at-hand to present-to-hand discussion as a later analogue.

Experience, by definition, is an “interaction” or “transaction” of things in nature. Experience is not a “mirror” of nature, and the imagistic metaphor inaugurated with Descartes and continued throughout Modern Empiricism should be set aside if one would understand Dewey. Experience is foremost an activity of nature, a transaction, an encounter. From the encounter emerge new qualities not found in either actor as such, just as “redness” emerges from the encounter with a (red) rose, and it not a determinate potentiality of the rose itself.

“Problems,” or reflective thought, arise when our everyday encounters surge over habitual channels due to some novelty in the situation. Since a problem manifests from an encounter, a transaction, a twoness of act and resistance, we call the situation a “problematic situation.” There is not initially the problem, but a problematic situation. The goal of reflective thought is to identify the problem, which is concurrent with identifying the solution. Dewey explains that we do not understand a problem fully without comprehending its solution, as a key fits a lock. However, as experience is no mirror of nature, the problem and solution are not singular but multiple. Whatever returns us to regular activity is a solution, and the multiplicity of resolutions implies that ethics (valuing, choice, and responsibility) is implicated at a level prior to reflective thought. Morality is an aesthetic, but in the Kantian and not Humean sense of aesthetic that places Dewey closer to Scheler, as I have discussed in another post.

My Deweyan and process theory of realist phenomenological intentionality builds upon the model and his theory of experience. It’s quite simple at first. Intentionality emanates from the encounter. The felt quality of the resistance in the ongoing transaction, beginning as a bodily intentionality, becomes a conscious intentionality. The problematic encounter does not arrest and end activity; it transforms it and raises it to a “higher” dynamic. Reflection, as the “highest” level of organic function is the last phase of a natural process trying to regain homeostatic equilibrium. Reflective experience attempts to symbolically represent the encounter as something meaningful and thereby expand the possibilities of interaction beyond rote habit.

My prior and forthcoming published work focuses on explicating this synoptic reading of Dewey, especially the processive and temporal elements. While the explanation of intentionality seems a little quick and easy, relatively speaking, by that degree the exposition of temporality and meaning becomes vastly more complicated. E.g., what happens when the temporality of a natural, non-human process becomes temporalized as human conscious experience? I insist that temporality and phenomenological temporality are continuous, wherein the key to the shift is imagination.

Eating Popcorn Watching the OOO Blogosphere

2012-01-11T23:03:00.000-06:00

Salted, no butter please.

I went back after a hiatus and read through some of Levi Bryant's recent posts. He's doing a lot to respond to the various criticisms. I suspect that he's not saying much new so much as articulating it in a different way; its a lot more direct than what I've seen. Hey, I like direct.

Recently, he answered a comment by Glen Fuller on Jussi Parikka's blog that I discussed in a prior post .... I would link it but the link is dead. I do have the quotation, however:

"Levi, if it is ‘very similar’ why then would I bother with OOP? Why not stick with Whitehead? Is it the whole ‘God’ thing you don’t like? I read eternal objects the same way as Shaviro, Massumi, etc as virtual singularities that can be repeated in different ways under different conditions, like the boiling point of water."

In a recent post, he directly responds to the question qua Massumi. Given what he quotes of Massumi concerning the relation of objects to becoming, it should be easy for him to defend against the critiques at least as stated, and he does so successfully There is not an absolute distinction between being and becoming in Americanist process metaphysics, e.g., Whitehead, especially since once you piivilege one side explaining the other becomes problematic. That has been a process philosopher mantra, and if we include Buddhism (cf Nagarjuna) as I would recommend, that mantra has been around for a loooong time.

There are a lot of reasons, aside from plain ol' criticism, not to stick with Whitehead. I follow William James on this point and would accept "temperament" as an answer. One still has to contend with the past, but "slaying the master" is not the only way.

Response to Graham Harman

2012-01-10T20:34:00.000-06:00

Harman responds to a prior post here.

Before I begin to respond, I do want to be very clear. My question about what under- and over-mining is, was an honest one. I do not ask questions or be critical to score points, which would not benefit me anyway. I also did not address it to anyone in particular, despite what Harman says.

When Harman kindly answers my question--thank you sir--I am not implying that he is "attempting to conceal my [his] sources." It was an open question, and it has become less obvious what the answer might be given the seemingly increasing divergence of the OOO field. I do not think that "classical" should be considered a derogatory term, by the way, especially since I am a specialist in classical, neoclassical, and neo-pragmatism. I have been somewhat critical of Harman per what seems to be an absolutist concept of withdrawal and thus my preference for Levi's, but I leave detailed criticisms to OOO scholars. They have supplied commentary, and I am thankful that some of my concerns and educated opinions were not entirely inaccurate.

Finally, I really wish that Harman and Levi would realize that I do not share many of Leon's opinions or the bad blood between them. I suspect those prior feuds have lead to months of misinterpreting my intentions and to posts such as Harmans, which presumes that I was talking about him. It saddens me really. Consider this a reaching out, gentlemen.

My Recent Scholarship

2012-01-10T19:59:00.002-06:00

I managed to do three things over the holiday break. I completed the final revisions on my article proposing a pragmatic theory of imagination that is processional and realist in the American tradition's senses of those terms. Second, I sent out another article dealing with logical problems in Dewey's theory of experience, which explains the basis of a realist theory of phenomenological intentionality as a corollary. Third, I submitted another article defending pragmatism and phenomenology; It's not just for Husserlians. Now, I just need my book to finish revising itself....

Question to the OOO Community

2012-01-10T13:31:00.002-06:00

I have a question. It just occurred to me that I do not know who OOO is "against;" i.e., who are the opponents of object-oriented philosophy?

I can think of many differing positions, but who is actively arguing against it? I am not, as I do not mean to include critical commentary from the sidelines like mine, since criticism and opposition are two different things. Harman et all are obviously reacting to someone, who is it?

Undermining and Overmining

2012-01-10T13:01:00.001-06:00

... are they the new "reductivism" and "master narrative?" That is, rather than accuse someone of reducing this to that or providing a master narrative of phenomena that lurks behind them as puppet-master, we now accuse someone of under- or over-mining?

My point?

Is this really a new concept, or just a re-deployment of an old one? I am fond of the latter move, though I do insist that we realize what it is.

Weird Al's Party in the CIA

2012-01-05T10:20:00.001-06:00

Watch it here--it's hilarious.

Update on Scholarship

2012-01-03T11:08:00.000-06:00

An update for those interested.

1. I finally completed the final revision of my essay on pragmatist aesthetics. I proposed a theory that explains how imagination extends the environment into the possible. That is, much of our "intelligence" consists in our ability to convert natural potenticies into anticipated possibilities of action that we may then symbolicly represent and consciously mediate. The account is processional, phenomenological, realist, naturalist, and pragmatist.

2. Submitted a long-belated article on a logical problem (contradiction) in Dewey's theory of experience. The solution also gives a theory of phenomenological intentionality that is, per above, processional, realist, naturalist, and pragmatist. Both play nice with science, unlike Husserl.

3. If you've seen the previous post .... I'm aiming to try to finish my book this semester; last semester was too hectic for me to do anything--even breath. 1 and 2 are advances well beyond my book, which is a major revision of my dissertation. By the time the book is done, I hope to have a better handle on the intricacies of creative, processional metaphysics so that I can better defend a realist, emergent naturalist phenomenology. Most people have problems with the emergence part, as most are epiphenomenolist, i.e., believe that conscious states "free ride" on physical states without a real relation or causal efficacy.

Rewritten Introduction To My Book

2012-01-03T11:01:00.000-06:00

I decided that the introductory paragraph of my book lacked clarity and punch. Below is a draft of what is replacing it. It concerns valuation, process metaphysic, and realistic and naturalistic phenomenology that is not Husserlian.

John Dewey’s theories of valuation, experience, and inquiry are contradictory because they share a fundamental flaw. Dewey insists that our impulses, interests, and motivations, are always available for reflective analysis, evaluation, and amelioration (cite). He is both wrong and inconsistent on the matter. By his own theories, desire is not always ideational, and therefore our deepest impulses, momentary interests, and true motivations may evade reflective recuperation. Admitting fallibility is not a solution, especially when the opaqueness of desire to thought is structurally necessary. Dewey fails to confront the problem, which positions him to commit the hubris of technocratic thinking villified by Reinhold Niebhur.

Most extant scholarship either denies (Lekan or other guy), avoids (Hickman, most everyone), or dances around the issue (debate on Dewey and tragedy). The scholars who address it (Boisvert, Stuhr, Wilshire, etc.) do not fix the problem. The few who address it suffer a scholarly backlash (Gouinlock—conservative, Kestenbaum—accused of radical re-reading, Lachs vs. Stroud) unless they do so by extending Dewey’s work rather than directly critiquing it (Alexander per cultural naturalism, Schusterman per somaestehtics, Stuhr)

My goal is to rehabilitate Dewey’s theories of valuation, experience, and inquiry by excising the flaw. Doing so requires answering the following question. How is desire presented to thought so as to become meaningful, and how do we achieve reflective control over desire? My answer builds upon prior scholarship, especially Gouinlock, Alexander, and Kestenbaum, to yield a Deweyan theory of the conscious representation of desire. Given this theory, I reinterpret and rehabilitate Dewey’s method for the the first-person reflective control of desire given in the 1932 Ethics and perfected in Theory of Valuation. In the process, I will achieve two goals that surpass resolving the flaw and render this work to be of great interest beyond Dewey scholars. First, I will unify Dewey’s theories of habit, quality, and experience through interpreting his thought as thoroughly processional. Second, and building on the first, I will offer a preliminary realistic and naturalistic phenomenology that is completely independent of Husserl and his heirs.

A New Way of Thinking the Object vs. Process Divide

2011-12-31T09:51:00.002-06:00

An excellent post here:

No Borders Metaphysics:

Object-oriented ontologies vc materialisms: what is at stake 1 (Objects and concepts)

The best part (for me):

"If the analogy holds, attachment to objects in ontology are somehow like the attachment to concepts concerning thought content. The issue is whether there is more to the world than ready-made objects, more to content than ready-made concepts."

Yes, and that lays the ground for why I am critical of OOO. It wants its fundamental ontological unit, the object as substance, ready-made. I think that's wrong. It's that simple.

Experience and World as Many-to-Many Relation

2011-12-30T12:38:00.003-06:00

Thinking out loud, again, and building upon prior sessions. This was long promised, and I hope that it is interesting. Yes, I am aware that many of these topics are discussed in Peirce, Hartshorne, Whitehead, Neville, Corrington, etc., but I haven't read enough of them to engage their scholarship as such on this level. Besides, I find that being able to generate much of a thinkers insights on one's own greatly aids one's ability to understand the complexities of other's thought, especially when it is careful, formal, and systematic.

Among realists, it is often assumed that the external world is one thing, a unity. I would argue that the experience-to-world relation is a many-to-many relation. I take it for granted that no one would argue that experience is at least a many-to-one relation. Many experiences can be had in one situation. However, that what is experienced is always a plurality is more controversial.

Experience adds to what is experienced, and thus the experienced world is always more than just the external world. For example, experienced meaning is not something fully contained in things as independent of the human mind, especially when one holds meaning to be more than mere reference. Moreover, the world is more than any finite experience, and thus we could experience more.

This would be a trivial observation except that we cannot think either the totality of the world or of experiences of it except as an abstraction. If we presumed that we could arithmetically sum the disparate experiences, we would treat both experience and world as atemporal, which is false. The world is not static, but changing. Moreover, though more controversially, we would treat relations as unreal, which is false. The spatial and temporal configurations of the world are causal just as much as what exists is causal, and we can think neither the totality nor morphology of spatio-temporal structures such that we could claim to know that the world is one thing.

The problem is that a unified world is assumed in commonsense realism without explaining the unity of the world. Do we know or experience the world as one? How does it reveal itself in its unity? If one insists that realism is meant as a metaphysical doctrine, and thus the issue of knowledge or experience is moot, then I insist that one must explain how one describes what is beyond description?

Assuming naturalism, i.e., that there are no uncaused causes or that causation is “closed” (meant in an algebraic manner), then there is a sense in which the possibilities of experience are real. I take it is uncontroversial that the potentialities of experience are real, i.e., that given an existential context certain future eventuations are possible. However, I hypothesize that possibilities themselves, unmoored from any given existential context in contrast with a potentiality, are real.

What does it mean to say that possibilities are real? I will address two premises required to make sense of the statement. First, nature is causally closed, which I discuss here and here. In short, I propose that thinking the totality of nature is possible if we are merely thinking its causal closure. Again, “causal closure” is a sophisticated way to say that there are no uncaused causes. Thinking the totality of nature per causal closure is thinking in terms of all the possible transformations of nature given the varieties of natural causes. Second, and as part of causal closure, I will assume that the varieties of causality is not limited, but that any cause must have an effect that remains within the bounds of nature. There are no “leaps” in nature that cause discontinuities; hence, I affirm a variant of the principle of sufficient reason. However, since I do not bound the set of causes, I likewise do not bound the set of effects that are “natural.” This means that nature can grow, i.e., that nature thought as an algebraic structure is not isomorphic. In simpler terms, nature need only be continuous, but not self-identical through time.

If nature is creative or “grows,” then time is an irreducible ontological category. Hello, process metaphysics. Given all this, the experience-to-world relation cannot be understood as static, because both terms of the relation are multiple and temporal. Now I will return to the question of the reality of possibilities.

If we accept this processional emergent naturalism, then possibility qua possibility must be real. Why? Because causal closure implies that there is an ultimate ontological structure to possibility such that closure and continuity is possible. Said again, if there are no self-caused causes or no ex nihilo causation, then that formal logical possibility is closed. (I do not accept the argument that closure is logically necessary, because that inference requires that Being qua Being is bound by logic, which is an assumption.) This alone is insufficient to convince one of the reality of possibility; for that we must turn to continuity. If each existence or event is to be related to every other such that discontinuity is impossible, yet we observe a regularity of what and how things are related, then by abductive hypothesis I propose that the possibilities of existence are bound. Otherwise, the cosmos would be utterly chaotic and permanence would be the exception rather than the rule. Hence, the structure of possibility must be real, where the “structure of possibility” just means “the possibilities of possibility.” I believe that the ontological vs. ontic distinction might be helpful to distinguish the structure of possibility from determinate possibilities. The reality of possibility only implies that in any given situation there are some limitations on the possibilities of present (and future) existence, which is an ontological statement. It does not imply any determinate or concrete possibilities or potentialities, which is an ontic issue.

What is the difference? I reject physicalism, materialism, and all the -isms that posit that reality is of one sort or another. These -isms make ontological restrictions on the ontic that are merely posits, bold assumptions. There may be reasons for doing so, but making those assumptions is neither necessary nor always compelling.

Finally, I will return to the original topic and tie this in. If possibility is real, then what does this have to do with experience-and-world as many-to-many relation. Well, if the world contains both the potentialities and (ontic) possibilities of experience, then when we experience the world we experience both what is actual and what might be, i.e., the present and the future. Hence, the “many” in the “many-to-many” cannot be thought of as an enumerable totality or collective in which calling it a “unity” makes sense. It is unified only insomuch as it is continuous, but this means “connected” and not “one.” And thus, the experience-to-world relation is not many-to-one ever.

Shaviro: Harman on Metzinger

2011-12-28T17:06:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite Shaviro posts is here.

There is lots to love, or maybe because I just happen to agree with most everything Shaviro says and wish I could communicate it so effortlessly. Points I like:

1. critique of scientism and eliminatism

2. recognition that "armchair" philosophy (anything not backed up by science) is indispensable

3. description of an event of perception as a reification of the process

4. recognition that scientistic philosophy contradicts itself when it belittles "folk" belief while championing science

A Difficulty of Processional and Temporal Writing

2011-12-27T13:03:00.000-06:00

A thought on the difficulties of processional and temporal writing.

I am in the midst of finishing edits to an article. A reviewer suggested that I harbored an “unexamined essentialism” in my writing as grammatically I refer to substantives too often when talking about functional and processional concepts. I mention this because I am likely not alone in having this problem, thought I have an uncommon but not unique solution.

Resist verbing and nominalization. That is what I am doing that is throwing my reviewer off, and it is also why these articles take so long to write and edit. It has been common for decades in philosophy in America, and philosophy in the West in general, to “verb nouns” (through usage to transform their functional part of speech from noun to verb) or to perform a “nominalization” (write the noun form of a verb and use it as the subject of the sentence).

My own compositional style has been compared to a “inexorable freight train” as I build my arguments linearly and always with a sense of an anticipated goal (that I do not always reach).

Objections and Responses to Object-Oriented Ontology

2011-12-24T11:09:00.000-06:00

Jussi Parikka at Machinology posts some tentative criticisms here and gets a lot of response.

I am in a similar situation with Parikka, though perhaps slightly more knowledgeable, and I agree with most of his concerns. My foremost question is why? Why do this theory? That is my first question because much of what I've seen in OOO is at best a radicalization of concerns expressed in novel ways that motivates an intellectual machinery. However, I do not see why we need OOO to address many of these concerns, e.g., correlationism or a want for "flat ontologies," as pre-existing metaphysics already known to them accomplish this.

I never ask a question that I do not already have an answer to, although having an answer is not the same as having knowledge. I suspect that what motivates OOO is more due to the current state of the discourse, political structures in the discipline of philosophy, and a lot of other reasons that are not philosophical per se.

In the comments, I see Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant responding. Dr. Bogost writes that Parikka's comments amount to "I don't like it." Well, I think that Bogost is right in that regard--educated guess--but he also has substantial questions that Bogost ignores that other posters bring to the fore.

Let me explain why "I don't like it" so far. In short, I am not convinced that the formal distinction offered by the term "object" is worthwhile. This is part of Parikka's and commenter "shane" 's point as this approach has a lot of consequences that we might not want to embrace. I like Levi Bryant's approach of the issue as a counter to this, e.g., his processional approach that I've discussed before and that he posts upon in response at machinology. However, I still do not see what this gets us beyond Whitehead; i.e., why not just do Whitehead? Or some other thinker? When I see responses to this, which are being fervently posted, I remain unconvinced except for one point. Since I encountered it, OOO appears to be way for a continentalist to do process philosophy while not being "just" a Deleuzeian, etc. I suspect that the freedom the new field allows is what motivates many, especially since continental as a tradition is very beholden to philosophical-figure thinking, i.e., centering work around thinkers rather than problems.

Speaking of, I wrote the previosu thought before seeing it replicated in Glen Fuller's response:

Conclusive Thoughts

I would discuss some of the fallout and its relation to my own engagements with OOO. I share Parika's puzzlement here about why posting or comment about OOO/OOP causes such heated and often unfriendly debate. For example--and this is not the only one as one need only peruse the comment threads--Harmans' response here is unfair per "normally someone reads something before attacking it." I have been accused of that, and my response is this: must I become a scholar of someone's work before I ever make a criticism? Parikka later makes that statement in a later post; he's read quite a bit but is not a scholar. This move sets the bar so high that it can only be read as a rhetorical move, i.e., a power-play to silence any criticism. Aside, every time I do look up a reference when given to me, it doesn't answer the criticism, excepting Levi's discussion of the processional nature of objects in onticology, which I think may contain a solution to my criticisms. This goes right back to Parikka's puzzlement that I also share; why would I want to discuss OOO, if it's not central to my own research, when that kind of reaction is common? For another example, see Glen Fuller's comments in Parikka's thread (this is my only knowledge of this person and the same for Parikka): what I take to be good, solid criticism is bashed as belligerence and speaking in a poor tone. That looks familiar, again, as I have been hit with that. Where am I going with this? I feel both validated and validating (of Parikka and others) that there is too much touchiness in *some* members of the OOO community. That is, they cannot seem to tell the difference between curious but critical interlocutors, and opponents cranking them; I am of the former. Sadly, I do not think they would believe me--even those commenters on Parikka's blog that I've never exchanged words with.

CFP: Feminist Pragmatism in Place Colloquium

2011-12-21T17:11:00.001-06:00

Feminist Pragmatism in Place Colloquium

*The University of Dayton*

*October 19-20, 2012 *

This colloquium will address feminist pragmatist approaches to place,

broadly construed, including natural and built environments, and spaces of

exclusion and belonging in historical and contemporary contexts.

*Plenary Speakers:*

Lisa Heldke, author of *Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer* and

Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College, will speak on "Urban

Farmers and Rural Cosmopolitans? Pragmatist Musings on Contemporary Food

Movements"

Louise W. Knight, author of *Citizen: Jane Addams and the

Struggle for Democracy* and *Jane Addams: Spirit in Action,* Visiting

Scholar, Northwestern University Gender Studies Program and School of

Communication, will speak on "Reading Addams's Rhetoric on Social Justice"

*Due Date: May 28, 2012.** *Papers will be blind reviewed. Please submit

two files, one with the paper title, your name, and email address, and the

other with the full paper of no more than 3500 words of text, without your

name or other identifying information. Send to Cynthia King (*

Cynthia.King@notes.udayton.edu*).

For more information please contact the colloquium organizers, Denise

James (*Denise.James@notes.udayton.edu*) and Marilyn Fischer *(

Fischer@udayton.edu*), of the Department of Philosophy, University of

Dayton, Dayton, Ohio.

CFP: Metaphysical and Religious Naturalism

2011-12-16T08:15:00.003-06:00

Highlands Institute Conference, 2012

Metaphysical and Religious Naturalism:

Present Forms and Future Prospects

June 11-14, 2012

Manitou Springs, Colorado

Keynote Speakers

Lawrence E. Cahoone, College of the Holy Cross

Nancy K. Frankenberry, Dartmouth College

Ursula Goodenough, Washington University in St. Louis

Robert C. Neville, Boston University

Intellectual Autobiography

Nancy R. Howell, Saint Paul School of Theology

Conference Chairs

Donald A. Crosby , Colorado State University, donald.crosby@att.net

Pamela C. Crosby, Florida State University, pcrosby@fsu.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2012

Submit proposals to: pcrosby@fsu.edu.

Proposals should contain a descriptive title and brief (no more than 500 words) but informative and readable description of the paper to be presented, with some indication of why the proposer considers the paper to be an important contribution. Proposals should also include a brief (150-word) biographical sketch of their authors.

The theme of the 2012 HIARPT conference encompasses exploration, defense, and criticism of the various forms of metaphysical and/or religious naturalism that have been proposed in the past, are being argued for in the present, or are thought to be inviting possibilities for the future.

Part of the task of the conference will be to address issues concerning the nature of naturalism itself as a metaphysical position or religious outlook and commitment. For example, was Aristotle a naturalist? Why or why not? Is panentheism a naturalistic position? Does adequate explanation of the present existence and character of the universe require the positing of an ultimate source or ground that is not itself a part of the existing universe—and if so, does this mean a departure from naturalism? Did the universe begin at some point, or has it always been, in some shape or form? Is natura naturans a part of nature, or does it transcend nature? What is the relationship of naturalism and materialism? Can an idealist be a naturalist? Does naturalism simply mean rejection of anything that could be termed supernatural? How are metaphysical and epistemological naturalism to be distinguished?

Other questions to be considered might include the following: What are the specific merits or strong points of a naturalistic outlook? How can such an outlook be criticized? What is the relation of metaphysical or religious forms of naturalism to the findings of the natural sciences? What sort of case could be made in favor of some sort of transcendent theism or spiritualism as over against various forms of naturalism? Which, if either, is primordial or emergent, matter or mind? What is matter and how does an adequate metaphysical or religious definition of it relate to current physics? How does naturalism relate to scientism? How does it relate to the natural sciences in general? How does naturalism account for evil or provide resources with which to respond to and cope with the menace of evil? Does evil exist only among human beings or is it a feature of nature itself? How do humans relate to the natural order? What are their responsibilities to that order?

These questions are only suggestive. Proposals relating to the history of naturalism or the future prospects of naturalism are welcome, as are constructive or critical attempts to come to terms with any aspect or aspects of a naturalistic metaphysics or religious naturalism. Proposals for panels on the theme are also invited.

As in the past, proposals are also invited in areas different from the theme of the conference but relevant to HIARPT’s mission statement and will be considered on their merits.

For a printable page containing the information above, click on this link:

HIARPT 2012 Announcement.

Every phenomenon is a valuation.

2011-12-14T20:30:00.001-06:00

Do the Dewey, and you too will see the light.

Seriously, however, John Dewey's position has been compared to Max Scheler, although I cannot recall a systematic treatment. Anyone know of any?

CFP: Special Issue of The Monist: Naturalizing Religious Belief

2011-12-14T13:48:00.003-06:00

CFP: Special Issue of The Monist
Theme: Naturalizing Religious Belief

Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2012
Advisory Editor: James Beebe, University at Buffalo (jbeebe2@buffalo.edu)

The cognitive science of religion brings the methods and resources of the cognitive sciences to bear on questions about religious thought and action, such as how ordinary cognitive structures inform and constrain the transmission of religious ideas, why people believe in gods, why religious rituals tend to have the forms that they do, and why afterlife and creation beliefs are so common. Findings in the cognitive science of religion raise a variety of philosophical questions, such as whether these findings undermine, threaten or explain away religious belief; whether those who believe in the supernatural can consistently accept a strongly naturalistic explanation of those beliefs; and whether traditional notions of religious belief are compatible with the view that explicit expressions of religious commitment are often post hoc rationalizations of intuitive but often unconscious inclinations of evolved mental structures. Contributions are invited that address these and other philosophical questions raised by the cognitive science of religion.

Submissions should be sent via email to the Advisory Editor, James Beebe (University at Buffalo) atjbeebe2@buffalo.edu.

Once Again Revising My First Book

2011-12-12T19:20:00.000-06:00

Below is a quickly drafted introduction to what will be my first book. One thing I learned from my dissertation defense and subsequent journal articles is that I need to reframe the entire project, and do so within invoking phenomenology at the outset. I have spent months doing so on this blog.

John Dewey’s theory of valuation is inseparable from his theory of experience. This is a point often missed, and even when captured, its ramifications deserve more consideration from scholars. We human creatures value first and consciously experience second, yet we mistakenly believe the reverse—that the reflect first and value second. This is an instance of the psychologist’s or philosopher’s fallacy, wherein one reverses a natural history and takes its outcome as most real, certain, stable, etc. Dewey dealt frequently with this problem, but his work is insufficient, in part because of his characteristic unwillingness to theorize on the darker aspects of this theory. Some defend Dewey by pointing to his awareness of the problems, but neither Dewey’s awareness nor scholarly reminders are sufficient to solve the lingering problems.

I propose to elucidate and begin resolving the problems not for the sake of historic Dewey scholarship or from a sense of “saving the Master,” but towards the aim of systematizing a basis from which to launch neoDeweyan scholarship that traces its roots in the now quiescent discourse on the intersection of pragmatism, phenomenology, and valuation that roared in the 70s and 80s.

Robert Neville on Realism and Universals in Process Theology

2011-12-11T12:49:00.001-06:00

Leon of After Nature has posted on Dr. Neville, and shared with me an article on realism and universals in Peirce, Harsthorne, and Whitehead. I must admit, Neville's work is amazing! Like Leon, I have met him several times, e.g., at his talk on cosmic creativity at Southern Illinois University, and at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. I can confirm that he's a nice guy, and since we're on the topic of leading thinkers who are nice guys, I will extend that to Joseph Margolis and Mitchel Aboulaffia, among others.

For a detailed discussion on the topic, see "Experience and Philosophy: A Review of Hartshorne's Creative Method and Philosophy." What is key in this is the difference between what is described as "Aristotelian" and "Platonic" notions of universals; e.g., whether universals are generated immanent within nature (Aristotle) or whether they are transcendent to natural existence (but not reality) (Plato). One thing that Neville discusses that is new to me, are the precise arguments for the temporality of the particular instantiation of a universal.

Forthcoming: The Multiplicity of the World

2011-12-10T09:24:00.001-06:00

I believe that I have sufficiently addressed realism and nominalism to broach my next post on the multiple relation of experience-and-world. This is where the discussion is headed, for me. How can I say that the experience-world relation is a many-to-many relation and maintain realism? "Realism" usually means that the world exists independently of human thought, is a unity such that an idea might "correspond" to an object in the world, and that the correspondence relation is at least many-to-one (many perspectives on one object). I will argue that the world is a multitude in its unity, which is not a novel thesis I'll admit, although I might give a novel articulation of it. I will argue for a realism that does not require the idempotent unity of the world.

What is really going one, behind all the fancy words? I will be arguing against Lockean empiricisms, by which I mean much more than Locke himself but also all forms of derived empiricisms, and I will be arguing for Hegelian empiricisms, wherein relations are real and the mediated immediacy of the phenomenon is not a copy, correlate, or mirror of nature. It is better understood as a real emenation of nature.

Universals vs. Genera vs. Generals in Realism vs. Nominalism

2011-12-09T14:13:00.001-06:00

I am continuing the discussion of realism and nominalism. Here I make the distinction between genera (genus-species relationships), generals (e.g., Lockean abstractive processes), and universals. I also explain the importance difference between a realist and nominalist on several key points of metaphysics and phenomenology.

Leon and I were discussing the basics of Duns Scotus, etc., and my own appropriations of the terms that adds some Aquinas. Below is an edited portion of our discussion.

The terms are “real distinction,” “formal distinction,” and a third term I do not know off the top of my head. We often just say a “mere distinction" or "merely formal."

Universals and genera are of the second kind. I forgot what the perfections are, which are special cases of this ontological problem. Note that genera and generals are distinct, whereas the latter refer to principles arrived at via an inductive process, e.g., Locke’s “abstraction” or logical induction. The former refer to genus-species relationships, e.g., categorical logic.

Correct, generality (generals) is neither a real nor formal distinction. Hence, a nominalist often thinks that generality is all we have—not universality or genera of being.

As for essence vs. thing, you are right. If we are Hobbes-style nominalists and think that all things are (corpuscular) particularities, then we deny essences. Recall that essences are a kind of universal, while quality is another kind of universal. Also, "essentiality" is not the category of uniquity (uniqueness); the latter is "quiddity." As I wrote in my post, nominalism gives up on substantial or essential identity—identity is a best a function of something. It does not necessarily give up on absolute particularity.

As for whiteness, it is a universal and a general, but not in the same way for both. Insomuch as whiteness has reality, it is a universal. Insomuch as we experience or know whiteness, it is a general; we infer from experience that this encounter is of the category of whiteness. Now, if we are not realists about universals, then we know merely the generality “whiteness.” The problem here is that we no longer experience the real thing, but merely a generated appearance. If one is a nominalist, one does not think that there is anything “under” this generation.

In my Peirce-Deweyan position, for instance, we add to the idea that whiteness is a universal and general. We talk about the generation of the phenomenal quality, so we are talking about a generated quality. However, since we think that generation is a real process, then the generated quality maintains a real, non-arbitrary relation to the thing experienced. (Note that the “thing experienced” is not an entity or object, but I’m keeping it simple for now.) A nominalist, on the other hand, can merely say that the phenomenal quality was generated, full stop.

Response to Leon on Realism and Nominalism

2011-12-08T16:21:00.001-06:00

I am responding to Leon of After Nature’s response to my previous post, which is all a response to…. It just keeps going, and that’s a good thing. I will good down through his post and respond to various portions, and much of my musing is riffing of off Leon rather than addressing and accusing him of anything. In fact, I add a lot of qualifications to what he attributes to me and what he claims of himself.

I apologize in advance for the -isms, for this is a case where they do far more harm than good, and this reads more like a comment than a post.

1. I did not say (and was wrong if I did) that realist metaphysics is impossible if one is a nominalist. Rather, I do not think that there is a plausible or non-trivial metaphysic that accomplishes this. The cases that I can think of are not considered vaguely plausible by contemporary standards and and contradict much establish science.

To be clear I am referring to cases wherein one is a realist about the external world, but holds either a form of metaphysical nominalism that eliminates identity/essence (perhaps a pure corpuscular metaphysics in either a Greco-Roman or Modern European variety), or holds to epistemic nominalism (e.g., Hume). However, one can pull if off if one is a speculative realist of a pragmatic or sort; e.g., one presumes the independent existence of the world and knows it through induction or abduction. However, one then has a very, very anthropocentric metaphysics by necessity, because one does denies oneself any methodology to achieve more than that. I am sure that there are ways around this limitation, especially given the number of non-Western views that I know, but all that come to mind are either trivial or not plausible, especially if we maintain a secular view.

Note that affirming “substance” without “essence” is still a nominalism and falls into the cases of corpuscular metaphysics and such. I would accept conceptions of identity that attribute identity to structure and not Aquilinian notions of essence, which is much closer to my own view. However, insisting on identity as a structural rather than a substantial concept does not save a nominalist from being hamstrung when attempting to do metaphysics.

2. I am not certain that pure immanentism is a problem. It depends on what that means, and my first hypothesis is materialism. If all reality is material, then transcendent identity is impossible. That is, if identity has no fixity other than momentary configurations, then we are at best in a materialist version of Heraclitean flux. I think pragmatic-abductive arguments can still be made within this view, because pragmatism doesn’t strictly require absolutist notions. However, one is reduced to realism of the external world and not of universals. In the best case scenario, metaphysics might extend to making abductive hypotheses about the cosmic conditions of our epoch, since there can be no laws of nature (or Peircean habits, which are the temporalized version), but at best localized constancies.

3. Realism of universals, though it implies transcendence, need not imply “ultimate governance among the particulars.” (I do not recognize the reference.) First, there need not be ultimacy. Second, we need more than universals for “goverance” of laws of nature, e.g., continuity. Continuity is a onto-logical concept and not a universal, e.g., a formal and not real distinction (Scotus).

4. Leon writes “Speculation necessarily extends beyond the singular term, and realism admits both the reality of terms, relations between those terms, and then the generic principles applying to both terms and relations.” Leon is being hasty again and will see my rebuttal coming the moment I start. Leon, you’re rolling separate theses together because they happen to coexist in your metaphysics, e.g., Peirce. The separation in order of mention: 1) realism about the external world, 2) realism of universals, 3) reality of relations (Peircean continuity as a case of Thirdness), 4) and the semiotic by which we come to know or speculate on those relations, etc. Leon, these are separable and you know this—don’t forget.

5. Leon has a point about the correlationist circle and flatness about immanence qua nominalism; he appears to be channeling some Peirce and then some Whitehead. He does not say this explicitly, but temporality might be a problem for pure immanence depending on what we mean by the term; it can mean much more and other than my “materialism” example. Note that we can take his words on the “show of the present moment” to include both metaphysical and phenomenological-empirical denotations. What’s the reference for that, Leon?

6. Leon describe the sense of transcendence that gives this blog its name “Immanent Transcendence”: “speculation necessarily involves transcendence—but transcendence with reference to particulars, and certainly never with reference to itself alone. I wonder if there is a widespread confusion of “transcedent” and “transcendental.” What is transcendent needs not be Kants’ “transcendental” or “conditions for the possibility of” in a strict logical manner of a transcendental deduction. When I think “transcendent,” I am usually thinking cases of emanence.

Varieties of Nominalism and Realism

2011-12-07T18:25:00.001-06:00

I wish to address the topic of realism vs. scholastic realism vs. nominalism. I hope that it will further clarify my earlier comments on the subject both here and at Footnotes2Plato, Knowledge Ecology, and After Nature. The remainder of my discussion should not be construed as a continuance of that conversation, but that it was the occasion for the present thought.

“Realism” is usually short for “realism about the external world” that is opposed to “idealism.” The former supposes that the world exists independently from mind, while the latter supposes that mind is fundamental to existence. Idealism is closely associated with “rationalism,” which holds that rationality or intellect is fundamental to existence. Given that mind implies rationalism—at least in a historic western context—rationalism implies idealism. “Realism” is commonly affirmed by those who merely assert the existence of the external world, and that was how it was defined by Levi Bryant in the mentioned conversations, who affirmed realism and (epistemic?) nominalism.

Suppose that one is a metaphysical nominalist, e.g., a Heraclitus or Thomas Hobbes. This kind of nominalist asserts that things do not have a discrete identity, e.g., denies either the reality or application of the logical law of identity. To deny the reality of the law is to say that there is no identity to anything, e.g., all is flux. Heraclitus might be said to approach this view, as the only unities within his metaphysics are the fact of flux and the persistence of the upward and downward way, e.g., change and logos. One could also deny the effective applicability of the law, e.g., arguing a Hobbesian corpuscular metaphysics in which body and motion are the primitives. In this case, nothing has an essence, even though diversity might be real in the sense that different configurations of bodies and forces may have different effects. Although neither of these examples is perfect, they do give an idea of the problems and common historic variants of metaphysical nominalism.

Suppose that one is an epistemic nominalist, e.g., a David Hume. This kind of nominalist does not deny (metaphysical) identity, but does deny that human beings can know it. Hume is an excellent example with which to move forward, because he is also an empiricist, and is thus a kind of nominalist that we are likely to see today, unlike Heraclitus and Hobbes. The combination of empiricism and epistemic nominalism birth a conundrum for such a thinker who also wishes to do metaphysics. Metaphysics becomes impossible. Barring exotic re-definitions and qualifications, this person has denied all the intellectual tools in which to do metaphysics. That is, an empiricist-nominalist is limited to immediate experience, because such a person cannot unequivocally name anything beyond experience. If the person equivocally names something, then the naming has nothing to do with the (metaphysical) identity of the thing. There are still options, for example, in pragmatic moves that redefine truth in terms of anticipated consequences. However, such options still court Hume’s inductive fallacy of assuming that the past will be like the future, which becomes a suffocating limitation for a nominalist.

The problem with nominalism is that one berefts oneself of the intellectual tools to do metaphysics. It is not impossible, but it greatly limits what positions one can claim without begging the question and becoming incoherent. If one is an epistemic nominalist and an empiricist, one must defend, to an extreme degree, one’s ability to perform metaphysics. You affirm that you experience something, but you know not what. Even if one asserts realism (about the external world) along with nominalism, this gets that person little, because the person admits that reality cannot be known in principle. Perhaps the best that person can do is affirm a Jamesian pragmatic principle about the “cash value” of holding this-or-that metaphysical theory. That is a defensible hypothesis, but a pragmatic abduction requires that one should that one’s metaphysics leads to actual change in the world. A Jamesian pragmatic hypothesis substitutes a traditional truth claim with an empirical and consequential one, and that metaphysician better like working with one’s hands. It’s a change of intellectual venue entirely, and cannot be purely theoretically justified. I say this because it’s too easy to claim Jamesian pragmatism and then overlook his verification requirement—having one’s cake and eating it too. (Note that James’ view does not hold for the other pragmatists, which is something often overlooked, but the other pragmatists were unequivocal realists vs. James’ ambiguity at points.)

Metaphysical nominalism is opposed to scholastic realism per the reality of universals. If one affirms the reality of universals, i.e., the reality of descriptive categories (cf Aristotle’s Categories), then one is much empowered. One need no longer perform the contradiction of claiming to do metaphysics without the descriptive categories to do so. When claiming the reality of universals, by the way, one is not claiming that (human) conceptual categories match the ontological categories. One claims that there are ontological categories towards which our conceptual categories might aim, i.e., that unity in the universe is real. In contrast, recall that Kant said that unity (or rules) are a feature of the (human) understanding, and therefore at best metaphysics extends little past sensibility. That is precisely what being a realist about universals denies. Moreover, if one is a process metaphysician rather than a substance metaphysician, another option is opened.

Process metaphysicians following in the wake of C.S. Peirce, who affirm the reality of continuity, may rest assured that there is a continuity of the ontological categories and the phenomenological and conceptual categories. That is, to leap a few steps ahead, experience is real. We experience things in their immediacy, and not through some annihilating Kantian mediation. However, I did not say that the experienced quality is isomorphic to the thing itself, because what also frequently comes with this view is non-representation theories of experience. Human experience is a semiotic process by which we interact with the thing and encode part of the interaction as consciousness. Sorry, no mirroring of nature here, despite being twice-over a realism and a naturalism.

I am, of course, describing in my own way the pragmatist position. Its empiricism is too often mistaken for a Lockean empiricism rather than a Hegelian empiricism; i.e., experience is a mediated immediacy. Following Peirce, phenomenologically-speaking, the mediation is physico-semiotic.

I hope that this post has been informative. My intent was to further delineate the various forms of nominalism and give some historic examples, while explaining my own interest in the topic. I have more to say that I will likely add in the comments.

Forthcoming Posts

2011-12-05T18:28:00.001-06:00

I am currently working on posts on the following topics:

1. Realism and Nominalism (again)
2. Experience and World as many-to-many relation (within realism)

Harman on Bergson and James

2011-12-05T08:23:00.001-06:00

Graham Harman, on Object-Oriented Ontology, writes,

"You can take the other path, of course. This is done most bluntly by Bergson in Matter and Memory and James in Essays in Radical Empiricism (I just wrote a critique of the latter book at the request of Kronos, though it will only be in Polish translation initially). Bergson's "images" and James's "experiences" are designed to circumvent the whole problem by eliding the difference between image and reality from the start. However, their arguments for this aren't very good, and succeed only if you share their distaste for the phenomenal/noumenal distinction."

I am less familiar with Bergson, but I can definitely speak for James, especially as he is taken here as the "other path" that culminates in the pragmatist tradition although Harman did not mention that. I would like to see his argument. So far, I would repeat Harman's own words used earlier in the post to defend his concept of "allure;" "I’ve not heard any objections to it that amount to anything more than personal distaste." His description of it as a "distaste for the phenomenal/noumenal distinction" is not wholly inaccurate, but the majority of philosophers are likely to misinterpret pragmatism by thinking its a Lockean empiricism, e.g., either that we are dancing the correlationist tango, or are getting around the problem by "eliding the difference between image and reality from the start." Again, that is not strictly false, but without a background in pragmatism, the average reader is very likely to read that in the customary way given to us by modern philosophy. One then misunderstands and misinterprets the tradition. Or, to give Harman more credit, perhaps he has grasped one of James' weaknesses, as many of James' arguments "aren't very good" but not for the reasons mentioned. They are not very good because James was more a visionary in his later work than a careful, systematic thinker. He relied heavily on C.S. Peirce, who was everything James and Dewey were not in this regard, and many misread both of them because they do not have this background.

In closing, I do hope that the translation will come out soon, as I am curious how James was read, especially since this can be dicey at times even among the James scholars when consulting his later work.

p.s. I could not help but be drawn in as pragmatism phenomenology and theory of representation is what I do, and James is hard to pin down definitely on these subjects, and thus I am curious how Harman does so. James' theory of truth, that also informs his theory of experience, is a derivation of Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" and the notion of "abduction," the logic of science.

From Hume to Dewey: Lockean vs. Hegelian Empiricism

2011-12-03T10:09:00.001-06:00

The following is part of a digital presentation and review that I am making for my Introduction to Philosophy class; it summarizes Hume's argument in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that the the will is necessarily determined and yet free. I want to take a moment to leap from this Locke-derived empiricism into Dewey's Hegel-derived empiricism. This description is an alternative to what I provided in my dissertation and my forthcoming article, both of which are copyrighted, and I might edit this post as I add to it.

TheWill Is Necessarily Determined and Yet Free

· We feel ourselves “making a choice.” Cause = Feeling

· We act in accordance with that “choice” Effect= Act

· We infer thatthe feeling is the cause of the act as effect. Habit

· If the effect follows the cause, we assume we have to powerto will our actions.

· We havenot proven that power exists; we haveproven that the inference occurs.

· We are “free”—accordingto Hume—if the act follows the feeling.

· But weare not free to “cause” the feeling.

· Natureand our surroundings “cause” the feeling, not us.

· Therefore,thus the will is necessarily determined, yet free.

I will add qualifications piece by piece to begin building a bridge from Hume to Dewey. I will not be able to add all the pieces, but I hope to have just enough to give one an idea of what occurs in Dewey if one is already familiar with Hume.

What if "feeling" is not a "moral sentiment" (an affect or emotion)? A moral sentiment is an affective response to the situation; a distinct and biologically-innate affect is aroused given an "environmental trigger." While the peculiarities of the sentiment are innate, its proper object or "environmental trigger" has only some natural tendencies but no fixities. Education and custom are what fix the precise object of a sentiment, its magnitude, etc.

What if "feeling" denotes, rather than an affective event, an organic process? Dewey uses a derivation of C.S. Peirce's definition of "feeling." Feeling is an activity born of the interaction of the environment and body; "feeling" denotes the receptivity of the body to its environment. Hence, to jump many steps forward, the feeling of making a choice is a late phase of a process of environmental-bodily transaction rather than an epiphenomenon.

How does this differ from Hume? When we "feel" that we are making a choice, the sentiment is not merely an affect resulting from a psychological principle. The affect results from a reality that extends beyond consciousness and the body, and into nature beyond ourselves. Perhaps the best way to conceive this is to imagine that the sentiment emanates from the environment, although the emanation is neither direct nor linear. The feeling of freedom is not an epiphenomenon, but the result of something bound to the world with a greater reality than merely a psychological principle.

A feeling is not an affect; it is a natural process or temporal activity. Feeling is not the whole of the process, as the whole is the unity of environmental-bodily transaction, but a phase of the process that occurs when sufficient dynamic conditions are met. Feeling is synonymous with the phase of the process in which the body may respond to the transaction, in which it make take an active rather than passive role. Feeling denotes the phase in which the response is represented, i.e., in which the body registers resistance to its activity upon the environment (and itself). Feeling is thus the inception of a Peircean Third between environment and body.

Suppose we accept the structure of Hume's argument, e.g., that the idea of freedom comes from a habitual inference and that we cannot presume absolute freedom. That is, we may not be the author of our thought of "making a choice;" nature and our bodily nature is the author of our choices, and our consciousness of this provides no agency. Dewey does not give up on free will; he reinvents what agency is in a manner that sounds Humean, but is not. Part of the puzzle is that he uses C.S. Peirce's notion of habit, not Hume's.

Agency is the cultivation of habits that allow for the mediation of (external) natural forces. We become more free as we develop habits to forestall and reflect upon what accosts us, what instincts we have, what prior habits we may now creatively repeat.

For Those Knowledgeable of Peirce

Peirceans may note that I am using the Peircean triad in an unusual way, although in one that does not strictly violate his principles. Dewey derives his notions from Peirce, and here I am formulating and formalizing a Deweyan conception, since Dewey never did so himself.

The triad is generative. E.g., "feeling" is commonly a First, while I describe it as the inception of Thirdness, the transitory phase from Secondness to Thirdness. I will give the schema that explains this generativity and use of terms, which requires that one understand that I write from a phenomenological point of view and what that means, although I haven't the time to fully explain. I am looking at things from how they eventuate in consciousness, and thus I take a speculative position because I view the process as if it were eventuating in consciousness even though any given process need not. One assumption that goes with this is temporality that begets the generativity. If I did not assume temporality, then the triad would not be generative. I give finer distinctions elsewhere than I may give here.

The schema. The act is First, where it remains forever ambiguous whether the act was the environment or the body. It would be the fallacy of false dilemma to insist at the outset that it is either one. Resistance is Second; the act is resisted and thus act becomes force. First becomes Second, or firstness is subsumed into secondness. Feeling is the movement from secondness to thirdness; as an activity it is synonymous with resistance. Yet the transition begins when there is sufficient resistance to disrupt the dynamic equilibrium secondness, whereas feeling becomes an event called "felt quality."

Leon on Realism and Nominalism

2011-11-28T13:24:00.001-06:00

Can be found at After Nature.

Leon breaks apart the difference between ontological and epistemic realism, whereas I did not directly address the issue, a blind spot in my prior arguments. When I wrote of scholastic realism, I meant ontological realism, but my arguments often drifted into examples from epistemic realism. Why? Because of the particular nature of pragmatic realism, wherein both realisms line up. Why do they? It's an artifact of Peirce's legacy to pragmatism of non-representational theories of experience (see my prior posts).

Apologies for any confusion this may have caused.

What Gains My Respect: Graham Harman

2011-11-28T13:13:00.001-06:00

Graham Harman blogged,

"I won't criticize Derrida's reading of Heidegger too much, since I'm probably just as guilty of going beyond the letter of what Heidegger actually says."

Serious. This gets a lot of brownie points from me. My major beef with many scholars is not about the details of the scholarship, but our awareness of our relationship to it, especially since I alight more on the practice of philosophy than philosophy as text. Kudos, Harman, for the reflexive moment.

Is conscious experience constructed?

2011-11-27T22:29:00.001-06:00

Is conscious experience is constructed?

Yes and no, despite what my critical thinking textbook says. The problem is that "construction" is a terrible metaphor once we get beyond an undergraduate understanding of experience. I write on the matter from a pragmatist perspective.

What is constructed is not, foremost, its phenomenal quality. There is a contribution of the body-mind, but "constructed" implies 1) a something that constructs, 2) some rule or reason to the construction, and 3) parts from which something is constructed, etc. I will address each of these in turn.

First, "experience" by definition denotes the local transactive field of the organism and environment. The field is called a "situation." We could say that both the organism and environment collaboratively construct the experience, but that is poor wording because it splits into two parts what is actually a unity. The situation constructs the experience if anything does, and is a better phrasing because it is closer to being a real distinction vs. the previous purely formal distinction (cf scholastic real vs. formal distinction per Duns Scotus). However, since the situation is a transitive field, it belies the presumption that what constructs is an entity or agency; it is not. Thus "construction" is not a good term.

Second, there is some rule or reason to the construction, but my implosion of the first point drastically alters the common conception of the second. "Construction" having a "rule or reason" implies a blueprint or some plan that is consulted. That is not the case; no one is consulting anything, and there is no pre-established plan. Rather, the "rule" is habit (cf Peirce as biologized by Dewey). A given environmental transaction is taken as a stimulus for some primitive or learned response, e.g., the sensation of the alternating patterns of visual intensity on this page is taken (after some intervening phases) as a meaningful discourse on experience. This is far from a Kantian schema or any "plan," although I have time only to hint at this. Unlike a engineer consulting a blueprint, what invokes a taking of a transaction as (eventually) meaningful is a dynamic disequilibrium in the transaction as registered by the body. "Consultation" or most rule-like interpretations of "constructing" experience are then inappropriate, because they presuppose much less contingency and dynamicity than occurs.

Third, following William James' "pure experience," experience is consciously experienced as a unity. The discriminated parts cannot be said to exist prior to and independently of being discriminated, else one commits the "psychologist's fallacy" of presuming that discrimination is a discovery and not a creation, which is something to be independently verified and not assumed. If experience has no parts, then there are not parts with which to construct.

Since I am time-limited, I shall add that it is not nothing that I shifted from writing "experienced" to "consciously experienced." Consciousness is a latter phase of the experiential process that at first is not conscious but becomes so, and is centered in the locale of the situation.

Concerning phenomenal qualities, please peruse past entries for a discussion of them.

A Wrap-Up Discussion of the Last Day's Wrangling over Nominalism

2011-11-27T12:41:00.001-06:00

The primary defender of nominalism in these debates has been Levi Bryant. If I had to pin the disagreements between us on one thing, though perhaps not the most important, I would say that it is because I am working on a realist pragmatic phenomenology, and he is not. I would have little to offer the larger discourse if I were giving just another pragmatic phenomenology; there are very few of those, but only a subfield of a small tradition would make note. But a realist, non-Husserlian phenomenology ... that's something else that few offer. As far as I can tell, Levi has little interest in working through a phenomenology let alone a realist one. By "working through," I have Husserlian standards in mind ... all those books. A contemporary example would be Robert Corrington.

Aside, the context of the original outburst of activity among many conversants was Matt's initial post on his Footnotes2Plato blog, wherein Levi and others were challenging him. I stepped in to assist and defend process metaphysics in the American tradition. (Whitehead is an Americanist, but not really a pragmatist, which is mostly an issue of historical classification.) Many conversants have been misinterpretting/misunderstanding both the place and necessity of eternal objects in Whitehead, which he elaborates from Peirce. I stepped in to clarify this. They are logically necessary for realism of most any sort other than "I believe an external world exists," which is not the only kind of realism and is widely considered only a necessary but not sufficient premise to how "realism" is commonly used.

So, that's why I've been posting on the subject. Wander over to Matt's Footnotes2Plato and Adam Robert's Knowledge Ecology for the rest of the back-and-forth.

Thinking Positions Through: Nominalism and more

2011-11-27T12:21:00.001-06:00

Just a thought that is often over-looked. If one embraces moral nominalism, which strongly tends towards embracing moral relativism, contra moral realism, then one must explain the origin of morality. Before embracing nominalism of this sort, one should think carefully of the consequences. Moreover, if one does not embrace moral nominalism while embracing it more generally, then one must explain the discrepancy, which will be difficult.

If you embrace moral nominalism, then if I ask why you should support the Occupy Wall Street movement, which so many academics do, what do you say? Are you giving any reasons that are not arbitrary? It can be done, let me assure you, but there’s a large difference between the possibility of resolving a paradox and actually having done so before one embraces a philosophical position.

What am I getting at, really? I believe that too many thinkers embrace positions without thinking through their consequences, and at best defend themselves in an ad-hoc manner. It can be difficult to have a critical conversation with someone who is defending themselves in this manner—even if they are earnest and especially if they are not or are unaware of the ad hoc defense.

I once saw a classic case of this mentality, wherein an author defended criticism of his view (in cyborg theory) with the retort that the criticism concerns topics of which he was not a specialist and therefore he should not be held to the implications of his view in those fields. That was the pinnacle of ignorance and sublated arrogance.

I am not addressing this missive to anyone in particular, though I am on record for targetting classical and neoclassical pragmatist scholarship on this matter, i.e., not thinking through all the implications of a position and deferring critiques—even from fellow scholars—as misunderstandings. To name names, I am still on the fence concerning the agon of Robert Talisse vs. the Dewey establishment on the topic of Dewey’s democratic politics, wherein Talisse re-invigorates historic critiques against Dewey’s organicist view of society.

An honest moment. I speculate that part of the problem is contemporary academia’s fetishism of uber-specialization. What goes along with this is either a blindness to or lack of appreciation for the fact that most things we scholars write have been written and said before and that true novelty is rare. I understand that we must grandstand as if we were all creative geniuses, but we must not forget that this is due to reasons other than wisdom or philosophy. Finally, the honest moment, I understand that not everyone wants to be a systematic thinker, even though I believe they should.

Explanation of Recent Activity and Lack of It

2011-11-26T12:06:00.001-06:00

Greetings, fellow blogo-citizens of the world.

I have been quiet for months as I teach a 5/5 load for my first full-time position. 4 days of Thanksgiving vacation has lead to fervent posting as I have not had time recently. Expect more posts over Christmas, especially since I will be doing the final edits on my article on aesthetics (a phenomenological study of the elements and order of experience, not a study of beauty) and try to complete editing of my book manuscript.

Addendum to On Nominalism and Response to Adam

2011-11-25T18:07:00.001-06:00

This is a repost from Adam Robert's Knowledge Ecology , where he continues the ongoing conversation about realism, nominalism, etc. He gives us a long lists of questions and problems; below is a response that may clarify my earlier posts.

Adam,

A few points of clarification. I appreciate the kind response. As you see, most of your points come from, perhaps, some lack of full clarity on my part and not from disagreement (yet) between us.

First, I’m not arguing for Whitehead so much as a Peircean part of Whitehead. I primarily work in the areas of his predecessors, and do metaphysics only to support a phenomenology and not for its own sake.

Second, I never wrote “OOO,” because I do not think this is a problem for all of OOO. I do think it is a potential problem for onticology, because it acknowleges a lot of process elements. That said, I much prefer onticology to Harman’s OOO because it has process elements. Please do not infer that I am speaking directly to a tradition, as I am not, and would be wrong.

Third, I never said that “realism requires universals.” Rather, I wrote of Peircean realism about universals, and explicitly said they (realism about the external world [poor wording] and realism about universals) were separable, although they are combined in my own pragmatist position as they are in many classical pragmatist views.

Fourth, contingency is not a universal. It’s an ontological primitive. This is a definitional matter.

Fifth, eternity can be had by those things that do not exist, such as mathematics, as they are unaffected by time. They are a-temporal rather than non-temporal (neutrality rather than negation). Only things that exist are affected by time. I explain this in my blog post. [This is a big deal because inability to explain mathematics leaves science and scientific realism in a terrible bind as they are wholly dependent on it. Of course, anti-realists views do not have this problem.]

Sixth, I never said that contingency is arbitrary. Most if not all cases of the coming to be of a concretion of a universal is contingent. [See my previous posts; it's contingency all the way down, but there is such a thing as a structure to contingency.]

On Nominalism

2011-11-25T09:47:00.001-06:00

Nominalism and realism have been a frequent subject in my online conversations of late. I think it would be beneficial to define the terms so that we are clear about what we mean. Primarily, I am concerned about realism and nominalism of universals and names. This statement may say more than it appears, because much of contemporary philosophy tends to equivocate on the term "realism."

There is a realism of the external world and realism of universals/names. The former is usually expressed in terms of a correspondence of idea or experience and what is experienced, which is invoked when we say that an idea of word has a real referent. The realism of universals/names is often thought in such ideas as Kripke's "rigid designation," although that is a cousin many times removed from the topic that I wish to discuss. In Kripke's case, a rigid designator is a name that refers to the same object in all possible worlds. It is a logical construction.

In contrast, the realism of universals/names argues for the reality of universals, e.g. the phenomenal qualities (white, red, vanilla, etc.), etc. that can be predicated of a subject. It is more an issue of onto-logy rather than mere logic, the logic of being rather than of signs. These two realisms are separable, but I hold them together, though not in the conventional way, though that is another topic. E.g., a felt quality is not merely a one-to-one mirroring of what is in the external thing; it is neither one-to-one nor a mirroring, which is what most contemporary realists (external world) would wish either in fact or ideally.

What's the point? Without a realism of universals, of which the phenomenal qualities are a case, then any experience becomes arbitrary. We run into all the problems of empiricism that Hume and Berkeley exposed. Should we then seek shelter in Kant and psychologism? Qualities are law-like by-products of human experience that have no basis in external reality? No.

What is at stake? Without a reality of universals, then phenomenology really is every bit of trash that most analytics think it is. This is in part why they almost universally denigrate it--because they are NOT REALISTS about universals, and thus they think that mere experience is hokum. And thus they retreat into a neo-Cartesian position of thinking that what is really real is the rational and intellectual, err … "scientific." This was part of Husserl's ferocious critique in the Crisis; they mathematized being and did not even realize it.

Finally, I have already indicated what is at stake in pragmatic process metaphysics elsewhere, which includes pragmatic phenomenologies. The latter are non-Husserlian and realist in a more robust sense than Husserl, and are scientific without being any flavor of scientific realist. What is at stake is the incoherence of a process metaphysics that rejects autonomous identity (substance) and becomes nominalist (what a thing is said to be, is arbitrary).

Phenomenal Realism Again

2011-11-23T15:56:00.001-06:00

Once again, thinking out loud.

Consider the Platonic theory of participation of matter in form.

It's erotic causality, not efficient. Material things desire eternity, and any material thing gains its formal qualities per its desire for a form, while the form remains unmoved. However, this remains a one-way causality.

The reality of quality works similar to this way. To halt the infinite regress of nominalism, I argue that universals are real but non-existent, and they become instantiated through particular interactions. The "universals" in this sense can be understood as principles of unity that are on the border of the intelligible (=generic or specific unity), and any determinate existence invokes a specific unity that we may categorize as one of these universals. This approach solves the logical problem, although it is counter-intuitive.

The ultimate structure of unity is the cosmic and existential limitation on possibility. That is, what is the structure of possibility qua possibility. This is not to ask what is possible, mere possibility to be this or that. Rather, it is to ask about the structural relations of possibilities. That is, what is the possibility of this relating to that, and what are the possible relations? This is an abstract discussion whose first level of concretion is when we say "potentiality" rather than "possibility." Possibilities are logico-mathematical realities, whereas potentialities are existent possibilities. Not all real things are existent, and existence constrains possibilities to the condition of particular existence or existence more generally.

Let us tweak the strict Plato model a little more. What if the forms slowly evolve over cosmic time-scales? Then we get much closer to the standard process-metaphysical view of the "laws of nature" that govern the interaction of things such that they come into unity. Coming into unity is to have determinate possibilities rather than the raw flux of chance. Mathematics is a particular determination of pure possibility that becomes determined once we choose its axioms. Existence is another order of determination, although online mathematics, it cannot be rid of pure chance. It scarifies the pure crystal clarity of mere reality for the existential possibilities that in concreto become potentialities. ("Existential possibility" is the ontological term, whereas "potentiality" is the ontic; the latter presumes determinate laws of nature.)

Were we not to talk of the reality of quality? Real quality is just a unity that may be achieved through particular interactions. Insomuch as a unity is a determinate structure of possibility, it has a reality separate from any particular existence. Existence longs for unity as matter strives for form, though the potentialities for any particular unity is limited by nature.

What do we have here? A realist re-description of nature that explains the reality of phenomenal qualities. Ok, "hints" rather than "explains," but I have just unburied myself from my workload for a moment....

CFP The Pluralist

2011-11-21T08:14:00.001-06:00

The Pluralist is the official journal of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

The Pluralist provides a publication venue for excellent scholarship in

philosophy that will be of interest to our readers. We invite submissions

of work related to American philosophy and pragmatism, but not limited to

those areas. All submissions are blind reviewed by multiple reviewers. The

journal also invites suggestions for themed issues or special emphases.

Please direct inquiries to Roger Ward atroger_ward@georgetowncollege.edu.

thanks,

Roger Ward, Editor

CFP European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

2011-11-20T08:34:00.001-06:00

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 1/2013

Call for papers Pragmatism and creativity

Edited by Giovanni Maddalena (University of Molise, Italy) and Fernando Zalamea (National University, Colombia)

The creative process is immensely important for any inquiry. In the sciences perspective it functions in the path of discovery, decisive in selecting a new hypothesis. In the arts, creativity's pivotal role is evident. But in our everyday experience, as Dewey pointed out, creativity is what describes our best acts in social relationships, in education, and in jobs of every kind. The web of images, languages and actions bends itself through the continuous insertion of new, creative, information. There can be creativity also in habitual works, where creativity is crucial for enhancing real satisfaction.

Philosophers often pigeon-hole creativity in the aesthetic or psychological realms. Classic Pragmatists tended toward a more comprehensive pattern of reasoning in which creativity could enter. From Peirce’s abduction to Mead’s relationship between Self and I, pragmatists contemplated a series of different and often problematic views of creativity. Certainly, they stressed the importance of creative processes in different aspects of life, abolishing the gap between scientific and non-scientific realms. Their anti-dualist attitude forbid any pigeon-holing, but their positive answer to the dilemma of what creativity is, and what its fields and boundaries are, remained quite obscure.

This issue of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy wants to investigate the perspectives that pragmatisms, old and new, opens up on creativity. We will welcome any contribution on this topic that will (i) clarify classic or neo pragmatists thought on creativity, or (ii) use pragmatist insights in other disciplines, particularly in mathematics and sciences, or (iii) compare pragmatist views with authors and perspectives belonging to other philosophical streams, or (iv) propose new theories inspired by pragmatism. Contributions related to the dialectics between plastic reason and exact imagination, closer to Peirce's pragmaticism and oriented to an understanding of multilayered creativity, will be considered of central interest.

Papers should be sent to Marco Stango (marcostango@alice.it) before November 1st 2012. Papers should not exceed 7,000 words and must include an abstract of 200-400 words and a list of works cited. Papers will be selected on the basis of a process of blind review. Acceptance of papers will be determined before February 1st, 2013. Papers will be published on July 1st, 2013.

My Response to Larval Subjects on Realist Phenomenology

2011-11-16T12:41:00.001-06:00

Levi is late in allowing my moderated comments on his Derrida thread. He challenged me to give an argument for what I claimed. I began to do so, although I figured that he already knew the answer since he claims knowledge of Whitehead. I just assumed I was being pedantic, but apparently I was not. My post is still not posted after several days.

***********

Levi,

This fact [that I am using a different definition of "phenomenology"] is clear to me, and I stress it to help bridge some OOO vs. SR-PR divides. If nothing else, I hope this point helps, because Leon, Adam, Matt, probably Shaviro, etc. are coming from (or including) a tradition that uses some of the same words as the Husserlian tradition. This is an exercise in cross-tradition communication.

"The" phenomenological tradition is bigger than Husserl et al; recall that Husserl cites William James, who was part of the pragmatist tradition that was already doing a "phenomenology" that C.S. Peirce called "phaneroscopy." Whitehead comes out of that tradition, and trying to read him from the Husserlian tradition will lead to terrible misunderstandings.

I'm not talking about intentionality as understood in the Husserlian tradition, and the corresponding concept is not correlationist. Since there is not strict "intentionality" in this view, I have nothing to defend from your critique; you presume a concept that I do not hold.

As for your last point, I prefer Peirce's response in his encyclopedia article on Berkeley. In short, do we take phenomenal qualities to be real or "just names" as nominalists would insist? If we treat "green" as an arbitrary "product," then we accept nominalism: there is no unity in what generates sense experience that leads to the conception of "green." I insist that's an arbitrary decision [that does not advance beyond Locke]. Following Peirce, if we agree that there is a existent independent of thought, something real, then "green" means that element of the existent [(a potency)] that tends to constrain thought to the [phenomenal] qualia "green," which it is capable of doing regardless whether there is anyone there to experience green. As before, "green" as an actualized potency is an event of the interaction of the thing and entities capable of experiencing the qualia "green." Otherwise, strictly speaking, "green" would be a "general" and not a "universal." This view also shuns any notion of a "thing in itself." There is something like withdrawal, but its an characteristic of temporality. I could go on, but I should defer to proper Peirce scholars; Whiteheads notion is derivative of this and I leave his scholars to explain further.

[In addition, please see other posts on this site to see what a "potency" or power is; it's not anything obvious or like Aristotle.

I would add a counter-argument to Levi's green example. If we define "green" as the product of properties of the object, e.g., green leaves of a plant, then we just re-inscribe the question. So, how do we know those properties? We leave ourselves right back where we began, only now we're talking about "Chlorophyll"--what is that a product of? Ad infinitum Is there anything real at the bottom of that? Why set ourselves up to ask that correlationist question? We cannot we say that green is real and not a product? Why--because the nominalist majority does not like talking about phenomenal qualities being real, i.e., there being whiteness in addition to white things. At worse, the view is on par with nominalism as arbitrariness goes.]

What You Are Missing Out On

2011-11-15T18:23:00.001-06:00

A thought.

My regular readers can request to friend my on Facebook as "Jason Hills." I make a lot less formal commentary there, but also post a lot of news, make philosophical commentary, and happen to be friends with a sizeable chunk of the SAAP pragmatist community.

If I'm quiet here, I'm much, much less quiet there.

CFP: New Mexico-West Texas Philosophical Society

2011-11-14T19:53:00.001-06:00

New Mexico-West Texas Philosophical Society

Papers on any serious philosophical subject are invited for the 63rd

annual conference of the New Mexico West Texas Philosophical Society

to be held in Las Cruces, New Mexico March 23 – March 25, 2012. The

deadline for paper submissions is January15, 2012. Please consult the

society’s website at www.nmwt.org. To be considered for presentation,

papers approximately 3,000 words long should be submitted

electronically (as a Word attachment) and presentable within 25

minutes. There will be comments on every paper. If you would like to

be considered for making comments on a paper, please contact the

Secretary with your name, title, institution, AOS, and AOC. To be

considered for publication in Southwest Philosophical Studies, papers

must be no more than 3,000 words plus endnotes using only MLA

formatting. Each paper (regular conference or for possible

publication) should be prepared for blind refereeing.

• Please send an electronic version (Word document) of papers to Dan

Flores, Secretary, at secretary.nmwt@gmail.com.

The conference will be held at Hotel Encanto de Las Cruces located at

705 South Telshor Blvd Las Cruces, NM 88011 (Phone: 575-522-4300 or

1-866-383-0443). For those who wish to stay at the hotel, rooms are

$93.00 (single and double) plus tax. Try to make reservations before

Friday, March 9, 2012 to ensure the $93.00 rate and mention that you

are a member of NMWT. Please check the Society’s website and your e-

mail accounts for any updates. www.nmwt.org

Registration and Fees

1. full-time professors: $70;

2. part-time professors and adjuncts: $45;

3. graduate students: $35;

4. undergraduate students: $25;

5. observers not on the program: free.

• Checks should be made out to: New Mexico West Texas Philosophical

Society

• Please send registration fees to:

Robert M. Louis, Treasurer

New Mexico-West Texas Philosophical Society

5810 Creston Springs Court

Spring, Texas 77379-8742

treasurer.nmwt@gmail.com (slow service)

Wolrml@aol.com (fast service)

Awards

The New Mexico-West Texas Philosophical Society awards two prizes: (1)

the Hubert Griggs Alexander Memorial Award for an excellent paper by a

philosopher at any career level, on any philosophical topic, but

especially on aesthetics, philosophy of language, symbolic form,

Hispanic philosophy, classical philosophy, or the role of philosophy

in the humanities; and (2) the Houghton Dalrymple Memorial Award for

an excellent paper by a graduate student or recent Ph.D. on any

philosophical topic, but with a preference for papers on epistemology

or Hume. Each award includes a check for $100.00 and publication in

Southwest Philosophical Studies. Those wishing to be considered for

either of these awards should put “Alexander” or “Dalrymple”in the

subject line of their e-mail message and include a CV with their

submission.

What Traditional Vocabulary Do You Teach?

2011-11-03T17:31:00.001-05:00

I just realized that, although I work primarily in the traditions of pragmatism and continental, I teach in an analytic vocabulary. I think that is amusing, because its an unintuitive way to break-down traditional barriers. Breaking down barriers is not the same as breaking traditions; it is being neighborly rather than hostile. I do this not by accident; I honestly think that analytic terms are easier to grasp on the face of it. However, as I would complain if you asked, they are no different from continental or pragmatist terms in assuming a specific background by which they foreground their taken meaning.

I teach most introductory courses in a historical format. Of course, I introduce and insist upon the historic terms, but I also introduce contemporary terms in my commentary, e.g., the "this is what this is about." (The distinction between historical perspective and explicit retrospective is a concept for a higher-level course, in which the distinction between historic and contemporary terms would be more significant.)

Does anyone else notice such tradition-shifting between their research and teaching, or between teaching different subjects in their own practice? In the future, I would love to teach upper-division or graduate courses where we would address issues "bi-lingually" in two traditions' vocabularies. The very first course I would like to do that in would be on phenomenal qualities ... because that's where my research is going. I'll keep dreaming that I'd ever get such a position, as the market looks so terrible.

Deweyan Pragmatists Cannot be Humeans: An Ethical Polemic, Part 2

2011-10-30T15:50:00.000-05:00

There has been a movement among Deweyan pragmatists towards moral aesthetics. Numerous articles have called for moral creativity, often invoking the metaphor of jazz music performance, as well as calling for moral imagination. This approach to morality is dangerous in general, and especially dangerous for Deweyans.

If morality is merely a judgment of taste, an aesthetic that we cultivate like we practice our jazz performance, then morality becomes mere social conformity. That was one of the obvious problems of Hume's morality, especially when we no longer take the moral sentiments as universal. But, my fellow Deweyans, if we continue to employ Jazz metaphors to explain our ethics, do we not engage the same problem?

Not necessarily. Although it is not always emphasized, Dewey insisted on conjoining ethics with solid science. No, he was not saying that there should be an ethics of science or that there are "moral facts" that we can treat as if they were an object of science. Rather, he thought in terms of the public commons and the disciplines of urban planning, criminal justice, social work, and the many other fields that are today called "applied science." I point this out to counter the implication that some scholars propose we become aesthetes.

However, the problem of imagination does not go away even after we include this crucial point. Per my earlier post, if we cannot imagine something, then we cannot consciously experience it as meaningful. Hence, if we do not already anticipate something as a moral problem, then we are not likely to comprehend the situation as such a problem. The problem with the employment of jazz metaphors, for example, is that it stresses the creativity of the imagination. But as my former professor Randall Auxier says, we usually look upon moral creativity with horror. Hitler was as morally creative as Gandhi. Creativity is good only when it is needed, and only when we know what we are about in advance. But that wouldn't be good jazz, now would it? At least, that's not why that metaphor re-appears in the literature.

If music education took a more Platonic or Aristotelian turn, then we would be better off. We learn harmony so that we may harmonize with others and ourselves, our souls. Then we may anticipate and be ratio-nal, because creativity is not quite what we really need. What we really need is education, and to that all Deweyans would agree.

We are all Humeans: An Ethical Polemic, Part 1

2011-10-30T15:49:00.000-05:00

We are Humeans about morality, for in practice morality is an aesthetic. We approve what we approve, and disapprove what we do, and if something does not look or feel right, it's wrong. Don't kid yourself about what you think--you think with you eyes most of the time. You have the possibility to be other than Humean if you notice this, but not if you do it from a theoretical perspective. You must do it from a practical perspective, from what you do rather than what you think.

The Thesis of My Upcoming Article on the Imagination

2011-10-29T19:16:00.002-05:00

If you cannot imagine it, then you cannot consciously experience it as meaningful.

It seems simple, but one you parse what a Deweyan pragmatist means by "imagine," "conscious," "experience," and "meaningful," it's as far from obvious as you can get.

If I were to add some assumptions, it would read:

Since consciously apprehended meaning arises from the imaginative projection of anticipated consequences, then if you cannot ....

If I were to explain what meaning is and how it is projected, it would read:

Since meaning arises from the habitual association of qualitative experience with remembered enactions of that experience, and since .... (continuing with the previous qualification).

Finally for this teaser, I would add that "experience" is the interaction of body and environment, i.e., the local temporal-spatial field of interactivity, and thus the "remembered enactions of experience" is actually a description of the behavioral patterns of a local environment inclusive of a human being....

For those who haven't heard me say it before--or read it--the point is that I'm working on a realist, pragmatist phenomenology that is also processional. The "integral ecology" and OOO folks who like their flat ontologies may note that the only privilege given to human being is that it is the focal point of experience only because I'm interested in human conscious experience. It I were interested in bare human experience, I could write a "phenomenology" of my shoes. The difference would be that the shoes as a "body" do not experience (its) potentiality as qualitative. Experience is modal, and not all things are capable of all modes, including humanity.

Dewey on Desire, Valuation, and Evaluation: A Motivation for Pragmatic Phenomenology

2011-10-29T11:16:00.003-05:00

First substantive post in awhile … first I begin with some criticism of Dewey, my own explanation of its failure, and James Gouinlock on Dewey's failures that I am attempting to rectify in "pragmatic phenomenology."

Dewey was often accused of committing both the naturalistic and is/ought fallacies. He claimed that we can evaluate our "desires, aims, and purposes" by determining if they are "desirable." He says this from a Hume-like standpoint, whereas valuative process are what determine when, where, how, and what we think or conclude, although he was closer to Max Scheler's Ordo Amoris than garden-variety Hume. Morton White famously criticized him for converting de facto desiring into de jure normative valuation.1 Specifically, Morton accuses him of having "'generated a normative or de jure proposition by performing a suitable operation on merely de facto propositions'" (LW 17:482).

For Dewey, "desirable" does not mean "what can be desired" in the sense that something is desirable first and desired second. He is not claiming, as was historically claimed and still needing to be defended, that we can convert de facto desiring into a de jure normative valuation. Rather, it means that we desire something first and then see it as desirable only in a subsequent reflective moment. The first moment is a valuation, while the second is an evaluative moment not necessary to the first in which evaluation might occur.

Dewey also does not mean that we make these distinctions immediately from a third person view, as those who scream "naturalist fallacy!!!" are likely to do. Rather, in any actual situation, the desirable is a horizon of possible coalescing desireds that may or may not exist. What Dewey is recommending when making the desired/desirable distinction, is that we lead our present desires along to some possible future fulfillment. He is not commiting a confusion of is from ought, but rather stating the psychological--or dare I call it a phenomenological--point that in any actual situation we are led to think of what might be from where we are and have been. His ethics is horizonal and progressive; just as the sunlight horizon differs from where we stand, the horizon of our moral ideals differ. Hence, he thinks non-horizonal norms, or static ideals, misconstrue the actual human conditions and limitations in which we find ourselves and are therefore unhelpful at being moral in addition to being disingenuine since their creators propose an ideal position that they cannot actually have.

However, I agree with James Gouinlock's criticism.

“If White were to address himself to Dewey's actual argument, the analysis would have to be directed at three questions: (1) Is it indeed true that the qualities of experience are functional constituents of continuous natural processes? (2) Can the methods of experimental intelligence be used to reconstruct natural processes in a deliberate way? (3) Has Dewey in fact presented distinctions which are appropriate for recognizing the principal phases of experience from the problematic to the consummatory?” (224).2

My dissertation and subsequent work has been aimed at addressing questions (2) and (3), whereas I rely on scholars such as Mark Johnson for (1). My criticism, noted in Victor Kestenbaum's recent work, is that we need a structural account of the "function constituents of continuous natural processes" to determine--on Dewey's own ground--if the methods of experimental intelligence to accomplish what is promised. In short, the answer is no. However, they may be corrected and expanded to perform the task, which has been my task.

1. Morton White, "Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis, Philosophical Review 58:4 (July 1949): 321-330

2. James Gouinlock. "Dewey's Theory of Moral Deliberation," Ethics Vol. 88, No. 3 (April 1978): 218-228. Reprinted in John Dewey: Critical Assessments, edited by J. E. Tiles. New York: Routlege, Chapman and Hall, 1993.

The Philosophy of Attention: A Recent Book and Some Thoughts

2011-10-26T13:07:00.000-05:00

Sebastion Watzl reviewed Christopher Mole, Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Cognitive Psychology in the online Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

I was really excited to see this and read this work, as much of my pragmatic phenomenology is also a theory of attention. I have discovered, unsurprisingly, that my work is far afield from what is being discussed in this work, as the review makes me doubt that the author is writing from the perspective of process metaphysics, especially since such a background could not reasonable lead to cognitivism of any sort (because we then would take a later phase of the prior as if it were a prior phase, which is an implication of James' psychologist's or Dewey's philosopher's fallacy).

I would welcome discussion from anyone who is more familiar with the work and its line of scholarship. For myself....

Attention arises from tension, a disequilibrium in the dynamic equilibrium of ongoing organismic-environmental transactions. We feel tension before we a-ttend (cf Peirce and Dewey on feeling). Likewise, to sound like Merleau-Ponty, the bodily has an in-tensionality that directs its ongoing body-environment interactions and thereby is a major factor in the dynamic equilibrium by which an event is felt as a disequilibrium, or tension, sufficient to draw a-tension and possibly cognitive function. Each of these are indistinct phases of the ongoing process that may or may not lead to either consciousness or consciousness-of. One of the primary functions of a-tension is to lead to perception, by which sensation becomes meaningful through the association of quality and memory, and perhaps apperception by which we become aware of this meaning. Note that "meaning" is not foremost a cognitive or linguistic affair, as most any Peircean third is also a "meaning," and thus with Heidegger I can say that this thing here means "good for sitting" long before I think "chair."

Much of my dissertation was on how attention arises from "desire" (~conatus) for Dewey and how our particular desirious makeup, or "character" or body of habits that lead to valuation, influences our perception of meaning.... Hence, part of its subtitle was "the Immanent Transcendence of Desire."

Ah. Continued thought is foiled by office hours!

CFP for First Schelling Society Conference

2011-10-25T21:20:00.002-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS for the FIRST ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SCHELLING SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA (SSNA)

AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2012

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY (SEATTLE, WASHINGTON USA)

The SSNA is open to anyone who conducts research on Schelling and Schellingian philosophy in the English language. The SSNA mission is to (1) further research in English, both historical and systematic, on Schelling and related figures (eg., Boehme, Oetinger, Baader, Fichte, Novalis, Hölderlin, Schubert, early Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Oken, Fechner, Coleridge, Bradley, Peirce); (2) organize a stand-alone Schelling conference every other year at a North American University, with proceedings published online, and the best papers published every four years with an academic press; (3) gather data concerning current graduate research in English on Schelling; (4) coordinate translation projects of Schelling into English.

PLEASE SEND ABSTRACTS (500 WORDS) TO JASON WIRTH (wirthj@seattleu.edu) AND SEAN McGRATH (sjoseph.mcgrath@gmail.com) by 15 JANUARY 2012.

CFP On Michel Henry for JFFP

2011-10-25T16:40:00.000-05:00

CFP : The Practical Philosophy of Michel Henry

The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (www.jffp.org) invites submissions for a special issue on the practical philosophy of Michel Henry. Increasing attention is being paid to Michel Henry’s work, especially with reagrad to its impact in the areas of phenomenology and theology. This issue hopes to build on the existing momentum in Henry studies by extending it to his important contributions in the areas of social and political philosophy as well as ethics. Important questions in this domain might include What are the implications of Henry’s philosophy of life for a theory of action, normative ethics or an analysis of socio-political questions? What results might his philosophy of life yield, if applied to contemporary issues? Papers that explore Henry’s practical philosophy in relation to other thinkers of interest or that creatively apply or extend under-appreciated aspects of his own work are especially welcomed. Papers can be submitted in French or English. Papers should not exceed 8,000 words in length, and citations should follow the Chicago Manual of Style. All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least two evaluators. To receive full consideration, completed papers should be submitted through the short, five-step submission process on the journal’s website by August 1, 2012.

A Question about Withdrawal In Object-Oriented Ontology

2011-10-22T22:31:00.000-05:00

I have a question to ask of object-oriented philosophers, and I hope that they can clarify a crucial point. If they cannot, then much of their ontology remains a mystery. I suspect that such individuals have an answer, but even if they do, then the exact details are significant unto the entirety of its ontology, and it would be good to explain them.

If the real being of an object is withdrawn, then what does "real" mean in regards to it? And what is this "real being" as contrasted with whatever the term is not signifying? I ask the question from the standpoint of a person not satisfied with answers that repeat and reinscribe withdrawal, because then one merely defers a keystone question of their metaphysics.

My insufficiently tutored suspicions are that "withdrawal" is much less novel than it first appears. Can not many process metaphysicians also point out that what is becoming is processional, then what exist now comes into the light from out of a dark past, out of a dim hallway of its history to which we cannot have immediate access? We could call that "withdrawal." The more I think about it, the less mysterious the concept becomes, until I remember that OOO frequently claims to be a substance metaphysics. Then I wonder whether the confusion is my own, or whether what is discussed is not clear, and I hope to be enlightened on the subject.

I suspect that the answer depends on the specific thinker, and I would welcome responses from any.

CFP for Ecstatic Naturalism

2011-10-19T16:16:00.001-05:00

Call for Papers

2012 Conference on Ecstatic Naturalism

April 13th & 14th, Drew University - Madison, New Jersey

Plenary Speaker:

Robert Neville

Departments of Religion, Philosophy and Theology – Boston University

Dean, Boston School of Theology

President, Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought

"Ecstatic Naturalism" is a relatively new but influential school of philosophical theology which proposes to conjoin continental phenomenology and American pragmatism from within the tradition of philosophical naturalism. Broadly put, ecstatic naturalism recognizes a deep and self-transforming dimension of nature: the difference between natura naturans (nature naturing) and natura naturata (nature natured). It is natura naturans which affords the possibility of religious transcendence via the ejection and subsequent semiosis of its potentials that take the shape of nature’s sacred folds. The religiosity of such transcendence is fully natural, as according to ecstatic naturalism, there is nothing other than nature. Ecstatic Naturalism's founder, Robert S. Corrington (Drew University) is heavily influenced by both the American and continental philosophical traditions generally, but in particular by philosophers such as C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, and George Santayana, as well as by F. W. J. Schelling, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers, to name but a few.

Paper topics may include the following, but should include reference to ecstatic naturalism: philosophical naturalism, speculative and systematic philosophy, process philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, German idealism, mysticism, Asian religious traditions (Hinduism, Shamanism, Buddhism, Daoism, etc.) or philosophers such as Peirce, James, and Dewey; Buchler, Emerson, Schelling, Hegel, Leibniz, Spinoza, Heidegger, Tillich, Jaspers, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Bergson, Deleuze, Badiou, Žižek, Marion, etc.

This year the conference especially welcomes interdisciplinary papers, and papers which discuss contemporary American philosophy and ecstatic naturalism vis-a-vis recent developments in the continental tradition (speculative realism, object oriented philosophy, Caputo, Kearney, Desmond, Meillassoux, Harman, Latour, Laruelle, etc.)

Submissions require a proposal only, 250 words. Conference registration fee includes the conference, dinner, and an after-dinner presentation on the campus of Drew University which houses the Graduate Division of Religion and Drew Theological School.

Please email proposals by December 31st, 2011 to: Leon.Niemoczynski@loras.edu. We intend to notify authors of our decisions by January 31st, 2012.

The conference is being organized by Wade Mitchell and Renee Blanchard (both Drew University), with support by Leon Niemoczynski (Loras College).

Harman and Bryant on the Analytic/Continental Divide

2011-10-19T13:08:00.002-05:00

Graham Harman on the analytic/continental divide.

And Levi Bryant commenting.

I agree with both, of course, and have previously discussed the issue. Per Harman, there is a divide. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Those who deny the divide often call for us to do just "philosophy," which happens to accede to the existing (power) structures under another name. As Levi Adds, its also about power, e.g., political and institutional power.

I am very glad that in the just-released JFP a number of ads specify that they want someone with the analytic take on the AoS, or someone who teaches the analytic variant of this or that course. Some might find the recognition of the division as unhelpful for reconciliation. I say quite the contrary; I prefer that we be honest to each other as a starting point of genuine communication. Thank you, departments, for not wasting the time of either of us.

Pluralism does not mean assimilation. It means that we work together and allow each of us to be different.

CFP: Pragmatism, Law, and Language

2011-10-14T17:46:00.000-05:00

Call for Abstracts for the 15th Annual Inland Northwest Philosophy

Conference

Topic: Pragmatism, Law, and Language

Location: University of Idaho, Moscow, ID

Dates: March 23-24, 2012

Contact: Graham Hubbs <hubbs@uidaho.edu>

This conference will bring together philosophers and legal scholars

interested in the pragmatist tradition, whether as critics or

advocates, so that each might learn from the other.

The Keynote Address will be delivered by Robert Brandom of the

University of Pittsburgh.

Participants include:

David Boersema (Philosophy, Pacific), Brian Butler (Philosophy & Law,

UNC Asheville), Tom Burke (Philosophy, South Carolina), Matthew

Chrisman (Philosophy, Edinburgh), Janice Dowell (Philosophy,

Nebraska), Heidi Li Feldman (Law, Georgetown), Danielle Macbeth

(Philosophy, Haverford), Martin J. Stone (Law, Cardozo), Karl Schaffer

(Philosophy, Pittsburgh), Michael Sullivan (Philosophy & Law, Emory),

Robert Talisse (Philosophy, Vanderbilt), Lynne Tirrell (Philosophy,

UMass Boston), and Benjamin Zipursky (Law, Fordham).

We invite papers in all areas of philosophy and law related to the

conference theme, including but not limited to the following:

pragmatic accounts of the evolution of legal meaning, the common law

method, constitutional law, law and economics, hate speech, justice

theory, and normative discourse.

To participate in this conference, submit an abstract of no more than

300 words via email to hubbs@uidaho.edu. The deadline for submissions

is December 1, 2011. Individuals will be notified of decisions

regarding submissions in mid-December. Chairs and commentators are

also needed: if you are interested, please indicate areas of

competence.

A selection of the conference's papers will be published by MIT Press

as part of its Topics in Contemporary Philosophy

Series. All accepted papers, including commenting papers, will be

considered for publication.

Additional information about the conference can be obtained at our

website: <http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc>

Graham Hubbs

Assistant Professor

Department of Philosophy

University of Idaho

409 Morrill Hall

Moscow, ID 83844-441110

208.885.6284

The Public Philosophy Network

2011-10-11T18:18:00.001-05:00

Encouraging and Supporting Publicly Engaged Philosophical Research and Practices
http://publicphilosophynetwork.ning.com/

This network has become popular with members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.

Lecture on Peirce, Part 1

2011-10-10T16:48:00.001-05:00

I was preparing a critical thinking lecture that included some C.S. Peirce and thought that I would present a variant of it to a wider audience. Since many of the SR and OOO crowd is more familiar with Whitehead than his predecessor Peirce, I hope that this is helpful and informative. Note that I have simplified it as befits an undergraduate course, and thus I have significantly rephrased some of the questions. That said, the re-phrasing might be more obviously informative.

"Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man"

Peirce asks seven questions in this article concerning thought and its ability to know.

Question 1.

Without previous knowledge or reasoning, can we immediately distinguish between introspection and perception?

No.

We feel that we have this power or faculty, but there is no evidence that we do.

There is lots of evidence that we do not.

"Every lawyer knows how difficult it is for witnesses to distinguish between what they have seen and what they have inferred" (CP 5.216).

Implications:

Two of the four sources of knowledge, introspection and perception, are not distinct.

Question 2.

Do we have an intuitive knowledge of ourselves, i.e., have self-consciousness?

No.

"I" or self-reference has to be taught to children.

So does ascribing what others says to ourselves.

Question 3.

Do we have a power to distinguish subjective from objective elements of thought?

No.

We have no intuitive power, but we have methods of verification.

Much of this follows from question 1.

Question 4.

Do we have a power of introspection, or is our knowledge of the internal world derived from observation of external facts?

No evidence.

Per question 3, we cannot know immediately.

The only way to investigate it is through psychology, but that is not based on introspection.

We cannot use non-introspective methods to prove the power of introspection.

Question 5.

Can thought reference nothing?

No.

Thought is always about something.

Implication:

Thought is intentional, although for Peirce we should understand this as originating from the thing, not mind.

Question 6.

Is anything unthinkable?

No.

To be is synonymous with to be thinkable.

Implication:

To be is to be related, which is to be thinkable.

Question 7.

Can we think things other than thought itself?

Yes.

*The last few questions concern his semiotic. As for question 7, I suspect that it has significance for the OOO crowd and others worried about anthropocentrism.

Pragmatism is a Realism and Leads to a Realist Phenomenology

2011-10-09T09:45:00.001-05:00

I would highlight some important tenets of pragmatism that do not appear to be not widely known.

Recently, it was argued that William James argued that the truth was what was expedient to believe. The next thought that James would have is, "what about the situation makes this an expediency?" He would then transfer the issue from one about facile truth-wishing to one about a scientific study of the conditions for belief and knowledge. He was particularly interested in those cases for which insufficient evidence is given to believe on thing or another, but we still find ourselves forced to make a decision. One does not usually find existentialism so closely accompanied by experimental science. Let me point out some other perhaps unexpected points about pragmatism.

Pragmatism is a realism. It is not the common contemporary realism that argues that only things that exist are real, and therefore science is the proper study of the real. It argues for the reality of universals, e.g., of qualities, and thus argues against those who would say that phenomenal experience either only partially or not real. It is opposed to nominalism, whether open or crypto, the view that leads to the thought that universals are arbitrary. E.g., whiteness is just a name, and thus "whiteness" or any quality is just an occurence due to arbitrary events none of which can be said univocally to give rise to "whiteness." In consequence, "whiteness" might have an intension (description) but certainly has no extension. But that means that "whiteness" is an arbitrary description. This nominalist view has monumental consequences for phenomenology if one adopts it.

Pragmatism argues for a derivative of scholastic realism about universals, following Peirce, that culminated in the Peircean triad. Reality can be described in terms of the generative categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, which have many denotations since they are generative, but include possibility/quality, existence/activity/force, and determinate existence/habit/law, respectively. Pure quality has reality, but does not exist. Aside, one consequence of this view, popularized by William James, is the thesis that relations are real.

Pragmatism is, in contemporary parlance, a mixed constructivist view. That means that we take everything that exists, whether love, rocks, fancy handshakes, etc., to be a combination of what exists in nature and semiotics (the science of relations)--and it all is real. Many contemporary "naturalists," whether of the hard or soft (scientific) naturalist variety would not agree with this and call phenomenal qualities a "non-natural kind."

When I speak of a pragmatic phenomenology as a realist phenomenology, I am insisting that the phenomenon is a real sign of that which gave rise to it. I am insisting that we not fall into the trap of the contemporary Cartesian dualist--still well practiced by so many who disavow it--and look only for the (efficient) "cause" of the phenomenon for only that is reputedly real. A pragmatist, following the theory of continuity (synechism), would say that there must have been causes that gave rise to that real phenomenon. Though there may be various existential conditions that give rise to "whiteness," we should not assume a nominalism about whiteness, but investigate the semiotic conditions, e.g., what are the relations in the situation and which were taken by the human organism as significant relations. This includes, as researchers like Mark Bickhard note, the notion that hierarchy and structure is causal, and thus an effect can point to a structure rather than singular existents.

As a researcher, I am interested in the embodied cultural (semiotic) structures that are also embodied hermeneutics. Specifically, I am not interested in the actual structures per se, e.g., what Johnson would call metaphors and a metaphor logic, but the habitual structures that limit concrete habituated or learned structures. E.g., why we take this or that to be meaningful.

CFP: Epictetus and Stoicism at RIT, April 2012

2011-10-03T17:03:00.001-05:00

Epictetus and Stoicism at RIT, April 2012

Rochester Institute of Technology Department of Philosophy announces a conference:
Epictetus and Stoicism: Continuing Influences and Contemporary Relevance
Thursday 26 April and Friday 27 April 2012
Keynote speaker: Katja Vogt (Philosophy, Columbia University)
Call for Papers: The RIT Philosophy Department invites papers that address any topic on or related to Epictetus and Stoicism, including, but not limited to: happiness, tranquility, detachment, reason, fate, volition, agency, what is (and is not) under our control, our moral purpose, virtue, cosmic order, divine providence, death, the Stoic sage, Epictetus as teacher, influence of earlier thinkers on Epictetus, Epictetus’s influence on later thinkers (including writers of our own time), the “practical” philosophy of Stoicism, and comparisons and contrasts with other traditions (such as Buddhism, Epicureanism, Christianity).
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2012. Papers should be 4,500–5,500 words in length (35–40 minutes reading time), and prepared for anonymous review. Please submit full papers as email attachments to (and direct inquires to): David.Suits@rit.edu.

*This is my undergraduate alma matter.

Pragmatic Theory of Imagination in the Transactions

2011-09-30T17:54:00.001-05:00

Finally, I have received word that my article on a new pragmatic theory of imagination has been accepted! I will shortly lift the veil on my recent work, as I do not blog (much) about my publishable work.

As a teaser, I am describing a theory of imagination from a Peirce-Deweyan basis that hits all the big neoclassical pragmatist points: process metaphysics, is naturalistic (emergentism), plays nice with science, is fully temporal, ..., and is part of my project of pragmatic phenomenology. It's very, very different from conventional or classical conceptions and also critiques and complements Mark Johnson's work.

Moore on James & Jason on Moore

2011-09-30T13:19:00.003-05:00

I have been responding to Crispin Sartwell's post on G.E. Moore on James' pragmatism here. Basically, Moore appears to misunderstand James in the predictable fashion, e.g., running with a metaphysical notion of truth rather than a practical notion. Of course James is not saying that believing something makes it true, but when believing makes a difference in the world, there is a sense in which we "make truth." Moreover, since every case of claiming metaphysical truth is also a "making truth," there is a strong sense in which practical truth is more important in our everyday lives. But this also means that many natural factors come into play, including the human one of culture, politics, etc.

Sartwell said that Stuhr, McDermott, and Rorty couldn't explain pragmatism to him, and I don't think I could do any better if they failed. That said, I insist that the position is being misunderstood, especially since corrupted forms of the view have been prevalent for a long time. Case in point, thinking that "believing makes something true" in the simple sense is a misreading that is still a prevalent one. I'm astonished that it is even seriously entertained ....

Summer Workshop on Pragmatism at Emory U.

2011-09-22T09:34:00.000-05:00

INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

2012 SUMMER WORKSHOP

EMORY UNIVERSITY, 4-14 JUNE 2012

PEIRCE, JAMES, AND THE ORIGINS OF PRAGMATISM

The Emory University Institute for the History of Philosophy will host its

fifth annual summer workshop on June 4–14, 2012 on the topic of “Peirce,

James, and the Origins of Pragmatism.”

Summer Workshops are designed to bring together a group of faculty scholars

specializing in specific areas of the history of philosophy for seminar

style workshop sessions focused on a shared reading list. Ten participants

and the co-directors meet in mornings and afternoons over the course of two

four-day weeks for directed discussions and participant led close readings.

The workshop format eschews the delivery of conference-style papers in favor

of a more open and group-based engagement with the texts at hand. In so

doing, the seeks to foster conversations that will inform future scholarly

work within the greater philosophical community. IHP’s past workshops have

focused on Vico and the Humanist Tradition, the Origins of Modernity,

Nietzsche and Heidegger on the issue of history, and religion and philosophy

in Neoplatonism. This year’s readings will draw on seminal writings by

Charles S. Peirce and William James. The focus will be on Peirce’s

pragmaticism, semiotics, and logic, and on James’s pragmatism, psychology,

and ethics. The goal will be to situate pragmatism within the history of

philosophy, to understand the similarities and differences between Peirce

and James, to grasp connections between issues in epistemology and ethics,

and to assess the contemporary importance of pragmatic philosophy as it

draws on Peirce, James, or both. The workshop will use critical edition

texts by both Peirce and James.

The Institute is pleased to provide room, board, and travel expenses for all

participants accepted into the workshop. Guests will be housed near Emory’s

campus center, within easy walking distance to the central meeting location

in the Philosophy department. A number of optional dinner excursions into

various neighborhoods of Atlanta are also planned.

To apply, scholars should send a cover letter addressing the relevance of

Peirce, James, and pragmatism

for their current and/or future scholarly work, and a CV to Professor Stuhr

at the address below by electronic or physical mail. The application

deadline is 13 January 2012 with decisions announced 1 February 2012. The

co-directors for 2012 are:

John J. Stuhr

Department of Philosophy, Emory University

214 Bowden Hall, 561 South Kilgo Circle

Atlanta, GA 30322 USA / jstuhr@emory.edu

Vincent M. Colapietro

Department of Philosophy, Penn State University

240 Sparks Building

State College, PA 16802 / vxc5@psu.edu