Reid of Planomenology has just started up a new blog called The Luxemburgist that focuses on political theory. Luckily for us all, Reid will keep posting metaphysics related stuff at Planomenology, but his aim appears to be to use the new blog to work out an explicitly non-metaphysical interpretation of Marxism. To this end, he’s drawing on some of the ideas I’ve been developing here over the last year (that’s right, Deontologistics is now over a year old!). Needless to say, I think he’s doing some very interesting work, and can’t wait to see where it leads. Maybe he’ll even coax me into posting some more stuff on social theory at some point. Till then, go read his last two posts on Marx at Planomenology (here and here), and the inaugural post at new blog (here).
Month: August 2010
Science and Metaphysics Event
For those of you who haven’t seen the announcement, myself, Nick Srnicek (Speculative Heresy / The Accursed Share) and Reid Kotlas (Planomenology), have organised a blog event similar to the Spec Heresy / Critical Animal event on ethics at the end of last year (here). The official announcement is here.
The basic idea is the same: we’re asking for short contributions (1,000-2,500 words) from people on the topic of the relation between science and metaphysics, to be submitted by the 17th of September, which will then be posted up one at a time on Speculative Heresy in the following week.
The submissions are intended to be slightly more formal than your average blog post, but less formal than a journal article. The purpose of the event is to motivate some discussion about an issue which rears its head regularly in this end of the blogosphere, without perhaps being addressed head on: the relationship between science and metaphysics. The problematisation of this relation was one of the core features that motivated interest in speculative realism, and many of the debates arising out of this have touched upon it to some degree (arche-fossil, anyone?). Now it’s time for this issue to take centre stage, however. I suspect that as much as anything else, asking the question properly will force us to think long and hard about just what we think science and metaphysics are.
As a final note, it’s my birthday tomorrow, so this is my last post from this side of 25. See you all in the second quarter of my century.
On Ereignis
I’m back to working on the thesis now. It’s a hard slog, but I made some good progress yesterday. I’ve been in denial about a serious structural problem in the thesis for a while now, and it’s prevented me from getting anything constructive done. I think I’ve tackled it head on now, and even though I haven’t fixed the problem, I think I now know how to do so, which is good. Given that my head is in Heidegger mode, I’m in the right frame of mind to respond to the question Paul has just posed over at anotherheideggerblog (here): ‘What do we know about Ereignis?’
Now, I haven’t performed an exhaustive reading of Heidegger (I can’t even read him in the original German, alas), but I’ve got a rough reading of what Ereignis is. I’ve mentioned this a bit before, but it can’t hurt to repeat myself a bit. On my account, it’s pretty much synonymous with a couple of other terms: Seyn, Being as such (as opposed to the Being of beings), Truth, and the Fourfold. The best way to understand this is in relation to an important duality that runs throughout Heidegger’s thought: that between beings as such and beings as a whole. Heidegger takes it that this duality presents the object of all metaphysics (i.e., beings as such as a whole). However, he takes it that the metaphysical tradition has systematically misunderstood this insofar as it thinks both in terms of beings. Heidegger’s relation to metaphysics is complicated. In his early work, he tries to leverage the criticisms of the tradition in order to complete the project of metaphysics, whereas in his later work he comes to see the problem of the tradition as an essential aspect of metaphysics, and thus attempts to overcome metaphysics entirely.
DEONTOLOGISTICS 