Just pointing in the direction of Levi’s blog, and his recent discussion of flat ontology and signs. I’ve chipped in a little bit on the comments to try and clear up some of my confusion over what he means by flat ontology, so I thought I’d link it here (http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/flat-ontology-and-signs/) rather than re-writing out some of my thoughts.
Will have something else up soon, part way through writing it but keep getting distracted.
I seem to have gotten quite a lot of traffic over the last few days, so thankyou to all of you taking time to visit. I must break my promises again, and write about something entirely different to what I have so far suggested. Someone pointed me in the direction of the Grundlegung blog (now linked in the sidebar), which I’m finding very interesting. It’s nice to see someone else interested in contemporary ontology and the philosophy of normativity at the same time. Specifically, I was very interested by his musings on how to reconcile a univocal account of Being and the essentially normative character of rationality/subjectivity. This seems to be an ongoing discussion with Levi at LarvalSubjects (now also linked in the sidebar) to which I chipped in a little bit. I have promise to chip in more however, and so I’m going to try and explain the outlines of my own work on the relation between normativity and ontology. This also expands on a discussion I was having with Ray Brassier at the last speculative realism conference, about how to reconcile the normativity of thought with ontology.
Coming out of the discussion between Tom and Levi, there seem to be three major issues that need to be addressed:-
1) In what sense is the philosophy of normativity (or deontology) prior to, or foundational for, ontology?
2) If we understand subjects as uniquely normative, how can we reconcile this with a univocal ontology in which no kind of being has any ontological privilege?
3) If ontology is somehow grounded in the normative, how do we account for the ontological status of norms, and how do we avoid the same problems vis a vis univocity?
To carry on the general theme of the last post, I thought I’d list in brief a few other common misunderstandings that I have encountered a number of times in Deleuze scholarship. These are my pet peeves.
1. Deleuze is not a transcendental philosopher
A lot of people do a double take when I mention this one, but its very true. Deleuze is indeed a transcendental empiricist, but the sense of transcendental here is different. There are really two different senses of the transcendental, a methodological sense (hence ‘transcendental philosopher’) and a more ontological sense (e.g. the ‘transcendental field’). To pursue a transcendental methodology is to inquire after conditions of possibility. Traditionally this is the Kantian project of the conditions of the possibility of experience, but there can be different objects of transcendental enquiry. The ontological sense refers to the conditions themselves, for instance, Kant’s categories, his pure forms of intuition, and the rest of his transcendental apparatus. These two senses neatly overlap in Kant, because what is sort in a transcendental enquiry is the transcendental conditions (conditions of possibility).
How quickly I break my word. After a couple good conversations over the weekend on this topic, I’m going to break my promise to write something about either Brandom or Badiou, and I’m going to make a few points about Deleuze. I’ve been making several of these points for a while, but do not officially work on Deleuze anymore, so this is a good excuse to write down something I otherwise wouldn’t.
The first point to make is that a lot of people get confused by what Deleuze means when he espouses the univocity of Being. He is not himself always clear about it, and as I hope to show in brief, some of the more important and salient features of it are not explicit at all. Indeed, I think if we get over confusions about precisely what the principle of univocity is, we can see how it is not just an aspect of Deleuze’s ontology, but rather the core aspect which motivates many of the other decisions he takes in building his system.
Confusion No. 1: The principle of univocity is the same in Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Deleuze.
It might seem that this is at least Deleuze’s opinion from the sections on univocity in Difference and Repetition (D&R). Here he heaps much praise on both Duns Scotus and Spinoza. Although he does criticise them, for keeping Being neutral and not ‘making substance turn around the modes’, respectively, neither of these criticisms seems to have direct relevance to the principle of univocity itself.
All set up and ready to go. The question is now just what to write about. The main purpose of this blog is to store down something in between half-formed thoughts and actual essays. At the moment its a toss up between writing up some thoughts about Brandom’s inferentialism and writing a run through of the first meditation of Being and Event as I understand it. Will be back when I’ve figured out which.
DEONTOLOGISTICS 