Graham Harman’s New Weblog: Object-Oriented Philosophy

Graham Harman’s new weblog has begun, and one can only look forward to the Latour and Heidegger friendly development of his metaphysical thought (responded to in brief by me here). In his opening post, My Favorite Philosophers, he lists them in this order, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Plato and then an unexpected Brentano, Plotinus (a hidden favorite [...]

Graham Harman’s La-deigger and Hei-tour

The Synthesis of Heidegger and Latour Recommended is Graham Harman’s introductory November 29th, 2007 lecture on how Heidegger’s tool-oriented, human-centered conception of Being is strengthened by de-centralization of Latour‘s panoplies of actor networks (human and non-human), and Latour’s pure ontology of relations (an occasionalism), is deepened by Heidegger’s Four Fold Substance cryptology (pictured signficantly below). [...]

Spinoza’s Tomb and Sign: sêma

In a curious and revealing conflation of meanings, in Greek sêma, the word from which we get our “semiology” and “semantics” was generally a “sign” or a “mark” of significance, but also archaically it meant a “tomb,” a “burial mound,” a “cairn”. In the video above we encounter the “sign” of Spinoza, his tomb at The Hague. Perhaps [...]

Talking to the Left: Zizek and Levy

If we take the Gadamerian advisment that lived dialogue is the lesson to be learned from the Platonic dialogues, and not any particular content or Theory, one must admit that it is a pleasure, even an edifying pleasure, to listen to two intelligent persons in discussion. Here is a recording of a discussion between two [...]

Tommaso Campanella et Benedict Spinoza

…this unity [of knower and known] is only possible if the subject and object, the knower and the known, are of the same nature; they must be members and parts of one and the same vital complex. Every sensory perception is an act of fusion and reunification. We perceive the object, we grasp it in [...]

Spinoza, Davidson and Conceptual Dualism…Only Two?

Tim Thornton’s Question In Floris van der Burg’s excellent study of the conceptual similarities between the work of contemporary philosopher Donald Davidson (a favorite of mine) and Baruch Spinoza, in which he fruitfully uses each philosopher to critique the other…Davidson to apply the linguistic turn to Spinoza and Spinoza to re-articulate the largely unstated metaphysical bias [...]

Campanella’s Three Primalities – Potentia, Sapientia, Amor

I would like to post here some commentary text on an almost entirely forgotten metaphysician, one whom in the longest of runs I would like to rehabilitate. He is forgotten, one might say, partly because he was drawfed by the memory of his contemporary Giordano Bruno, who had the historical good fortune to be burned at the [...]

Visual and Lyrical Spinoza

In order to pursue the inner, intelligible yet affective kernel of Yannis Kyriakides’ lyrical rendition of Spinoza’s defintions of the affects, written about here, I shot and edited this short visual meditation on the music he composed, brought through the Latinity. It is but a stone I found in a stream nearby my house, caught in and expressing an aura [...]