Loxogonically, The Picture, the Path and the Hand

  The recent orientation towards objects in philosophy which has been sponsored by Graham Harman’s radical claims has definitely got me thinking about how objects have appeared to me, have entered into my experience as a thinker over the years. Always they ripped apart at the seams and showed so many dangling strings I never [...]

The Coming Medieval Scholasticism of SR

A Debate “Worth Having” Responding to Splintering Bone Ashes prediction that there will rise up an eliminativist (materialist) branch in the Speculative Realism debate, Graham dreams of waking up in a world where the Scholastic Realism vs. Nominalism debate had been permanently revived (part of his love for irreducible tensions): What if I could wake up every [...]

Spinoza’s Substance Stripped Bare

(above Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even,” 1913 -23) Just a Blob of nothing, an intellectual Sleight of Hand…? Levi, over at Larval Subjects has a well-worded summation of the possible difficulties and assumptions contained in Spinoza’s Proposition 5 (Ethics, part I: ) “Proposition Five: Questions of Individuation”, in particular how they [...]

The Whiteness of Metaphysics: Colored Readings of the Same

The Murderer of Agamemnon ἆ ἆ, ἰδοὺ ἰδού: ἄπεχε τῆς βοὸς τὸν ταῦρον: ἐν πέπλοισι μελαγκέρῳ λαβοῦσα μηχανήματι τύπτει!.. Ah, ah, See, see! Hold off from the cow the bull!  Within robes blackhorned she seized, by a machina striking! Agamemnon (lines 1125-1128) Ἀργεῖός εἰμι, πατέρα δ᾽ ἱστορεῖς καλῶς, Ἀγαμέμνον᾽, ἀνδρῶν ναυβατῶν ἁρμόστορα, ξὺν ᾧ σὺ Τροίαν ἄπολιν [...]

Davidson Fast and Loose With Conceptual Schemes?

  Daniel over at SOH-Dan picks up on quote from an older post of mine, Spinoza, Davidson and Conceptual Dualism…Only Two?, and provides some interesting information. I had quoted from Davidson and Spinoza: Mind, Matter and Morality  (Floris van der Berg), an comment made by a Wittgensteinian: Here I want to refer to my friend and former [...]

A River Runs Through it: Scotus, Spinoza and then Davidson

    In recent conversation the connection between contemporary philosopher Donald Davidson and Spinoza has come up, a connection which I have felt runs in several directions. Previously the only thing I had strictly read on this is Davidson and Spinoza: Mind, Matter and Morality by Floris van der Burg, which in my view aside from [...]

Binaries, Orientalism and Harman on the Exotic

The Gleam of Gold and the Pasha of Causation Graham was generous enough a spirit to take my cultural criticism of his metaphysics at a distance, and to allow my commentary to largely remain at the level of theory. In my last two posts, The White and the Colored In Heidegger (and Harman), and then The [...]

The Allure of Graham Harman’s Orientalism and Flaubert

A mix from Salammbo and “On Vicarious Causation” I recently attempted to draw out the implicit white/colored, colonialist conceptualization that I see in Graham Harman’s rather poetically depicted Object-Oriented Philosophy, in particular of its theory of Vicarious Causation. Further, I tried to point out that Graham actually exhibits in the very core of his concept of the [...]

The White and the Colored In Heidegger (and Harman)

  Thinking about the Politics of Objects As an aftermath of my thinking about Spinoza and Heidegger it occurs to me that Heidegger ready-at-hand contains something of a notion of “Whiteness,” in the idea of invisibility (and his present-at-hand something of that of “colored”). I suspect that this probably has some strong correlate in Derrida’s critique and continuation of [...]

Checking Heidegger’s Hammer: The Pleasure and Direction of the Whirr

How to Philosophize With a Hammer (or better…Spinoza’s Hatchet) Heidegger is credited with profound originality in his treatment of “the hammer”, something even it is said his critics have to doff their hat to. With this we cannot, and should not dispute. But, it may be enough to point out that approximately 265 years before [...]