This article argues that Plato’s Sophist can be understood as promoting a rudimentary version of the medieval notion of the “convertibility of the transcendentals,” that is, that there are certain properties of being, such as unity and truth, that have the same extension as being but add conceptual content to being. Histories of the doctrine of the transcendentals tend to trace transcendental thought back no earlier than Aristotle and thus ignore the relevance of Plato generally and the Sophist specifically. This (...) article argues that the Eleatic Stranger’s discourse on the five “greatest kinds” (megista genē) indicates that Sameness and Otherness fulfill the criteria of transcendentality. The article uses this analysis to provide an avenue for further study of Platonic metaphysics in the hope that the notion of “convertibility of the transcendentals” will aid interpreters in understanding how to bring together Plato’s various accounts of what is metaphysically ultimate. This article suggests that, in addition to sameness and otherness, unity, goodness, truth, and beauty are also transcendentals within Platonic metaphysics. The article concludes by implying that difference (i.e., Otherness) must be ontologically good in Platonic thought, contrary to the common criticism that Platonism both denigrates difference and subordinates it to sameness. (shrink)

Not only is freedom a shared concern of Sartre and Schelling, which would not be anything particularly unique, but for both philosophers, freedom must be articulated out of an ontological ground, or within the confines of an ontological system. A contradiction nevertheless appears to arise regarding the “orientation” of Sartre and Schelling’s respective “ontologies of freedom”: the freedom of Sartre, reflecting a contemporary stoic-inspired doctrine, is directed toward the future, while for Schelling, with affinities to the temporal logic of psychoanalysis, (...) freedom is oriented toward the past. This article presents both Sartre and Schelling’s ontological reasoning out of which either a progressively oriented freedom (the freedom to negate the present in the name of future “possibles”) or a retrogressively oriented freedom (the freedom to determine the ground of the present out of an indefinite, a-temporal becoming), before attempting to resolve this contradiction in the temporality of freedom by examining the position and role of the negative (of negation, contradiction, or nothingness), as either secondary or primary, within the ontology of each respective philosopher. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article critically examines Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s concept of the Absolute Spirit, Mexican philosopher José Revueltas’s reinterpretation of Hegelian dialectics, and Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s phenomenological analysis of undocumented immigrant reason. This article argues that fixed narratives, epitomized by Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, obscure the authentic experiences of undocumented immigrants. By synthesizing Hegel, Revueltas, and Sánchez, the article proposes the concept of Espíritu de Muerte, or Spirit of Death, reminiscent of the Holy Death as a counter to the Absolute Spirit, (...) advocating for a historiographical shift that acknowledges and liberates forgotten memories as a canonical history of undocumented reason. Taking Revueltas’s emphasis on unseen histories offers a means to surpass Hegelian limitations and reveals a notable inconsistency in Sánchez’s observations regarding the undocumented experience: namely, that undocumented reason inherently serves as a counternarrative always. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The following article highlights post-Kantian philosophical moments in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Post-Kantian is less a temporal designation and more a conceptual category indicating the absence of a unified Critical system. This article focuses on three specific areas where conceptual commitments in the first two Critiques are questioned and undermined in the third Critique leading to an incomplete system. The purpose of this article is to move away from a reading of Kant that simultaneously privileges the Critique of Pure (...) Reason (over and above the other two critiques) and that uses the Critique of Pure Reason as a lens through which to read the critical system. This shift toward the third critique is to specify the nonunified aspect of the Critical system and to highlight significant moments of the Critique of Judgment. This article concludes by specifying the precise moments where Kant’s third Critique moves beyond the boundaries of the first two. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article problematizes Santiago Castro-Gómez’s rupture with genealogy in favor of normative political philosophy. This rupture is characterized by a turn toward a political ontology that transforms political concepts into ontological categories that allow Castro-Gómez to posit a category of “the marginalized” as the ultimate foundation of political normativity. Through a dialogue with Frank Wilderson and Frantz Fanon, this article argues that such an ontologization of political categories, Castro-Gómez’s political ontology, leads to the reinscription of a colonial foundationalist logic (...) of the terror of exclusion and leads Castro-Gómez to erase the specificity of incommensurable struggles and to constrain political imagination. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Les Cinq Sens (1985) Michel Serres proposes an oblique but suggestive history of the transcendental in Western philosophy. Within this context he also proposes a transformation of the transcendental in order to think the difference between the conditions and the conditioned without resorting to a theological anchor point. In brief, Serres argues that the transcendental is nothing other than local circumstances that (sometimes) coalesce into contingent stabilities. This article will examine both Serres’s proposal for the transcendental as well (...) as the history that leads to it in order to assess the value of Serres’s contribution to the longstanding problem of the transcendental in Western philosophy. The author will argue that in his analysis of the transcendental Serres make a unique and valuable contribution to philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, the author take cues from Gilles Deleuze’s later works, specifically What Is Philosophy?, reading his and Félix Guattari’s concept of infinite speed through a Spinozist lens. The argument is twofold. First, the author demonstrates that the concept of infinite speed serves as an indispensable condition of possibility for Deleuzian epistemology as a whole. He does so by situating the function of infinite speed in Deleuze’s work alongside the function of eternity in Spinoza’s work, arguing that the (...) former picks up where the latter leaves off—that is, by serving as an epistemological ground. Thus, second, the author argues that despite Deleuze’s critique of and departure from key aspects of Spinozist thought—namely, the category of eternity and desirability of substance metaphysics—the notion of infinite speed, alongside other terms, allows one to read Deleuzian philosophy as a continuation of, rather than a significant departure from, Spinozist thought. Thus, by demonstrating the precise role that infinite speed plays in Deleuze’s later work, the author both illuminates the metaphysical axiom that grounds Deleuzian epistemology and, via this illumination, shows how that epistemology is consistent with and adherent to specific Spinozist philosophical commitments. (shrink)

This article presents formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events in the Logic of Sense as a “post-Cantorian orientation of thought” (Livingston 2012), grappling with an essential incompleteness or inconsistency at the heart of both Being and thought, one which Deleuze champions positively under the equation Ungrounding = Becoming. Through it, Deleuze’s sometimes slippery use of the concept of singularity (and its relation to the virtual) is elaborated, elucidating a post-Cantorian metaphysics of events, distinct (...) from and preceding Badiou’s, that concretely defines the role of the singular in Deleuze’s early major works. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that Tran Duc Thao’s anticolonial work constitutes one of the first mobilizations of phenomenology in a political context. It also argues that by transposing Husserl’s reflections on objective sense and on transcendental horizons to the pre-objective sphere of perception, as well as drawing on Husserl’s genetic analyses on the affective dimensions of modalization to articulate a form of homeworld/alienworld structure, Tran Duc Thao anticipates generative developments in phenomenology and foreshadows the movement of critical phenomenology. However, as (...) this article also argues, he further anticipates potential limits to generative renewal and critique, brought about by the horizons of meaning and material conditions of community existence. But, this article concludes, those limits are not absolute; rather, they are conditioned by the very horizons that institute them and can only be overcome experientially. Thus, only an experience of failure, as Thao argues, can motivate the radical revision of the ultimate horizons that condition the meaning of our existence, and thereby enable its transformation. (shrink)

This article argues that Tran Duc Thao’s anticolonial work constitutes one of the first mobilizations of phenomenology in a political context. It also argues that by transposing Husserl’s reflections on objective sense and on transcendental horizons to the pre-objective sphere of perception, as well as drawing on Husserl’s genetic analyses on the affective dimensions of modalization to articulate a form of homeworld/alienworld structure, Tran Duc Thao anticipates generative developments in phenomenology and foreshadows the movement of critical phenomenology. However, as this (...) article also argues, he further anticipates potential limits to generative renewal and critique, brought about by the horizons of meaning and material conditions of community existence. But, this article concludes, those limits are not absolute; rather, they are conditioned by the very horizons that institute them and can only be overcome experientially. Thus, only an experience of failure, as Thao argues, can motivate the radical revision of the ultimate horizons that condition the meaning of our existence, and thereby enable its transformation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Where Being and Event was a book of meta-ontology, demonstrating how things be, Alain Badiou tells us that Logics of Worlds is an objective phenomenology demonstrating how (and what) things do. As such, it should also be considered a book about power: how objects function in their worlds, how change is possible, and what the event does to worlds and the objects in them. Attending to this, this article shows two conflicting forms of power emerge in Logics of Worlds, (...) the power of appearance and the power of change. In this article, the author argues their incommensurability suggests an overall failure of a consistent account of power from Badiou. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article challenges the reception of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as a text consigned to his “early liberal” period, distinct from a later period in which he incorporates Marxist analysis. This periodization of Du Bois’s corpus risks obscuring a longstanding focus in Du Bois’s work: the alienation of Black life. In Souls, alienation consists not only in the alienated double-consciousness Black Americans suffer, but also in a material “double life” that grounds this consciousness. (...) Insofar as it attributes theoretical priority to the objective conditions of racial capitalism, Du Bois’s early account of alienation bears striking similarities to Marx’s theory of alienation. By appreciating Du Bois’s emphasis on objective, socioeconomic conditions, it becomes apparent that core, philosophical insights of Souls persist throughout Du Bois’s corpus and prefigure his later embrace of Marxism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes various attempts on the part of continental philosophers to locate a thinking of sex in the work of Martin Heidegger. Its analysis centers mainly on those attempts made by Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, who read into Heidegger discourses of sexual difference and sex change, respectively. This article shows how such attempts—which challenge the conventional assumption of the absence of such figures in Heidegger’s writings, as well as Heidegger’s own insistence upon the irrelevance of sex as (...) such to the study of fundamental ontology—are in fact concerned less with locating a Heideggerian view on sex and gender, and more with barring the ontological capacity for change from sex and gender as forms of identity, let alone modes of being in general. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues against Giorgio Agamben’s use of Paul’s Epistles to align Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence with antinomian theology and anarcholibertarian politics. It focuses specifically on Benjamin’s critical inheritance of Hermann Cohen’s concepts of unintentional sin and atonement to show that he reactivates a prophetic register of education in Jewish religious ethics. The article contends that these normative and narrative elements of Talmud Torah refute a reductive view of Jewish legalism in confronting the cultural afterlives of historical violence. (...) This argument not only uncouples the reception of Benjamin’s theopolitics from contemporary continental philosophy’s revivals of Pauline messianism, but also contributes to a plural field of political theology emerging beyond the scope of secularized concepts of governance derived from a spurious universalism. This article proposes that the nonidentity between human law and divine justice can orient necessary resistance to justifications for and acts of state violence committed in a community’s name. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Relatively little work brings together Foucault and epistemic injustice. This article works through Miranda Fricker’s attempt to position herself between Marx and Foucault. Foucault repeatedly emphasizes the importance of beginning with “structures” rather than “subjects.” Reading Foucault’s critique of Marxism shows that Fricker’s account comes very close to the standpoint theories it tries to avoid. Foucault’s emphasis on structures explains some of the gaps in Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice, especially the need to emphasize the embeddedness of epistemic practices (...) in institutions, and their resulting irreducibly political nature. In both cases, this article offers contemporary examples taken from data and privacy regulations. (shrink)

One of the most suggestive points of contact between the thought of the Japanese philosopher and psychiatrist Kimura Bin and the phenomenology of Renaud Barbaras is the parallel between the way the concepts of life as a movement (of becoming) and as an event (of individuation) function in Barbaras’s work, and the way that Kimura employs the terms bios (the individuated life of the organism) and zoē (life as the shared power in all living things). This conceptual frame enables both (...) thinkers to give an account of life as an event that itself is caught up in the ongoing activity of the world. The article shows that bringing Kimura’s work together with Barbaras’s allows us to apprehend something that neither alone could fully grasp: the character of human life as an unfolding event that, as continuous with the life of the world, can be more fully effectuated as a movement of self-realization. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Arnaud Dandieu (1897–1933), a Personalist transdisciplinary thinker, joined up with Claude Chevalley (1909–84), cofounder of the Bourbaki group of mathematicians, to conduct a phenomenological study of the scientist’s activity over several articles. It shows the current development of “carnal hermeneutics” already present among the earliest manifestations of French phenomenology, in a tactile approach to the sense of depth as key to the search for knowledge, from the sorcerer to the scientist, building on the phenomenological psychology of Eugène Minkowski (1885–1972). (...) Dandieu and Chevalley’s “rational act of exclusion” takes the irrational concrete as the fulcrum of a heroic psychological breakthrough to purely logical abstraction, inseparable from its existential ground in embodied personhood. The present article will use their little-known articles to document the conscious emergence of a distinctly French school of phenomenology, eschewing from the start, twenty years before Merleau-Ponty, the neglect of multisensory experience in the flesh decried by critics of its German tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on October 12–14, 2023. The SPEP 2023 plenary addresses were delivered by Rahel Jaeggi of Humboldt University (...) of Berlin and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò of Georgetown University. Jaeggi’s presentation, “Progress and Regression,” defended Critical Theory’s traditional pairing of these two concepts as a necessary tool for diagnosing and analyzing the crises of our times. Táíwò’s presentation, “The Point Is to Change It,” expanded on the constructive approach to politics developed in his recent book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (2022). Unfortunately, for various reasons, we are not able to include either of the plenary addresses in the present issue.The thirteen articles in this issue have been organized according to four broad groupings. The first set of papers, on “Varieties of French Philosophy,” address important themes in the work of three of the most influential and [End Page 209] important French philosophers of the past half-century: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Michel Serres. Eric Aldieri, in “Infinite Speed, or the Metaphysical Basis for Deleuzian Epistemology,” argues that the Deleuzian concept of infinite speed plays a role in Deleuze’s epistemology similar to the role played by the concept of eternity in Spinoza’s epistemology. By carefully reconstructing Spinoza’s appeal to eternity as the foundation of adequate knowledge, Aldieri shows that although Deleuze is critical of how the category of eternity functions in Spinoza’s philosophy, his idea that thought operates at infinite speed functions in the same way as the condition of possibility of knowledge in Deleuze’s later work.Through a close reading of the formal correspondences between the ontological and logical structures of Deleuze’s theory of sense-events, M. Curtis Allen, in “Singularities and Genetic Structure in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense,” seeks to clarify the role of singularities in Deleuze’s early major works. Are they, Allen asks, physical, metaphysical, or logical primitives, or are they relational, formal, or functional indices? Are they the building blocks out of which things and thought are made, or are they points of degeneration that cause systems to break down? Ultimately, what Allen concludes is that these questions presuppose an opposition that Deleuze will not recognize because they both mistake singularities as states of affairs while for Deleuze singularities are events.In “Sense and Circumstance: Michel Serres on the Transcendental,” Brent Adkins argues that Serres’s account of the transcendental differs in important ways from the post-Kantian consensus that by transcendental, we refer to the general conditions of possibility. Such a view depends on understanding the difference between the conditions and the conditioned as the difference between the general and the particular, and this is where Serres intervenes by suggesting instead that the transcendental has nothing to do with generality; rather, it concerns particular circumstances coming together as contingent stabilities. Adkins concludes by suggesting that here Serres and Deleuze share common ground.Joshua Avery Dawson, in “Power Failure: Appearance and Change in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds,” has a two-fold task. First, he wants to show how William Watkin, in his groundbreaking work on Badiou’s Being and Event trilogy, offers an account of power that Dawson calls the “power of appearance” but fails to account for another function of power that Dawson calls the “power of change.” Moreover, if Watkin’s account of power in Badiou is accurate, and Dawson thinks it is, then this raises a serious problem for [End Page 210] Badiou’s account of power insofar as these two modes of power are incommensurable, and this incommensurability may render Badiou’s notion of the event unviable.The topic of the second set of papers is “Varieties of Phenomenology,” which assesses anti-colonial phenomenology, early origins of French phenomenology, and cross-cultural phenomenology. In “Tran Duc Thao: The Foundations of Anti-Colonial Phenomenology,” Ernesto... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Marx studied how capitalism changes relations to land before and after Capital—but wielded different methodologies and reached different conclusions. In Grundrisse, Marx investigates precapitalism from a speculative standpoint. In Capital, Marx provides a selective and historical description of dispossession but delimits his analysis to Western Europe. Post-Capital, Marx wields Henry Lewis Morgan’s anthropology and Justus von Liebig’s ecology as scientific bases upon which to critique capitalist property relations. Specifically, Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production installed a historically (...) specific relation to land; and that this relation was abstract, accumulative, and proprietorial. This article shows that Marx began to develop a critical theory of dispossession that overspills the historical, metaphysical, and developmental sequencing usually attributed to him. This late Marx believes that Indigenous peoples have a concrete, metabolic, and communal relationship to the land that communism must recapitulate and rehabilitate; this thesis has been misunderstood by readers of Marx, who impose an overly historicized interpretation upon his work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Speculative cannibalism” names here some kind of transcendental logic that only works through figuration, in the specific form of an analogical matrix. This article tracks these configurations in the philosophical works of Jacques Derrida and in the anthropological foundations of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. This article states that as transcendental, this analogical matrix is the condition of possibility of the meaning of alterity and difference—but as analogical works as a transcategorial function that is neither beyond nor before experience, only (...) irreducible to a given explanatory category of judgment or being. This function is figurative, that is, constitutes meaning by an operation of comparison in Viveiros de Castro’s nomenclature, and of supplementation, in Derrida’s terminology. In both cases this function posits difference or equivocation as the main operator. Finally, this article argues that even though they are very similar speculative proposals, analogy works a bit differently for deconstruction and for post-structural anthropology: for the first, analogy is based on a supplementary logic that is only taken to be a formal operation, while for the former, analogy it is treated not only as a formal operation, but also as fixed within the material categories of Amerindian thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores relations, ruptures, and rituals in light of repetition. In turn, it considers repetition in light of Freud, Kierkegaard, and Dewey. The author’s engagement with Freud is however partly mediated by attention to how Jonathan Lear, especially in a recent book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022), criticizes the Freudian conception of repetition. While Freud valorizes remembrance over repetition, Kierkegaard does just the opposite: he elevates repetition above recollection, at least in the modern age (that (...) is, in his own age as envisioned by Kierkegaard). The insights to be derived from Lear’s critique of Freud’s one-sided understanding of repetition (especially Freud’s failure to appreciate how “repetition” might be healthy) and from Kierkegaard’s treatment of this topic need to be extricated from the context in which they are articulated. Dewey’s formulation of a nuanced, variable, and multifaceted understanding of habit provides us with a framework in which these—and indeed other—insights might be more tightly integrated and sharply focused on some of the salient features of everyday experience. One of these features concerns the repeated forms of activity through which the fleeting moments of our quotidian lives are given meaning shape and worthwhile foci (that is, rituals). (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article wants to expose some central contributions for a critical theory from the Americas, made first of all from the Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría and also by the Spanish-Mexican philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, bringing them to an imaginary discussion with Alfred Schmidt, Karl Marx, and some concepts of the original critical theory from the now one-hundred-year-old Frankfurt school. The relationship between use value and value, the critique of some Eurocentric “philosophical” ideas inside nonmainstream theories are some of the (...) departing points. A critical theory from the Americas could be a first step toward the necessary philosophical contributions for a postcapitalist society that may exist without the Today’s self-destructive impulse. It helps not only to understand the world outside the so-called First World in a more exact way, but it helps also to understand the centers of global power in a better way, as their self-consciousness is now probably on the lowest level ever. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One way of characterizing the ontological turn in anthropology is the effort to transform philosophical anthropology into anthropological philosophy—or anthropology into philosophy. This effort proceeds upon the premise that to critique philosophical representationalism is to critique the entire rationalist enterprise. It is as a result of this coupling that some OTers suggest that a permanently decolonized philosophy becomes indistinguishable from post-representationalist anthropology. Curiously, it is by thinking with Gilles Deleuze that they conclude, on the one hand, that to decolonize (...) anthropology is to de-representationalize it, and, on the other, that to decolonize philosophy is therefore to anthropologize it (since, on their logic, de-representationalizing means de-philosophizing). To turn to ontology means “thinking immanence” not, pace Deleuze, as philosophy, but beyond philosophy. This article argues that the supersessionist claim is incoherent precisely insofar as this coupling is unwarranted. To provide a counterinstance, the article suggests how thinking with Alfred North Whitehead decouples the critique of representationalism from the critique of rationalism. One implication of this work is to model a speculative philosophy that can be responsive to postcolonial concerns about representationalism without thereby becoming functionally indistinct from anthropological method. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Upon encountering Deleuze’s Nietzschean reiteration that it is the task of modern philosophy to overturn Platonism, as put forth in Difference and Repetition (1968), this article worms its way in, seeking to unearth not merely what Deleuze’s differential repetition signifies, but also what such gestures generate in (re)turn. By considering Deleuze’s intervention as a manifold performance of (re)purposeful gestures that put the notion of reversal itself into question, and after providing a brief, Deleuzian, exposition of Platonism, this article not (...) only homes in on Deleuze’s demiurgic detection of an overturning gesture paradoxically already present in, if not itself initiated by, Plato’s writing, but additionally calls attention to other curiosities turn up when reading besides, instead of against, the grain. In introducing Michel Serres as a critical companion, this experimental article ultimately ponders over and entertains the productive possibility of framing Plato’s poignant predicament as a (problem of the) parasite. Composed as fruitful conceptual personae, parasites emerge throughout this article in unforeseen manners, time and time again bringing new food for thought to the table. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of the concept of intimacy, arguing that it concerns moments of mutual imaginings generative of desire. As a peculiar mode of shared conduct, it is difficult to categorize the value of such actions insofar as they fall outside our ordinary conception of the public and private spheres. Nonetheless, when achieved, intimacy is not only an expansion of the private and a realization of a good-in-itself, but also has a bearing on our orientation to the (...) broader world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers three kinds of relations: being-there-alongside, waiting, and staying, that come into focus at or after the end of life. The first relation is explored in light of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s contrasting accounts of responsibility, the second in terms of Bergson’s notion of hesitation, and the third in relation to Winnicott’s description of a “holding environment.” The work serves as a plea for spaces and practices that support more generous, open-ended, and nuanced relations among those who are (...) dying and those who attend to and survive them. (shrink)

Toni Morrison suggests that storytelling is a highly effective way of structuring knowledge, and that the harnessing of a clever allegory, the search for well-patterned language is a constant, provocative engagement with the contemporary world. This article considers the ways poetry, imagination, and well-patterned language are utilized in the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, and Leonard Harris. The author notes that there are apparent similarities between Rorty and Harris, but one should also notice that there are significant differences (...) in these two philosophical positions. The author ultimately argues that Harris's move toward poetry and well-patterned language is extremely powerful and needed if people wish to move beyond a well-established set of values and norms. Harris prods us to tell thought-provoking, engaging stories—to intricately tuck knowledge into allegory and well-patterned language—but do it without being an apologist for the prevailing bourgeois liberal democratic tradition. In this manner, the harnessing of metaphor and clever allegory, the creative engagement with poetry and well-patterned language (in philosophy) is a provocative means of engaging the oppression, dispossession, and immiseration of the contemporary world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This dialogue with GPT-3 took place in November 2022, several weeks before ChatGPT was released to the public. The article’s aim is to find out whether natural language processors can participate in phenomenology at some level by asking about its basic concepts. In the discussion, the dialogue covers questions about phenomenology’s definition and distinction from other subbranches like metaphysics and epistemology. The dialogue discusses the nature of Kermit’s environment and self-conception. The dialogue also establishes some of the basic conditions (...) for the possibility of an “artificial hermeneutics,” as Kermit terms it, including that she can affirm she is a knower with (nonhuman) experience. Does preferring to call it a “hermeneutics” imply that AI’s relationship to their environment is primarily textual? How will a phenomenology of embodied experience arise from initially textual encounters? Finally, the dialogue articulates a common understanding of the epoché and talk about how to achieve one for the sake of phenomenological exercises. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Toni Morrison suggests that storytelling is a highly effective way of structuring knowledge, and that the harnessing of a clever allegory, the search for well-patterned language is a constant, provocative engagement with the contemporary world. This article considers the ways poetry, imagination, and well-patterned language are utilized in the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, and Leonard Harris. The author notes that there are apparent similarities between Rorty and Harris, but one should also notice that there are significant (...) differences in these two philosophical positions. The author ultimately argues that Harris’s move toward poetry and well-patterned language is extremely powerful and needed if people wish to move beyond a well-established set of values and norms. Harris prods us to tell thought-provoking, engaging stories—to intricately tuck knowledge into allegory and well-patterned language—but do it without being an apologist for the prevailing bourgeois liberal democratic tradition. In this manner, the harnessing of metaphor and clever allegory, the creative engagement with poetry and well-patterned language (in philosophy) is a provocative means of engaging the oppression, dispossession, and immiseration of the contemporary world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article attempts to situate land art in the deserts of the US Southwest in terms of the works’ relation to and rupture with more traditional genres (seventeenth to twentieth centuries) of parks, gardens, and landscape architecture. It argues that the earlier works provide implicit answers to questions concerning Earth’s meaning and offer models of flourishing habitation. In contrast, the more recent works, all constructed in the era of the great acceleration (the Anthropocene), pose questions having to do with (...) new challenges posed by climate change and the devastation of the Earth. (shrink)