Skip to main content

Being thrown in Plato´s rivers

In a old and nice little essay on Platonism and the Ockham´s razor, Oswaldo Chateaubriand begins to pave a possible road for a renewed Platonism that would fill the holes which made philosophers so impatiently give up on such a theory about reality as a whole. He disparages against the Ockham razor, which is an absolute principle that favors desert landscapes against all sort of speculation. It has set the stage for confining mathematics to a physical non-place, devoid of any inherent connection to concrete things. In particular, it makes mathematisation something outside the sphere of what there is - to mathematize is to drift away, as the razor inspired projects like Hartry Field´s fictionalism. The razor keeps speculation to a minimum and exiles the products of a mathematizing effort.

My interest in negation and the reality of inconsistencies has driven me towards Platonist territories. The essay came back to my mind: why philosophers are so impatient against an overall view of reality just because there are some flimsy arguments against it? I remembered discussing with Meillassoux about mathematisation. He´s all for it, even though he has reservations against most mathematical doctrines. The problem with mathematisation, I said, had to do with measurement. Measurement is crucial and yet is laden with arbitrary choices from the user - it cannot be good enough to attain absulutes for reasons that go back to the old Wittgensteinian arguments in his Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik: why would I use a wooden ruler instead of a rubber one? Meillassoux didn´t answer quite to the contentment of the Wittgensteinian suspicion in the book. Mathematics is filled with our practices and in particular nothing can be mathematized without having been part of the process triggered by someone doing mathematics. God can only determine something mathematical by doing mathematics. But the issue of the measurement is dramatic only if we place it as the sole point of contact between abstracta and a physical world. If things are less clear-cut and abstracta are somehow part of the physical furniture, then mathematisation could be such that there is room for both a wooden ruler measured physical item and a rubber ruler measured physical item.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Meta-m

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I