Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access

Volume 4 Issue 1

January 2021

Issue of Open Philosophy

Contents
Journal Overview

Topical issue: Philosophy and Sonic Research - Thinking with Sounds and Rhythms, edited by Martin Nitsche and Vít Pokorný

Open Access December 10, 2021

Philosophy and Sonic Research: Thinking with Sounds, Rhythms, and Music. An Editorial Introduction

Vít Pokorný, Martin Nitsche

Page range: 374-377

Download PDF

Open Access August 30, 2021

Sonic Environments as Systems of Places: A Critical Reading of Husserl’s Thing and Space

Martin Nitsche

Page range: 136-148

More Download PDF

Abstract

This article offers a thorough and critical reading of Husserl’s Thing and Space . This reading is principally motivated by the effort to methodologically design a phenomenological–topological approach to the research of lived sonic environments. In this book, Husserl lays foundations of phenomenological topology by understanding perceptions as places and defining, consequently, the space as a system of places. The critical reading starts with pointing out the ambiguity of location in Thing and Space , which consists mainly in the insufficient implementation of the distinction between the location and the localization. Further investigations then reveal the roots of this ambiguity in both the preference of visual perception and the omission of subjective aspects of kinesthesia. The article critically examines Husserl’s notion of the appended localization that expresses the marginalization of (among others) acoustic experience. In conclusion, the article utilizes the critical findings to formulate the project of a place-based (phenomenological–topological), medium-centered, and multi-sensory approach to sonic environments.

Open Access September 20, 2021

Hearing and Listening in the Context of Passivity and Activity

Jiří Zelenka

Page range: 190-197

More Download PDF

Abstract

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the phenomenologically grounded dynamics of hearing and listening as a possible approach to our sonic experience. Its starting point is the studies of contemporary urban spaces devoted to their sonic experience. The results of these studies and their interpretation will serve as a starting point for the introduction of dynamics of hearing and listening. In the next part of this article, I will focus on the elaboration of this relationship with regard to the critique of Husserl’s concept of activity and passivity in his late work Experience and Judgment and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of being-in-the-world. Based on this, in the end, certain common features will be shown, connecting the thematization of activity and passivity with the relationship of hearing and listening.

Open Access September 17, 2021

The Muting of the Other: The Technological Reconfiguration of Our Auditory Experience of Others

Ivan Gutierrez

Page range: 179-189

More Download PDF

Abstract

Increasingly privatized auditory spaces resulting from the mutual engendering of auditory cultural practices and sound technologies that separated the sense of hearing and segmented acoustic spaces have had a muting effect on our experience of Others that has intensified since the advent of mobile listening devices. In Section 1 of the article, I outline features of the social realm of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries that made modern sound technologies possible and then features of the technological realm that have shaped today’s social realm – all with an eye toward our experience of other people. Then, in Section 2, I reach for a few phenomenological tools from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don Ihde to draw out the phenomenological vectors that have taken shape within the enmeshed sociotechnological context described in Section 1. Specifically, I show how technologically mediated auditory experience has been individualized and how the use of sound technologies on the go – whether wearing earphones or in a car – has had a muting effect on our experience of others.

Open Access December 10, 2021

Polyrhythmic Arrangements: Rhythm as a Dynamic Principle in the Constitution of Environments

Vít Pokorný

Page range: 394-403

More Download PDF

Abstract

This study explores the concept of rhythm and the relation of rhythm to the environment. Rhythm is not conceived of simply as a linear sequence of beats and pauses, but as a formative dynamic principle operating in all living systems. Following the rhythmanalysis of H. Levebvre and C. Regulier, phenomenological analyses of rhythm in Schutz and Richir, and a deleuzian processual approach to rhythm and milieu, this study attempts to address rhythm in terms of polyrhythmic bundles, which may be in states of eurhythmia or arrhythmia. Specifically, the study focuses on three types of polyrhythmic arrangements – individual organism, garden, and city, on which it shows several types of rhythmic formations and rhythmic principles, whose interplay or discrepancy determines the formation of distinct types of living environment.

Open Access September 8, 2021

Thinking with Susanne Langer: Sonar Entanglements with the Non-human

Lona Gaikis

Page range: 149-161

More Download PDF

Abstract

An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature(s) with culture(s) is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal relationship of sounding . What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art.

Open Access September 13, 2021

The Sound Monad: A Philosophical Perspective on Sound Design

Vincenzo Zingaro

Page range: 162-178

More Download PDF

Abstract

This article aims at sketching a philosophical theory of sound based on the perspective of sound designers: unique agents blurring the boundaries between engineering, music, acoustics and sound-based art. After having introduced the general framing in Section 1, focusing on a short history of the theory and practice of sound design, in Section 2 we propose a reading of sound as monad. We derive such intuition from the technology of digital sampling of audio signals, based on the decomposition of complex sound waves in a number of elementary sinusoidal waves. Thus, in Section 3, we attempt at grounding the resulting “sound-atom” on Leibniz’s notion of monad, intended both as a “simple substance without parts” and as a “nucleus of forces in statu possibilitatis .” The insight is resumed and further discussed in Section 4, where we draw our conclusions by demonstrating the fitness of such framing with regards to the standpoint of sound design, while accounting for the work of sound artists Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda.

Open Access September 21, 2021

Tuning in on the Becoming of Music

Edvin Østergaard

Page range: 198-210

More Download PDF

Abstract

In this article, I explore the music-in-becoming as a dialogue. The thesis of my inquiry is that during musical composition, the composer’s listening is marked by both activeness and receptiveness; actively structuring the sounding work, and receptively letting the work express itself as it takes its form. Composer and work merge in sudden moments of attunement, the sensation of coherence between the so-fare completed and the anticipation of the as-of-yet unformed work. Composition is all about balancing writing as a handicraft with those rare, unexpected moments of attunement. I discuss the emerging work’s invitational character and the fact that during composition, the piece seems to request the composer’s attention. The audibility of the work’s voice depends on the composer’s ability to listen. Finally, the methodological considerations concerning sonic-artistic research show that researching sonic experiences requires competencies of being attentive, responsive, and reflective. Attentiveness is related to thorough listening experiences of the emerging music, responsiveness appears as a vital skill in a composer’s dialoguing with the music-in-becoming, and reflectiveness is associated with empirically documenting the processes. At the heart of this sonic research project, I place my lived experience of composing and the intimate relation between sound and listening.

Open Access December 6, 2021

Toward Ubimus Philosophical Frameworks

Damián Keller, Luzilei Aliel, Marcos Célio Filho, Leandro Costalonga

Page range: 353-371

More Download PDF

Abstract

We tackle the philosophical implications of post-2020 music practices. To situate our discussion, we address pending issues in current definitions of music-making. Our analysis indicates that post-2020 definitions of music should feature sonic information and events, framed through social interactions and through the material grounding of the musical activity. Ubiquitous music (ubimus) furnishes a promising playing field for the emerging aspects of creative music-thinking. New frameworks that encompass the dynamic, multimodal and situated characteristics of music while skewing an anthropocentric perspective on creativity may provide meaningful targets for ubimus research toward a new notion of musicality. Three artistic projects serve to exemplify key aspects of this proposal: Atravessamentos, Memory Tree and Lyapunov Time. We address the philosophical implications of these artistic endeavors toward the construction of ubimus philosophical frameworks.

Open Access November 30, 2021

Trans*formative Thinking Through Sound: Artistic Research in Gender and Sound Beyond the Human

Luca Soudant

Page range: 335-346

More Download PDF

Abstract

This article reflects on an ongoing artistic research practice that deals with sound, gender, power, spatiality, and human–nonhuman entanglement. Sparked by a sound design for a less crunchy “lady-friendly” crisp, the research inquires the relationship between gender and sound at human–nonhuman encounter through making and thinking. Drawing on queer theory, sound studies, and posthumanism, it aims to transcend essentialist, vision-focused, and anthropocentric conceptualisations of gender and, as an insight gained from working with low-frequency sound waves, it reflects on sound as material-philosophically demonstrating human–nonhuman interconnectedness. The latter, as this article proposes, may encourage us to horizontalise hierarchies between the human and nonhuman. Finally, this text situates sonic thinking as a mode of trans*formative thinking: a process-oriented philosophy that aims to embrace the messy, queer ways of human–nonhuman relationality, which characterises a vibrant space from which this artistic research will further develop.

Open Access October 5, 2021

Sonic Becomings: Rhythmic Encounters in Interspecies Improvisation

Louisa Collenberg

Page range: 224-230

More Download PDF

Abstract

David Rothenberg, a philosophy professor and Jazz musician, has been improvising with nonhuman animals for years, among his playing partners are birds and whales, known to be territorial animals. As Deleuze and Guattari propose that the origin of art is precisely the territorialising animal and more a function of nature than a specifically human cultural achievement, their concept of territory and rhythm offers a non-anthropocentric way of looking at these encounters. Rothenberg’s sonic experiments in resonance and interspecies interaction do not rely on language, thus I argue that the human and the nonhuman animals form a temporary joint territory via sonic rhythms and engage in a mutual becoming by forming a rhizome. His sound thinking practice thus also helps in decentralising further anthropocentric models of music and art.

Open Access October 18, 2021

Odyssey Towards a Sirenic Thinking: An Attempt at a Self-Criticism of the Listening Paradigm Within Sound Studies

Jim Igor Kallenberg, Hannah L. M. Eßler

Page range: 231-251

More Download PDF

Abstract

This text departs from a contradictory claim in deaf studies and sound studies: both disciplines describe a hierarchical regime of the sensible – visuocentrism and audiocentrism – which they try to counter with conceptualisations as “acoustemology” or “deaf gain.” However, as we argue, they both thereby erect what they claim to overcome: a sensual regime that privileges one sense over another and a restricted conception of subjectivity deriving from it. First, we draw a philosophical line in the critique of sensual regimes. Then we propose a figure for the transcendence of the separation of the sensible: in re-reading of the myth of Odysseus and the sirens, we engage various examples from literature, art, and acoustics to describe sirens as a mythological and technical archetype of the transcendence of the sensual regime, as well as reified subjectivity. The question, then, is not how to escape the sirens, but how they can be approached. It is necessary, we argue, for sound studies to develop a critical self-consciousness of its own restricted concepts in order to move from sonic thinking towards a sirenic thinking.

Open Access October 29, 2021

Singing Philosophy: Deviating Voices and Rhythms without a Time Signature

Salomé Voegelin

Page range: 284-291

More Download PDF

Abstract

This text practices a philosophical voice that deviates from visuo-centric theory and the muteness of its language and instead sings a complex simultaneity of things and thoughts that burn through the walls of the discipline and illuminate the activities at the margins. This philosophical voice sings a refrain of “I,” which brings us back to bring us forward, surprising us in its renewal again and again. It is a body that is, as Samuel Beckett’s Not I , at once not I and I; an idiosyncratic subjectivity that carries its plural name in its mouth. In this way, it further diffracts the sonic possibility of counterfactual slices into simultaneous dimensionalities open to our gaze in the dark, when we have let go of a normative orientation and are able to see the image at its depth. Between text scores, Churten theory, Canto Cardenche, and the breath of a humpback whale, this voice tries not to theorise. It does not want to produce a philosophical message, supporting a “philosophism” which akin to “scientism” treats philosophy as a phenomenon unconnected to cultural values or location, gender or racial specificity. Instead, it aims to practice a philosophy that opens in song to its own anxiety of objectivity, its fear of a reflective centre, and performs a translucent marginality that generates the view of a plural world burning through a permeable skin.

Topical issue: Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach, edited by Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten

Open Access December 8, 2021

Home and Exile – Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach

Laura Hellsten, Nicole des Bouvrie

Page range: 372-373

Download PDF

Open Access August 30, 2021

Exploring the Craft of Exilic Thinking/Becoming

Nicole des Bouvrie

Page range: 124-135

More Download PDF

Abstract

Being-at-home in a particular, determined, world is dangerous for thinking. For thinking to be thinking/becoming, one should not get too comfortable. For thinking is to not arrive back home, in the same place one begins. But how to escape the world that has created who you are, gave you purpose and a past? How to make sure the future is not a repetition of the Same? How to break away from something that you need? In this article, my aim is not to give one more solution to this fundamental problem that is in essence an ethical problem. For providing a refuge, a new theory, a new methodology, would be providing a new island for those who realise that a flood is endangering their own island. My aim is to exercise the craft of exilic thinking as a way to deal with the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” Exilic thinking as a craft of fragilising the self establishes a matrixial borderspace through which the impossible becomes possible.

Open Access September 23, 2021

Home and Exile in Irène Némirovsky’s Novella Les Mouches d’automne (1931)

Marta-Laura Cenedese

Page range: 211-223

More Download PDF

Abstract

Irène Némirovsky’s novella Les Mouches d ’ automne (1931. Snow in Autumn , 2007) paints an effective portrait of exile, of the longing for the lost home, and the disorientation that one feels when faced with a reality that is neither recognizable nor understandable. In this article, I analyse Némirovsky’s narrative strategies in relation to spatio-temporal phenomena. My analysis is based on the work of philosophers Mikhail Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze: Bakhtin’s chronotope and Deleuze’s crystal-image illuminate how the novella’s dominant themes, exile and nostalgia for the home, are irreducible to the clichés of a linear narration and to the simplistic dichotomy home/exile, past/present, and here/there. Instead, Némirovsky creates a productive tension of overlapping and coalescing space- and time-frames. The philosophical framework provided by Bakhtin and Deleuze is useful to unlock and make visible how this thematic complexity is reflected in the novella’s narrative structure. Indeed, my analysis of Les Mouches ’s chronotopes and crystal images illuminates Némirovsky’s innovative experimentation in the creation of time–space crossings and a/synchronies, and also contributes to extend further our understanding of Némirovsky’s place within the contemporaneous literary panorama.

Open Access October 21, 2021

Towards a Critical Reconstruction of Modern Refugee Subjectivity: Overcoming the Threat–Victim Bipolarity with Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben

Ariadni Polychroniou

Page range: 252-268

More Download PDF

Abstract

The accurate illustration of the contemporary refugee subject has presented an unprecedented theoretical, epistemological and methodological challenge to all fields of academic research. Seeking for alternative philosophical modalities capable of liberating refugee representation from the suffocating threat–victim bipolarity, this article critically investigates Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler’s theoretical perspectives on refugee subjectivity. Section 1 systematises the dominant tropes of refugee representation either as dehumanised threats or depoliticised victims. Section 2 introduces the readers to Giorgio Agamben’s emblematic homo sacer as a potentially fertile reconceptualisation of refugee subjectivity. In this context, Judith Butler’s critique on the Agambenian bare life is presented in two core pillars. Following one Butlerian claim, we trace the Agambenian inadequacy to successfully overcome the contemporary threat–victim mode of refugee representation in the absence of an empowering theoretical account of the homo sacer’s agentic and resisting capacities. In Section 4, we explore Judith Butler’s main argument regarding the constitutively political character of vulnerable refugee existence. By designating the Butlerian constellation of vulnerability and agency as an invigorating alternative perspective on modern refugee representation, we finally argue that Butler’s epistemological framework provides a more agonistic and nuanced theorisation of refugee subjectivity than Agamben.

Open Access October 25, 2021

The Sexual Body as a Meaningful Home: Making Sense of Sexual Concordance

Rita Niineste

Page range: 269-283

More Download PDF

Abstract

The past 20–30 years have provided plenty of new empirical data on women’s sexuality, a topic often theorised as puzzling and unexplainable. In recent discussions, a controversial issue has been the phenomenon of sexual concordance, i.e. the correlation between the self-reported, subjective assessment of one’s sexual arousal and the simultaneous bodily response measured directly on the genitals. In laboratory-based assessments, sexual concordance has been observed to be on average substantially lower in women than in men, although the reasons for the considerable gender difference are still open to debate. Drawing on a phenomenological approach to culture-dependent meaning-formation and on feminist social theory of everyday sexuality, I argue that the reasons behind women’s low sexual concordance can be found neither in their minds nor their bodies but in the way meaning-making processes function in human sexual experiences. Women’s first-person perspectives on their own sexuality have historically played only a marginal role in the creation of socially endorsed sexual meanings, yet these shared meanings have a profound influence on how individuals make sense of their bodily experiences in sexual situations.

Open Access December 13, 2021

Laying One’s Cards on the Table: Experiencing Exile and Finding Our Feet in Moral Philosophical Encounters

Camilla Kronqvist, Natan Elgabsi

Page range: 404-424

More Download PDF

Abstract

Engaging with the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, we submit that there are difficulties associated with providing a good description of morality that are intimately connected with difficulties in understanding other human beings. We suggest three senses in which moral philosophical reflection needs to account for our understanding of others: (1) the failure to understand someone is not merely an intellectual failure, but also engages us morally; (2) the moral question of understanding is not limited to the extent to which we understand a particular person, but also presents itself in how we picture difficulties in understanding people; and (3) “philosophical pictures of morality” fundamentally shape the conceptual framework we use to investigate morality, as well as the analysis of morality we find illuminative and satisfactory. Exploring the implications of these claims, we ask what it means to think of others as the same, or as different, from ourselves. We then consider the ethical significance of finding, or not finding, our feet in our encounters with others, dwelling on how the metaphor of movement reveals one way in which we are never at peace in the exploration of morality.

Topical issue: Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics III, edited by Graham Harman

Open Access December 4, 2021

Editorial for the Topical Issue “Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics III”

Graham Harman

Page range: 347-352

Download PDF

Open Access February 13, 2021

That Raw and Ancient Cold: On Graham Harman’s Recasting of Archaeology

Tim Flohr Sørensen

Page range: 1-19

More Download PDF

Abstract

This is a comment to Graham Harman’s 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman’s historical approach in Immaterialism (2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology studies media with a low density of information. History, Harman holds, ends up in too much detail, while archaeology has the advantage of lending itself to the imagination. Hence, his reading of history had the aim of tempering the historical information overload, in effect making the book a work of archaeology. In this comment, I want to do three things: (1) critique the idea that archaeological and historical media are inherently different with regard to their densities of information, (2) discuss how archaeology and history approach their media, and (3) reflect on conceptualisations of “archaeology” outside the discipline itself.

Open Access March 3, 2021

Superficiality and Representation: Adding Aesthetics to “Knowledge without Truth”

Gonzalo Vaillo

Page range: 36-57

More Download PDF

Abstract

This article has two parts. The first one compares the ontological and epistemological implications of two main philosophical stances on how reality relates to appearance. I call the first group the “plane of superficiality,” where reality and appearance are the same; there is no gap between what a thing is and how it manifests itself. I call the second group “volume of representation,” in which reality is beyond appearances; there is an insurmountable gap between the thing and its phenomena. The second part of the article focuses on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the second group’s contemporary position. Within the OOO epistemological model of “knowledge without truth,” Harman’s schema of the observer’s participation in the object’s knowledge production is questioned. Alternatively, based on the notion proposed here of “flat representativity” in which each appearance is equally valuable to represent different aspects of the object, I argue for the full spectrum of the sensual as the basis for “knowledge without truth.” In particular, the aesthetic method, excluded from Harman’s concerns about knowledge, is suggested as another contribution to the episteme.

Open Access June 17, 2021

Object, Reduction, and Emergence: An Object-Oriented View

Niki Young

Page range: 83-93

More Download PDF

Abstract

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a contemporary form of realism concerned with the investigation of “objects” broadly construed. It may be characterised in terms of a metaphysical pluralism to the extent that it recognises infinitely many different kinds of emergent entities, and this fact in turn leads to a number of questions concerning the nature of objects and emergence in OOO: what is the precise meaning of an emergent entity in OOO? How has emergence been denied throughout the history of Western thought? Is there a specific object-oriented account of emergence? What is the causal mechanism which provides the conditions of possibility for the generation of emergent entities? In this article, I aim to answer all these questions by constructing the first extensive account of real emergence in the context of Object-Oriented Ontology, and I also seek to tie this analysis to the notion of “vicarious” or indirect causation.

Open Access August 4, 2021

Malabou’s Political Critique of Speculative Realism

Graham Harman

Page range: 94-105

More Download PDF

Abstract

A recent political critique of Speculative Realism by Catherine Malabou finds fault with this loosely arranged movement for its focus on reality in its own right, apart from the subject. Malabou responds with a radical ontological claim, holding effectively – if not always explicitly – that subject and object mutually generate one another amidst a primal void. After criticizing this idea, I point to some of the difficult political consequences of such a position, though Malabou defines it positively as an anarchic awakening that generates new collectivities unconstrained by any thing-in-itself. By contrast, I contend that nonhuman constraints and collaborators are an intimate part of the human political sphere. More generally, it is shown that there are consequences for which sorts of relations are taken to be the primary political relations.

Open Access August 25, 2021

Notes Toward an Extimate Materialism: A Reply to Graham Harman

Russell Sbriglia

Page range: 106-123

More Download PDF

Abstract

This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism , against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”

Open Access November 29, 2021

Xenological Subjectivity: Rosi Braidotti and Object-Oriented Ontology

Jordi Vivaldi

Page range: 311-334

More Download PDF

Abstract

The conceptualization of the notion of subjectivity within the Anthropocene finds in Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism one of its most explicit and profuse modulations. This essay argues that Braidotti’s model powerfully accounts for the Anthropocene’s subjectivity by conceiving the “self” as a transversal multiplicity and its relationality to the “others” and the “world” as non-hierarchized by nature–culture distinctions; however, by being ontologically grounded on a neo-Spinozistic monism, Braidotti’s model blurs the notions of finitude, agency, and change, obscuring the possibility of critical dissent while decreasing the overall theory’s consistency. An alternative ontological model capitalizing on these elements can be found in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its notion of withdrawal. By associating OOO’s non-onto-taxonomical pluralism with Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, this essay aims at ontologically discretizing the latter in order to overcome these limitations. Grounded on this association and invoking a narrative imaginary propelled by the Greek terms xenos (guest-friend) and xenia (hospitality), the article paves the way for a form of subjectivity deviating from Braidotti’s ecological model and defined as xenological , arguing that, within the context of the Anthropocene, it constitutes an adequate alternative to Braidotti’s subjectivity.

Regular Articles

Open Access February 26, 2021

Vagueness, Identity, and the Dangers of a General Metaphysics in Archaeology

Artur Ribeiro

Page range: 20-35

More Download PDF

Abstract

Archaeology is currently bound to a series of metaphysical principles, one of which claims that reality is composed of a series of discrete objects. These discrete objects are fundamental metaphysical entities in archaeological science and posthumanist/New Materialist approaches and can be posited, assembled, counted, and consequently included in quantitative models (e.g. Big Data, Bayesian models) or network models (e.g. Actor-Network Theory). The work by Sørensen and Marila shows that archaeological reality is not that discrete, that some objects cannot be easily identified, and that perhaps reality is not always necessarily composed of discrete objects. The aim of this article is to take Sørensen and Marila’s arguments to their ultimate logical consequences: most archaeological theory today operates under the illusion of a general metaphysics . This illusion dictates not only that all of reality is composed of discrete objects, but that since reality manifests in a certain way, there has to be a methodology that accurately represents that reality. A brief discussion on the notion of “conjecture,” as conceived in certain historical theories, is also presented.

Open Access March 5, 2021

Earth and World(s): From Heidegger’s Fourfold to Contemporary Anthropology

Sofya Gevorkyan, Carlos A. Segovia

Page range: 58-82

More Download PDF

Abstract

This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology , that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we examine how the inherently reciprocal dynamics of “earth” and “world,” as thematised by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art , have become opaque. Second, we analyse whether it is possible to find those same dynamics at play behind Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” which we propose to reread in binary key in dialogue with contemporary anthropology, from Bateson and Lévi-Strauss to Wagner and Viveiros de Castro, and in light of Guattari’s notion of “trans-entitarian generativity.” Third, we stress the need to reposition Heidegger’s thought alongside contemporary concerns on “worlding” and we explore its plausible intersections with today’s object-oriented ethnography. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of rereading Heidegger’s Fourfold afresh against the backdrop of Heidegger’s non-foundational thinking, as a conceptual metaphor for the joint dynamics of Abgrund and Grund .

Open Access November 19, 2021

Kant’s Metaphilosophy

Michael Lewin

Page range: 292-310

More Download PDF

Abstract

While the term “metaphilosophy” enjoys increasing popularity in Kant scholarship, it is neither clear what distinguishes a metaphilosophical theory from a philosophical one nor to what extent Kant’s philosophy contains metaphilosophical views. In the first part of the article, I will introduce a demarcation criterion and show how scholars fall prey to the fallacy of extension confusing Kant’s philosophical theories with his theories about philosophy. In the second part, I will analyze eight elements for an “imperfect definition” ( KrV A731/B759) of philosophy outlining the scope of Kant’s explicit metaphilosophy against the backdrop of recent metaphilosophical research: (i) scientific concept of philosophy, (ii) philosophy as an activity, (iii) worldly concept, (iv) philosophy as a (proper and improper) science, (v) philosophy as an architectonic idea (archetype and ectypes), (vi) philosophy as a social practice and the appropriate holding-to-be-true (one or many true philosophies?), (vii) reason as the absolute condition and subject of philosophy, and (viii) methodology of philosophy. I will put these elements together for an attempt to give an imperfect definition of philosophy – something that Kant promised but never did – in the conclusion.

About this journal

Open Philosophy is an international Open Access, peer-reviewed academic journal covering all areas of philosophy. The objective of Open Philosophy is to foster free exchange of ideas and provide an appropriate platform for presenting, discussing and disseminating new concepts, current trends, theoretical developments and research findings related to the broadest philosophical spectrum. The journal does not favour any particular philosophical school, perspective or methodology.

Article Processing Charges

Call for proposals for topical issues

Open calls for papers:

Dialogical Approaches to the Sphere ‘in-between’ Self and Other: The Methodological Meaning of Listening, edited by Claudia Welz and Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen (Aarhus University, Denmark) - deadline for submissions: March 31, 2024.
Theory Materialized—Art-object Theorized, edited by Ido Govrin (University of Tessaly, Greece) - deadline for submissions: January 31, 2024.
Happiness in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, edited by Ype de Boer (Radboud University) - deadline for submissions: January 31, 2024.
Towards a Dialogue Between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Science, edited by Adrian Razvan Sandru (Champalimaud Research, Portugal), Zach Mainen (Champalimaud Research, Portugal) and Federica Maria Gonzalez Luna Ortiz (Tuebingen University, Germany) - deadline for submissions: March 31, 2024.
Lukács and the Critical Legacy of Classical German Philosophy, edited by Rüdiger Dannemann (International Georg-Lukács-Society) and Gregor Schäfer (University of Basel) - new deadline for submissions: March 31, 2024.
The Human Being and Time: From Kant to Existentialism, edited by Addison Ellis (The American University in Cairo) - new deadline for submissions: March 31, 2024.

Published Topical Issues:

2018:

The New Metaphysics: Analytic/Continental Crossovers (ed. Jon Cogburn and Paul Livingston)
Objects Across the Traditions (ed. Tom Sparrow)

2019:

Does Public Art Have to Be Bad Art? (ed. Mark Kingwell)
Computer Modeling in Philosophy (ed. Patrick Grim)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics (ed. Graham Harman)
Experience in a New Key (ed. Dorthe Jørgensen)

2020:

Imagination and Potentiality: The Quest for the Real (ed. Graham Harman and Kristupas Sabolius)
Changing One's Mind: Philosophy, Religion and Science (ed. Yossef Schwartz, Paul Franks and Christian Wiese)
Philosophy of the City (ed. Sanna Lehtinen)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics II (ed. Graham Harman)

2021:

Philosophy and Sonic Research - Thinking with Sounds and Rhythms (ed. Martin Nitsche and Vít Pokorný)
Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (ed. Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics III (ed. Graham Harman)

2022:

Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation (ed. Michael Lewin and Rudolf Meer)
Conceptual Personae in Ontology (ed. Carlos A. Segovia)
Ethics and Politics of TV Series (ed. Sandra Laugier)
Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (part II) (ed. Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten)