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mstyslavity
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the-last-last-hope

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[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Now, in so far as our rememberings always start from what has more context (i.e., is more recent) and the fading increases as the time increases, the P-series gives us a sense qua justified belief that the series of memory-images being so remembered extends from present t...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Let us now reformulate Boltzmann’s challenge with regard to the question of time in a traditional philosophical frame: It would be that the genuine problem is not really about the enigmas of the Heraclitean flux —the quan daries of becoming, recurrence, or the puzzles of ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In this respect, Hegel’s conception of time qualifies not only as a robust metaphysics of time but also as a fundamental element of metaphysics as such, since it rescues the thought of the infinite from fixed contradictions, and from pernicious attempts at resolving these...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: For without becoming, we are living in a wholly deterministic world of mere being. for human action: If there is no coming-into-being, the future is already determined, and therefore the idea that agents can change their world seems to be absurd for there is no real freed...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: To summarize, the pragmatist view of time-conscious agency should Liberation from a model of time restricted to a particular contingent constitution does not rob the subject of its cognitive and practical abilities, but releases it from the shackles of its most entrenched...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Like material inferences that open up a non-monotonic space of entailments, these protocol-like transitions also have their non-monotonic entailments: If Ain circumstance Cj then B, if A in Ct then D, or if B then A in C; and not Ct, etc. not just because their contexts a...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Anything and anyone who fulfils this formal condition is not only a person but also the bearer of thoughts. for us to posit such a connection between the I that ate the hot dog and the differ ent instances of I attached to the gustatory acts of eating ingredients, we cann...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: So far we have discussed what the world of Kanzi could be like had Kanzi reached the status of a child; but it hasn’t yet attained this goal. We shall follow Rosenberg’s path in order to turn this into reality, while at the same time making necessary modifications in tand...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: And it is precisely in virtue of this yearning or willto-autonomy — which can be fleshed out both in naturalistic and normative terms — that seeing a prelinguistic child as a mere sentience who is yet to be culturally condi tioned is fundamentally ill-judged. The distinct...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: But this abstract self-certainty is the germ of an indispensable process whereby the ego begins to repulse or negate itself in favour of that which is outside of it, individuating itself ‘outside in’. In its most elementary form the will of the child arises from its sense...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This is, however, a thorny issue, particularly when it comes to vertical modular structures, since, owing to accumulative constraints, biases tend to be transferred from lower to higher levels and become fully entrenched. Therefore, from the standpoint of computational-co...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: abilities does not mean that semantic abilities are devoid of syntax or that syntactic abilities lack semantics. It simply means that the emphasis of semantic abilities is on semantic relations rather than on syntactic resources or formal relations, and conversely the foc...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This, of course, does not mean that we cannot think of the training regimen for K in terms of mechanizable algorithms. It simply means that the kind of pedagogical algorithms we should conceive for K must involve the interaction of the trainee and the trainers as agents w...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In our thought experiment, the construction of AGI must therefore be a part of the realization of language. Rather than taking language as an extrinsic feature of this construction that can be introduced at a later stage, the realization of language will be treated as an ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The state of the representational system or the wir ing diagram of the automata is now a second-order isomorphism — i.e., an equivalence (but not equality) relation — that registers as E-* — E*, a statistical inductive association with its corresponding transitions and ob...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Independently of Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin, Solomonoff showed that there exists an optimal prior probability distribution on any potentially infinite string such that one can compute the next best possible or formally simplest extrapolation using this universa...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Recall that the automata are provided with organs or electromagnetic devices capable of constricting the continuous sound (noise) and discon tinuing it in a specific manner. In this way, the sound is discontinued either abruptly or gradually (i.e., within a temporal windo...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: What makes the discretization of sound a consequential structural change in our multi-agent system is that it enables the evolution of speech and cognition for the automata. It simultaneously fulfils the necessary condi tion for the emergence of speech and transforms the ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Having access to different classes of formal grammar, K, S, and M can syn tactically structure their picturing reports concerning the pattern-governed regularities of their world. For example, if we were to reproduce their report concerning the presence of a mass of fuzzy...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Any string that projects such properties or structures would be recognized by the automata as a syntactic utterance in the language that produces such properties and structures with the caveat that the automata would have the ability to recognize orparse the expressions o...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: To this extent, the capacity to know, believe, or mean something rests upon certain practical know-how (i.e., pragmatism), the practical mastery of inferential roles. In the inferentialist semanticsnormative pragmatics framework, semantics can be said to concern the meani...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: According to the classical Church-Turing computability thesis, computation can be modelled on a mathematical function. The machine receives input; it undergoes a sequence of state transitions (moves or legal runs) and yields an output. During the computation, the machine ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: F o r e x a m p l e , d e p e n d i n g o n w h e t h e r t h e c o n f r o n t a t i o n o f a c t i o n s b e t w e e n s y s t e m a n d e n v i r o n m e n t i s s y n c h r o n o u s o r a s y n c h r o n o u s , w h e t h e r t h e g a m e c a n b r a n c h t o s u ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: => AgD{m) = A W i t h i n t h i s g a m e , w e c a n t h e n h a v e s u b g a m e s o f t h e g e n e r a l f o r m. QUESTION: What is the significance of the sub-games within the general form of the game mentioned in the passage?" }, { "role": "assistant", ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: a n d B a n d t h e i r c o m p o s i t i o n s d e n o t e d b y t h e t e n s o r p r o d u c t (g> w h i c h a r e c o n s t r u c t i o n s o v e r G. S u b g a m e s c a n b e t h o u g h t o f a s t h r e a d s a n d s u b t h r e a d s h a v e b a s i c c o m p o s...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: w h i c h , f o l l o w i n g A n d r e a s B l a s s ’s s e m a n t i c s of i n t e r a c t i o n f o r t h e l i n e a r l o g i c o p e r a t o r <2), c a n b e i n t e r p r e t e d a s s a y i n g t h a t t h e p l a y c a n c o n t i n u e i n both A a n d. QUESTIO...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: a l t e r n a t e l y : 258 Ma®b = Ma + Mb = Aa + Ab P a ® b =Ise M ag } \\~ a ® b = ^ a + \\ ~ b t h e o p e n i n g m o v e ( p l a y e d b y. QUESTION: What is the relationship between the open move played by the player with the open hand and the mathematical expressio...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: i s a l w a y s a r e q u e s t f o r d a t a o r a q u e r y c o n s t r a i n t c a n b e f o r m a l i z e d a s f o l l o w s : a n d Ak{ g ,B ( s ?-+ 1 ) = 1 . T h e c o n t i n u a t i o n o f t h e g a m e a t t h e l e v e l o f s u b g a m e s i s d e n o t e d a...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Refounding logic on generalized interaction — the deepest computational phenomenon — allows us to understand precisely what form of logico-com putational interactions the automata must exhibit in order for them to cross the bridge between syntax and semantics. In other wo...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: cut hA Ah cut hi 3 h (Notice thatd on the left and the right side of the consequence relation or turnstile can be seen as a duality: proofs of A versus proofs ofA1, where the linear negation 1 signifies the switching of roles or, in this case, swapping the place of A with...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: To provide even a rudimentary account of such frameworks for bridging syntax and semantics would entail an introduction to recent developments in logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science — itself a gargantuan task that would surely distract us from the main th...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Earlier in this chapter, the problem of the syntax-semantics interface was addressed. The solution to this problem was put forward in terms of dia logical interaction as a logico-computational condition for the possibility of meaning. But in order for our automata to have...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: From this perspective, focalizatio creates a proof tree in which rules or logical connectives are captured b alternating sequences of positive and negative actions which switch lo for subloci and vice versa across the consequence relation (b): b£ £o hf.o.i, .....The meani...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Again in an imaginary dialogue between Kanzi and Sue, this can be interpreted as the first move made by Kanzi — for example, an utterance regarding the presence of a fuzzy item (the focus £.). If Sue acknowledges Kanzi’s utterance as a speech act, it may reply with an utt...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Yet the qualifier ‘formal’ should not be construed as a reinscription of form versus content or, more precisely, the dichotomy of syntactic form and semantic content. Both form and content belong to language as a formal dimension. Moreover, the interactionist view of logi...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: What Kant means by logic as an organon is a formal tool for the pro duction of objective insights or an instruction for bringing about a certain cognition that can be said to be objective. This conception of logic is then characterized as the science of speculative unders...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: However, in contrast to the traditional view of formalism, this disengage ment from content does not make formal languages or formalisms mean ingless, i.e., pure abstractions with arbitrary applications. As Kramer and Dutilh Novaes have elaborated, the decoupling of forma...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This involution is the power of determinate or critical negation as distilled in the activities of conceptual construction and the conceptual revision, formation, and reappraisal of beliefs. It is this nisus (mental effort, striving or cognitive tendency) toward being eve...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: One opens up the space of possibilities beyond the given totalities or absolutized norms of the past and present, and the other works toward the concrete actualization of such possibilities, moving from the Concept to its full actualization or the Idea. It is in the conte...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This means that, rather than starting the inquiry into the nature of philosophy by asking ‘What is philosophy trying to say, what does it really mean, what is its applica tion, does it have any relevance?’, we should ask ‘What sort of program is philosophy, how does it fu...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In this sense, programs elaborate realizabilities (what can possibly be realized or brought about) from a set of elemen tary abstract realizers (what has operational information concerning the realization or the bringing-about of a specific category of properties and beha...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: 266 For Cohen’s and Natorp’s reflections on the critical method of origin, see Cohen, In Ways ofWorldmaking , Nelson Goodman proposes five thinly veiled theses:considered to be one world can be made up of many contrasting, even incommensurable aspects, and what are taken ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Let us look at a crude example: i. p i san E In a Platonic style, this cryptic expression says: ‘The form ( Eidos ) that Parmenides partially exhibits defines who Parmenides is (p)’, or ‘the form of Parmenides, as a complex of cognitions, qualifies who he is’, or, in a mo...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Philosophy is aprogram whoseprimary data are thosepertaining to thepossibility ofthinking as such. Its task is to elaborate the realizabilities behind this possibility in terms of what can be done with thought or, more broadly, what thought can realize out ofitself. I f t...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The concept of the artificial signifies the idea of craft as a recipe for making something whose purposes are neither entailed by nor given in its material ingredients, even though they are afforded by the properties of those ingredients. These purposes should be understo...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: More explicitly put, the branching and canalization of the analysis — the specialization of knowledge that truly contributes to its complexity — is necessary for a fine-grained determina tion of distinctions and correlations between the logical-conceptual and causal-mater...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: And at the level of actions, the recipe involves purposive actions and practical intelligibilities that are not only good instrumentalities (hypothetical practical intelligibilities concerning bringing about a certain outcome in a given circumstance) but also goods-in-the...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: For an introduction to ontologies and DOLCE, see The question of semantic access to different hierarchies of information is the question of understanding the logics of worlds as the primary step for the design and execution of robust and consequential action. But under st...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Just as the inception ofphilosophy coincides with the speculativefutures ofgeneral intelligence, so its ultimate task corresponds with the ultimateform ofintelligence. By prompting thought to grapple with itself from below, philosophy drives thought to confront itself fro...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Therefore, for this kind of intelligence, politics or its equivalent must not only supply the necessary conditions, means, and actions for the objective realization of a good life; it must also internalize the aforementioned inquiry into what the subject of a good life — ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Through what is arguably the most enigmatic yet innocuous diagram ever plotted, the analogy of the divided line, Plato presents a curious picture of the Good in which intelligence, the pursuit of the Good, and risk are necessarily intertwined. In grasping the intelligibil...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: It is the transcendental excess of the Good that deepens the abyss of the intelligible through which intel ligence conceives and reshapes itself. Accordingly, transcendental excess (the Good) is what points to the excess of reality. It is because of this transcendental ex...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: If the better is fraught with risks — both mitigable and immitigable — then why should we pursue it, why should intelligence strive for the good? This is one objection regularly levelled against any talk of the good and the concrete realization of the better. The other ob...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: While the history of intelligence beginsfrom death as a condition of enablement, it extends by way of a viewfrom nowhere and nowhen through which completed totalities are removed and replaced by that which ispossibleyet distant, and that which seems impossibleyet is attai...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In the Hobbesian jungle, all groups not only gnaw at one another, but will also end up eating their own kin alive. In accomplishing this task, however, we can dismiss neither the concrete Thus fragmented experiential consciousness becomes an engine of col lective producti...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The supposed distinction between us and them is revealed to be a mere symptom of what was, all along, the condition of exploitation. To concretely demonstrate the death of God, we must become gods. But gods as objects of philosophy vastly differ from gods as objects of re...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Deduction can be defined as a form of reasoning that links premises to conclusions so that, if the premises are true, following step-by-step logical rules, then the conclusion reached is also necessarily true. Deductive infer ences are what Hume identifies as demonstrativ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In other words, that we should give up on the idea of modelling the mind or general intelligence on induction as the degree of confirmation, and instead model it on the recursion-theoretical account of induction. As we shall see, not only is this solution plagued with the...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Goodman observes that Hume’s version of the problem of induction is, at its core, not about the justification of induction but rather about how evidence can inductively confirm or deductively corroborate law-like gen eralizations. Before moving forward, let us first formu...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: If we take H as the set of hypotheses of some interest or the set of all possible data streams which may arise, there is an actual data stream s e H which can be extrapolated as the predictor inspects increasingly larger initial segments of s and outputs increasing sequen...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This allows us to define monotone descriptional complexity of a data object in terms of U with almost the shortest description and without reference to the hidden information in the length of either p or a. distribution over this task can be accomplished by resorting to O...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: A half-decade later, this explicit call for realism was reinforced by what is so far the best-organized movement of the next generation. Inspired by the publication of Quentin Meillassoux’s Après la finitude ( After Finitude ) in early 2006, the first Speculative Realism ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: But while Žižek has signalled a ‘transcendental materialist’ turn within recent continental thinking, it is perhaps Badiou who has raised the anti-phenomenological flag most explicitly, attempting thereby to clarify the ontological stakes of contemporary continental philo...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Speculative Realism Revisited In ‘Mining Conditions’, his response to Harman’s critique, Iain Hamilton Grant argues that the genesis of objects necessarily occurs somewhere outside them, in a realm of productivity irreducible to fully constituted objects. By returning to ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In this endeavour, Žižek uses the distinction drawn by Meillassoux between ‘potentiality’ and ‘virtuality’ (see Meillassoux’s essay, next in order in this volume), in order to show how dialectical progression is ‘the becoming of necessity itself ’. The result is a system ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Given the relatively recent emergence of continental materialism and realism, the future of these trends is still unclear, and debates in a number of areas remain less than fully formed. Without presuming to provide an exhaustive account of these debates, we can note at l...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: An object (or ‘actor’, as Latour calls it) is not an au-tonomous substance, but a ‘score list’ of victories and defeats in struggles with various other objects. Here, the object is held to be nothing more than its effects on other things.terminate objects as playing any r...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: This is because life provides an effective alibi against philosophy’s tendency to “antiphysics”, while centralizing ethico-political or existential problematics as philosophy’s true domain’. And ‘despite the naturephilosophy disputing this onesidedness, the metaphysical d...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Today Bruno is more a hero to natural scientists than to philosophers, due to his bold defence of the Copernican system, an infinite universe, and possible extraterrestrial life. But his philosophical spirit is alive and well, if not always acknowledged by name, and I was...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: es, then it is unclear why it should be laced in advance with pre-articulate seeds capable of generating specific trees and horses later on. In this way we run the risk of extreme monism, of a single rumbling apeiron without parts. More than this, individual entities are ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In the end, Bruno is simply not anti-Aristotelian enough, because he maintains that there must be a ground to mine in the first place. Now I do not dispute that ground is so mineable, nor indeed do I dispute the actuality of grounds. What I dispute is their metaphysical s...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Thus the earth is not an object containing its ground within itself, like the preformationists’ animal series; but rather a series or process of grounding with respect to its consequents. If geology, or the ‘mining process’, opens onto an ungroundedness at the core of any...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The other way to resolve the Bruno problem is not to make the denial of anteriority symmetrical, which simply displaces the issue along an infinite chain, or brings it to an arbitrary halt, but to replace it with the assertion of anteriority as such. In this way, however,...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Accordingly, correlationism sanctions all those variants of pragmatic instrumentalism which endorse the primacy of practical ‘know-how’ over theoretical ‘knowing-that’. Sapience becomes just another kind of sentience — and by no means a privileged kind either.object disti...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: To do that, one would have to show that ‘to be’ means ‘to be referred to’; an equation tantamount to Berkeley’s equation of ‘to be’ with ‘to be perceived’; yet it would require more than another Gem to dissolve such a fundamentally normative distinction in meaning. Of cou...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The dualism of atoms and force that lay at the core of Newtonian mechanistic materialism, and which is evident in the ‘grounded’ powers theorists in the philosophy of nature noted above, attests to an unresolved problem as regards the metaphysics of matter, namely, the co...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: And the ‘ground’ therefore of this explanation can be afforded only by ‘free activity’ or ‘ selfactivity ’. I ≠ I ; therefore, the I is not generated from a not-I. Ultimately, it is the difference of being from activity (a distinction Hülsen denies it is possible to make)...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Hindrichs’ starting point for the thinking of ground is a reassessment of Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument as a positive account of the nature of the absolute. ‘The concept of the absolute receives its true determination in Kant’s critique of the ontological ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Intellect and thing are thus exactly counter-posited [ entgegengesetzt ]: they inhabit two worlds between which there is no bridge. 53 It is precisely this relation that Leibniz considers the ‘great principle’ to furnish. Section 7 of Principles of Nature and Grace (1714)...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In this regard my guiding question will open onto some subsidiary ones, two of them being of particular significance: ‘Is non-metaphysical speculation possible?’ and ‘What is the difference between realism and materialism (and indeed between these two and naturalism)?’ In...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Without dwelling on the under-determined and exceedingly allusive references to contemporary fanaticism that lend Meillassoux’s claims their charge of urgency, as well as on the rather dubious claims made about the relation between Christianity and Western reason, in the ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Crucial to Marxism and Hegel is the highlighting of Marx’s theory of real abstraction, to wit the idea that the excesses of speculation and the hypostases of idealism are not merely cognitive problems, but are deeply entangled with abstract categories and entities that ha...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: In fidelity to the materialist tradition inaugurated with Marx’s 1845 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, this intervention insists upon keeping simultaneously in view the different praxes of the really existing natural sciences and those of the surrounding political circumstances of ...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Why is this so? And, what are the consequences for Meillassouxian materialism? But, what about an instance in which one experiences oneself as witnessing firsthand the occurrence of a miracle as an event that violates the laws of nature? Drawing on his recasting of causal...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: He asserts that Cantor’s infinitization of infinity itself — in the nineteenth century, the infinite goes from having been conceived of as the single grand totality of a unique One-All to being shattered into an infinite variety of incommensurable, non-totalizable infinit...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The former, in, for example, ‘Deuil à venir, dieu à venir’, contrasts his ‘contingent’ and ‘unmasterable’ God-to-come with the traditional God of pre-Kantian rationalist metaphysics (i.e., a necessary and rational supreme being eternally existent). For Meillassoux, hyper-...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Both books criticize the prevalent ‘turn to religion’, in the course of reactivating fundamental questions of contingency and necessity, time and space, life and death. Returning to these questions here, I will not only seek to critically assess Meillassoux’s work and pre...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The structure of the trace — as the co-implication of time and space — is therefore the condition for everything that is temporal. Everything that is subjected to succession is subjected to the trace, whether it is alive or not. By the same token, one can make explicit th...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Life is a possibility of materiality, not as a potential that it is ‘normal’ for materiality to bring forth, but as a vastly improbable possibility, by far the exception rather than the rule’. The distinction between matter and life that I propose, however, is not meant t...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: On the one hand, mourning is an act of fidelity, since it stems from the attachment to a mortal other and from the desire to hold on to this mortal other. On the other hand, mourning is an act of infidelity, since one can only mourn if one has decided to live on without t...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Hume himself, however, (along with both Kant and the main thrust of the analytical tradition) retreats from the full implications of his demonstration. Rather than ditch the concept of causal necessity altogether, he affirms it as simply beyond demonstration, and thus inv...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Kant is the founding figure of correlationist philosophy, of course, but the label applies equally well, according to Meillassoux, to most strands of post-Kantian philosophy, from Fichte and Hegel to Heidegger or Adorno. All these philosophies posit some sort of fundament...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: It may be, however, that an argument regarding the existence or inexistence of God is secondary in relation to arguments for or against belief in this quintessentially ‘divine’ power — a super-natural power to interrupt the laws of nature and abruptly re-orient the patter...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Regardless of whether or not we agree with this contention, it has strictly nothing to do with Meillassoux’s book, since it is an assertion about the operation of evolution as we know it, whereas Meillassoux’s arguments concern the possibility that precisely such processe...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: The specific is the relational mediation of determination and indetermination, the medium of both contextual coherence and of universal principle. It is contextually coherent insofar as it ‘implies a situation, a past, an intelligibility constrained by inherited condition...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: If Hallward’s account of the specific can in fact be deconstructed, it is because the unconditional status of relationality upon which it relies (‘there is nothing more primitive of which it is made up’; it is ‘the unchanging medium and transcendental condition of our exi...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Before turning to Althusser, I should say that there will be no space here to offer a critical assessment of his work — to either defend or take issue with it on particular points. My goal is descriptive: to articulate the sense in which Meillassoux’s project is consisten...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Even if science must remain indifferent to philosophical legislation concerning the invariance of physical law, any effort to guard such questions against rational inquiry remains deleterious insofar as such abdications of reason only serve to ‘resuscitate religiosity’. S...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Decision is the constitutive self-positing and self-giving gesture of philosophy, and one which invariably (and problematically) makes philosophy circular and reciprocally constitutive of the Real. In its simplest form, Decision consists of three elements: (1) a presuppos...
[ { "role": "user", "content": "TEXT: Considering the significance of this notion of determination-in-the-last-instance, it is important to provide some clarification about its nature. The most recent use of this concept comes from Louis Althusser who used it to explain how the Marxist base and superstructure...