This paper introduces the concept of univocal enmeshment as a novel ontological framework for understanding design as a metaphysical act of creation. Drawing from medieval theology ‒ particularly Duns Scotus’s doctrine of univocity ‒ and extending through mystical, occult and modern philosophical traditions, we argue that design is not merely a technical or aesthetic practice but a manifestation of Being itself. By tracing the historical entanglement of design with Christian mysticism, occult science and speculative metaphysics, we reveal how artefacts emerge from a shared ontological field that includes both Life and technics. Engaging with key thinkers including Deleuze, Simondon, Heidegger and Thacker, we propose that design operates within a continuum of immanence, where creation is distributed, ambiguous and co-emergent. The resulting model of univocal enmeshment challenges hierarchical and hylomorphic views of design, offering instead a vision of design as a mystical, recursive and more-than-human process of becoming.
Human destiny itself is foremost a religious problem because, paradoxically, it stems from a distinctive sense of disbelief, or more precisely, from a radical disagreement with the randomness of life. The latter bears a resemblance to meaninglessness insufferable for human beings. On the other hand, fate presupposes a profound belief that despite the apparent reign of chaos inevitably spiralling towards nothingness, somewhere deep at the very foundations of things lies a secure harmony and a somewhat benevolent order, which ultimately governs the whole and leads all things to a happy end. Therefore, believing in fate is not so much about adopting a theory or practicing faith as embracing a profound existential stance. As a prelude to a synthesis of the history of human fate, a lexical analysis will be made to explain various approximations of the concept of fate. Subsequently, the various historical forms, or rather disguises that fate has assumed in the history of culture will be explored in a philosophical and theological manner.
In the article I will try to show that considerations on God on the ground of philosophy not only have to start with the image of God handed down by Revelation and Tradition, but they are complementary to the latter ones. In the first part I will refer to the most prominent philosophical conceptions of the absolute being developed by Plato, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. In the second part I will sketch the problem of God shown on the ground of Revelation, considering the question of “The God of the Fathers” and “The God of Christians.” And in the last part I will present the tools which make it possible to reconcile both approaches, indicating the basics of predicating about God as well as the problem of analogy which makes it possible to predicate about the first cause on the basis of its effects.
Scott Ferguson explores the implications of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for contemporary metaphysics and aesthetics. He asserts that only MMT can rescue society from neoliberal austerity by realizing the potential of money as a boundless public resource with an infinite capacity to serve human and environmental needs. In order to explain the resistance to MMT, Ferguson retraces the prevailing understanding of the money form to the political crises of the fourteenth-century republic of Florence. He presents the art of the Florentine renaissance as a response to these crises and the expression of the obsession with haecceity, or ‘thisness’, which has obscured money’s restorative potential for centuries. He also suggests that the sacramental theology of the thirteenth-century Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas offers a potential path out of the intellectual blind alley of haecceity, towards a just, tolerant, and ecologically sustainable future.
Logical positivists claim that the whole of human knowledge can be reduced to analytic and synthetic sentences, and this means that the only possible knowledge is provided by science. Metaphysics is thus meaningless, because its sentences do not comply with the rules set forth by logical analysis of language. What, then, is the philosopher’s job? The members of the Vienna Circle answer that his task is to clarify the concepts used within empirical and formal sciences, while analytic philosophers stress instead the importance of ordinary language’s analysis. But the outcome is in both cases clear: philosophy is linguistic analysis. Howeber, by reducing the whole of reality to empirical reality, logical positivists do metaphysics. We do not have the “elimination” of metaphysics, but just the proposal of an empiricist brand of metaphysics.
Among the tools of philosophical work, the dialogue, as form of live "transaction" between two or more persons, seems to have its beginning and its end with Socrates. Along the subsequent development of our philosophical tradition the dialogue reappears only as literary genre. The essay aims to suggest that the live philosophical dialogue, if offered in new forms as a distributed social practice arranged and supported by the professional skills of philosopher, shows some promise of widening the boundaries of the examined life.
Searching for a theme of the conference, we kept stumbling on the problem of the status of the individual, which seems to have been either lost along the way, or absorbed by more strenuous philosophical inquiries, pertaining to the eternal quest of linking the Universal to the Particular, the singular to plurality. Both Metaphysics and Late Modern Thought reinvented their philosophical or sometimes anti-philosophical bases, seeming to actually hold back on the ineffable actuality of the living individual. Still, Philosophy is always bordering on a real that cannot be represented or positively signified, but is effective as such and philosophers have coined different concepts in order to grasp its negativity, like Kierkegaard’s unique – den Enkelte, Heidegger’s Dasein or maybe even Derrida’s différance, to name only these. But the option of our philosophical discourse was rather for forms, as well as that of Modern science and Epistemology that developed as a bundle of theories about/ of forms. And they are still doing it to some extent, as even nowadays science finds it hard to unleash from the forms that have guided and recreated it.
This essay reflects on the constitution of subjectivity in relation to transcendence specifically through an analysis of responsibility. The openness to re-thinking transcendence in continental philosophy led to a corollary re-thinking of subjectivity as constituted in response to otherness or transcendence, in such a way, however, that emphasized the utter passivity of the subject. This essay attempts to forge a path forward for thinking about the constitution of responsible subjectivity, beyond the ruinous alternative of either the subjugating or subjugated self, to a subject able to respond to transcendence in such a way that does not threaten the inviolability of transcendence. Deliberating with, and beyond, Jean Wahl, Emmanuel Levinas, and Kelly Oliver, this essay argues that the various accounts of responsibility found in Jewish and Christian scriptures can provide an articulation of subjectivity as constituted by its relation to transcendence, in which transcendence is understood as both a movement and an end—a movement undertaken by a self towards that which remains ever other.
Keywords: Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Wahl, Kelly Oliver, transcendence, responsibility, subjectivity, witness, trauma, phenomenology, theology
Nossa reflexão consiste na reavaliação de algumas considerações originais de Vladimir Lossky em Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart (publicação póstuma, Paris, 1960) quanto a uma aproximação entre a teologia apofática e a relação entre Essência e Energias divinas em escritos do Mestre Eckhart (1260-1328) e de Gregório Palamas (1296-1359), rememorando o projeto losskiano (inacabado) de efetuar um estudo das convergências ou semelhanças entre a mística renana e o “palamismo”. Para isso, levamos em conta opiniões defendidas por Nikolai Gavryushin em "‘Istínnoe bogoslovie preobrazhaet metafiziku’: Zametki o Vladimire Losskom" ("‘A verdadeira teologia transforma a metafísica’: Notas sobre Vladimir Lossky", 2004), e analisamos o inacabado projeto de Lossky à luz da revisão das ideias de Gregório Palamas operada por pensadores da “escola russa de neoplatonismo”.
De acordo com Foucault, o amor, para os estoicos, pode ser entendido como uma prática filosófica que faz parte do cotidiano daqueles que se dedicam ao governo de si mesmos. O conhecimento de si mesmo e o conhecimento do mundo são incitados pela articulação entre sociabilidade e recolhimento meditativo. Os conselhos dos amigos orientam as meditações do indivíduo que, ao refletir sobre os diferentes modos de interagir com o contexto social e cultural no qual vive, acessa a verdade relativa à multiplicidade da natureza e simultaneamente a verdade concernente à dimensão de sua própria existência. Sendo assim, recorrendo à discussão das análises de Foucault acerca da relação entre o eu e o outro nas práticas estoicas de constituição de si, almeja-se mostrar a importância do amor (philia) para os antigos processos de subjetivação, de maneira a problematizar e recontextualizar a interpretação crítica proposta por Pierre Hadot, segundo o qual Foucault teria desconsiderado a influência do cosmos sobre os exercícios filosóficos, de modo a transformar a ética antiga em uma estética individualista.
I defend Jack Goody's approach to explaining expansive social and intellectual changes by pointing to the contributions of the technologies of communication, and specifically, of the use of writing (Goody 1987, 2000). I argue that conceptually driven approaches to social or human kinds contribute the clarifications needed to alleviate and respond to his critics’ concerns surrounding the notion of a literate society (Collins 1995, Finnegan 1999, Sawyer 2002, Bloch 2003). My defense of Goody also identifies and endorses a few main criteria and resources for the success of any satisfactory definition of the related notions of a literate society/literate mind.
Following the 1988 publication of Bergsonism by Gilles Deleuze, many contemporary critics such as Leonard Lawlor and Paul Douglass have re-contextualized Bergson within poststructuralism. In so doing, Bergsonian theory enables us to readdress questions associated with concepts of temporality and their relation to language. In considering this re-appropriation, Suzanne Guerlac in Thinking in Time: an introduction to Henri Bergson (2006), asks why Bergson has never been considered in relation to Derrida, given that the two philosophers share fundamental concerns about time and writing. Following Derrida’s critique of Husserl in La Voix et le phénomène (1967), it is perhaps the case that many critics categorize Bergson as a phenomenologist. However, I aim to develop the argument that Guerlac instigates and show that Derrida’s critique of Husserl in fact establishes a close proximity with Bergson’s view that Western metaphysics suppresses time as durée. I will show how both Bergson and Derrida operate with the understanding of a particular rupture in the full presence of the present, an expansion of consciousness as a ‘now’ to include a constant deferral to memory. While this overlap establishes an affinity, I conclude by showing that it simultaneously marks a point of diffraction with regard to how both seek to methodologically embody such a concept of time.