By Hilan Bensusan Citizenships and nationalities are (ontologically) tricky items. They could be seen as properties (as abstract universals) that can be acquired and removed and the complex processes of acquiring and removing a citizenship involve in most cases some negotiations between the holder and a state. They can also... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan I'm working on a Manifesto for polystylism in philosophy. Discussed it a bit at the ABC+ conference (Analytic Bridge Continental +) last week in Liverpool. This is the current version, suggestions much welcome as this is meant to be an embryo of a movement of sorts... When... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan Derrida, in his 1996 seminar on hostility and hospitality diagnoses that hospitality, of the type that is not only a legal or law-abiding procedure, entails an antinomy. The issue is, and it is similar to other impossible decisions studied by Derrida like forgiving, that in order for... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan My book Being Up For Grabs is out. It is an attempt to offer a metaphysics of contingency and think about what is out of the rich of a necessity of any kind, or rather of a single necessity of any kind. I propose three complementary approaches.... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan What makes me angriest and saddest about this coup in Brazil is not the outrageous hypocritical acts of those who took power and pretend everything is fine, neither is it that incredibly corporate-oriented and ungenerous policies are being implemented in order to destroy the social inclusion measures... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan I was talking with my student working on Deleuze's empiricism (and moving fast towards believing that Whitehead via Jean Wahl had a huge influence on Deleuze from the beginning) about the remarkable presence of Artaud, and of the idea of a body without organs, in Deleuze. Then... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan Leibniz inaugurated a way of thinking that makes potentialities somehow irrelevant. At least potentialities in this world - they are all removed to other possible worlds. There is no modal realism - at least in the sense privileged by Mumford who wants to associate the term with... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan I've been thinking about Gallen Strawson's points about physicalism and panpsychism. His 2006 piece, "Why physicalism entails panpsychism" brings in Eddington (and also Russell and to some extent Carnap and Feigl) to his side of the argument. In a footnote (21), he finds in Smart's work the... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan In Of Grammatology Derrida remarks about the style of deconstruction: "[...] one can only judge its style in terms of received oppositions. One will say that this style is empiricist and, in a certain way, one would be right. The exit is radically empiricist."(162; Spivak's translation, Baltimore:... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan Convos are central to our orientation around things through people. Yet speech is often understood in terms of (propositional) content aside from its dialogical context. It is as if what is ultimately said can be abstracted away from its coordination within a conversation. Predication - often taken... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan In lecture 8 of Modes of Thought, called "Nature alive", Whitehead claims that the basic tenets of reality are organisms which are geared towards self-enjoyment, creative and purposeful. He then asks what is the evidence we have in favor of this idea. He finds the evidence in... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan Sorry, Edward, if what I wrote sounded mysterious. I apologize. In fact, I don't know how to write (philosophy) blog posts in the sense that I never know how to pitch whatever I feel the urge to say. I like the idea of "philosophy that is not... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan I'm haunted by the problem Shaviro formulates inspiringly in his first piece in The Universe of Things - that of how to think Whitehead and Levinas in the same breath or, rather, how to attend to an attraction to both of these writers - deserve much pause.... Continue reading

Today I wrote a post about Derrida, the ontological turn and animism and I was curious about the Percolations community reaction to my use of Derrida's "The Beast and the Sovereign" to get insights about arché and the ontology of command. As I wrote there, deconstruction moves in many different... Continue reading

In my work with Alexandre and Rodrigo in universal logic and galaxy theory (following up to a paper we published earlier this year) we found ourselves in a quite interesting moment. We have been developing ways to deal with the plurality of logic and we defined a galaxy as a... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan Been preparing my class about the notion of importance in Whitehead. The beautiful opening pages of Modes of Thought invoke a contrast and an interdependence between importance and matters of fact (between facts of the matter and facts about what matters, as I put in my recent... Continue reading

By Hilan Bensusan First I introduce myself, Hilan, as this is my first post around here. I was invited to be part of this percs bunch blog about a month ago, and I'm very grateful for this. I've been lecturing epistemology for the first time in two years and I'm... Continue reading