“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, April 23, 2012

"Perspectivalism" Is the Metaphysics of Presence

One more thing about Shane's questions: his phrase "non-foundational perspectival" as in


...[D]oesn't it make sense to say that the debates over processes vs objects are in a sense undecidable, or that these determinations depend upon some sort of non-foundational perspectival selections, which need not be mutually exclusive?


Again, it's the process philosopher who sees this as undecidable, precisely because of a metaphysical assumption of what processes are, which we can detect in the use of "vs" in "processes vs objects." For me, it's not undecidable at all, because objects are not beings that are metaphysically present.

But more urgently, a perspectival determination, as far as I can tell, is another kind of foundationalism. It's saying that perspective is more real than what is perceived or perspectivized or whatever.

Thus the phrase "non-foundational perspectival" is akin to "square circle." Or saying "Overmining is the governing view of relationism."

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