Thinking, Sensing, Being: Epistemology & Ontology in the 21st Century (1 of 4)

The New centre for Research & Practice is a Non-profit higher-education institution providing graduate-level seminars in philosophy, art & curatorial practice, media & technology as well as transdisciplinary studies. Become a Member of The New Centre to access the rest of the sessions & the full archive of our past seminars from 2014 onwards. To learn more about Membership and subscribe, please visit: https://thenewcentre.org/membership/member ////////////////////////////////////// Ever since the critical assault against dogmatic metaphysics initiated by Kant’s transcendental epistemology, philosophy has understood that any discourse attempting to answer the question “what is Real?” must first interrogate how subjective experience mediates the knowledge, disclosure, or constitution of being. In this seminar, we will examine some of the ways in which post-Kantian philosophy has proposed to articulate the complex relationship between sensing, thinking, and being in response to the Kantian predicament, clarifying the methodological role of ontological and epistemological questioning in philosophical investigation. The seminar is divided into two parts. In the first part, we shall critically examine how proponents of the so-called “ontological turn” in 20th Century philosophy proposed different solutions to Kantian epistemology and its construal of experience. We focus on two diametrically opposed historical trajectories. First, we follow the empiricist vector following downstream from the work of Henri Bergson, developed above all in the work of Gilles Deleuze, which reaches its terminus in Nick Land’s machinic practicism. Second, we follow the rationalist vector following the Hegelian, dialectical tradition, most rigorously elaborated in the work of Alain Badiou, and reaching its most radical expression in the work of Quentin Meillassoux.

In the second part, we schematically draw a constructive response to these empiricist and rationalist ontological solutions, by rekindling the Kantian project for a transcendental epistemology, drawing insights from the works of Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, Ray Brassier, Lorenz Puntel, Peter Wolfendale, and Reza Negarestani, among others. More specifically, we examine how the resources of a functionalist and computationalist theory of cognition provide the required methodological tools to understand how mind relates to world according to various functional-experiential modalities, whose structural integrity also provides the basis for a realist theory of knowledge.

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