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Plato

philosopher · 47 mentions across 21 readings

In this course

Plato appears only as a passing reference in the course readings, invoked implicitly in discussions of plasticity as a philosophical concept with deep historical roots tracing back to classical thought. The excerpts focus on distinguishing plasticity from flexibility—a distinction that carries philosophical weight through its lineage—but do not directly engage Platonic texts or arguments about forms, knowledge, or the material world.

Mentioned in 21 readings

Paul M. Churchland

Eliminative Materialism

 9
Such an examination will make little sense, however, unless it is first appreciated that the relevant network of common-sense concepts does indeed constitute an empirical theory, with all the functions, virtues, and perils entailed by that …Let us begin with the explanation of human (and animal) behavior. The fact is that the average person is able to explain, and even predict, the behavior of other persons with a facility and success that is remarkable. Such explanations and …Given that folk psychology is an empirical theory, it is at least an abstract possibility that its principles are radically false and that its ontology is an illusion. With the exception of eliminative materialism, however, none of the majo…

+6 more

Reza Negarestani

from Intelligence and Spirit

 7
However, the actualization of these unities or integrations is neither given nor certain. Self-consciousness, once attained, may be lost; or it may never be fully realized. All unities of mind—which constitute mind as such—are fragile. It i…This recognitive system, which is built on an interactive semantic space, simply is the order of self-consciousness. Personhood is the product of the impersonality of reason, and consciousness of the individuated self is an artefact of an i…of nature that accommodates a full-blown transcendental philosophy, the formal distinction between thinking and being, and the absolute formal autonomy of reason: that which facilitates the process of unifying consciousness in knowledge of …

+4 more

Karen Barad

Agential Realism from Meeting the universe halfway_ quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning -Duke University Press (2007)

 5
In this chapter, I propose a posthumanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism.⁴ The move toward performative alter…bodies and subjects is in fact untenable, and I propose instead a posthumanist understanding of the “human.” Crucially, I will argue that the nature of the production of bodily boundaries is not merely experiential, or merely epistemologica…Crucially, agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of subjects or objects (as they do not preexist as such). It is not an attribute whatsoe…

+2 more

Manuel DeLanda

Introduction to Philosophy and Simulation_ The Emergence of Synthetic Reason-Continuum

 4
INTRODUCTION Emergence in History The origin of the modern concept of emergence can be traced to the middle of the nineteenth century when realist philosophers first began pondering the deep dissimilarities between causality in the fields …to particular ones without adding anything new it seemed like an ideal way of modeling the explanation of situations like those involving rigid collisions. But the synthesis of water does produce something new, not new in the absolute sense…Since neither tendencies nor capacities must be actual to be real it would be tempting to give them the status of possibilities. But the concept of a possible event is philosophically suspect because it is almost indistinguishable from that…

+1 more

Nick Bostrom

ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

 4
The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we formulate an assumption that we need to import from the philosophy of mind in order to get the argument started. Second, we consider some empirical reasons for thinking that running vastly…The same reasoning holds if S is not the property of having a certain genetic sequence but instead the property of being in a simulation, assuming only that we have no information that enables us to predict any differences between the exper…If betting odds provide some guidance to rational belief, it may also be worth to ponder that if everybody were to place a bet on whether they are in a simulation or not, then if people use the bland principle of indifference, and consequen…

+1 more

Catherine Malabou

Introduction from What should we do with our brain

 2
Humans make their own brains, and they do not know that they do so. Our brain is a work, and we do not know it. Our brain is plastic, and we do not know it. The reason for this is that most of the time flexibility superimposes itself on pla…Flexibility is a vague notion, without tradition, without history, while plasticity is a concept, which is to say: a form of quite precise meanings that bring together and structure particular cases. This concept has a long philosophical pa…

Vincent Le

Spirit in the Crypt: Negarestani vs Land

 2
Returning to the book’s main theory of mind, Negarestani argues that it is in knowing how one thinks by giving and asking for reasons in interactions with others that we are able to expand our intelligible field of experience and knowledge …praxis. Negarestani’s model here is Plato’s divided line of the Good in The Republic. Like intelligence, the divided line ascends from opinions and conjectures based on shady sense impressions, to true opinions about empirical objects, to t…

Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 5Michel Foucault 2Robert Brandom 2Aristotle 2Reza Negarestani 2Colin Campbell 1Jacob Brucker 1Jacob Thomasius 1Martin Luther 1Wouter Hanegraaff 1John Nash 1Siméon Denis Poisson 1Anindya Ghose 1Bert-Jaap Koops 1Brian Massumi 1Felix Guattari 1Finn Brunton 1Gilles Deleuze 1Helen Nissenbaum 1Hubert Dreyfus 1Jorge García-Robles 1Julie Cohen 1Marty Gordon 1Maša Galič 1Paul Rabinow 1Tal Timan 1Vincent Descombes 1Weiguo Fan 1William Davies 1William S. Burroughs 1

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