4 Symposium Speculations on Anonymous Materials - Iain Hamilton Grant

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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• 00:00:07

  Good afternoon. Hello for this afternoon session, which will be starting with Ian Hamilton Grant, who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of the West of England in Bristol. He translated several seminal works from French postmodern philosophy that also influenced his own work. I just mentioned Jean…

• 00:08:41

  This creates a universe shaped in the following manner. All universes, shaped in accordance with this hypothesis, would have these properties. First, they would derive from their inexistence. Second, they would be responsive to sense, intellect, and palpability for the reasons stipulated. But third, they would…

• 00:18:37

  It's setup on the course to become, as it were, utterly a problem for ontology. Why is ontology important. I just want to pause and say something about why ontology is important. Ontology concerns all that is. investigates. Philosophers always acknowledge that ontology cannot investigate this or that thing. This…

• 00:26:58

  Every time there is synthesis, there is a construction of the cosmos. But like ontology, that construction is a local feature of the cosmos. In other words, there is no construction of the cosmos that is not, A, additional to that cosmos, and B, therefore, a local ingredient within it. So, should we wish to understand…

• 00:34:03

  Fundamentally not. It cannot. What the unity principle does belong to is particularity which is irreducible. That is to say, the law of non-contradiction is itself a non-equivalence principle which holds that nothing is anything else, or everything is exactly as it is. Thank you. Yeah. I think you got an idea what…

• 00:39:59

  But it's not my responsibility. I also find that coexistence, the fact that you exist and me exist at the same time creates this problem. This is not a philosophical problem. It's a technical problem. They explain to me that if two microphones are at the same time active, it's a discovery recently made. Well…

• 00:47:15

  So, what I wanted to ask you, to put it, like, on that in a few words, both, like, what that means for epistemology, like, for what kind of theory of science does that imply? And, of course, like, what this could mean for art, you know? Sure. Without, like, getting into, like, concrete art examples, but, like, what…

• 00:54:12

  Thanks a lot Ian. Every time I start doubting about whether we still need philosophy in the 21st century I think of inviting Ian. Thanks for having been here and the great talk. We'll immediately yeah so we