Practices and Processes Object Naturalism, Subject Naturalism, Process Naturalism - Ray Brassier

Provenance

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.

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  I'm going to talk about Wilfred Sellers and I'm going to try to explain, well, there's a, in a way, there is a continuity between this, my current work on Sellers, which I hope will result in a book in about a year or so, and the work, the book I published a decade ago. My book opens with an account of Sellers…

• 00:06:39

  It's a radicalized Kantian account. The transcendental question then becomes, what is the nature of the connection between thinking and thought, or sensing and sensed? Or more generally, how are we to understand the connection between representing and represented? The problem of representation arises from…

• 00:12:17

  Now, this argument establishes only that if there are represented, then there must be representings in themselves. Not that there actually are such representings in themselves or that we can know either them or non-representings in themselves. Because there are also non-representings in themselves. Transcendental…

• 00:17:41

  It can. Provided we bear in mind the distinction between pure and schematized categories. The pure or unschematized category of causation. Is the logical relation of ground and consequence. And as such it can be applied to the relation between appearances and things in themselves. So long as we are clear that this…

• 00:22:43

  In other words. It is a general expression. Of the form x or y. And it is a general expression. Of the form x or y. In other words. This is not. A relation between objects. A representing of a green square. Need not comprise. Anything green. Or square. Its structure. Does not mirror. The structure. Of what…

• 00:30:09

  What is this? This is the thesis that, I won't read out the quote here, but it's simply the claim that alethic modal concepts like necessity and possibility express lawful relations between empirical descriptive concepts, such as house, cat, opera, electron. And what they express are the structural framework features…

• 00:34:53

  So, Brandon concludes. Person A and passenger 1 differ in at least one modal property. So, since manifest object and scientific objects fall under different descriptive sortles with different criteria of identity and individuation, identifying them would require what Brandon calls strongly cross sortle identities. But…

• 00:41:42

  Um. Okay, um, that's it. I'll just stop. Thanks.