Erobots and the deterritorialization of eroticism

As a result of its accelerated evolution in the early 21st Century, technology has already extended far beyond mere instrumental status. In the not too distant future we can expect technology to move towards a new dimension in terms of fusing with human nature; most notably in the field of intimacy towards what are known as erobots (i.e., sexbots, augmented erotic characters, erotic chatbots, erotic avatars, etc.). Given that these erobots have every chance to become part of a future eroticism, this places erobots beyond the onto-metaphysical grounding of the Western tradition regarding objects. This is an aspect that attracts the dissolution of the anthropocentric legacy of Western metaphysics, within the parameters of OOO, by showing that, in this paradigm, so-called human uniqueness is suffering an ontological twist. To show this I am investigating, the scenario that involves the relationship between a sexbot and a human, alongside of that between two sexbots, within the limits of OOO. Consequently, I am addressing the issue of how a sexbot relates to both a human agent and to another sexbot. I am also analyzing the perspective in which a future presence of erobots in the intimate life of the individual will twist the traditional image of eroticism in Western culture. This perspective is opening a deconstructing process with regard to human exceptionalism – analyzed within the limits of the ‘deterritorialization’ of eroticism – from the traditional structures of Western metaphysical heritage. Such deterritorialization emphasizes the paradigm shift in which eroticism is leaving the familiar terrain of the metaphysics of presence and the fixed structures of societies’ ‘strata’. Thus, following the philosophical thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the ‘reterritorialization’ of eroticism – in the fluid, transversal and rhizomatic network of technology – is an ongoing, ever-changing process, taking place in the immanent sphere of techno-eroticism’s ‘plane of consistency’.

In defence of constitutive rules

Although the notion of constitutive rule has played an important role in the metaphysical debate in social and legal philosophy, several authors perceive it as somewhat mysterious and ambiguous: the idea of a specific kind of rules that are supposed to be “magically” constitutive of reality seems suspicious, more a rationalistic fiction than a genuine explanation. For these reasons, reductionist approaches have been put forward to deflate the explanatory role of this notion. In this paper, I will instead try to defend constitutive rules. My thesis is that the notion of constitutive rule is explanatorily helpful because it gives a complete account of an important phenomenon in the social and legal domain, namely, that of artifactual entities endowed with statuses that can have emergent normative properties. Conceiving of these entities as rule-constituted artifacts is an important part of what H. L. A. Hart called “the internal point of view” toward law, and for this reason constitutive rules should be included in an explanation of that point of view as an integral part of the life of institutions. The structure of my argument will be as follows. First, I will provide an example of an important phenomenon in the internal point of view, namely, the fact that individuals can have normative reactions not about the specific regulation of an institution but about its underlying purpose and rationale—what in the legal domain is called the ratio of a norm. Then I will identify two reductionistic approaches on constitutive rules. The first approach is exemplified by Brian Epstein’s idea that the phenomena explained by constitutive rules are better explained in terms of metaphysical (grounding/anchoring) relations. The second kind of reductionism is instead exemplified by the idea (held by several authors, among whom Alf Ross, Riccardo Guastini, Frank Hindriks, and Francesco Guala) that the phenomena explained by constitutive rules can be accounted for in terms of regulative rules plus a certain terminology. I will try to show that neither of these approaches can explain normative reactions to the ratio of an institution from an internal point of view: While the first cannot explain the fact that the reaction is strongly normative, the second cannot explain the fact that the reaction is about the ratio of a normative entity. Constitutive rules can instead explain both things and should be preserved as an important notion for the analysis of institutional ontology. By way of constitutive rules we create something: immaterial, rule-based institutional artifacts that can have emergent normative properties.

Explanations of and in Time

Various approaches to quantum gravity render spacetime an emergent phenomenon, with the existence and properties of spacetime depending on a non-spatiotemporal underlying reality. This chapter investigates the mode of dependence that is involved. I explain and defend my recent proposal to classify different kinds of dependencies in terms of the principles mediating the dependency, and apply this proposal to the emergence of spacetime. While philosophers have typically interpreted spacetime emergence as involving metaphysical grounding, I show how premises that are widely endorsed lead us to classify the emergence of spacetime in loop quantum gravity as causal in nature. I recommend spacetime functionalism as a resolution of this puzzle that vindicates the natural view of spacetime emergence as non-causal. I then explore a different approach to spacetime emergence in quantum gravity, the ‘many-instant landscape’ scenario described by Gomes, and show how it fits into the proposed framework for spacetime emergence.

Art and Indiscernibility: Arthur C. Danto and the Dynamics of Analytic Philosophy

Arthur C. Danto was one of the most influential and prolific philosophers of art of the second half of the twentieth century. More particularly, his encounter with the art of Andy Warhol in 1964 became a crucial moment that would catapult his lifelong attempt to spell out the theoretical conditions of contemporary art, and the implications those conditions held for art history and criticism. In this article, however, I show that Danto was in fact primed for his encounter with Warhol by the newly emerging identity of Anglo-American analytic philosophy at mid-century. Using unpublished archival material, I show that Danto's fundamental insights in his first two major essays in the philosophy of art, “The Artworld” (1964) and “Artworks and Real Things” (1973), were in place at least two years before his chance meeting with Warhol's artwork. In making this more modest historical claim, however, I argue that Danto was part of a broader generation of philosophers who were attempting to work through some of the fundamental problems raised by the naturalist tradition of American thought since the late nineteenth century, problems that became central to the emerging identity of analytic philosophy in its early stages. Among the most pressing of these problems was how values functioned in a naturalistic universe absent theological or metaphysical grounding. Drawing from this philosophical space, Danto's account of art deeply influenced the direction of Anglo-American philosophy of art during the second half of the twentieth century. In the process, he became one of the most significant theorists of contemporary art in the English-speaking world.

Anabaptist two kingdom dualism: metaphysical grounding for non-violence

A non-violent position drawn from the Anabaptist tradition (‘two-kingdom dualism’) is contrasted with the Christian pacifism with which that position is commonly conflated. It is argued that two-kingdom dualism more effectively leverages the philosophical and practical features of its particularly Christian character than does Christian pacifism – and that these features may have implications beyond the philosophy of religion.

A kind route from grounding to fundamentality

I offer an account of fundamentality for facts in terms of metaphysical grounding. The account does justice to the idea that whether a fact is absolutely fundamental, and whether a fact is more fundamental than, or as fundamental as, another fact, are a matter of where in a grounding-induced hierarchy of kinds of facts these facts appear.

Motherhood in the Realm of Eastern Indian and Himalayan Art: An Iconographic Study of Visual Forms of Prajñāpāramitā from the National Museum, Delhi

This paper aims to outline and explore the development of iconographic forms and metaphysical grounding of one of the most venerable and distinguished Buddhist female deities, Prajсāpāramitā. The Buddhist female pantheon gained a paramount pre-eminence with the idolization of Prajñāpāramitā, establishing the significance of female figure and, especially, mother symbolism during the early medieval period under the liberal patronage of the Pala dynasty of Eastern India. The religious imageries and practices of this deity gradually disseminated to the adjoining Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal and Tibet through pedagogic and religious linkages, and became an integral part of their society. To understand the factors of cross-cultural assimilation through the study of representational forms and its metaphysical grounding, the paper explores and shows the metaphorical meaning of ‘prajсā’ propounded in the Prajñāpāramitā discourse, and its representation in cultic icons of the goddess Prajñāpāramitā and the manuscript. This thematic narrative opens up new avenues of interpretations on gender-subjectivity in Buddhist cosmology and pantheistic belief system which are touched upon in this paper. The idea of pronouncement and expansion of female-oriented texts and icons is highlighted through a study of select devotional icons of this deity, Prajсāpāramitā, from the collection of the National Museum, Delhi.

The Metaphysical Grounding of Logical Operations: John Dewey’s Theory of Qualitative Continuity

In John Dewey’s logical theory, qualities or qualitative relations account for the capacity to distinguish and associate the objects of reflective thought; they are antecedent to reflective analysis and necessary for coherent processes of inquiry. In Dewey’s writings that are specifically “metaphysical” in orientation, he is much more vague about the function of qualities, but does call them “generic traits of existence.” As such, they appear to be central to his mature ontological theory. In order to more fully understand the metaphysical import of qualitative relations, I first examine the details of Dewey’s logical theory, and then generalize those details in accordance with Dewey’s larger theory of nature. The end result is a novel interpretation of Dewey’s metaphysics.

The Metaphysics of Moral Explanations

This chapter defends the view that general moral principles play an ineliminable role in moral explanations. More specifically, it argues that this view best makes sense of some intuitive data points, including the supervenience of the moral upon the natural. The chapter considers two alternative accounts of the nature and structure of moral principles: (i) “the nomic view,” on which moral principles are laws of metaphysics of the same broad kind as the laws that (plausibly) figure in metaphysical explanations more generally; and (ii) “moral platonism,” on which moral principles are facts about kind-applying (as opposed to particular-applying) moral properties. Along the way, the chapter criticizes the competing view that moral principles are not explanatory in the way just suggested. The chapter also considers a number of related issues, such as the distinction between metaphysical grounding and metaphysical analysis. It concludes by discussing the sense in which moral principles obtain of necessity.