The Dialogic Expansion of Garcia’s We: Chronotopes, Ethics, and Politics in The Expanse Series

Popular culture could be understood as a political battleground where conflicting meanings are inscribed into the “ordinary objects” that constitute that public sphere. This is also true for science fiction television series. This article critically examines how political matters and ethical agencies are represented within The Expanse, a series that takes place within a speculative twenty-fourth century milky way. Firstly, I will situate The Expanse within its generic “system of reference.” Then, I will illustrate how political matters are represented as conjoined with the ethical. While the ethical refers to actions of persons, politics refers to fictional conceptions of what Tristan Garcia’s terms we-ourselves, understood as conflicting and overlapping conceptions of “we.” The conjunction between the political and the ethical in The Expanse is spatiotemporal: the characters, the events they are entangled in, and the spaces that connect discrete events develop through fictional and literal time. I argue that the science fictional representations of “we-ourselves,” and the specific spatiotemporal representational capacities of the television series format, can be understood through the application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the chronotope and the dialogic. That is, The Expanse’s we-representations are chronotopic and the refractive rhetoric of television is dialogic.

Minimal Realism about ordinary objects

<p>In 2015 Daniel Korman published an incredibly important book called Objects: Nothing out of the ordinary, in which he defends a position known as conservatism about ordinary objects. He contrasts this position with two other positions – eliminativism and permissivism – and provides comprehensive arguments against these two positions. Korman takes eliminativism to be the view that ordinary objects do not exist. Even though this is indeed one of the claims eliminativists make, by itself it is not a good description of what eliminativism entails. For eliminativism, as ordinarily conceived, contains three main claims: i) the anti-realist claim that certain entities do not exist, ii) the claim that we are making an error when we assert that those entities do exist, and iii) the prescriptive claim that we should eliminate talking and thinking about those entities. These three claims together entail eliminativism. Korman, however, identifies eliminativism merely with the first anti-realist claim. Since Korman‟s focus is on the anti-realist claim, this thesis departs from Korman‟s tripartite division and instead frames the debate in terms of Minimal Realism and Minimal Anti-Realism about ordinary objects. Minimal Realism is simply the view that ordinary objects exist, and includes views such as conservatism and permissivism. Minimal Anti-Realism, by contrast, is the view that ordinary objects do not exist, such as eliminativism as Korman defines it. By refocussing the debate in terms of Minimal Realism and Minimal Anti-Realism, it becomes apparent that there are a variety of Minimal Realist positions which claim that ordinary objects do indeed exist, but which have been left out by Korman. My goal is to supplement Korman‟s arguments with literature published since the publication of his book, and to show how Minimal Realism responds to the arguments for eliminativism. In particular, I focus on the Debunking Argument, the Argument from Arbitrariness, the Overdetermination Argument, the Argument from Vagueness, the Argument from Material Constitution, and the Problem of the Many. After setting out these arguments, I discuss some recent objections, and show how Minimal Realism can respond to the proposed arguments and objections.</p>

Minimal Realism about ordinary objects

<p>In 2015 Daniel Korman published an incredibly important book called Objects: Nothing out of the ordinary, in which he defends a position known as conservatism about ordinary objects. He contrasts this position with two other positions – eliminativism and permissivism – and provides comprehensive arguments against these two positions. Korman takes eliminativism to be the view that ordinary objects do not exist. Even though this is indeed one of the claims eliminativists make, by itself it is not a good description of what eliminativism entails. For eliminativism, as ordinarily conceived, contains three main claims: i) the anti-realist claim that certain entities do not exist, ii) the claim that we are making an error when we assert that those entities do exist, and iii) the prescriptive claim that we should eliminate talking and thinking about those entities. These three claims together entail eliminativism. Korman, however, identifies eliminativism merely with the first anti-realist claim. Since Korman‟s focus is on the anti-realist claim, this thesis departs from Korman‟s tripartite division and instead frames the debate in terms of Minimal Realism and Minimal Anti-Realism about ordinary objects. Minimal Realism is simply the view that ordinary objects exist, and includes views such as conservatism and permissivism. Minimal Anti-Realism, by contrast, is the view that ordinary objects do not exist, such as eliminativism as Korman defines it. By refocussing the debate in terms of Minimal Realism and Minimal Anti-Realism, it becomes apparent that there are a variety of Minimal Realist positions which claim that ordinary objects do indeed exist, but which have been left out by Korman. My goal is to supplement Korman‟s arguments with literature published since the publication of his book, and to show how Minimal Realism responds to the arguments for eliminativism. In particular, I focus on the Debunking Argument, the Argument from Arbitrariness, the Overdetermination Argument, the Argument from Vagueness, the Argument from Material Constitution, and the Problem of the Many. After setting out these arguments, I discuss some recent objections, and show how Minimal Realism can respond to the proposed arguments and objections.</p>

The Thing before Us

In this article the authors identify and analyse points of agreement and disagreement between Michael Ayers and Charles Travis, starting from their views on ‘things before us’. The authors then try to spell out what separates these philosophers in matters concerning perception, knowledge and language. In spite of their both being self-professed realists, equally critical of conceptualism and representationalism, Ayers’ empiricism and Travis’ anti-empiricism lead them to different positions in these three areas. It is shown that in the case of Ayers they hinge on “ordinary” objects and a KK principle (knowledge that and how we know), whereas in the case of Travis they are articulated around occasion-sensitivity and anti-psychologism.

Hidden Identities in Contemporary Cambodian Photography

This article examines the works of three photographers, Kim Hak (b. 1981), Khvay Samnang (b. 1982), and Neak Sophal (b. 1989), all born in the post-Khmer Rouge era and all established relatively early in their careers. These third-generation Cambodian photographers construct portraitures that steer away from identity to address the larger issues of individuals and local communities in present-day Cambodia, which still lives in the shadow of the trauma of the Khmer Rouge. Kim's photography avoids a direct representation of people who suffered through the Khmer Rouge regime and instead presents small, ordinary objects that were kept secretly in their household; Khvay documents the hardship of local communities in Phnom Penh and their questioned identity by portraying masked faces; Neak questions the hardship of the youth, women, and townspeople through the erasure of face in her series of photographs depicting various community groups in Cambodia. This subtle avoidance of portraying individuals in a direct, straightforward way signifies a multi-faceted interpretation of the traumatic past, its resilience, and the newly added social problems of contemporary Cambodia, which struggles in the aftermath of the genocide and more recent economic growth.

Substance and Property

Substances are property bearers. Properties are particular ways substances are, modifications of substances, modes, not universals, not repeatable ‘general’ entities. Substances are simple, lacking parts that are themselves substances. Ordinary objects are probably not substances, hence not themselves property bearers. Modes are qualities of substances that empower those substances in distinctive ways. Qualities and powers of complex objects resolve themselves into the qualities and powers of their constituents organized as they are. The possibility of ‘coinciding objects’—a statue and a lump of bronze, for instance—is considered and rejected in favor of the idea that a particular lump of bronze could be the truthmaker for ‘this is a statue’ and ‘this is a lump’.

Levels of Ontology and Natural Language

Two levels of ontology are commonly distinguished in metaphysics: the ontology of ordinary objects, or more generally ordinary ontology, and the ontology of what there really or fundamentally is. This chapter argues that natural language reflects not only the ordinary ontology but also a language-driven ontology, which is involved in the mass-count distinction and part-structure-sensitive semantic selection (as well as perhaps the light ontology of pleonastic entities in the sense of Schiffer). The language-driven ontology does not constitute another level of representation, but is taken to be a (selective) ontology of the real, given a plenitudinous or maximalist conception of reality. The language-driven ontology aligns closely with the functional part of grammar and a commitment to it is mandatory with the use of language. This gives rise to a novel view according to which part of ontology should be considered part of universal grammar on a broadened understanding. The chapter recasts the author’s older theory of situated part structures without situations, in purely ontological terms, making use of a primitive notion of unity.

Sensation and the Grammar of Life

Anscombe’s published writings, lectures, and notes on sensation offer material for a sophisticated critique of philosophical theories of perception and a novel analysis of the concept of sensation. Her philosophy of perception begins with the traditional question, ‘What are the objects of sensation?’, but the response is a grammatical rather than ontological enquiry. What, she asks, are the characteristics of the grammatical object of sensation verbs? Anscombe’s answer is: sensation verbs take ‘intentional objects’, where an ‘intentional object’ is a description which has the characteristics of the concept of intention—characteristics elucidated in detail in her Intention. This allows Anscombe to reject two opposing positions—that the objects of sensation are sense data, and that they are ordinary objects. Both views, she argues, fail to recognize the grammatical fact that verbs of sensation take intentional objects. This chapter sets out Anscombe’s analysis and outlines the case for a grammatical methodology. Along the way, it will be shown that Anscombe’s philosophy of perception should not be read as forerunning contemporary representationalism.

Grounding Personal Persistence

Modal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s possibly being F with its having a counterpart that is F at another possible world; temporal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s having been F or going to be F, with its having a counterpart that is F at another time. Benovsky, J. 2015. “Alethic Modalities, Temporal Modalities, and Representation.” Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 29: 18–34 in this journal endorses modal counterpart theory but holds that temporal counterpart theory is untenable because it does not license the ascription of the intuitively correct temporal properties to ordinary objects, and hence that we should understand ordinary objects, including persons, as transtemporal ‘worms’. I argue that the worm theory is problematic when it comes to accounting for what matters in survival and that temporal counterpart theory provides a plausible account of personal persistence.