Neither Substance Nor Process IV: Existence and Resistance

Chapter X explores Garcia’s accounts of gender, adolescence, and death. Each provides a good example of Garcia’s tragic aporetic dialectics.

Neither Substance Nor Process I: Anti-Reductionism

The first chapter focuses on Garcia’s arguments against reductionism, with (i) an explanation of Garcia’s affirmation of ontological liberality, and (ii) a discussion of Garcia’s important supplementary arguments against the view that some putative entities are not things. The first few sections of the chapter contain an analysis of Garcia’s argument against what Graham Harman calls overmining and undermining. Both philosophers’ efforts are tied to contemporary work concerning reductionism in analytic philosophy. This discussion motivates (i) a brief presentation of Harman’s account of Heidegger’s “readiness-to-hand”, (ii) a discussion of capacity metaphysics, and (iii) Garcia’s differential ontology of objects. In this manner, Garcia’s central motivation and broad picture are situated with respect to recent trends in continental philosophy, particularly speculative realism and object-oriented ontology.

Neither Discovered Nor Created II: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness

Chapter IX explores how appeal to intensity and his basic metaphysical machinery gives rise to Garcia’s account of Aquinas’ basic trinity of beauty, truth, and goodness. For Garcia, beauty is an intensified object, truth is a form of intensified comprehension, and goodness understood in terms of relation to beauty. Garcia’s views are developed via comparison with A.J. Ayer and W.V.O. Quine on semantic underdetermination and Graham Harman on beauty.

Neither Substance Nor Process III: Events, Time, and Life

Chapter VIII shows how, just as the de-determined world of the thing must be buttressed by the world of the object, the extensive world of (n)either/(n)or must be buttressed by an account of the intensive world of more and less. For Garcia events are facts that are present, time is a result of events indexed by intensity of presence, and life is a result of the intensification of the intensity of the difference between that which an object comprehends and that which comprehends and object.

Neither Matter Nor World: Thing

Chapter VI shows how Garcia’s triad of matter/thing/world leads to a novel rebuttal of Chapter V’s Putnam/Parmenides argument. For Garcia, the de-determined object, the entity-qua-thing, works as a solitary anchor, differentiating the object from those objects it comprehends and those which comprehend it. In this manner, Garcia’s Janus faced ontology is neither relational (since each entity is simultaneously a solitary thing) nor atomistic (since these things are merely differentiators between matter/no-matter-what and world).

Neither Analytic Nor Dialectic I: Horizon

The second chapter contains an exposition and critique of Garcia’s definitions of analysis and dialectics, again tying his discussion to canonical discussion in analytic and continental philosophy. ‘Analysis’ is explicated via a discussion of G.E. Moore’s canonical arguments as well as more recent work on Ramsey sentences, Ramsifying the George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art in the Process. Recent criticisms of Ramsey Sentence Functionalism support Garcia’s contention about analysis. For dialectics Garcia’s tragic aporetic dialectics is contrasted with traditional explications of Hegel.

Neither Discovered Nor Created I: Universe and Matter

By this point in the book Garcia’s basic understanding of entities in terms of their two modes (qua object and qua thing) is explained well enough to allow for a critical evaluation of the Kantian sounding claims he makes with respect to the universe, scales, and limits.

Neither Substance Nor Process II: Two Modes

Chapter V begins by rehearsing the distinction between substance and process philosophies and how Garcia attempts to avoid problems with both. Of particular relevance is Graham Harman’s claim that Garcia’s characterization of an object in terms of its difference from that which it comprehends and from what comprehends it ends up, actually in the characteristic manner of process philosophies, having the object depend on these very things. Changing any of the comprehended or comprehending things would change the precise difference in question, resulting in a different object. Worse, since the object is comprehended by all of the relations that it has to every other object, Garcia seems to be committed to the view that the object’s identity is a function of everything in the universe, a position which easily veers into the (British) Hegelian affirmation that there is only one thing. Discussing Garcia allows me to pose this problem in a novel way, via what I call the Putnam/Parmenides argument.

No-Matter-What

Chapter IV contains a clarification one of Garcia’s major terms of art, ‘no-matter-what’. Interpreting Garcia correctly on this allows one to derive a new argument for the existence of the empty set.

Introduction: Tristan Garcia among the Cave Dwellers

The introduction contains (i) an analysis of various metaphysical and epistemological positions with respect to the transcendent and merely immanent realms as suggested by Plato’s myth of the Cave, (ii) how Garcia fits into this tradition, and (iii) a first account of what I, building on Paul Livingston’s notion of “paradoxico-criticism,” call “paradoxico-metaphysics”.