Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0016
Micah Tewers
This article investigates the analogy of the “laws of nature” through Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic naturalism (ON). Both thinkers challenge the literalist interpretation of scientific knowledge by emphasizing the indirect nature of relation and the primacy of the autonomy of discrete beings over pre-established physical laws. Harman’s OOO defends this autonomy as the irreducible independence of objects from their relations, while Simondon focuses on the modulation of information in shaping the laws of nature through individuation. The article argues that while science remains the best recursive triangulation between logic and empirical evidence, its grasp of an ultimate, literal Truth is constricted by an epistemological relation to autonomous realities, grounded in analogy. Consequently, the laws of nature are considered as legislated by discrete autonomies, with space and time emerging from the things themselves. The article concludes by discussing the consequences of this reframing in light of the ancient conception of díkēkosmos (cosmic justice).
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Pub Date : 2024-06-25DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0018
Andrew Fuyarchuk
Studies about the influence of sound and ambient environments on understanding and the affects, prior to intentional acts of consciousness, are employed to rectify self-fragmentation exemplified in Heidegger and Augustine. Due to a visual bias that suppresses his auditory disposition in Being and Time, Heidegger gestures toward Dasein’s fulfillment in social-being yet also recoils from it. To ameliorate this impasse, his underdeveloped modification of existence is revisited by way of Augustine’s attunement to rhetoricity during his conversion experience. As a result of embracing a shared ambient space, he brings care for others as oneself into the realm of “the with” and thereby verifies the significance of an auditory way of being-in-the-world to the formation of communities.
{"title":"From the Visual to the Auditory in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Augustine’s Confessions","authors":"Andrew Fuyarchuk","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0018","url":null,"abstract":"Studies about the influence of sound and ambient environments on understanding and the affects, prior to intentional acts of consciousness, are employed to rectify self-fragmentation exemplified in Heidegger and Augustine. Due to a visual bias that suppresses his auditory disposition in <jats:italic>Being and Time</jats:italic>, Heidegger gestures toward <jats:italic>Dasein</jats:italic>’s fulfillment in social-being yet also recoils from it. To ameliorate this impasse, his underdeveloped modification of existence is revisited by way of Augustine’s attunement to rhetoricity during his conversion experience. As a result of embracing a shared ambient space, he brings care for others as oneself into the realm of “the with” and thereby verifies the significance of an auditory way of being-in-the-world to the formation of communities.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141510743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-29DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0008
Kurt Borg
This article takes as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s discussion of public happiness, contextualising it within her thoughts on politics, democracy and revolution. It draws on Arendt’s discussion of how the expression “pursuit of happiness” has historically shifted from a public understanding of happiness into an increasingly privatised one. The article engages with Arendt’s account of public happiness in order to reanimate her radical democratic critique of how representative politics reduces the scope of political action and participation; and how the notion of happiness in a neoliberal era can only be interpreted in economistic and subjectivist terms. Furthermore, the article turns to examine how recent works in contemporary political thought, namely, those by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, extend and transform the stakes of Arendt’s account of public happiness. On one hand, Cavarero’s notion of surging democracy is considered as an account of radical politics that keeps alive the Arendtian concern with public happiness by contextualising it within contemporary political struggles and social movements. On the other hand, Butler problematises Arendt’s discussion of politics for its neglect of precarity; however, this article argues that Butler’s work on assembly extends Arendt’s by highlighting possibilities of resistance, radical democracy and even public happiness amid experiences of loss and grief. Although prima facie it might appear that happiness and precarity are opposed to each other, this article points towards contemporary political practices, such as those of Ni Una Menos, that are critically reanimating public happiness through the intertwining of affective registers that range from joy to grief.
本文以汉娜-阿伦特（Hannah Arendt）对公共幸福的讨论为出发点，将其纳入她对政治、民主和革命的思考之中。文章借鉴了阿伦特关于 "追求幸福 "这一表述在历史上如何从对幸福的公共理解转变为日益私有化的理解的讨论。文章引用了阿伦特关于公共幸福的论述，以重新唤起她的激进民主批判，即代议政治如何缩小了政治行动和参与的范围；以及新自由主义时代的幸福概念如何只能从经济学和主观主义的角度来解释。此外，文章转而研究当代政治思想的最新作品，即阿德里安娜-卡瓦列罗和朱迪斯-巴特勒的作品，是如何扩展和改变阿伦特关于公共幸福的论述的利害关系的。一方面，卡瓦列罗的 "澎湃民主"（surging democracy）概念被认为是对激进政治的一种阐述，它通过将阿伦特对公共幸福的关注置于当代政治斗争和社会运动的背景下，使其得以延续。另一方面，巴特勒质疑阿伦特对政治的讨论忽视了不稳定性；然而，本文认为巴特勒关于集会的研究通过强调在失落和悲伤经历中抵抗、激进民主甚至公共幸福的可能性，扩展了阿伦特的研究。虽然从表面上看，幸福与不稳定似乎是相互对立的，但本文指出，当代的政治实践，如 "Ni Una Menos "的政治实践，正在通过交织从欢乐到悲伤的各种情感，批判性地重新唤起公众的幸福感。
{"title":"Reanimating Public Happiness: Reading Cavarero and Butler beyond Arendt","authors":"Kurt Borg","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0008","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s discussion of public happiness, contextualising it within her thoughts on politics, democracy and revolution. It draws on Arendt’s discussion of how the expression “pursuit of happiness” has historically shifted from a public understanding of happiness into an increasingly privatised one. The article engages with Arendt’s account of public happiness in order to reanimate her radical democratic critique of how representative politics reduces the scope of political action and participation; and how the notion of happiness in a neoliberal era can only be interpreted in economistic and subjectivist terms. Furthermore, the article turns to examine how recent works in contemporary political thought, namely, those by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, extend and transform the stakes of Arendt’s account of public happiness. On one hand, Cavarero’s notion of surging democracy is considered as an account of radical politics that keeps alive the Arendtian concern with public happiness by contextualising it within contemporary political struggles and social movements. On the other hand, Butler problematises Arendt’s discussion of politics for its neglect of precarity; however, this article argues that Butler’s work on assembly extends Arendt’s by highlighting possibilities of resistance, radical democracy and even public happiness amid experiences of loss and grief. Although prima facie it might appear that happiness and precarity are opposed to each other, this article points towards contemporary political practices, such as those of Ni Una Menos, that are critically reanimating public happiness through the intertwining of affective registers that range from joy to grief.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141195848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-28DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0009
Vivian Liska
The considerable literature discussing Walter Benjamin’s “idea of happiness” points both to the important role it plays in his thought and, in this context, to the diversity of interpretations his elliptic style has generated. The pivotal role played by the term in Benjamin’s oeuvre from his early writings on language to his Passagenwerk originates in what has been regarded as his “dialectics of happiness.” While this is certainly a plausible diagnosis, a closer look at the wording of the relevant passages in Benjamin’s oeuvre reveals more nuanced and numerous manifestations of the indirectness that characterizes his approach to happiness. Benjamin invokes the term “happiness” (Glück) at crucial crossroads in his thought. It oscillates between potentiality and inaccessibility; individual and collective experience; commemoration and utopia, Eros and emancipation, concrete phenomena and abstract ideas, and last but not least between politics and theology. Equally striking are the divergent modes of expression in which Benjamin’s notion of happiness is articulated. They range from the inexpressible (das Ausdruckslose) to the most lyrical effusions. My talk will correlate Benjamin’s seemingly incommensurable invocations of happiness with the very detours, incompletions, and indirections in his writings about this state of being.
{"title":"Das Unabgeschlossene (das Glück). Walter Benjamin’s “Idea of Happiness”","authors":"Vivian Liska","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0009","url":null,"abstract":"The considerable literature discussing Walter Benjamin’s “idea of happiness” points both to the important role it plays in his thought and, in this context, to the diversity of interpretations his elliptic style has generated. The pivotal role played by the term in Benjamin’s oeuvre from his early writings on language to his Passagenwerk originates in what has been regarded as his “dialectics of happiness.” While this is certainly a plausible diagnosis, a closer look at the wording of the relevant passages in Benjamin’s oeuvre reveals more nuanced and numerous manifestations of the indirectness that characterizes his approach to happiness. Benjamin invokes the term “happiness” (<jats:italic>Glück</jats:italic>) at crucial crossroads in his thought. It oscillates between potentiality and inaccessibility; individual and collective experience; commemoration and utopia, Eros and emancipation, concrete phenomena and abstract ideas, and last but not least between politics and theology. Equally striking are the divergent modes of expression in which Benjamin’s notion of happiness is articulated. They range from the inexpressible (das Ausdruckslose) to the most lyrical effusions. My talk will correlate Benjamin’s seemingly incommensurable invocations of happiness with the very detours, incompletions, and indirections in his writings about this state of being.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141173077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-18DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0003
Marina Marren
This article analyzes the artwork of two seemingly distant contemporary artists – Toomas Altnurme and Cao Jun – elucidating their creative processes through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson. In Section 1, I offer reasons for a side-by-side examination of Altnurme’s and Jun’s art. In my discussion of Altnurme’s art in Section 2, I argue that his process exemplifies Heidegger’s view that artists must abnegate themselves in order for their creations to come into being. In Section 3, I elucidate Jun’s painting in its power to decenter the usual, object-oriented, circumspection of the mind. I ground my analyses in Freud’s concept of dream logic. Freud’s work on dreams allows me to approach Jun’s creative process as a work of translation whereby the artist translates the preconscious elements into images that we – the audience – then see on canvas. In Section 4, where I offer a comparative examination of both artists, I rely on Bergson’s articulation of the importance of intuition in order to show that both Altnurme and Jun create artworks that disclose to us the non-objective dimension of life wherein action or process and possibility take precedence over objectively existing things.
{"title":"Self-abnegation, Decentering of Objective Relations, and Intuition of Nature: Toomas Altnurme’s and Cao Jun’s Art","authors":"Marina Marren","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0003","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the artwork of two seemingly distant contemporary artists – Toomas Altnurme and Cao Jun – elucidating their creative processes through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson. In Section 1, I offer reasons for a side-by-side examination of Altnurme’s and Jun’s art. In my discussion of Altnurme’s art in Section 2, I argue that his process exemplifies Heidegger’s view that artists must abnegate themselves in order for their creations to come into being. In Section 3, I elucidate Jun’s painting in its power to decenter the usual, object-oriented, circumspection of the mind. I ground my analyses in Freud’s concept of dream logic. Freud’s work on dreams allows me to approach Jun’s creative process as a work of translation whereby the artist translates the preconscious elements into images that we – the audience – then see on canvas. In Section 4, where I offer a comparative examination of both artists, I rely on Bergson’s articulation of the importance of intuition in order to show that both Altnurme and Jun create artworks that disclose to us the non-objective dimension of life wherein action or process and possibility take precedence over objectively existing things.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141058662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-17DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0004
Antonio Cimino
The article explores the relationship between two different approaches to happiness and knowledge, that is, the contemplative model and the economistic and instrumental model. Whereas the former equates happiness with the contemplative life, the latter separates happiness from knowledge and subordinates both to what present-day policy-makers call “the economy of well-being.” While biopolitical modernity seems to have rendered the contemplative model obsolete and purposeless, the article suggests reviving the contemplative lifestyle, by putting forward three arguments. First, it contends that we should challenge the economistic and instrumental model, by reaffirming the principle that knowledge and happiness are primarily intrinsic values and ends in themselves. Second, the two models do not necessarily exclude each other and we should strive to combine them. Third, the envisaged integration of the two models requires that we revise them significantly. The elitist and metaphysical character of the traditional contemplative model must be abandoned as it is no longer palatable to modernity. Also, the primacy of economic and instrumental rationality that defines the modern biopolitics of knowledge must be questioned.
{"title":"Happiness and the Biopolitics of Knowledge: From the Contemplative Lifestyle to the Economy of Well-Being and Back Again","authors":"Antonio Cimino","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0004","url":null,"abstract":"The article explores the relationship between two different approaches to happiness and knowledge, that is, the contemplative model and the economistic and instrumental model. Whereas the former equates happiness with the contemplative life, the latter separates happiness from knowledge and subordinates both to what present-day policy-makers call “the economy of well-being.” While biopolitical modernity seems to have rendered the contemplative model obsolete and purposeless, the article suggests reviving the contemplative lifestyle, by putting forward three arguments. First, it contends that we should challenge the economistic and instrumental model, by reaffirming the principle that knowledge and happiness are primarily intrinsic values and ends in themselves. Second, the two models do not necessarily exclude each other and we should strive to combine them. Third, the envisaged integration of the two models requires that we revise them significantly. The elitist and metaphysical character of the traditional contemplative model must be abandoned as it is no longer palatable to modernity. Also, the primacy of economic and instrumental rationality that defines the modern biopolitics of knowledge must be questioned.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141058679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-16DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0007
Cécilia Andrée Monique Lombard
Albert Camus and Rachel Bespaloff had an undeniable influence on the existential thought of the twentieth century. The former, by claiming the world to be silent to our search for meaning, based the concept of happiness in the inherent value of life. The latter grounded her happiness in music and transcendence rather than in the acceptance of the absurd human condition, though the two thinkers seem to agree on the importance of subjective contemplation. In this article, I will offer a reading of Camus’s works that emphasizes his view of happiness in awareness of the absurd. I will then argue for the ethical and political challenges that such happiness causes. Finally, by putting into dialogue the philosophies of Camus and Bespaloff, I wish to show that the two thinkers advocate for the possibility of happiness despite the suffering of the world, and show that this concept, understood as contemplation, can be rooted in the absurd as well as in transcendence.
{"title":"Albert Camus and Rachel Bespaloff: Happiness in a Challenging World","authors":"Cécilia Andrée Monique Lombard","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Albert Camus and Rachel Bespaloff had an undeniable influence on the existential thought of the twentieth century. The former, by claiming the world to be silent to our search for meaning, based the concept of happiness in the inherent value of life. The latter grounded her happiness in music and transcendence rather than in the acceptance of the absurd human condition, though the two thinkers seem to agree on the importance of subjective contemplation. In this article, I will offer a reading of Camus’s works that emphasizes his view of happiness in awareness of the absurd. I will then argue for the ethical and political challenges that such happiness causes. Finally, by putting into dialogue the philosophies of Camus and Bespaloff, I wish to show that the two thinkers advocate for the possibility of happiness despite the suffering of the world, and show that this concept, understood as contemplation, can be rooted in the absurd as well as in transcendence.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141149039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-27DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0006
Paul Mendes-Flohr
Noting that one may hear without listening, the article probes the phenomenological and epistemic distinction between hearing and listening. To listen is to be attuned to voices muffled by silence or camouflaged by a defensive rhetoric resonant with a voice inflected by festering wounds, existential and political. In exploring how one is to listen to these voices of silence, I draw upon Martin Buber’s concept of dialogical “inclusion” of others’ stories, to listen without interpretation to allow the voice behind his – or her or their – story, be it merely etched viscerally in the language of silence, to dwell aside one’s own story in a dialogue unencumbered by perceptions of the Other forged by cultural, social, political constructs, and perhaps most insidiously one’s own defensive postures.
{"title":"The Poetics of Listening","authors":"Paul Mendes-Flohr","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Noting that one may hear without listening, the article probes the phenomenological and epistemic distinction between hearing and listening. To listen is to be attuned to voices muffled by silence or camouflaged by a defensive rhetoric resonant with a voice inflected by festering wounds, existential and political. In exploring how one is to listen to these voices of silence, I draw upon Martin Buber’s concept of dialogical “inclusion” of others’ stories, to listen without interpretation to allow the voice behind his – or her or their – story, be it merely etched viscerally in the language of silence, to dwell aside one’s own story in a dialogue unencumbered by perceptions of the Other forged by cultural, social, political constructs, and perhaps most insidiously one’s own defensive postures.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"101 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140812436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-11DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0001
Sonja Lavaert
This article investigates the anthropology of Spinoza as a strategy for happiness, political, as well as individual. Inspired by the readings, comments, and perspectives of Matheron, Deleuze, and Balibar, I will analyze Spinoza’s theory of the affects as the basis for this strategic anthropology. These authors all share an ontological and political vision organized around the concepts of multitude and the transindividual which result directly from Spinoza’s analysis of the human affects in books III and IV of the Ethics, and his theory of political dynamics developed in the Political treatise. They consider Spinoza a contemporary and share with him the idea of a relational ontology and an inextricable and mutual interdependence of the individual and the community which is captured in the concept of the transindividual. With Matheron/Spinoza I will focus on the question of anthropology and the structure of thought, with Deleuze/Spinoza on the kinds of knowledge in relation to the human mind and body, and with Balibar/Spinoza on the transindividual, productive, active, and thus strategic nature of our thinking. These three analyses of human thought and affects all proceed from the hypothesis of conatus/desire as human essence and aim not just at theoretical knowledge but rather at the effective improvement of our well-being and lives, that is, at happiness.
{"title":"A Strategy for Happiness, in the Wake of Spinoza","authors":"Sonja Lavaert","doi":"10.1515/opphil-2024-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0001","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the anthropology of Spinoza as a strategy for happiness, political, as well as individual. Inspired by the readings, comments, and perspectives of Matheron, Deleuze, and Balibar, I will analyze Spinoza’s theory of the affects as the basis for this strategic anthropology. These authors all share an ontological and political vision organized around the concepts of multitude and the transindividual which result directly from Spinoza’s analysis of the human affects in books III and IV of the <jats:italic>Ethics</jats:italic>, and his theory of political dynamics developed in the <jats:italic>Political treatise</jats:italic>. They consider Spinoza a contemporary and share with him the idea of a relational ontology and an inextricable and mutual interdependence of the individual and the community which is captured in the concept of the transindividual. With Matheron/Spinoza I will focus on the question of anthropology and the structure of thought, with Deleuze/Spinoza on the kinds of knowledge in relation to the human mind and body, and with Balibar/Spinoza on the transindividual, productive, active, and thus strategic nature of our thinking. These three analyses of human thought and affects all proceed from the hypothesis of <jats:italic>conatus</jats:italic>/desire as human essence and aim not just at theoretical knowledge but rather at the effective improvement of our well-being and lives, that is, at happiness.","PeriodicalId":36288,"journal":{"name":"Open Philosophy","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140580022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-08DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2024-0002
Salomé Voegelin
With reference to Steven Feld’s “acoustemology,” his epistemology of sounding and listening, developed in the Bosavi Rainforest in Papua New Guinea, where the trees are too dense to afford a distant view and meaning has to be found up close, on the body with other human and more-than-human bodies, this essay deliberates how sound knows in entanglements and from the in-between: in a being with as a knowing with rather than from a distance. In this way, this essay, from the densities of the rainforest, critiques Western knowledge and its reliance on visual categories, straight lines, and universalising principles that pretend objectivity and a distant view. Instead, it turns to the relational indivisibility of sound that lets us hear interdependencies and confronts us with the invisible of which we are part. In conclusion, it proposes that sound studies as applied, transversal studies enable such a paradigm shift that at once reveals what hegemonic knowledge strands exclude and invites a different dialogue from the in-between of everything.
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