In _Necropolitics_ Achille Mbembe—a leader in the new wave of Francophone critical theory—theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world—a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror, as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side, or what he calls its “nocturnal body,” which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has (...) hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times, in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered to be enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucault debates on biopolitics, war, and race, as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability, to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude, but as a person with whom to build a more just world. (shrink)

Some have argued that the vagueness exhibited by geographic names and descriptions such as ‘Albuquerque’, ‘the Outback’, or ‘Mount Everest’ is ultimately ontological: these terms are vague because they refer to vague objects, objects with fuzzy boundaries. I take the opposite stand and hold the view that geographic vagueness is exclusively semantic, or conceptual at large. There is no such thing as a vague mountain. Rather, there are many things where we conceive a mountain to be, each with its precise (...) boundary, and when we say ‘Everest’ we are just being vague as to which thing we are referring to. This paper defends this view against some plausible objections. (shrink)

There are two ways of understanding the notion of a contradiction: as a conjunction of a statement and its negation, or as a pair of statements one of which is the negation of the other. Correspondingly, there are two ways of understanding the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), i.e., the law that says that no contradictions can be true. In this paper I offer some arguments to the effect that on the first (collective) reading LNC is non-negotiable, but on the second (...) (distributive) reading it is perfectly plausible to suppose that LNC may, in some rather special and perhaps undesirable circumstances, fail to hold. (shrink)

Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, (...) as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole. (shrink)

L’Afrique a participé jusqu’a présent, souvent à titre de laboratoire, au développement de la science occidentale. Les défis rencontrés par la théorie critique aujourd’hui sont l’instrumentalisation de la théorie par les gouvernements, la prolifération de pratiques critiques diverses, notamment écologique, et surtout l’émergence d’un capitalisme de l’image et de l’affect. C’est en relation avec la Chine que l’Afrique peut apporter de nouvelles réponses et relever ces défis.

One logic or many? I say—many. Or rather, I say there is one logic for each way of specifying the class of all possible circumstances, or models, i.e., all ways of interpreting a given language. But because there is no unique way of doing this, I say there is no unique logic except in a relative sense. Indeed, given any two competing logical theories T1 and T2 (in the same language) one could always consider their common core, T, and settle (...) on that theory. So, given any language L, one could settle on the minimal logic T0 corresponding to the common core shared by all competitors. That would be a way of resisting relativism, as long as one is willing to redraw the bounds of logic accordingly. However, such a minimal theory T0 may be empty if the syntax of L contains no special ingredients the interpretation of which is independent of the specification of the relevant L-models. And generally—I argue—this is indeed the case. (shrink)

In his Romanes Lecture of 1907, Lord Curzon emphasized the overwhelming influence of “natural” and “artificial” frontiers in the political history of the modern world. As Barry Smith has shown, the same could be said, more generally, of the natural and artificial boundaries that are at work in articulating every aspect of the reality with which we have to deal, not only in the world of geography, but the world of human experience at large. Moreover, once the natural/artificial distinction has (...) been recognized, it can be drawn across the board: not merely in relation to boundaries but also in relation to those entities that may be said to have boundaries. If something enjoys a natural boundary, its identity and survival conditions do not depend on us; it is a bona fide, mind-independent entity of its own. By contrast, if its boundary is artificial, then the entity itself is to some degree a fiat entity, a product of our worldmaking. Here I am interested in limit case: what if, pace Curzon and pace Smith, all entities turned out to be of the latter sort? (shrink)

A lot of work in metaphysics relies on linguistic analysis and intuitions. Do we want to know what sort of things there are or could be? Then let’s see what sort of things there must be in order for what we truthfully say to be true. Do we want to see whether x is distinct from y? Then let’s see whether there is any statement that is true of x but not of y. And so on. In this paper I (...) argue that this way of proceeding is full of traps and is bound to be pretty useless unless we already have a good idea of what sort of things there are, and of how we are going to count them. (shrink)

In _Critique of Black Reason_ eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black (...) reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With _Critique of Black Reason_, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. (shrink)

David Lewis’s counterpart theory is often seen as involving a radical departure from the standard, Kripke-style semantics for modal logic, suggesting that we are dealing with deeply divergent accounts of our modal talk. However, CT captures but one version of the relevant semantic intuition, and does so on the basis of metaphysical assumptions that are ostensibly discretionary. Just as ML can be translated into a language that quantifies explicitly over worlds, CT may be formulated as a semantic theory in which (...) world quantification is purely metalinguistic. And just as Kripke-style semantics is formally compatible with the doctrine of world-boundedness, a counterpart-based semantics may in principle allow for cases of trans-world identity. In fact, one may welcome a framework that is general enough to include both Lewis’s counterpart-based account and Kripke’s identity-based account as distinguished special cases. There are several ways of doing so. The purpose of this paper is to outline a fully general option and to illustrate its philosophical significance, showing how the large variety of intermediate relations that lie between Lewisian counterparthood and Kripkean identity yield a corresponding variety of modal theories that would otherwise remain uncharted. (shrink)

There is no doughnut without a hole, the saying goes. And that’s true. If you think you can come up with an exception, it simply wouldn’t be a doughnut. Holeless doughnuts are like extensionless color, or durationless sound—nonsense. Does it follow, then, that when we buy a doughnut we really purchase two sorts of thing—the edible stuff plus the little chunk of void in the middle? Surely we cannot just take the doughnut and leave the hole at the grocery store, (...) as we cannot just eat the doughnut and save the hole for later. But then, again, surely when we eat a doughnut we do not also eat the hole. Or do we? (shrink)

A scholarly annotated epic poem on the pitfalls and tribulations of “good philosophizing”. Divided into twenty-eight cantos (in medieval Italian hendecasyllabic terza rima), the poem tells of an allegorical journey through the downward spiral of the philosophers’ hell, where all sorts of thinkers are punished for their faults and mistakes, in the endeavor to reach a way out of the condition of intellectual impasse in which the narrator has found himself. The affinities with Dante’s Inferno are apparent. Whereas Dante’s poem (...) is about human sins and moral felonies, this one is about philosophical errors and fallacies; whereas Virgil takes Dante through the gluttons, the wrathful, the violent, the traitors to parties and countries, etc., here Socrates takes us through the realists, the skeptics, the dualists, the nichilists, the worshipers of language and easy mythos, etc. And yet this is not just a philosophical counterpart of Dante’s masterpiece, even less a parody. We can’t say exactly when, how, and why it was written, but this is an authentic piece of philosophy, a poem of love, a passionate testimony of militant metaphysics. It is the inspired and inspiring journey of someone, anyone, who is truly moved by the Love for Wisdom and by the grueling purification of the intellect that it demands. (shrink)

Euclid’s definition of a point as “that which has no part” has been a major source of controversy in relation to the epistemological and ontological presuppositions of classical geometry, from the medieval and modern disputes on indivisibilism to the full development of point-free geometries in the 20th century. Such theories stem from the general idea that all talk of points as putative lower-dimensional entities must and can be recovered in terms of suitable higher-order constructs involving only extended regions (or bodies). (...) Here I focus on what is arguably the first thorough proposal of this sort, Whitehead’s theory of “extensive abstraction”, offering a critical reconstruction of the theory through its successive installments: from the purely mereological version of ‘La théorie relationniste de l’espace’ (1916) to the refined versions presented in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919) and in The Concept of Nature (1920) to the last, mereotopological version of Process and Reality (1929). (shrink)

In _Brutalism_, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and (...) artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic. Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things. (shrink)

On the difficulty of extracting the logical form of a seemingly simple sentence such as ‘If Andy went to the movie then Beth went too, but only if she found a taxi cab’, with some morals and questions on the nature of the difficulty.

We exhibit a family of computably enumerable sets which can be learned within polynomial resource bounds given access only to a teacher but which requires exponential resources to be learned given access only to a membership oracle. In general, we compare the families that can be learned with and without teachers and oracles for four measures of efficient learning.

Jeffery et al. suggest that three-dimensional environments are not represented according to their volumetric properties, but in a quasi-planar fashion. Here we take into consideration the role of visual experience and the use of technology for spatial learning to better understand the nature of the preference of horizontal over vertical spatial representation.

A dialogue among statements that try to explain to each other the mechanisms and peculiarities of self-referential assertions and, particularly, of their context-dependence.

Paul Hovda’s excellent paper ‘What Is Classical Mereology?' has fruitfully reshaped the debate concerning the axiomatic foundations of classical mereology. Precisely because of the importance of Hovda’s work and its usefulness as a reference tool, we note here that one of the five axiom systems presented therein, corresponding the ‘Third Way’ to classical mereology, is defective and must be amended. In addition, we note that two other axiom systems, corresponding to the ‘First Way’ and to the ‘Fifth Way’, involve redundancies.

Can we really perceive absences, i.e., missing things? Sartre tells us that when he arrived late for his appointment at the café, he saw the absence of his friend Pierre. Is that really what he saw? Where was it, exactly? Why didn’t Sartre see the absence of other people who were not there? Why did other people who were there not see the absence of Pierre? The perception of absences gives rise to a host of conundrums and is constantly on (...) the verge of conceptual confusion. Here I focus on the need to be clear about four sorts of distinctions: (i) the difference between perceiving an absence and perceiving something that is absent; (ii) the difference between perceiving an absence and an absence of perceiving; (iii) the difference between perceiving an absence and perceiving something as an absence; and (iv) the difference between perceiving an absence and perceiving that something is absent. (shrink)

Mereological atomism is the thesis that everything is ultimately composed of atomic parts, i.e., parts lacking proper parts. Standardly, this thesis is characterized by an axiom that says, more simply, that everything has atomic parts. Anthony Shiver has argued that this characterization is satisfied by models that are not atomistic, and is therefore inadequate. I argue that Shiver’s conclusion can and ought to be resisted, for the models in question are atomistic in the intended sense, and even though the standard (...) characterization does not say that everything is composed of atoms, it implies so. If there is a sense in which the relevant models are problematic, it lies elsewhere. (shrink)

We tend to talk about (refer to, quantify over) parts in the same way in which we talk about whole objects. Yet a part is not something to be included in an inventory of the world over and above the whole to which it belongs, and a whole is not something to be included in the inventory over and above its constituent parts. This paper is an attempt to clarify a way of dealing with this tension which may be labeled (...) the Minimalist View: An element in the field of a part-whole relation is to be included in an inventory of the world if and only if it does not overlap any distinct element that is itself included in the inventory. (shrink)

Au cours de cet entretien mené par Yala Kisukidi, Achille Mbembe revient sur les thèmes clés de son ouvrage Brutalisme (2020) : la définition de l’idée d’« Afrique », la nécessité de sortir d’une « histoire de la prédation » et de réinvestir des utopies par le « ré-enchantement », la revalorisation d’une « politique du soin » tandis que la terre est endommagée, la création d’un espace africain de libre circulation sont évoquées tour à tour. Convoquant les écrivains (...) Amos Tutuola et Sony Labou Tansi, Mbembe souligne le rôle de l’imaginaire, et singulièrement de la littérature, dans la fabrique des utopies de demain. L’art, entendu comme réserve de vie et de possibles, constitue une ressource pour penser les migrations contemporaines et imaginer d’autres modèles alternatifs au modèle actuel néolibéral. Face à la criminalisation des circulations, le pillage des ressources, la violence du « brutalisme » contemporain, Mbembe en appelle à une « politique du soin » capable d’inclure, depuis l’Afrique, la question du commun et du partage de la Terre. (shrink)

This book is a conceptualization of the literary aesthetic in relation to ethics, in particular, an ethics for a concern for the Self. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's constructivist thinking into a practical domain, Sabrina Achilles rethinks the ways in which literature is understood and taught. Through an interdisciplinary approach, literature is viewed from the position of a problem without any pre-given frame.

Extended revised edition of "Logica" (2003).

It is common lore that standard, Kripke-style semantics for quantified modal logic is incompatible with the view that no individual may belong to more than one possible world, a view that seems to require a counterpart-theoretic semantics instead. Strictly speaking, however, this thought is wrong-headed. This note explains why.

At the beginning, all there is is world. It’s not all alike: here is mama, there is cold, over there—noise. Soon we begin to distinguish and to recognize: more mama, more cold, more noise! Yet initially these things appear to be all of a type. Each is, in Quine’s words, just a history of sporadic encounter, a mere portion of all there is. Only with time does this fluid totality in which we are immersed begin to take shape: sensations recur; (...) objects stick out; noise changes depending on the things around us. We learn how to act and to predict. We launch into giving names, using verbs, painting adjectives. Such marvelous unfolding is the subject of much inquiry by psychologists and biologists, and eventually by sociologists. But for a philosopher it is first and foremost the source of deep and bemusing bewilderment, if not a dilemma: Are we learning to make out the structure of the world, or are we endowing the world with a structure of our making? Is reality gradually revealing the mechanisms according to which it is organized, or is it we who progressively organize the amorphous and continuous flux of our experience? (shrink)

There are two ways of understanding the notion of a contradiction: as a conjunction of a statement and its negation, or as a pair of statements one of which is the negation of the other. Correspondingly, there are two ways of understanding the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), i.e., the law that says that no contradictions can be true. In this paper I offer some arguments to the effect that on the first (collective) reading LNC is non-negotiable, but on the second (...) (distributive) reading it is perfectly plausible to suppose that LNC may, in some rather special and perhaps undesirable circumstances, fail to hold. (shrink)