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Showing posts from December, 2017

Galaxies and monadologies 1

This is just a quick note to be continued later. It is something I found in my notes while I writing on time and determination. In Leibniz, the actual world is chosen before the present time. In neo-monadologies, one could resort to David Lewis schema and claim that the actual world is being chosen at any event, it being no more than this world. One could extend this schema to possible worlds of other galaxies, and the galaxy of the present world would be also this galaxy. (Galaxies are collections of worlds associated to logics, see our first article on this .) But in both cases, one is assuming an enclosed totality of possible worlds – the one God contemplates in the first time. There is a determinate domain of rooms in Pallas' palace. What is interesting about galaxies could be that there is no such totality. Once Priest asked Alexandre and me what is the space of all worlds, possible and impossible. We never completely answered this question. I wonder if we can think of gal

The timing of determination

Three paragraphs of what I'm writing about Leibniz, process philosophy and determinations: One of the dazzling features of time is that it introduces the idea of process – and that reality itself could be a consequence of multiple processes. As a general feature of what is often called process philosophy1 – committed to the claim that reality is constituted by ongoing processes and somehow doesn't precede them – the idea of process poses a specific problem for the relation between metaphysics and time: the problem of the timing of (metaphysical determination). Metaphysical truths are often considered to be (at least to a large extent) necessary and permanent. That is to say respectively that they are not contingent on anything else and that they are not subject to the passing of time.2 The issue here is whether metaphysical determinations take place once and for all – and cannot be otherwise – or whether they are not an instant event but rather require some duration. In parti