Dr Renee Conroy (University of Cambridge)
Recent Ruins: Romanticism Reconsidered
6 May 2015

American political satirist P. J. O’Rourke observes, “Detroit’s industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th century etching”. I argue that O’Rourke’s claim should be taken literally: the crumbling pockets of urban decay that famously dot major cities in America’s so-called “rust belt” belong to the aesthetic category ‘ruins’. While sites of recent urban devastation have a distinctive aesthetic character, they are nonetheless of an appreciative piece with those iconic structures from ancient times we relish in virtue of their incompleteness and their capacity to incite sustained reflection on things past.

The body of literature in this corner of aesthetics remains unfortunately small, but one shared thesis emerges clearly from extant work in this area, viz., that age-value is central to our aesthetic regard for ruins. Hence, according to the traditional model, sites of contemporary ruination in places like Detroit, Michigan do not count as genuine ruins. They are, at best, ruins in a metaphorical or analogical sense. By considering carefully Carolyn Korsmeyer’s account of ruins as objects of aesthetic regard (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 2014), I argue that philosophers of art have overlooked an important appreciative category – that of “recent ruins” – and that this category can be subsumed under traditional theories of ruin appreciation.

Dr David Roden (Open University)
Brandom and Posthuman Agency: An Anti-Normativist Response to Bounded Posthumanism
4 March 2015

In Posthuman Life I distinguish two theses regarding technological successors to current humans (posthumans): an anthropologically bounded posthumanism (ABP) and an anthropologically unbounded posthumanism (AUP). ABP proposes transcendental conditions on agency that can be held to constrain the scope for “weirdness” in the space of possible posthumans a priori. AUP, by contrast, leaves the nature of posthuman agency to be settled empirically (or technologically). Given AUP there are no “future proof” constraints on the strangeness of posthuman agents.

In Posthuman Life I defended AUP via a critique of Donald Davidson’s work on intentionality and a “naturalistic deconstruction” of transcendental phenomenology (See also Roden 2013). In this paper I extend this critique to Robert Brandom’s account of the relationship between normativity and intentionality in Making It Explicit (MIE) and in other writings.

Brandom’s account understands intentionality in terms of the capacity to undertake and ascribe inferential normative commitments.  It makes “first class agency” dependent on the ability to participate in discursive social practices. It implies that posthumans – insofar as they qualify as agents at all – would need to be social and discursive beings.

The problem with this approach, I will argue, is that it replicates a problem that Brandom discerns in Dennett’s intentional stance approach. It tells us nothing about the conditions under which a being qualifies as a potential interpreter and thus little about the conditions for meaning, understanding or agency.

I support this diagnosis by showing that Brandom cannot explain how a non-sapient community could bootstrap itself into sapience by setting up a basic deontic scorekeeping system without appealing (along with Davidson and Dennett) to the ways in which an idealized observer would interpret their activity.

This strongly suggests that interpretationist and pragmatist accounts cannot explain the semantic or the intentional without regressing to assumptions about ideal interpreters or background practices whose scope they are incapable of delimiting. It follows that Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism is not seriously challenged by the argument that agency and meaning are “constituted” by social practices.

AUP implies that we can infer no claims about the denizens of “Posthuman Possibility Space” a priori, by reflecting on the pragmatic transcendental conditions for semantic content. We thus have no reason to suppose that posthuman agents would have to be subjects of discourse or, indeed, members of communities. The scope for posthuman weirdness can determined by recourse to engineering alone.

References:

Roden, David. 2012. “The Disconnection Thesis”. In The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds), 281–98. London: Springer.

Roden, David. 2013. “Nature’s Dark Domain: An Argument for a Naturalised Phenomenology”. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 72: 169–88.

Roden, David. 2014. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge.