︎ Materialism and the Public Nature of Knowledge: Michel Serres Circumstantial Universalism
September 27
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Michel Serres is widely known as a philosopher of science,
literature, and especially perhaps communication. But his philosophy is before
all a natural philosophy, a veritable
communicational physics (Bühlmann,
2020). This talk explores how to reconnect Serres’s neo-materialist thought of
what I call circumstantial universalism not
only with theancient atomism of
Lucretius, but also with the pre-Socratic monisms of Anaximander and
Pythagoras. The latter both sought to mathematizethe different approaches of their teachers and peer scholars to nature as physis (in the sense of a material
(elemental) primary body, like water,
fire, air etc). My argument will be that “mathematisation“ here – abstract, but
still pre-formal (in the sense of pre-axiomatic) – is computational in a way that bears great actuality for how we can
come to terms with computation today: especially Anaximanders’ accommodation of
mechanics within the materially-circular and percolative mode of “being” of themeteora (with his notion of the apeiron) bears important clues for how
we can learn to cope with the constitutive circuitous, self-referential
“logics” that manifests through and is at work in computation also today.
Key
to such an understanding is how one relates to the reality of time. Two related
projects of contemporary thinkers, who both engage with computation in
substantial rather than formalist manner, will be profiled in the light of each
other such as to find a concrete milieu to situate the abstract speculations
sketched above: The two projects are that of a Grand Récit of the Universe (Michel Serres) and that of The Unnameable Present (Roberto
Calasso).