2016

Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

Vittorio Possenti, Nihilism and Metaphysics: The Third Voyage, trans. Daniel B. Gallagher with foreword by Brian Schroeder. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.

Erkenntnis, 2020

It's widely accepted that we have most reason to accept theories that best fulfill the following naturalistically respectable criteria: (1) internal consistency, (2) consistency with the facts, and (3) exemplification of the theoretical virtues. It's also widely accepted that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. I argue that if you accept the aforementioned criteria, you have most reason to reject that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. By applying the criteria to worlds that are all prima facie possible, I show that contingent local matters of particular fact partly determine which theory of composition we should accept at a world. For instance, I argue that when we apply the criteria to our world, we should accept Mereological Nihilism. Furthermore, even if you think that the worlds I mention, such as gunky worlds, are impossible, you should still reject the brute principle that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. Instead, you should only accept that a theory of composition is necessarily true if contingent local matters of particular fact at possible worlds cannot tell in favor of one theory of composition over another.

A Meta-Philosophy exploration of immanent and non-immanent features of first-order philosophy in terms of the values of non- values or negative values of Radical Scepticism, Nihilism and Minarchy, executed to show how philosophizing is done. It misleadingly seems as if there is no progress in philosophy as, like in visual art, literature and music, each original thinker re-invents the entire discipline, its aims, purposes, values, methods, etc The nature of philosophical tools, methods, techniques and skills will be investigated and applied in terms of radical scepticism. This approach, set of values and attitude restrict the nature and the style of the meta-philosophizing. It will for example prevent the traditional development of a general, all-encompassing and all-inclusive metaphysical system. It also demands the focus on context-specific investigation of questions and the dealing of a particular problem in a certain context. These limits require the re-interpretation of any philosophical tool being employed as well as the underlying assumptions and any pre-suppositions. As far as possible philosophizing as an aspect of the processes of theorizing will be adhered to and realized. In chapter THREE I illustrate many-leveled and multi-dimensional thinking, that are to me as a visual artist as well, of extreme importance. These are the types of things employed by radical skepticism and that should be the form of philosophizing instead of and replacing traditional one-leveled and one-dimensional thinking, argumentation and reasoning

Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 2018

According to ontological nihilism there are, fundamentally, no individuals. Both natural languages and standard predicate logic, however, appear to be committed to a picture of the world as containing individual objects. This leads to what I call the expressibility challenge for ontological nihilism: what language can the ontological nihilist use to express her account of how matters fundamentally stand? One promising suggestion is for the nihilist to use a form of predicate functorese, a language developed by Quine. This proposal faces a difficult objection, according to which any theory in predicate functorese will be a notational variant of the corresponding theory stated in standard predicate logic. Jason Turner (2011) has provided the most detailed and convincing version of this objection. In the present paper, I argue that Turner's case for the notational variance thesis relies on a faulty metasemantic principle and, consequently, that an objection long thought devastating is in fact misguided. B oth standard metaphysics and common sense are, plausibly, committed to a picture of the world as containing individual objects: these objects range from the mid-sized dry goods of everyday life such as trees, tables, and turnips to electrons, protons, and neutrons. These objects belong to kinds-biological, chemical, physical, etc.-but they are particular instances of these kinds. It is these particular objects that we seem to encounter in perception, and they are central to much of our ordinary communication about the world. Viewing the world as containing concrete, particular objects-henceforth 'individuals'-is so fundamental to our cognitive operations that the project of devising a metaphysics without individuals might seem hopeless. Recently, however, several philosophers have challenged this picture, motivated by puzzles stemming from both metaphysics and (a certain interpretation of) the findings of physics. They argue that contrary to appearances, fundamental reality does not include any individual

2016

Fundamental Nothing Ontological analysis of knowledge in education might begin by distinguishing between knowledge and the determining force that defines knowledge as significant or otherwise. Under the pressure of this division “knowledge itself” eludes any grasp. And without the ballast of a determinant knowledge, what becomes of education—except to be a technology of the self? Fundamental conditions of possibility for knowledge are implicitly elaborated in Being and Time (1927). In What is Metaphysics? (1935) Heidegger rehearses some of the themes of Being and Time but gives attention to what he calls the “nothing” that lies beyond the attention of science or practical knowledge. This metaphysical analysis has implications for understanding the foundations of knowledge—its ontological conditions. This is a dimension of understanding—a dimension of knowledge also, of course—that is effectively foreclosed in dominant accounts of education, and in particular, in what passes for...

London Conference in Critical Thought / School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2022

Deleuze carves out from Nietzsche the idea that the collapse of nihilism is going to be an autonomous event, that is to say, it is going to happen no matter what, regardless of whether the free-spirits and the associated active forces manage to destroy it or fail to do so. This means that nihilism will be defeated solely by the reactive forces that created it. Nevertheless, the very active forces that allow Deleuze to posit the self-annihilation of nihilism effectively restricts him from thinking and experiencing this event. The paradox of affirmationism is that its reactive forces are not sufficiently autonomous from active forces and do not possess the power to destroy nihilism. There is thus a discrepancy between the project of overcoming nihilism and its result, in a similar manner with the kind of failure Deleuze finds in Kant’s project. I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces. My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.

Philosophical Quarterly, 2009

Metaphysical nihilism is the view that there could have been nothing, or more precisely, that there could have been none of the things philosophers are asking about when they ask 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'. Since in asking that question they are clearly not concerned with necessarily existing abstract objects such as numbers, the recent literature on metaphysical nihilism has described the position as claiming that there could have been no concrete objects. In , Thomas Baldwin proposed an argument for metaphysical nihilism. 1

2018

Scientists and metaphysicians alike often accept that the best theory is that which best exhibits familiar theoretical virtues such as empirical testability, fruitfulness, conservatism, explanatory power, and parsimony. In this dissertation, I assume this naturalistically respectable methodology and explore whether it can help decide between competing metaphysical theories. I argue it can. In chapter 1, I present my version of mereological nihilism, Minimal Truthmaker Nihilism (MTN). According to MTN, only the minimal truthmakers for all true sentences are included in the correct ontology and composite objects are not among the minimal truthmakers. I argue that the proponent of MTN can claim ‘hands exist’ is true, even though hands don’t really exist. In chapter 2, I argue we can use the theoretical virtues to answer the Special Composition question (SCQ), which asks what the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions are under which two or more objects come together to compose a f...