speaking in New York

It’s still over a year away, September 16, 2011, but I’ll giving a plenary talk at the Speculative Medievalisms Conference in New York, at the CUNY Graduate Center.

They asked for occasionalism, so that will be my topic.

The idea that two entities need a third in order to communicate is, in my opinion, one of the profoundest and strangest ideas in the history of philosophy. The key difficulty faced by this concept is clear enough: if A and B need C to communicate, then don’t A and C and B and C also need a third term to communicate? And so on.

Assuming you agree that causal relations need a mediator (most of you won’t, but I can’t argue it in this post), there are several possible ways of approaching the “infinite mediators” problem:

1. You can make one entity so incredibly special that it can initiate direct contact where other cannot. God is the obvious candidate, though I’m afraid the human mind has been drafted into the same unfortunate role, in which it continues to dominate philosophy.

2. You can make this a pragmatic issue… Namely, we try to determine the mediators between two entities only as far as it remains interesting. This, I’m afraid, is ultimately Latour’s approach to the problem, though he deserves immense credit for escaping position #1 on this list, which even Whitehead doesn’t pull off. If you haven’t read Prince of Networks, one of my conclusions is that Latour is the first secular occasionalist.

3. You can have a model in which there are two kinds of entities, each of which can only make direct contact with the opposite kind. That’s my model. I didn’t develop it in order to solve this particular problem, but it turns out to be a simple and elegant solution to the problem anyway.

I may try to fit Suárez into the talk as well. He has no interest in occasionalism per se (and oddly enough, he can’t even name any despite being one of the most widely read philosophers of all time; even Aquinas doesn’t transmit the names in question, which are all Arabic and Persian names). But nonetheless, Suárez comes up with a theory that resembles occasionalism in a number of respects, and I suspect that this may have been the route through which a full-blown occasionalism entered France.