Cosmos and History, Vol 7 No 1

I didn’t realize it was available and am not sure how long it has been up.

By clicking HERE you can find all the open-access goodies of the latest issue of Cosmos and History, based largely on the outstanding conference in Dundee in March 2010.

Don’t miss the very clear Editors Introduction by Michael O’Neill Burns and Brian Smith. That’s the right place to start.

The issue includes my article on Metzinger, but that’s not the lecture I gave in Dundee. In Dundee I spoke about Ladyman & Ross, but since I had already sent that piece off to a journal (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space) before realizing that there would be a special Dundee conference journal issue, I wrote a substitute paper for them about Metzinger.

Abstract of my article:

“Abstract: This article provides a critical treatment of the ontology underlying Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One. Metzinger asserts that interdisciplinary empirical work must replace ‘armchair’ a priori intuitions into the nature of reality; nonetheless, his own position is riddled with unquestioned a priori assumptions. His central claim that ‘no one has or has ever had a self’ is meant to have an ominous and futuristic ring, but merely repeats a familiar philosophical approach to individuals, which are undermined by reducing them downward to their material underpinnings, and ‘overmined’ by reducing them upward to their functional effects. Ultimately, Metzinger blends a rigid form of traditional materialism with an ontology of processes and events that is too reminiscent of late 1990’s continental philosophy. In both directions, the novelty and fertility of Metzinger’s position can be called into question.”