Computing the Unprethinkable: Plato’s Line and Deflationary Ontology
Popular critiques of mathematization in continental philosophy have tended to assert either an unspecifiable ground to existence which escapes it and/or to crudely assert that the intentions of mathematization are a nefarious outgrowth of purportedly outmoded universalism. While philosophers such as Badiou and Meillassoux have made mathematical form into ontological structure, they have maintained an odd relation between those structures and their qualitative outcroppings. Markus Gabriel, among others, has utilized German Idealism (particularly the work of the late Schelling) to demonstrate that the very concept of logic as ontology itself denies the former’s foundation as a mathematics as well as its embodied roots. Taking Plato’s parable of the Divided Line as an instance of the insuperability of math’s sensorial ground, I set out to argue that contemporary utilizations of German Idealism, whether deflationary or inflationary, combat the false modesty of Badiou and Meillassoux’s logically based (or weak) ontologies. Furthermore, this talk investigates whether theories of computation may fall to a similar critique given the structural isomoprhisms between weak ontology and the indiscriminate digitalization of the physical world. Plato’s line can be utilized as a heuristic in comparing the ontogentic spectra of both anti-epistemological weak ontology and anti-embodiment digitality.
Benjamin Woodard is a third year doctoral student at the Centre for Theory and Criticism. His dissertation focuses on the relation between thought and nature in the philosophy of FWJ von Schelling focusing specifically on the relation between speculative physics and pragmatism in the context of a maximally extensive naturalism. He is also interested in philosophical pessimism and ecology.