Randolph Dible
The New School for Social Research
Universal Ontology and the First Distinction: Spencer-Brown, Husserl, and Conrad-Martius VideoIn a chapter of
Laws of Form—A Fiftieth Anniversary (August, 2022), "First Philosophy and the First Distinction: Ontology and Phenomenology of
Laws of Form," I contributed some ways of generally tying the paradigm of Spencer-Brown from its first principle, the first distinction, to first philosophy, as broadly understood from Ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary phenomenology and cybernetic philosophy. In this next development, I aim to connect this work on first philosophy to a work of ultimate philosophy. This will take the form of articulating a new universal ontology of reality and ultimate reality, based on the formal-ontological paradigm of
Laws of Form.
Universal ontology is the ultimate intention of first philosophy. It brings in its wake the speculative metaphysical project of grounding all things in a common foundation, in common terms, somewhat paradoxically including the kinds of things that are not things at all. Such universality stands on a hypothesis of true reality that entails a true metaphysical system and its connection to a hypostatic series of realities: antepenultimate reality, penultimate reality, and finally, the ultimate reality from which it originates. Such a project should be understood in conventional as well as novel terms, as it seeks to approximate the cognition of a vision, method, and doctrine appropriate to the ultimate truth of being: it should present a theory of being including along with all beings beings that are beyond being. The theory itself should be a theory of forms that is also a theory of possible theory-forms. The universal ontologies of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Hedwig Conrad-Martius are here synthesized with George Spencer-Brown's paradigm to contribute such a system.
Randolph Dible is a lecturer in philosophy at St. Joseph's University, New York, and a philosophy doctoral student at The New School for Social Research. He has recently published the chapter "First Philosophy and the First Distinction: Ontology and Phenomenology of Laws of Form," in Laws of Form—A Fiftieth Anniversary (2022), and he has forthcoming publications in Analecta Husserliana, including "Ontopoiesis, Autopoiesis, and a Calculus Intended for Self-Reference." Recent publications can also be found in Natur und Kosmos (2020) and The Further Shores of Knowing (2021). He has published on mysticism in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research (2010), and his Masters thesis is entitled Phenomenology of the Spheres: from the Ancient Spherics to Philosophical Cosmology (2018). Randolph Dible's current research focuses on the historical hypothesis of an infinite sphere and its relevance to the interpretation of formation in the cosmologies of George Spencer-Brown and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Associated with this thesis is a general theory of extension and dimensionality. Randolph Dible is the Secretary and the Director of the Webinar for the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience (SOPHERE), the Communications Director for the North American Society for Early Phenomenology (NASEP), and Assistant to the Editor for the journal Phenomenological Investigations.More info:
nssr.academia.edu/RandolphDible