Francesca Greco

Thinking the Float Tank – Thursday, August 24, 2023 (Day 1)

Shapes of Nothingness—Countless Relations: A World of Floating Boundaries

Speaker Bio:

Francesca Greco studied Philosophy in Italy and continued her research in Germany. She works currently at the University of Hildesheim as research member of the DFG Koselleck-Project “Histories of Philosophy in Global Perspective” (2019-2024) and is PhD student in the field of intercultural philosophy with a focus on meontology and Japanese philosophy. Her major fields of specialization are negativity, relationality, and the history of philosophy in global perspective. She is co-editor of the 10th volume of Frontiers in Japanese Philosophy “Transitions. Crossing boundaries in Japanese Philosophy” (2021) and is the author of several papers and presentations also available on YouTube. See also her page at Universität Hildesheim.

Abstract:

How to think nothingness? How to represent it, for example in art? And foremost, why at all? Plato answered these questions by dismissing, from a reasonable and meaningful discourse, any possibility of thinking and pronouncing a nothingness that is truly absolute (medamos on), thus different from a simple determined negation (not beautiful, not big; Cf. Sophistes). Remaining on the level of language, logic, and ontology, Nishida Kitarō, on the other hand, makes of the absolute nothingness a necessity, just as necessary is its withdrawal from a hypostatized ontological status despite its constant presence and action in reality. In my talk I will follow in broad strokes Nishida’s path to the logical foundation of reality in the absolute nothingness and then dwell on further consequences of this ontological position that I call “logic of boundaries.” Inspired by Nishida’s logic of place, the logic of boundaries shows how to trace the absolute nothingness in a weaving web of countless relations. Since these relations are founded on an absolute nothingness that, precisely by virtue of its absoluteness, has no form but necessarily realizes itself in each individual and unrepeatable form being, makes boundaries and relations as mobile and malleable as the waves of the sea: Each wave is composed of the movement of the water of the whole sea but is unique and unrepeatable in its form, while the sea has no other form than that of its floating waves.