In this paper, I engage with the motif of “the pluriverse” such as it has increasingly been used in the past few years in several strands of critical humanities pertaining to the so-called “ontological turn”: science and technology studies (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers), critical geography and political ontology (Mario Blaser), cultural anthropology (Marisol de la Cadena, Arturo Escobar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), decolonial thought (Walter Mignolo), or posthuman feminism (Donna Haraway). These various iterations of the figure of the (...) class='Hi'>pluriverse constitute a loose network of textual traces, a supposedly new scene for ‘humanities’, organized around what is understood as a pluralistic ontology. In political terms, the discourse of the pluriverse presents itself as a strategic response to the violence of universalism. It advocates for a multiversal ethics, a pluriversal cosmopolitics based on interspecies and multi-natural kinships, and more aware of the multiplicity of worlds and world-making practices that make up the post-globalization scene. Based on readings of Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Arturo Escobar and Marisol de la Cadena among others, I argue that the notion of pluriversality remains self-contradictory and self-defeating as long as it relies on an ontological representation of world/worlds in the form of copresence. Drawing on Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of world (cosmos, mundus) in his late writings, I propose to think an exorbitant plurality, before the pluriverse and before being. Beyond ontological pluralism, Derrida’s “infinity of untranslatable worlds” also signifies an irreducible interruption, the end of the world, of any “world-in-common”, thus raising the stakes for the ethical demand towards the other. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that for the purposes of ordinary reasoning, sentences about properties of concrete objects can be replaced with sentences concerning how things in our universe would be related to inscriptions were there a pluriverse. Speaking loosely, pluriverses are composites of universes that collectively realize every way a universe could possibly be. As such, pluriverses exhaust all possible meanings that inscriptions could take. Moreover, because universes necessarily do not influence one another, our universe would not be (...) any different intrinsically if there were a pluriverse. These two facts enable anti-realists about abstract objects to replace, e.g. talk of anatomical features with talk of the inscriptions concerning anatomical structure that would exist were there a pluriverse. The availability of such replacements enables anti-realists to carry out essential ordinary reasoning without referring to properties, thereby making room for a consistent anti-realist worldview. The inscriptions of the would-be pluriverse are so numerous and varied that sentences about them can play the roles in ordinary reasoning served by simple sentences about properties of concrete objects. (shrink)

This paper advances a relational ontology that reconceptualizes entities—including human selves—as affects of dynamic pluriverses rather than autonomous origins of action and being. Drawing from Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, process metaphysics, phenomenology, and contemporary ecological thought, it argues that entities emerge through complex ecological relationships that constitute rather than merely contain them. The work develops two key philosophical insights: first, that the ecology of affects as it interacts constitutes intelligence in non-agential form, challenging the notion that intelligence is a property possessed (...) by discrete entities; and second, that this understanding carries an ethical imperative of subtractive teleology, wherein reflexive beings must recognize their fundamental nature by shedding layers of contextual existence while maintaining awareness of contextual realities. This approach aligns with the Buddhist path toward śūnyatā (emptiness) while offering a framework for ethical engagement that honors both particular embodied positions and the fundamental intelligence that expresses itself through these positions. By reconceptualizing intelligence as an immanent field rather than an individual possession, the essay provides conceptual resources for addressing contemporary ecological, ethical, and existential challenges through a more comprehensive understanding of existence as inherently relational. (shrink)

Unity has been touted as the cornerstone of Indonesian nationalism since its declaration in 1945. With the national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, Indonesian unity holds a sacred and absolute status. However, in reality, unity sometimes becomes a national problem. This article revisits Indonesian unity by shedding light on its darker aspects, namely heteronormativity, and introduces how Indonesian unity can be supported by a new ontological alternative: pluriverse. The study provides a brief historical overview of the New Order era and (...) the family ideology that shaped an adherence to heteronormative norms, and followed by exploration of the pluriverse as an ethical ontological foundation that can deepen the struggle for unity. (shrink)

This paper reframes intelligence as an immanent, relational, and ethical characteristic of ecological systems, challenging anthropocentric views that confine it to individual minds. Drawing on Leibniz’s monadology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, Ruyer’s primary consciousness, Grosz’s incorporeality, Deleuze’s immanence, Whitehead’s process philosophy, Levin’s bioelectric morphogenesis, and relational ontology (Prabakaran, 2025), we argue that intelligence is the pluriverse’s capacity for responsiveness, adaptation, and creativity, expressed through entities as localized affects. Rooted in Mahāyāna Buddhism’s pratītyasamutpāda (Garfield, 1995), this intelligence is inherently ethical, (...) fostering mutual flourishing within interdependent webs. Unethical behavior arises from the delusion of separateness, occluding intelligence and disrupting ecological harmony. Through embryogenesis and the practice of subtractive teleology, we illustrate how intelligence operates as an ethical ecology, calling for a reorientation toward relational responsiveness and care. (shrink)

Normative realism is the view that there are ought facts, i.e. facts about what we ought to do. A recent influential challenge to normative realism, raised separately by Justin Clarke-Doane and Matti Eklund, argues that ought facts—even if they exist—are inert in the sense that they cannot tell us what to do. The ground for this challenge is the epistemic possibility of a normative pluriverse, that is, the epistemic possibility of there being not only ought facts but also ought-like (...) facts. I counter this challenge by showing the inconsistency, and thus the epistemic impossibility, of a normative pluriverse. I do so mainly by revealing a certain constraint on ought-likeness. (shrink)

This paper advances relationalism as an epistemic alternative to the fragmented relativism embedded in colonial-modern epistemology. By integrating insights from Sāṁkhya metaphysics, Mahāyāna Buddhist interdependence (Pratītyasamutpāda), and contemporary cognitive science, it redefines intelligence (Buddhi) as a relational, participatory force rather than a mechanistic or contextually fragmented function. The study critiques modernity’s privileging of materialist essentialism, arguing that potentiality (Puruṣa) and actuality (Prakṛti) exist in dynamic interplay, where the incorporeal remains fundamental while the corporeal is consequential. Similarly, Mahāyāna Buddhist relational ontology (...) reveals that actuality emerges through networked convergence, challenging the ontological assumptions of Enlightenment scientism. This paper also explores the implications of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) within a pluriversal epistemic framework, proposing that AI must transcend computational reductionism and align with an ontology of relational intelligence that fosters epistemic justice and planetary-scale ethical engagement. By reclaiming intelligence as a mode of epistemic and existential liberation, this study argues for a shift from extractive knowledge paradigms to participatory ontologies, fostering a pluriversal future that transcends the limitations of modernity and its colonial legacies. (shrink)

This paper reframes intelligence as an immanent, relational, and ethical characteristic of ecological systems, challenging anthropocentric views that confine it to individual minds. Drawing on Leibniz’s monadology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, Ruyer’s primary consciousness, Grosz’s incorporeality, Deleuze’s immanence, Whitehead’s process philosophy, Levin’s bioelectric morphogenesis, and relational ontology (Prabakaran, 2025), we argue that intelligence is the pluriverse’s capacity for responsiveness, adaptation, and creativity, expressed through entities as localized affects. Rooted in Mahāyāna Buddhism’s pratītyasamutpāda (Garfield, 1995), this intelligence is inherently ethical, (...) fostering mutual flourishing within interdependent webs. Unethical behavior arises from the delusion of separateness, occluding intelligence and disrupting ecological harmony. Through embryogenesis and the practice of subtractive teleology, we illustrate how intelligence operates as an ethical ecology, calling for a reorientation toward relational responsiveness and care. (shrink)

This essay reconceptualizes the ethical field as a dynamic, pluriversal ecology of interdependent relations, drawing on Sāṁkhya metaphysics, Mahāyāna Buddhist Pratītyasamutpāda, and relational ontology to argue that existence unfolds within a co-creative matrix of responsibility and intelligence. Dissociation from this field—crossing the dharmic threshold through the illusion of autonomy—fractures the ethical relation, fostering an adharmic crisis marked by extractive power and ecological impoverishment. By privileging relational intelligence (Buddhi) over fragmented relativism, the essay critiques colonial-modern epistemologies that prioritize autonomous relata over (...) interdependent relationality. Through the practice of subtractive teleology, it proposes an ontological return to the ethical field, aligning human action with dharma as mutual flourishing. Integrating insights from contemporary thinkers like Barad, Bateson, and Levin, the essay envisions intelligence as an ethical ecology, offering a decolonial framework for restoring relational harmony in a pluriversal world. (shrink)

This paper proposes a radical shift in metaphysical understanding by replacing the conventional time-space continuum with a relational age-shape continuum, conceptualized as a pluriversal and affective field. Drawing from Indian philosophical traditions such as the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya, and Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka, alongside Western relational metaphysics including Leibniz’s Monadology, Julian Barbour’s shape dynamics, and Mahāyāna Buddhist concepts of śūnyatā (emptiness) and pratītyasamutpāda (co-dependent origination), we argue that time and space are not ontologically fundamental. Instead, entities emerge as affects of a dynamic (...) pluriverse—a world of many worlds—constituted by karmic momentum (kāla) and relational place configurations (sthala, deśa). This framework reconceptualizes intelligence as a non-agential, immanent process that expresses itself through entities rather than being possessed by them. The ethical imperative of subtractive teleology emerges as a practice of shedding illusory separateness to realize interdependence, aligning with the realization of śūnyatā. By emphasizing ratios as measures of transformation, this age-shape ontology offers a participatory metaphysics that addresses ecological, ethical, and existential challenges through a relational understanding of existence. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that intrinsically bad possible worlds are inconsistent with the perfect goodness of God. A perfectly good being could not exist in possible worlds that are intrinsically bad. Indeed it is widely believed that possible worlds that are insufficiently good are inconsistent with a perfectly good God. Modal atheological arguments aim to show that, since the pluriverse includes intrinsically bad worlds and insufficiently good worlds, there necessarily does not exist a perfectly good God. I show that (...) modal atheological arguments are in general invalid. Modal atheological arguments fail to show that there exists no perfectly good God even on the assumption that there are extremely bad worlds in the pluriverse. Modal atheological arguments depend entirely on the logic of modality in S5. But the logic of S5 ensures that a perfectly good God is consistent with extremely bad possible worlds and so guarantees that a perfectly good God is consistent with a plenitudinous pluriverse. (shrink)

In 1901 Russell had envisaged the new analytic philosophy as uniquely systematic, borrowing the methods of science and mathematics. A century later, have Russell’s hopes become reality? David Lewis is often celebrated as a great systematic metaphysician, his influence proof that we live in a heyday of systematic philosophy. But, we argue, this common belief is misguided: Lewis was not a systematic philosopher, and he didn’t want to be. Although some aspects of his philosophy are systematic, mainly his pluriverse (...) of possible worlds and its many applications, that systematicity was due to the influence of his teacher Quine, who really was an heir to Russell. Drawing upon Lewis’s posthumous papers and his correspondence as well as the published record, we show that Lewis’s non- Quinean influences, including G.E. Moore and D.M. Armstrong, led Lewis to an anti- systematic methodology which leaves each philosopher’s views and starting points to his or her own personal conscience. (shrink)

This paper rethinks intelligence not as a computational or representational faculty, but as an ecological, embodied, and ethical unfolding. Drawing from Friston’s predictive coding, Fields’ processual epistemology, Kastrup’s ontological idealism, Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus, Weil’s moral attention, and Buddhist prajñā traditions, it reframes intelligence as a subtractive and relational field. Rather than an intrinsic property of discrete agents, intelligence emerges as an incorporeal coherence manifesting through corporeal forms. The paper introduces “descenting into realness” as a deconditioning process that reveals intelligence not (...) through accumulation, but through subtraction—via openness to what exceeds inherited structures of cognition. Through a theory of “subtractive teleology,” inspired by Badiou’s ethics of the void, the essay positions intelligence as evolving through rupture, fidelity, and ethical resonance. Intelligence is thus reconceived as a field of ethical responsiveness, oriented toward the unfolding of the pluriverse. (shrink)

This article presents a discursive critique of the Eurocentric paradigms of knowledge production that characterise much of the underlying logics in the age of neoliberal discourses on resilience, pointing out important areas not given sufficient attention. In particular, it highlights the limits of the modernist ontology of resilience, whereby extremely “vulnerable” African communities are encouraged “to become resilient” to climatic disruption and environmental catastrophe and to “bounce back” as rapidly as possible. The article moves the discussion forward, drawing from critical (...) decolonial approaches, in alignment with Indigenous knowledges, to question and rethink meaningful alternative ontologies, ways of knowing and being, in adaptive governance. I argue that the recognition of the plurality of many worlds, rather than one world, highlighted through critical decolonial understandings of epistemic forms with Indigenous knowledges, can be counterposed to Western universality as an innovative ontology to decentre the world order in the problematic dominant development of resilience thinking. Keywords: resilience; decolonisation; Africa; epistemology; pluriverse; Indigeneity. (shrink)

Set-theoretic pluralism is an increasingly influential position in the philosophy of set theory (Balaguer [1998], Linksy and Zalta [1995], Hamkins [2012]). There is considerable room for debate about how best to formulate set-theoretic pluralism, and even about whether the view is coherent. But there is widespread agreement as to what there is to recommend the view (given that it can be formulated coherently). Unlike set-theoretic universalism, set-theoretic pluralism affords an answer to Benacerraf’s epistemological challenge. The purpose of this paper is (...) to determine what Benacerraf’s challenge could be such that this view is warranted. I argue that it could not be any of the challenges with which it has been traditionally identified by its advocates, like of Benacerraf and Field. Not only are none of the challenges easier for the pluralist to meet. None satisfies a key constraint that has been placed on Benacerraf’s challenge. However, I argue that Benacerraf’s challenge could be the challenge to show that our set-theoretic beliefs are safe – i.e., to show that we could not have easily had false ones. Whether the pluralist is, in fact, better positioned to show that our set-theoretic beliefs are safe turns on a broadly empirical conjecture which is outstanding. If this conjecture proves to be false, then it is unclear what the epistemological argument for set-theoretic pluralism is supposed to be. (shrink)

Contemporary political theory (CPT) has approached questions of plurality and diversity by drawing rather implicitly on anthropological accounts of difference. This was the case with the ‘cultural turn’, which significantly shaped theories of multiculturalism. Similarly, the current ‘ontological turn’ is gaining influence and leaving a marked impact on CPT. I examine the recent turn and assess both the possibilities it offers and the challenges it poses for decentering CPT and opening radical, decolonial avenues for thinking difference otherwise. I take Paul (...) Nadasdy's critique of the ontological turn as an invitation to reflect on the methodological precepts that inform how the field frames the scope and limits of comparison. In pursuit of this, I examine the Zapatistas’ notion of a ‘world of many worlds’, which provides a way of approaching difference that captures the generative aspects of the ontological turn while avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and political inertia. I argue that the Zapatistas’ insights offer ethical guidance towards social and ecological thriving. Ultimately, my goal is to move CPT towards a more capacious form of making sense of what is out there in the world, and thus make room for better ways of inhabiting the Earth. (shrink)