It would seem that currently there is no text titled “A Dictionary of Philosophical Verbs”. That’s a pity, but it does give one something to search for in the library of Babel. We find ourselves wondering about the projects such a text would make possible.
Speculatively imagining such a project, a taxonomy, raises the question of whether the movement of thought is a transition or accumulation of possible processes indexed by these verbs. There seems to have been a long age of subsumption, where thought moved, at times in astonishing ways, to grasp ever further at the edges that would trace the contours of a figure that could enclose the given. Once this figure came into relief, though, a different set of movements arise. Thus, we discover a preponderance of actions, movements, pulses that could be vaguely brought together under the heading of orthogonality. To cut, to unwind, to resonate…
Or, rather: cutting, unwinding, resonating? Would that dictionary be an endless enumeration of infinitives, in the staccato “to”s? Or would it rhyme endlessly in “-ing”s, an image of thought where even the alphabetically ordered text is in permanent movement that enlivens and transforms the seemingly timeless concepts — abating, adjusting, affecting, aggravating?
Anyway, one can dream of such texts, and the projects they would engender. Find here four sideways glances at such a potential, where ‘subsumpting’ has been pushed to its edges and discarded for orthogonal excursions across and through…