Levi Bryant post that complements both his interview here and recent discussion about GPS

The post is HERE. In it Levi explains how Speculative Realism arose in part out of a shared dissatisfaction with aspects of the linguistic turn (in analytic and contintental philosophy), phenomenology, and new historicism. [Protevi's recent inteview with Bryant, I think one of the most interesting in the series, is HERE.]

In some of the comments coming from Mohan and Schleisser's interesting discussions about the possible decline of Generalized Philosophy of Science, I tried to argue that the Quinean heritage in analytic philosophy has bifurcated. On the one hand you have an increasingly a prioristic approach to ontology which follows Quine's thinking of theories as formally regimented linguaform things so that issues like reduction and emergence are addressed in terms of possible derivability relations between such logical theories. The apex of this tradition is now in the "to be is to be the value of a bound variable" type metaphysics instanced by someone like Sider writing on the philospohy of time. On the other hand you have Quine's professed anti-apriorism followed to the hilt by people like Mark Wilson, Ian Hacking, and Stephen Stich.

And one of the thing constitutive of these thinkers like this is how they manage to remain true to the broad questions posed, and lessons learned from the more aprioristic tradition while still wholely rejecting the logico/linguaform idealizations of those traditions. Yet they still radically inform their work with deep discussions of various overallapping historical, cultural, and factual domains. I mean Wilson is doing rist rate epistemology and metaphysics broadly enough construed [I should note here that this does not mean that we should no longer philosophize about more aprioristic things, like logic itself! In addition, the naturalistic methodology in no way robs philosophy of its normative job, as Penelope Maddy (a great philosopher!) sometimes argues as if it should.]

In continental philosophy I think that neo-Deleuzians like Protevi, Bell, and Delanda and Speculative Realists like Bryant, Harman, Brassier, Boghost, Morton, and Meillassoux (and to some extent Latour is in the background too) are doing something exactly analogous as the second Quinean tradition! The work is still informed by the questions posed by the great more prioristic and more epistemologically motivated continental traditions, it still contains enough normative space to be revisionary of the practices explained, and yet the methodology is much more broadly naturalistic, exploring in depth various types of objects (hurricanes, speciesation, the experience of horror, anger, personal identity, avatars, operating systems, ecosystems, warfare, etc. etc. etc.) in greater depth. I think Levi's interview and the post I linked to above gives a really good sense of the background of this analogous movement in continental philosophy.

Just to be clear, by "methodological naturalism" of first rate post phenomenological continental philosophy and post positivistic analytic philosophy (accepting cartoon construals of each movement to make the contrast), I do *not* mean science envy or anything specifically to do with the metaphysical views about the supernatural. In fact, somebody should maybe do a post titled "Naturalism: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" on this very issue. [I'm not the one to write it though, in part because I don't know how the fact that Robert Brandom is among my favorite philosophers (living or among the mighty dead) fits with any of the above views. Brandom does gets the kind of friction I like, but this is more by his engagement with the history of philosophy. . . but he is also doing philosophy of logic, language, and mind in a really nice frictiony way. Even though I think some empirical results involving for example animal cognition requires revising some of the views, the bigger project and setup of dialectical space doesn't fade to irrelevance the more linguistics or psychology you learn.]