Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.
For a really first-rate anthology that ecapsulates a lot of the main issues, see The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. The anthology includes essays and interviews by Badiou, Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Alberto Toscano, Adrian Johnson, Martin Hagglund, Peter Hallward, Nathan Brown, Nick Srnicek, Reza Negarastani, Quentin Meillassoux, Francois Laruelle, Levi Bryant, Steven Shaviro, Bruno Latour, Gabriel Catren, Isabelle Stengers, Manuel Delanda, our very own John Protevi, and the indomitable Slavoj Zizek. Next Spring Semester I'm going to teach this anthology along with some of Harman's own books.
In Harman's post above he characterizes some of the prehistory of the term "Speculative Realism." The first plank is a revolt against the reigning pretense that phenomenology somehow got us past various idealism/realism controversies. Lee Braver's masterful A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-realism went far to verify Richard Rorty's contention about the pose of being beyond realism/idealism disputes. Rorty stated that what always ended up laying beyond the very dispute was in fact idealism. Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude critiqued the pervasiveness of various unacknowledged permutations of Berkeley's Hylas/Philonous master argument. Permutations of the same idealist argument is almost constitutively made by everyone who claims to deconstruct or somehow undermine the very distinction between realism and idealism. So the first step in speculative realism a rejection of the pretense that phenomenology provided some point where realism/anti-realism issues could be avoided, and to understand that very pretense as just being anti-realism. Graham Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier all share this view.
The second plank is the realism. The involves rejecting the idea that being is in any way necessarily correlated with human existence. But the rejection can take a variety of forms. One rejection is via some variety of panpsychism. This is to accept Berkeleyan arguments as sound, concluding that reality has properties we associate with minds, but to hold that this has nothing in particular to do with human minds. Or one can reject the validity of the Berkeleyan reasoning altogether, which may or may not lead to a form of nihilism (see Brassier's Nihil Unbound). I think Harman's own work is somewhere in the middle of this continuum. In his fantastic book Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects he radically externalizes relations that orthodox Heideggerians take to be constitutive of people/object interactions. For Harman, the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit play always takes place whenever any two objects interact. Critics and defenders have seen this as a subtle form of panpsychism. Harman argues that it is not, but notes that pan-psychism is closer to his view than many fashionable forms of naturalism, which he rejects.
The third plank is the "speculative" part. This is the most difficult to cash out. As Harman notes, the one thing in common to the early speculative realists is an appreciation for Lovecraft. This tempermant shows up in philosophy in a variety of ways: (1) A rejection of strong ties between conceivability and possibility. Reality first and foremost is what is capable of suprising us and problematizing whatever theory we apply to it. Human beings have no very good priveleged access about what is in fact conceivable, because reality always surprises us and overturns previous conceptions. This is why Lovecraft is a patron saint, because much of his fiction describes the indescribable as indescribable (Neal Hebert and I argue as much in a paper for me and Silcox's forthcoming anthology on philosophy and Dungeons and Dragons). Lee Braver actually has a really manuscript outlining a guerilla history of continental philosophy in terms of this very trope (I think he is developing it into a book project). Braver traces its first articulation to Kierkegaard. On its own in the history of continental philosophy it tends to lead to neo-Kantian "realism of the remainder" type realisms. The Object Oriented Ontology of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant has as its founding moment the rejection of realism of the remainder, the view that the real is some inarticulate and inarticulable mush (see Harman's Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things and Bryant's forthcoming Democracy of Objects). [The way in which this rejection is made actually ties their work to Graham Priest's main argument in Beyond the Limits of Thought in interesting ways]. But Harman and Bryant do accept the trope that part of what constitutes the real is the ability for novel things to happen, they just show what happens when you marry this view to a metaphysical commitment to objects that exist independently of humans. In terms of telling a new history of continental realism,there are open and interesting questions concerning the extent to which the "continental materialist" tradition tracing from Marx and Nietzsche through to Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari provides something beyond realism of the remainder realism. The extent that it is fair to characterize Protevi and Delanda as Object Oriented Philosophers is the extent to which their development of these thinkers gets us beyond realism of the remainder. (2) Commitment to strong views of emergence. In the Object Oriented vein, when objects interact in novel ways, novel properties come to the fore. Again, Harman is able to articulate this beautifully in terms of a radical externalization of the way Heidegger presents the scheme/content distinction. My own work with Mark Silcox on emergent properties (we have papers in American Philosophical Quarterly and the British Journal of Aesthetics, and a chapter in our video games book) is part of what brought me into the fold. (3) A rejection of naturalism. Again, this is not necessarily to affirm anti-realism about science. It's just the view that there is more to reality than our scientific theories capture. C.S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga (who cites Lewis), Robert Brandom, and John McDowell all make arguments similar to some made by speculative realists. In the book proposal I am going to make to this series, one of the things I will try to do is to motivate Harmanian themes in part by critiquing the quietism of Brandom and McDowell, while accepting their anti-naturalism. The resulting view is a recognizable variety of speculative realism.
Anyhow, given my analytic background of writing about Dummett, and recent interests in Pittsburgh Hegelianism, I find Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology to be among the most exciting things going on in contemporary metaphysics. Hopefully the book will be able to substantiate this claim from an analytic perspective. Being fair to McDowell is probably going to add a year of writing time though.
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