Graham Harman

This discussion concerns whether philosophical materialism is false or not. The exchange between Graham Harman and Javier Pérez-Jara goes to the core of the present book: what is materialism, how many varieties are there, and what use are they today? While Harman identifies materialism with reductionism, Pérez-Jara offers a broader definition that includes non-reductionist materialisms. It might seem to be just as a matter of differing definitions. And yet, each approach gives rise to a whole different way of reconstructing the history of philosophy as well as of deciding which are the current available options in metaphysics.

Prometheanism -- Brassier at Goldsmiths -- Brassier's nihilism -- The path ahead -- Vitalist idealism -- Grant at Goldsmiths -- Philosophies of nature after Schelling -- A new sense of idealism -- Object-oriented ontology (OOO) -- OOO at Goldsmiths -- The withdrawn -- Objects and their qualities -- Vicarious causation -- The crucial place of aesthetics -- Speculative materialism -- Meillassoux at Goldsmiths -- After finitude -- Glimpses of the divine inexistence -- The two axes of speculative realism.

We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. "To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory." At OOO's heart is the idea that objects--whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human, or non-human--are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out OOO's history, ideas, and impact, taking in art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. From Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, and videogames to Dadaism, Voltaire, and string theory, this book will change the way you understand everything.

Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl in Voice and Phenomenon targets several ways in which Husserl’s theory of signs is said to remain dependent on a model of presence, and therefore to be a form of onto-theology. In a sense this simply extends Martin Heidegger’s own critique of Husserl as failing to account for what remains obscure behind any presentation to the mind. Yet Derrida’s critique is ultimately more radical than Heidegger’s, though the radicality is in this case unjustified. Namely, Derrida goes beyond Heidegger’s critique of presence to mount an additional critique of “self-presence,” which is more often known as “identity.” Derrida’s insufficiently motivated critique of identity leads to additional problems for his philosophy.

This article begins with a treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” The essay is often read, in the deconstructive tradition, as a showcase example of the impossibility of making a literal philosophical claim: is Nietzsche’s claim that all truth is merely metaphorical itself a true statement, or merely a metaphorical one? The present article claims that this supposed paradox relies on the groundless assumption that all philosophy must ultimately be grounded in some unshakeable literal truth. From here, we turn to Edmund Gettier’s famous critique of the widespread notion of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Expanding on Gettier’s point, it is argued that there can only be “justified untrue belief” or “unjustified true belief,” never a belief that is both justified and true at once.

A recent political critique of Speculative Realism by Catherine Malabou finds fault with this loosely arranged movement for its focus on reality in its own right, apart from the subject. Malabou responds with a radical ontological claim, holding effectively – if not always explicitly – that subject and object mutually generate one another amidst a primal void. After criticizing this idea, I point to some of the difficult political consequences of such a position, though Malabou defines it positively as an anarchic awakening that generates new collectivities unconstrained by any thing-in-itself. By contrast, I contend that nonhuman constraints and collaborators are an intimate part of the human political sphere. More generally, it is shown that there are consequences for which sorts of relations are taken to be the primary political relations.

Este artículo es una respuesta a la crítica de Noé Expósito Ropero —que se basa en gran medida en la visión de Javier San Martín— a mi interpretación de la filosofía de José Ortega y Gasset. El resultado del argumento de Expósito Ropero es que Ortega es más fenomenólogo de lo que yo considero, que me equivoco al pen-sar que existen los “objetos reales” más allá de los objetos intencionales de Edmund Husserl, y que ningún objeto inanimado puede ser tratado como un “yo”. Como réplica, respondo a cada una de estas acusaciones.This article is a response to Noé Expósito Ropero’s critique—which draws heavily on the views of Javier San Martín—of my interpretation of the philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset. The upshot of Expósito Ropero’s argument is that Ortega is more of a phenomenologist than I realize, that I am wrong to think there is any such thing as “real objects” beyond Edmund Husserl’s intentional objects, and that no inanimate object can be treated as an “I.” In response, I answer each of these charges.

The essay contrasts “realism” in the usual sense (of referring to the existence of a reality outside the human mind) with Harman’s own Object-Oriented Ontology, which broadens the meaning of the term to refer to the existence of a reality outside any relation, including inanimate causal relations. The idea here is that the real is a surplus that is never quite reflected in any actual state of the world. In political theory, “realism” generally refers to a“hardcore” actualist theory of politics, represented prominently by Thomas Hobbes and the later Carl Schmitt, that tries to get rid of hypocritical high-minded ideals, instead looking at political power in the way it actually works. Again by contrast with this, Harman defends a different sense of political realism, consistent with Object-Oriented Ontology and represented by recent works of Bruno Latour, according to which our understanding of politics must acknowledge both the inherent fallibility of our understanding of the world and the relevance of non-human actors and agencies to political problems and actions.

This article contends that the central principle of modern philosophy is obscured by a side-debate between two opposed camps that are united in accepting a deeper flawed premise. Consider the powerful critiques of Kantian philosophy offered by Quentin Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, respectively. These two thinkers criticize Kant for opposite reasons: Meillassoux because Kant collapses thought and world into a permanent “correlate” without isolated terms, and Latour because Kant tries to purify thought and world from each other rather than realizing that they are always combined in “hybrid” form. What both critiques tacitly accept is the notion that “thought” and “world” are the two major poles of the universe. I claim that this stems from the post-Cartesian assumption that thought and world are the two basic kinds of things that exist. The name “onto-taxonomy” is introduced for this view.

The Hungarian-born philosopher of science Imre Lakatos introduces the methodology of scientific research programs, and also makes a famous distinction between “progressive” and “degenerating” programs. Although Lakatos does not give extensive guidance as to whether philosophical rather than scientific theories could also be judged in this way, he does give some intriguing hints in his discussion of a debate on induction between Rudolf Carnap and Karl Popper. After considering two extant but misguided attempts to use “degenerating” as a polemical term in philosophy, this article gathers the aforementioned hints from Lakatos and a few others from Alfred North Whitehead in an effort to identify what a “progressive philosophy” might look like.

There have been several criticisms of Object-Oriented Ontology from the political Left. Perhaps the most frequent one has been that OOO’s aspiration to speak of objects apart from all their relations runs afoul of Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism.” The main purpose of this article is to show that even a cursory reading of the sections on commodity in Marx’s Capital does not support such an accusation. For Marx, the sphere of entities that are not commodities is actually quite wide, including all the beings of nature not subject to exchange, as well as bartered goods, and tithes and rents paid in kind to feudal lords. In short, the theory of commodity fetishism is a theory of v a l u e, not an anti-realist theory of b e i n g, and thus does not touch on OOO at all. In closing, I make some brief comments on Marx’s relation to Kantian formalism and to Heidegger’s famous account of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand.

This article begins by addressing a critique of my book Immaterialism by the archaeologists Þóra Pétursdóttirr and Bjørnar Olsen in their 2018 article “Theory Adrift.” As they see it, I restrict myself in Immaterialism to available historical documentation on the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and they wonder how my account might have changed if I had discussed more typical archaeological examples instead: wrecked and sunken ships, released ballast, deserted harbors, distributed goods, and derelict fortresses. In response, I argue that my account was not therefore non-archaeological, since ruins are the topic of archaeology only by accident: the real subject of the discipline is what Marshall McLuhan describes as “cold media,” in the sense that they are low in information. McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media is shown to be surprisingly analogous to Aristotle’s difference between continua and discrete substances, and some consequences are drawn from this analogy.

This article provides a critical treatment of the ontology underlying Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One. Metzinger asserts that interdisciplinary empirical work must replace ‘armchair’ a priori intuitions into the nature of reality; nonetheless, his own position is riddled with unquestioned a priori assumptions. His central claim that ‘no one has or has ever had a self’ is meant to have an ominous and futuristic ring, but merely repeats a familiar philosophical approach to individuals, which are undermined by reducing them downward to their material underpinnings, and ‘overmined’ by reducing them upward to their functional effects. Ultimately, Metzinger blends a rigid form of traditional materialism with an ontology of processes and events that is too reminiscent of late 1990’s continental philosophy. In both directions, the novelty and fertility of Metzinger’s position can be called into question.

This book is a major contribution to the understanding of Heidegger and a rare attempt to bridge the schism between traditions of analytic and Continental philosophy. Cristina Lafont applies the core methodology of analytic philosophy, language analysis, to Heidegger's work providing both a clearer exegesis and a powerful critique of his approach to the subject of language. In Part One, she explores the Heideggerean conception of language in depth. In Part Two, she draws on recent work from theorists of direct reference to reveal the limitations of Heidegger's views and to show how language shapes our understanding of the world without making learning impossible. The book first appeared in German but has been substantially revised for the English edition.