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99The Problem with MetzingerCosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 7 (1): 7-36. 2011.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 u…Read more
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98Object-Oriented Ontology and Commodity Fetishism: Kant, Marx, Heidegger, and ThingsEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 1 (2): 28-36. 2017.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, includ…Read more
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96Materialism is Not the Solution: On Matter, Form, and MimesisNordic Journal of Aesthetics 24 (47): 94-110. 2015.This article defends a new sense of “formalism” in philosophy and the arts, against recent materialist fashion. Form has three key opposite terms: matter, function, and content. First, I respond to Jane Bennett’s critique of object-oriented philosophy in favor of a unified matter-energy, showing that Bennett cannot reach the balanced standpoint she claims to obtain. Second, I show that the form/function dualism in architecture gives us two purely relational terms and thus cannot do justice to th…Read more
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92Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and LecturesZero Books. 2010.These writings chart Harman's rise from Chicago sportswriter to co-founder of one of Europe's most promising philosophical movements: Speculative Realism. In 1997, Graham Harman was an obscure graduate student covering Chicago sporting events for a California website. Unpublished in philosophy at the time, he was already a popular conference speaker on Heidegger and related themes. Little more than a decade later, as the author of stimulating and highly visible books on continental philosophy, h…Read more
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89Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to ThingOpen Court. 2007.Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) influence has long been felt not just in philosophy, but also in such fields as art, architecture, and literary studies. Yet his difficult terminology has often scared away interested readers lacking an academic background in philosophy. In this new entry in the Ideas Explained series, author Graham Harman shows that Heidegger is actually one of the simplest and clearest of thinkers. His writings and analyses boil down to a single powerful idea: being is not presen…Read more
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82Concerning Stephen Hawking's Claim That Philosophy is DeadFilozofski Vestnik 33 (2): 11-22. 2012.The article begins from Stephen Hawking's well-known claim that philosophy is dead, and considers several other quotations in which philosophy is either belittled or subordinated outright to the natural sciences. This subordination requires a downward reductionism that is paralleled by the upward reductionism of the linguistic turn and social constructionist theories. Rather than undermining or overmining mid-sized individual entities, philosophy must deal with objects on their own terms. This s…Read more
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78The Future of Continental Realism: Heidegger’s FourfoldChiasma: A Site for Thought 3 81-98. 2016.
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76The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE (edited book)Zero Books. 2011.The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which took place on February 5, 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher Graham Harman.
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75Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the MakingEdinburgh University Press. 2011.Quentin Meillassoux has been described as the most rapidly prominent French philosopher in the Anglophone world since Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. With the publication of After Finitude (2006), this daring protege of Alain Badiou became one of the world's most visible younger thinkers. In this book, his fellow Speculative Realist, Graham Harman, assesses Meillassoux's publications in English so far. Also included are an insightful interview with Meillassoux and first-time translations of excerp…Read more
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71Agential and Speculative Realism: Remarks on Barad's OntologyRhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 30. 2016.
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70Plastic Surgery for the Monadology: Leibniz via HeideggerCultural Studies Review 17 (1): 211-229. 2011.The article discusses fascinating points of similarity and difference between Leibniz's Monadology and Heidegger's 'The Thing', two of the greatest short works in the history of philosophy. But the key point of intersection between them is not widely recognised: indirect causation.
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69The Battle of Objects and Subjects: Concerning Sbriglia and Žižek’s Subject Lessons AnthologyOpen Philosophy 3 (1): 314-334. 2020.This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.
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66Technology, Objects and Things in HeideggerCambridge Journal of Economics 34 (1): 17-25. 2010.Martin Heidegger is famous for his early analysis of tools, and equally famous for his later reflections on technology. This might suggest an easy literal reading of these themes in his work along the following lines: ‘Heidegger began his career fascinated by low-tech hardware such as hammers and drills, but later took an interest in advanced devices such as hydroelectric dams’. But such a literal interpretation would miss the point, since neither Heidegger's tool analysis nor his views on techn…Read more
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64Object-oriented ontology: a new theory of everythingPelican Books. 2018.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 …Read more
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61Whitehead and Schools X, Y, and ZIn Nicholas Gaskill & Adam Nocek (eds.), The Lure of Whitehead, Univ. of Minnesota Press. pp. 231-248. 2014.Graham Harman’s “Whitehead and Schools X, Y, and Z,” distinguishes among three schools of contemporary philosophy according to their respective positions on process, becoming, and relations: the schools of Whitehead and Latour, of Deleuze, Bergson, Simondon, and other philosophers of becoming, and of object-oriented philosophy. One of the goals of the essay is to challenge those who would too quickly align Whitehead with Deleuze.
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61On Interface: Nancy's Weights and MassesIn Peter Gratton & Marie-Eve Morin (eds.), Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense, State University of New York Press. pp. 95-107. 2012.
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59Response to ShaviroIn Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek & Graham Harman (eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Re.press. 2011.
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59On Progressive and Degenerating Research Programs With Respect to PhilosophyRevista Portuguesa de Filosofia 75 (4): 2067-2102. 2019.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 misg…Read more
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