•  9
    Novelty in Badiou’s Theory of Objects: Alexander and the Functor
    Res Pública. Revista de Historia de Las Ideas Políticas 26 (3): 291-299. 2023.
    Alain Badiou’s treatment of objects in Logics of Worlds is both rich and highly technical, though its terminological challenges are softened by his use of illuminating examples. This article takes a twofold approach to the topic. In a first sense, the theory of objects developed in Logics of Worlds by way of an imagined protest at the Place de la République in Paris exhibits two questionable aspects: (1) the notion that the object is a bundle of qualities (found proverbially in Hume, but also in…Read more
  •  9
    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 th…Read more
  •  19
    Abstract:Niki Young speaks with Graham Harman about his Object-Oriented Philosophy in relation to his understanding of Heidegger's tool-analysis, and more.
  •  15
    Žižek and the Kantian gesture: Parallax and beyond
    Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofía 70 119-130. 2023.
    Early in his 1993 book Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek asks contemporary philosophy to “repeat the Kantian gesture.” The implication is that (much like Plato did with the Sophists) Kant accepted the critique of metaphysics made by David Hume, affirming it in an unexpected positive sense. The analogous gesture for a would-be Kant in our time would be to accept deconstruction’s insistence on the contingency of meaning while treating contingency not as a failing, but as the very stuff of t…Read more
  • Materialism Is False/Materialism Is Not False
    with Javier Pérez Jara
    In Gustavo E. Romero, Javier Pérez-Jara & Lino Camprubí (eds.), Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology, Springer. pp. 349-360. 2022.
    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 di…Read more
  •  8
    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 re…Read more
  •  55
    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
  • Poe's Black cat
    In Chris Washington & Anne C. McCarthy (eds.), Romanticism and speculative realism, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.
  •  4
    Art and objects
    Polity. 2019.
    OOO and art: a first summary -- Formalism and its flaws -- Theatrical, not literal -- The canvas is the message -- After high modernism -- Dada, surrealism, and literalism -- Weird formalism.
  •  19
    The Missing Pieces of Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon
    Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 6 (2): 4-25. 2022.
    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. N…Read more
  •  26
    Merely Intentional Objects: A Defense
    Foundations of Science 28 (4): 1177-1183. 2023.
  •  36
    On Truth and Lie in the Object-Oriented Sense
    Open Philosophy 5 (1): 437-463. 2022.
    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…Read more
  •  32
    Malabou’s Political Critique of Speculative Realism
    Open Philosophy 4 (1): 94-105. 2021.
    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 positi…Read more
  •  11
    Respuesta a Noé Expósito Ropero
    Investigaciones Fenomenológicas 17 369. 2021.
    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 c…Read more
  •  36
    Concerning the COVID-19 Event
    Philosophy Today 64 (4): 845-849. 2020.
    This article focuses on Alain Badiou’s surprisingly moderate response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is shown that his dismissal of the virus as a familiar problem best dealt with by bureaucratic managers stems from an overly idealist approach to one of his key philosophical topics: the event.
  •  61
    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.
  •  117
    The Only Exit From Modern Philosophy
    Open Philosophy 3 (1): 132-146. 2020.
    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 th…Read more
  •  55
    On Progressive and Degenerating Research Programs With Respect to Philosophy
    Revista 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
  •  2
    Editorial for the Second Volume of Open Philosophy
    Open Philosophy 2 (1): 590-591. 2019.
  •  94
    Object-Oriented Ontology and Commodity Fetishism: Kant, Marx, Heidegger, and Things
    Eidos. 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
  •  23
    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 dere…Read more
  •  5
    Editorial for the First Volume of Open Philosophy
    Open Philosophy 1 (1): 1-2. 2018.