Niki Young

This article explores the underexamined political dimensions of Alphonso Lingis’ philosophy, with a focus on his understanding of community, alterity, and passion as a possibility for political action. I show how Lingis’ work departs from liberal individualism in order to emphasize “community” as a condition for political engagement rooted in the ethical imperative evoked by the singularity and suffering of others. I then present a speculative account of Lingisian politics which builds on the possible reasons for his admiration of revolutionary figures such as Gandhi and Ché Guevara as exemplars of a passionate, compassionate, and dynamic political praxis.

In this paper, I aim to clarify and expand Alphonso Lingis’ understanding of impassioned states by showing how society pathologises passion through the language of emotions, thereby obscuring the excesses that are constitutive of life. I proceed by first analysing how modernity reconfigures disruptive passions into manageable emotional states that sustain regularity, utility, and calculative models of the self. Second, I elaborate six interrelated properties of passion while systematically contrasting the latter with culturally coded emotions. Finally, I briefly examine how literature, theatre, cinema, and media narratives disclose the contingent, irrational forces that shape individual lives. I conclude that pathologising passion is not a neutral diagnostic gesture but a deeply philosophical operation that props up a shallow, needs-based conception of agency, and I argue instead for a philosophical practice that attends to impassioned ruptures and shared festive intensities as indispensable revelations of the real forces that contour both individual and collective existence.

This paper analyses Graham Harman’s and Alphonso Lingis’ views on the nature of experience, focusing on their shared emphasis on the difference between mundane experiences and disruptive states. The paper further delves into how Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology and Lingis’ phenomenology of substances similarly highlight the excess and mystery present in both objects and experience. Despite this shared emphasis on rupture, Harman and Lingis are shown to diverge in their views on the self; Lingis sees the “I” as emerging only through passion, while Harman posits a continuous, though often muffled, self across different states of experience.

This paper analyzes Alphonso Lingis’ contributions to the ongoing philosophical debate on the “question of the animal.” It situates Lingis’ philosophy of the animal within what Matthew Calarco calls the “indistinction” approach, a framework that transcends traditional binary distinctions between humans and animals. It also explores how Lingis’ philosophy challenges anthropocentrism by proposing a novel ontology of life that emphasizes the shared ontological ground between humans and animals, promoting an understanding of life as characterized by excess, kinship, and interconnectedness. It then goes on to link this to his ethical stance which is grounded in the phenomenology of the animal encounter. This paper ultimately advocates for the relevance and force of a Lingisian philosophy of the animal, underscoring its potential to reshape contemporary discussions on animal ontology, ethics, and environmental issues.

We revisit the notion of vicarious causation in Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in order to first show that Harman has articulated two iterations of his account that are in tension with one another; one is found in his earlier paper “On Vicarious Causation,” while the other is contained in his later writings following the publication of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. This involves a critical assessment of his developing theory of metaphor in a way that encourages sympathetic revision in the service of improving his non-correlationist view of intra-objective relations.

In recent years, a vast array of thinkers have been invested in challenging the long-standing binary division between the human and nonhuman. The notion of the human microbiome especially attests to the truth of such a complication, since current research in biology strongly suggests that we are at the very least as much microbe as we are human and that the number of microorganisms in the human body outnumber distinctly human cells considerably. In this article, we aim to bring the biological notion of the human microbiome in dialogue with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) so as to ultimately show that there can be a fruitful exchange of ideas between the two currents of microbiome research and OOO more specifically, and that Graham Harman’s top-down account of objective emergence can be fruitfully a bottom-up approach according to which the parts of an object also impact and constrain the whole.

In Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), an apparent tension arises between his pursuit of a self-proclaimed “new theory of everything,” or general ontology, and his assertion that any ontology must be able to account for distinctions among various regions of being. This paper delves into this tension between universality and specificity, particularly concerning the question of animal ontology, and examines the potential for constructing an object-oriented animal ontology. By juxtaposing Harman’s perspectives with those of Matthew Calarco and other scholars, I aim to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an animal ontology using the framework of OOO.

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a contemporary form of realism concerned with the investigation of “objects” broadly construed. It may be characterised in terms of a metaphysical pluralism to the extent that it recognises infinitely many different kinds of emergent entities, and this fact in turn leads to a number of questions concerning the nature of objects and emergence in OOO: what is the precise meaning of an emergent entity in OOO? How has emergence been denied throughout the history of Western thought? Is there a specific object-oriented account of emergence? What is the causal mechanism which provides the conditions of possibility for the generation of emergent entities? In this article, I aim to answer all these questions by constructing the first extensive account of real emergence in the context of Object-Oriented Ontology, and I also seek to tie this analysis to the notion of “vicarious” or indirect causation.

Speculative Realism (SR) has often been characterised as a heterogeneous group of thinkers, united almost exclusively in their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’ The terms ‘correlationism’ and ‘philosophy of access’ are in turn often treated – at times even by Meillassoux and Harman themselves – as synonymous. In this paper, I seek to analyse these terms to evaluate their similarities, but also possible differences. I shall argue that the difference between the two terms ought to be retained and emphasised, since it hints at important differences between the positions of Harman and Meillassoux.