Vasyl Korchevnyi

Basing on the philosophers that are primarily associated with speculative realism, the author of the article examines the place of this phenomenon in the context of contemporary philosophy. The discourses concerning these thinkers are structured according to the central tendencies, or motives, of the philosophical thought that is close to speculative realism. The research shows that these tendencies are as follow: realism, anti-Kantianism, materialism, anti-anthropocentrism, and philosophical attention to mathematical and natural sciences. Speculative realism is an ontological realism that affirms the possibility of human thought to know a thought-independent reality. Thus, it is anti-Kantian by its nature. However, for the most part, philosophers associated with speculative realism propose to transgress the Kantian frame through the radicalization of Kantianism itself. Speculative realism is often considered along with new materialism, but this concept is too wide and polisemantic today to provide considerable clarification concerning the nature of speculative realism. The latter is also characterized by its opposition to anthropocentrism, but this relation is not homogenous among speculative realists and, moreover, is somehow paradoxical, as their speculative stance reserves for humans the noblest ability: to know a thought-independent reality. Finally, the attempt to philosophically engage with natural and mathematical sciences plays a significant role in most of the examined philosophical projects. Speculative realism is inscribed in the speculative shift, or speculative turn, that is happening in the contemporary continental philosophy. This shift is a change in the attitude of the philosophical community towards the questions about “reality in itself” and about the “Great Outdoors.” The relevance of such problems is being restored, and they are becoming the subject of emerging realistic and speculative projects.Manuscript received 06.09.2020.

The article aims to explore the ways in which scholars from Poland and Ukraine engage with Graham Harman’s philosophical work1. The introductory part briefly describes Harman’s ontology and demonstrates the link connecting Harman with Polish and Ukrainian intellectual environments. Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) states that objects are the fundamental building blocks of reality and cannot be reduced either to what they are made of or to what they do, that is, either to their constituents or to their effects. The connection with Poland and Ukraine goes back to the theory of objects suggested by the Polish philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski, whom Harman names among the predecessors of his ontology and who influenced both Polish and Ukrainian intellectual milieus. The next part of the article examines the history of the reception, identifying its key events and publications. The reception in Poland proves to be much more substantial than in Ukraine. A common tendency is determined: a conflation of Harman’s OOO and speculative realism by mistakenly ascribing the features of the former to the latter (broader concept), which suggests that speculative realism is being received through the lens of Harman’s project. The next part establishes the key discursive points that are used to map Harman’s ideas within the contemporary philosophical landscape. They can be summarised by the terms antianthropocentrism and antireductionism. The final part analyses the strategies for applying Harman’s theory showing that it can become the lens for interpretation and direct our attention to nonhumans and the hidden, inexplicable dimension of things or provide an ontological grounding for semi-literary and literary discourses. The methodology of this application, though, needs further development and clarification. Overall, in Poland, two of Harman’s books and two articles have been translated, and at least two books, one Ph.D. dissertation, and around two dozen articles discuss or apply his ideas. Apart from philosophy, his OOO is used for discussing literature, video games, films, humanities in general, education, management processes, antique studies, and ecocriticism. In Ukraine, one of Harman’s articles has been translated, and around ten articles and one collective monography engage with his philosophical project. Some of the Ukrainian works also apply Harman’s OOO in contexts that are not strictly philosophical, namely, in literary criticism, urban studies, film studies, and humanities in general. This paper can be of use to researchers studying OOO and its reception in different countries. In addition, it can help Ukrainian and Polish scholars who want to discuss or use OOO to familiarize themselves with the previous reception in their countries, thus facilitating domestic philosophical interaction.

This article has a twofold aim. First, it attempts to reconstruct and critically analyze arguments provided by Quentin Meillassoux, a contemporary French philosopher, for his central philosophical thesis: only contingency is necessary. By this thesis, Meillassoux means that the main property of the absolute – reality which is independent of thought – is a possibility to be otherwise. It leads Meillassoux to the relinquishing of the principle of a sufficient reason. He argues that everything – even the laws of nature – has no reason to be what it is or to preserve its identity and existence. Such an extreme statement, surprisingly, is a part of Meillassoux`s attempt to contest irrational fideism. Such fideism is legitimized by the philosophical view which Meillassoux calls “correlationism”. It is a model of all de-absolutizing philosophies which assert the inability of thought to know the thought-independent reality, thus undermining the possibility of rational knowledge of the world. Secondly, this article aims to identify and make clear a specific type of rationality in which Meillassoux elaborates his arguments. We call it the rationality of non-One and try to show that it can propose an alternative to the classical Western rationality, structured by the metaphor of the One. The rationality of non-One can be an essential tool in the intellectual defense of rational knowledge when such a type of knowledge is questioned and undermined both by philosophical arguments of correlationism and by different forms of irrationalism. Such rationality presents a non-unifying form of rational thinking that avoids some controversial elements of Western reason. At the same time, such rationality does not become irrational because it preserves the principle of non-contradiction and tries to be consistent with scientific, especially mathematical, knowledge. Article received 10.09.2019

У листопаді 2018 р. у Національному університеті «Києво-Могилянська академія» відбулася Міжнародна наукова конференція «Філософія: Нове покоління», присвячена темі: «Історія Філософії та історії філософій». Починаючи з 2006 р., це вже тринадцята конференція «Філософія: Нове покоління», організаторами якої виступають студенти та аспіранти кафедри філософії та релігієзнавства НаУКМА. Як і в попередні роки, учасниками конференції були студенти, аспіранти, викладачі та наукові співробітники з різних міст України та зарубіжжя. Пропонований огляд висвітлює проблематику виголошених доповідей, а також лекцій і круглих столів, що відбулися в рамках конференції.