У статті досліджується місце об’єкта в полі спекулятивного реалізму загалом та об’єктно-орієнтованої онтології зокрема. Описується особливе положення об’єкта, яке йому надає ООО на противагу «кореляційному» відношенню. Взята за основу чотирична структура Ґ. Гармана доповнюється уявлюваним модусом об’єкта, чиє місце знаходиться на межі суб’єкт-об’єктної дихотомії. Сама дихотомія розглядається у контексті дослідження можливості її подолання завдяки підходу, який був запропонований прибічниками ООО. Стверджується неможливість повного переходу до цілковито об’єктної реальності, перепоною для чого слугує неможливість відокремлення останньої від поля уявлюваного.

I argue that phenomenology should take seriously what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given”. Phenomenologists have either ignored this idea or misunder-stood it. I argue that the Myth of the Given, if understood correctly, could be an objection to phenomenological method. Specifically I argue that Husserl’s static phenomenology is vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism. However, I also show that Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism because of how he navigates the relationship between phenomenology and science. This (...) shows that the question as to whether phenomenology is vulnerable to the Sellarsian criticism is more complicated than has been assumed by phenomenologists or their critics. (shrink)

Some contemporary philosophers have called for a “new realism” in philosophical ontology. Hartmann’s works provide some of the richest resources upon which recent realists might draw for both inspiration and argument. In this brief exploration I touch on some key concepts and arguments from a few of the players in this “ontological turn,” including Meillassoux, Brassier, and Ferraris, and show how many of them were already clearly articulated in Hartmann’s works. I’ll also describe and comment on Hartmann’s arguments concerning the (...) “thing in itself,” which he considers a key “critical” concept of his new ontology. His treatment of this issue demonstrates the sophistication—and, perhaps, superiority—of Hartmann’s approach. (shrink)

This essay interrogates recent materialist monisms, be they based on contingency, eliminativism, or objective phenomenology, on account of their metaphilosophical ramifications. It is argued that certain dualities must be retained, at least nominally, in order to have any explanatory purchase and escape velocity from philosophical circularity. Dyads such as “spirit” and “matter,” “manifest” and “scientific,” “living” and “dead,” or even “illusion” and “reality” are given an immanentist reading that treats them as equal parts of the Real. Following this revisionary metaphysics (...) that reviews the meaning of such terms as optical realities, the matter–spirit couple is specifically used to explain why reality cannot appear as just one thing, even if only in virtue of the illusion of at least two things. The consequences for philosophical monisms of all types, and for anthropocentric thought in general, are then examined in the light of the ethical effects of recent attempts to explain every thing through one medium alone. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

An inbuilt theoretical deficiency of any cybernetic or phenomenological accounts of human-smartphone interaction is that their inherited frameworks suffer from lopsided explanatory proficiencies. Neither can explicate one ‘side’ of the interaction without inappropriately foisting those logics onto its dyadic counterpart. In this paper, both Michael Polanyi’s bio-philosophy and a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy of brain seek to remedy this conceptual deficit by positing a conceptual toolkit that incorporates pertinent cybernetic and phenomenological revelations while abjuring their dogmatizing propensities. This conjoined reading of Polanyi (...) with Deleuze and Guattari asserts that temporary, bounded structures of interference between mind and machine – rooted in asymmetry, inertia, and labile planes of cognition – are the grounding dimension of human-smartphone interaction, which is itself taken as emblematic of our wider relations to smart technologies. (shrink)

This is a contribution to the debate on speculative realism deriving from the book The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. It is also in part a response to Fabio Gironi’s review article on the subject, ‘Between naturalism and rationalism: a new realist landscape’ 2012: 361–87).

After reading the stimulating exchange between Chris Drain and Siyaves Azeri, I wanted to reply to Drain from a slightly different angle. Drain’s latest response takes aim at what Vygotsky calls his general genetic law of development, which Drain suggests should be updated through an appreciation of Tomasello and Searle’s concept of “joint intentionality”. At the heart of Vygotsky’s thought is the claim that “every function in the cultural development of the child appears on the stage twice, in two planes, (...) first, the social, then the psychological, first between people as an intermental category, then within the child as an intramental category”. Drain takes Vygotsky to derive this from Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic”. Drain appears to follow Alexandre Kojève’s influential interpretation of Hegel, as picked up by continental philosophers like Sartre, in which the dialectic is treated as an allegory about social antagonism. As continental thought turned against Hegel and Marx, this reading was retained and Hegel himself was associated with social subordination. As a starting point for my response, I would note that Vygotsky and Hegel are not offering a social critique here: they are making a more basic point about the process of determination as such. Radical liberal constructivist critiques of Vygotsky of the kind offered by Jones and Stetsenko follow continental philosophy and critical theory in ignoring the constructive side of Hegelian negation and recognition. (shrink)

Editorial to a special edition of 'Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy': Creating the Future, December, 2018.