In Graham Harman’s realist philosophy, which I call “ontological liberalism,” all objects are considered equal, there being no unbridgeable gap between various modes of being. Every object is a unique individual, endowed with a positive being. Any privileging of a certain class of objects over other classes of objects is invalidated. An object is composed of its relations, summarized under the heading of what Harman calls “sensual qualities,” while objects also contain mutually inaccessible essences. Supposedly, every object may be characterized (...) by the duality of relationality and substantiality. According to ontological liberalism, all objects exist. In this essay, I propose an ontological nihilist critique of Harman’s liberal ontology. We cannot exclude the possibility of every object being equally nonexistent. Appearances could pertain all the way down, with no final substance at the end of the infinite chain of appearances. Building on insights gleaned from Jan Westerhoff’s defence of ontological nihilism, I propose a nihilist reconfiguration of Harman’s ontological liberalism. If objects and relations are empty and reality is made of appearances all the way down, no underlying objective essence can or should be posited. Because relations are without basis, lacking in substance, nothing exists, nothing happens, and no objects exist. (shrink)

This book argues for an actualist and presentist reading of Bergson’s philosophy of time. Instead of the past or future, what matters is the self-realization of diverse durations. Through both philosophical and interdisciplinary means, Adam Lovasz actualizes Bergson’s work and brings it into dialogue with contemporary scientific debates.

Walking is an activity that always unfolds within a certain landscape. Tim Ingold has used the notion of “taskscape” to denote pragmatic uses of terrain. Whilst walking, we come to intersect with a variety of taskscapes. As Julia Tanney has highlighted, formal language can only get us so far when thinking about spontaneous, non-theoretical and non-representational activities. Borrowing Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “knowing that” and knowing how”, I argue for a concept of walking that does not privilege intentions. When somebody (...) walks, they melt into a taskscape not entirely of their own design. Mind is inherently ecological. It is enacted within a certain ecology, and is actually inseparable from its environment. Mind is the sum of intelligent enactments. According to the position I seek to advance in this article, walking may be approached in an object-oriented manner. Each form of behavior composes an enactment that meshes with a certain ecology, what W. Teed Rockwell has called a “behavioral field.” Mind is the inherently relational enactment of a set of behavioral dispositions which are always already enmeshed within a field. When these dispositions enter what, following Markus Gabriel, may be called “fields of sense”, mind and walking become independent objects in their own right. (shrink)