Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism, No. 3 (2012)
Filed under journal | Tags: · non-philosophy, philosophy, religion, speculative realism, theory

Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and post-continental philosophy.
“This is a leviathan whale of an issue [510 pages!] comprising articles (by Benjamin Norris, Beatrice Marovich, Levi Bryant, Daniel Whistler, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Christopher Norris, and Michael Haworth), position papers (by Christian Thorne and Peter Wolfendale), translations (Graham Harman’s “On Vicarious Causation” into German, for example), reviews (of Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects, Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus, Christopher Watkin’s Difficult Atheism, Andy Merrifield’s Magical Marxism, and Joseph Nechvatal’s nOise anusmOs installation), and an interview with Stathis Psillos. Those interested in the ongoing struggles to define exactly what Speculative Realism (SR) is, will want to read the translation of Louis Morelle’s comprehensive “Speculative Realism: After Infinitude and Beyond?” also included in this issue.” (publisher)
Editors: Michael Austin, Paul J. Ennis, Fabio Gironi, Thomas Gokey, Robert Jackson
Publisher punctum books, September 2012
Creative Commons license
ISBN 978-0988234017
510 pages
PDF (single PDF)
PDF (PDF articles)
Graham Harman: Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · contingency, fideism, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy, religion, science, speculative realism

Quentin Meillassoux has been described as the most rapidly prominent French philosopher in the Anglophone world since Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. With the publication of After Finitude (2006), this daring protege of Alain Badiou became one of the world’s most visible younger thinkers.
In this book, his fellow Speculative Realist, Graham Harman, assesses Meillassoux’s publications in English so far. Also included are an insightful interview with Meillassoux and first-time translations of excerpts from L’Inexistence divine (The Divine Inexistence), his famous but still unpublished major book.
Publisher Edinburgh University Press, July 2011
Speculative Realism series
ISBN 0748640800, 9780748640805
240 pages
PDF (updated 2012-7-26)
Comment (0)Levi R. Bryant: The Democracy of Objects (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · object, object-oriented ontology, onticology, ontology, philosophy, speculative realism, systems theory

Since Kant, philosophy has been obsessed with epistemological questions pertaining to the relationship between mind and world and human access to objects. In The Democracy of Objects, Bryant proposes that we break with this tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Drawing on the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, as well as the thought Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhman, Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour and the developmental systems theorists, Bryant develops a realist ontology that he calls “onticology”. This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects. Drawing on the work of the systems theorists and cyberneticians, Bryant argues that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. In this way, he is able to integrate the most vital discoveries of the anti-realists within a realist ontology that does justice to both the material and cultural. Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects.
Print and downloadable e-book versions will be available soon from the publisher.
Publisher: Open Humanities Press, September 2011
New Metaphysics series
ISBN 978-1-60785-204-9
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)
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