Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century (2014)

“Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology and theorize aesthetics in its ontological connotations. It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as “first philosophy” and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism aesthetics no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of processes, entities, and objects as free from our allpervasive anthropocentrism which states, always, that everything is “for us.”

This special issue of Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism explores the ramifications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics. In doing so, it stages a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature.”

With contributions by Steven Shaviro, Theodor Leiber and Kirsten Voigt Sellars, Matija Jelača, Claire Colebrook, N. Katherine Hayles, Jon Cogburn and Mark Allan Ohm, Miguel Penas López, Graham Harman, Bettina Funcke, Thomas Gokey, Robert Jackson, Roberto Simanowski, Francis Halsall, Magdalena Wisniowska Disegno, and Sjoerd van Tuinen.

Edited by Ridvan Askin, Paul J Ennis, Andreas Hägler, and Philip Schweighauser
Publisher punctum books, Brooklyn, NY, May 2014
Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA
ISBN 0692203168, 9780692203163
ISSN 2327-803X
474 pages

PDF (single PDF, 9 MB, updated on 2016-12-24)
PDFs (individual essays, updated on 2016-12-24)

Nikolaus Gansterer (ed.): Drawing A Hypothesis: Figures of Thought (2011)

“Drawing a Hypothesis is a reader on the ontology of forms of visualizations and on the development of the diagrammatic view and its use in contemporary art, science and theory. In a process of exchange with artists and scientists, Nikolaus Gansterer reveals drawing as a media of research enabling the emergence of new narratives and ideas by tracing the speculative potential of diagrams. Based on a discursive analysis of found figures with the artists’ own diagrammatic maps and models, the invited authors create unique correlations between thinking and drawing. Due to its ability to mediate between perception and reflection, drawing proves to be one of the most basic instruments of scientific and artistic practice, and plays an essential role in the production and communication of knowledge. The book is a rich compendium of figures of thought, which moves from scientific representation through artistic interpretation and vice versa.”

Translation: Veronica Buckley, Aileen Derieg
Publisher Springer, 2011
Edition Angewandte
ISBN 3709108020, 9783709108024
352 pages

Review: Mark Robert Doyle, Gert Hasenhuetl (in German).

Author
Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-12-17)

Isabelle Stengers: The Invention of Modern Science (1993–) [EN, PT]

The so-called exact sciences have always claimed to be different from other forms of knowledge. How are we to evaluate this assertion? Should we try to identify the criteria that seem to justify it? Or, following the new model of the social study of the sciences, should we view it as a simple belief? The Invention of Modern Science proposes a fruitful way of going beyond these apparently irreconcilable positions, that science is either “objective” or “socially constructed.” Instead, suggests Isabelle Stengers, one of the most important and influential philosophers of science in Europe, we might understand the tension between scientific objectivity and belief as a necessary part of science, central to the practices invented and reinvented by scientists.

First published in French as L’Invention des sciences modernes, La Découverte, Paris, 1993.

English edition
Translated by Daniel W. Smith
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Theory Out of Bounds series, 19
ISBN 0816630569, 9780816630561
185 pages

Review (Robert Evans, Contemporary Sociology, 2002)
Commentary (Stephen Shaviro, 2004)

Publisher (EN)
Google books (EN)

The Invention of Modern Science (English, trans. Daniel W. Smith, 2000)
A invenção das ciências modernas (Portuguese, trans. Max Altman, 2002)