Graham Harman: The Quadruple Object (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · metaphysics, object-oriented ontology, ontography, ontology, panpsychism, phenomenology, philosophy, speculative realism
The book uses a pack of playing cards to present Harman’s metaphysical system of fourfold objects, including human access, Heidegger’s indirect causation, panpsychism and ontography.
In this book the metaphysical system of Graham Harman is presented in lucid form, aided by helpful diagrams.
In Chapter 1, Harman gives his most forceful critique to date of philosophies that reject objects as a primary reality. All such rejections are tainted by either an undermining or overmining approach to objects. In Chapters 2 and 3, he reviews his concepts of sensual and real objects. In the process, he attacks the prestige normally granted to philosophies of human access, which Harman links for the first time to the already discredited Menos Paradox. In Chapters 4 through 7, Harman brings the reader up to speed on his interpretation of Heidegger, which culminates in a fourfold structure of objects linked by indirect causation. In Chapter 8, he speculates on the implications of this theory for the debate over panpsychism, which Harman both embraces and rejects. In Chapters 9 and 10, he introduces the term ontography as the study of the different possible permutations of objects and qualities, which he simplifies with easily remembered terminology drawn from standard playing cards.
Publisher Zero Books, 2011
ISBN 1846947006, 9781846947001
148 pages
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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.
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