Speculative realism is a movement in
contemporary
Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. Contemporary history is either a subset of the late modern period, or it is o ...
Continental
Continental may refer to:
Places
* Continent, the major landmasses of Earth
* Continental, Arizona, a small community in Pima County, Arizona, US
* Continental, Ohio, a small town in Putnam County, US
Arts and entertainment
* ''Continental'' (al ...
-inspired philosophy (also known as post-Continental philosophy) that defines itself loosely in its stance of
metaphysical realism
Philosophical realism is usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters. Realism about a certain kind of thing (like numbers or morality) is the thesis that this kind of thing has ''mind-independent exi ...
against its interpretation of the dominant forms of
post-Kantian philosophy
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary ...
(or what it terms "
correlationism
In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.. This is in contrast to what it calls the "anthropocent ...
").
Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at
Goldsmiths College
Goldsmiths, University of London, officially the Goldsmiths' College, is a constituent research university of the University of London in England. It was originally founded in 1891 as The Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute by the Wor ...
,
University of London
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...
in April 2007. The conference was moderated by
Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano (born 1 January 1977) is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's ''The Century'' and ''Logics of Worlds''. He served as both editor ...
of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by
Ray Brassier
Raymond Brassier (born 1965) is a British philosopher. He is member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research ...
of
American University of Beirut
The American University of Beirut (AUB) ( ar, الجامعة الأميركية في بيروت) is a private, non-sectarian, and independent university chartered in New York with its campus in Beirut, Lebanon. AUB is governed by a private, aut ...
(then at
Middlesex University
Middlesex University London (legally Middlesex University and abbreviated MDX) is a public research university in Hendon, northwest London, England. The name of the university is taken from its location within the historic county boundaries ...
),
Iain Hamilton Grant
Iain Hamilton Grant (born 21 November 1963, in Bristol) is a British philosopher. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include ontology, European philosophy, German I ...
of the
University of the West of England
The University of the West of England (also known as UWE Bristol) is a public research university, located in and around Bristol, England.
The institution was know as the Bristol Polytechnic in 1970; it received university status in 1992 and ...
,
Graham Harman
Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is an American philosopher and academic. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. His work on the metaphysics of objects led to the developm ...
of the
American University in Cairo
The American University in Cairo (AUC; ar, الجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة, Al-Jāmi‘a al-’Amrīkiyya bi-l-Qāhira) is a private research university in Cairo, Egypt. The university offers American-style learning programs ...
, and
Quentin Meillassoux
Quentin Meillassoux (; ; born
26 October 1967) is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Biography
Quentin Meillassoux is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux. He is a former student of th ...
of the
École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, Savoi ...
in Paris. Credit for the name "speculative realism" is generally ascribed to Brassier,
[Graham Harman]
"brief SR/OOO tutorial."
/ref> though Meillassoux had already used the term "speculative materialism
Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy (also known as post-Continental philosophy) that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against its interpretation of the dominant forms of p ...
" to describe his own position.[
A second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at the ]UWE Bristol
The University of the West of England (also known as UWE Bristol) is a public research university, located in and around Bristol, England.
The institution was know as the Bristol Polytechnic in 1970; it received university status in 1992 and ...
on Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths. The line-up consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place of Meillassoux, who was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano.[
]
Critique of correlationism
While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a shared resistance to what they interpret as philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
.
What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both "correlationism
In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.. This is in contrast to what it calls the "anthropocent ...
" and " philosophies of access". In ''After Finitude'', Meillassoux defines correlationism as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over other entities. For speculative realists, both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism (; ) is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity in the universe. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. F ...
.
All four of the core thinkers within speculative realism work to overturn these forms of philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism against the dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary Continental philosophy.
Variations
While sharing in the goal of overturning the dominant strands of post-Kantian thought in Continental
Continental may refer to:
Places
* Continent, the major landmasses of Earth
* Continental, Arizona, a small community in Pima County, Arizona, US
* Continental, Ohio, a small town in Putnam County, US
Arts and entertainment
* ''Continental'' (al ...
philosophy, there are important differences separating the core members of the speculative realist movement and their followers.
Speculative materialism
In his critique of correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux
Quentin Meillassoux (; ; born
26 October 1967) is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Biography
Quentin Meillassoux is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux. He is a former student of th ...
(who uses the term speculative materialism to describe his position)[ finds two principles as the focus of Kant's philosophy. The first is the ''principle of ]correlation
In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics ...
'' itself, which claims essentially that we can only know the correlate of Thought and Being; what lies outside that correlate is unknowable. The second is termed by Meillassoux the ''principle of factiality,'' which states that things could be otherwise than what they are. This principle is upheld by Kant in his defence of the thing-in-itself
In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (german: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. The concept of the thing-in-itself was introduced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and ...
as unknowable but imaginable. We can imagine reality as being fundamentally different even if we never know such a reality. According to Meillassoux, the defence of both principles leads to "weak" correlationism (such as those of Kant and Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
), while the rejection of the thing-in-itself leads to the "strong" correlationism of thinkers such as late Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrians, Austrian-British people, British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy o ...
and late Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger, the 20th-century German philosopher, produced a large body of work that intended a profound change of direction for philosophy. Such was the depth of change that he found it necessary to introduce many neologisms, often connected ...
, for whom it makes no sense to suppose that there is anything outside of the correlate of Thought and Being, and so the principle of factiality is eliminated in favour of a strengthened principle of correlation.
Meillassoux follows the opposite tactic in rejecting the principle of correlation for the sake of a bolstered principle of factiality in his post-Kantian return to Hume. By arguing in favour of such a principle, Meillassoux is led to reject the necessity not only of all physical laws of nature, but all logical laws except the Principle of Non-Contradiction
In logic, the law of non-contradiction (LNC) (also known as the law of contradiction, principle of non-contradiction (PNC), or the principle of contradiction) states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the sa ...
(since eliminating this would undermine the Principle of Factiality which claims that things can always be otherwise than what they are). By rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason
The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or a cause. The principle was articulated and made prominent by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with many antecedents, and was further used and developed by Arthur Schopenhau ...
, there can be no justification for the necessity of physical laws, meaning that while the universe may be ordered in such and such a way, there is no reason it could not be otherwise. Meillassoux rejects the Kantian ''a priori'' in favour of a Humean ''a priori'', claiming that the lesson to be learned from Hume on the subject of causality
Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...
is that "''the same cause may actually bring about 'a hundred different events' ''(and even many more)."
Object-oriented ontology
The central tenet of Graham Harman
Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is an American philosopher and academic. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. His work on the metaphysics of objects led to the developm ...
and Levi Bryant
Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area.
Bryant has written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, ...
's object-oriented ontology
In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.. This is in contrast to what it calls the "anthropocent ...
(OOO) is that objects have been neglected in philosophy in favor of a "radical philosophy" that tries to "undermine" objects by saying that objects are the crusts to a deeper underlying reality, either in the form of monism or a perpetual flux, or those that try to "overmine" objects by saying that the idea of a whole object is a form of folk ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
. According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox, electromagnetic radiation
In physics, electromagnetic radiation (EMR) consists of waves of the electromagnetic field, electromagnetic (EM) field, which propagate through space and carry momentum and electromagnetic radiant energy. It includes radio waves, microwaves, inf ...
, curved spacetime
In physics, spacetime is a mathematical model that combines the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize relativistic effects, such as why differen ...
, the Commonwealth of Nations
The Commonwealth of Nations, simply referred to as the Commonwealth, is a political association of 56 member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire. The chief institutions of the organisation are the Co ...
, or a propositional attitude
A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition.
Linguistically, propositional attitudes are denoted by a verb (e.g. "believed") governing an embedded "that" clause, for example, 'Sally believed that she had won ...
; all things, whether physical or fictional, are equally objects. Sympathetic to panpsychism
In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism () is the view that the mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists thro ...
, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone".
Harman defends a version of the Aristotelian notion of substance
Substance may refer to:
* Matter, anything that has mass and takes up space
Chemistry
* Chemical substance, a material with a definite chemical composition
* Drug substance
** Substance abuse, drug-related healthcare and social policy diagnosis ...
. Unlike Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathema ...
, for whom there were both substances and aggregates, Harman maintains that when objects combine, they create new objects. In this way, he defends an a priori metaphysics that claims that reality is made up only of objects and that there is no "bottom" to the series of objects. For Harman, an object is in itself an infinite recess, unknowable and inaccessible by any other thing. This leads to his account of what he terms "vicarious causality". Inspired by the occasionalists of medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with t ...
Islamic philosophy
Islamic philosophy is philosophy that emerges from the Islamic tradition. Two terms traditionally used in the Islamic world are sometimes translated as philosophy—falsafa (literally: "philosophy"), which refers to philosophy as well as logic, ...
, Harman maintains that no two objects can ever interact save through the mediation of a "sensual vicar". There are two types of objects, then, for Harman: real objects and the sensual objects that allow for interaction. The former are the things of everyday life, while the latter are the caricatures that mediate interaction. For example, when fire burns cotton, Harman argues that the fire does not touch the essence of that cotton which is inexhaustible by any relation, but that the interaction is mediated by a caricature of the cotton which causes it to burn.
Transcendental materialism
Iain Hamilton Grant
Iain Hamilton Grant (born 21 November 1963, in Bristol) is a British philosopher. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include ontology, European philosophy, German I ...
defends a position he calls transcendental materialism. He argues against what he terms "somatism", the philosophy and physics of bodies. In his ''Philosophies of Nature After Schelling'', Grant tells a new history of philosophy from Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
onward based on the definition of matter. Aristotle distinguished between Form and Matter in such a way that Matter was invisible to philosophy, whereas Grant argues for a return to the Platonic Matter as not only the basic building blocks of reality, but the forces and powers that govern our reality. He traces this same argument to the post-Kantian German idealists Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (; ; 19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814) was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kan ...
and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (; 27 January 1775 – 20 August 1854), later (after 1812) von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him be ...
, claiming that the distinction between Matter as substantive versus useful fiction persists to this day and that we should end our attempts to overturn Plato and instead attempt to overturn Kant and return to "speculative physics" in the Platonic tradition, that is, not a physics of bodies, but a "physics of the All".
Eugene Thacker
Eugene Thacker is an American philosopher, poet, and author. He is Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. His writing is often associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include ''In the Dus ...
has examined how the concept of "life itself" is both determined within regional philosophy and also how "life itself" comes to acquire metaphysical properties. His book ''After Life'' shows how the ontology of life operates by way of a split between "Life" and "the living," making possible a "metaphysical displacement" in which life is thought via another metaphysical term, such as time, form, or spirit: "Every ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life...that something-other-than-life is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence"[Eugene Thacker (2010), ''After Life'', p. x.] Thacker traces this theme from Aristotle, to Scholasticism and mysticism/negative theology, to Spinoza and Kant, showing how this three-fold displacement is also alive in philosophy today (life as time in process philosophy
Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, is an approach to philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only true elements of the ordinary, everyday real world. In opposition to the classic ...
and Deleuzianism, life as form in biopolitical thought, life as spirit in post-secular philosophies of religion). Thacker examines the relation of speculative realism to the ontology of life, arguing for a "vitalist correlation": "Let us say that a vitalist correlation is one that fails to conserve the correlationist dual necessity of the separation and inseparability of thought and object, self and world, and which does so based on some ontologized notion of 'life'.''. Ultimately Thacker argues for a skepticism regarding "life": "Life is not only a problem ''of'' philosophy, but a problem ''for'' philosophy."
Other thinkers have emerged within this group, united in their allegiance to what has been known as "process philosophy", rallying around such thinkers as Schelling Schelling is a surname. Notable persons with that name include:
* Caroline Schelling (1763–1809), German intellectual
* Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), German philosopher
* Felix Emanuel Schelling (1858–1945), American educat ...
, Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson (; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopherHenri Bergson. 2014. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 13 August 2014, from https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/61856/Henri-Bergson , Whitehead, and Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...
, among others. A recent example is found in Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro (; born April 3, 1954) is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981 ...
's book ''Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics'', which argues for a process-based approach that entails panpsychism as much as it does vitalism or animism. For Shaviro, it is Whitehead's philosophy of prehensions and nexus that offers the best combination of continental and analytical philosophy. Another recent example is found in Jane Bennett's book ''Vibrant Matter'', which argues for a shift from human relations to things, to a "vibrant matter" that cuts across the living and non-living, human bodies and non-human bodies. Leon Niemoczynski, in his book ''Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature'', invokes what he calls "speculative naturalism" so as to argue that nature can afford lines of insight into its own infinitely productive "vibrant" ground, which he identifies as ''natura naturans''.
Transcendental nihilism
In ''Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment'', Ray Brassier
Raymond Brassier (born 1965) is a British philosopher. He is member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research ...
defends what Michael Austin, Paul Ennis, Fabio Gironi term as transcendental nihilism. He maintains that philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinction
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...
, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the "threat" of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucau ...
, François Laruelle
François Laruelle (; ; born 22 August 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty b ...
, Paul Churchland
Paul Montgomery Churchland (born October 21, 1942) is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland ros ...
and Thomas Metzinger
Thomas Metzinger (born 12 March 1958) is a German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. , he is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a co-founder of thGe ...
, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism
Nihilism (; ) is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. The term was popularized by Ivan ...
, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing, but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all. Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.
Controversy about the term
In an interview with Kronos magazine published in March 2011, Ray Brassier denied that there is any such thing as a "speculative realist movement" and firmly distanced himself from those who continue to attach themselves to the brand name:
Publications
Speculative realism has close ties to the journal ''Collapse'', which published the proceedings of the inaugural conference at Goldsmiths and has featured numerous other articles by 'Speculative Realist' thinkers; as has the academic journa
''Pli''
which is edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick
The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands (county), West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded i ...
. The journal ''Speculations'', founded in 2010 published by Punctum Books, regularly features articles related to Speculative Realism. Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press is a scholarly publisher of academic books and journals, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
History
Edinburgh University Press was founded in the 1940s and became a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh ...
publishes a book series called ''Speculative Realism''.
In 2013, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies journal published a special issue on the topic in relation to anarchism.
Between 2019 and 2021, the De Gruyter Open Access journal, ''Open Philosophy,'' published three special issues on object-oriented ontology and its critics.
Internet presence
Speculative realism is notable for its fast expansion via the Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
in the form of blogs
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
.[Fabio Gironi, "Science-Laden Theory" in ''Speculations 1'' (2010), p. 21.] Websites have formed as resources for essays, lectures, and planned future books by those within the speculative realist movement. Many other blogs, as well as podcasts, have emerged with original material on speculative realism or expanding on its themes and ideas.
See also
* Kantian empiricism
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".
Life and career
His father ...
* New realism (contemporary philosophy) {{Short description, Movement in philosophy
New realism was a philosophy expounded in the early 20th century by a group of six US based scholars, namely Edwin Holt, Edwin Bissell Holt (Harvard University), Walter Taylor Marvin (Rutgers University, R ...
* Accelerationism
Accelerationism is a range of Marxist and reactionary ideas in critical and social theory that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change and other social processes in order to destabilize existing systems ...
* Object-oriented ontology
In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.. This is in contrast to what it calls the "anthropocent ...
* Objectivity
* Postanalytic philosophy
Postanalytic philosophy describes a detachment from the mainstream philosophical movement of analytic philosophy, which is the predominant school of thought in English-speaking countries. The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' defines the mo ...
* Speculative idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary ...
* Transhumanism
Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition.
Transhuma ...
* Transcendental empiricism
Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...
* Transcendental nominalism
Ian MacDougall Hacking (born February 18, 1936) is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and been a ...
Notable speculative realists
* Ray Brassier
Raymond Brassier (born 1965) is a British philosopher. He is member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research ...
* Levi Bryant
Levi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area.
Bryant has written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, ...
* Manuel DeLanda
Manuel DeLanda (born 1952) is a Mexican- American writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is a lecturer in architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania School ...
* Tristan Garcia
Tristan Garcia (born 5 April 1981) is a French philosopher and novelist. His first novel, ''La meilleure part des hommes'' (2008), won France’s Prix de Flore. It was translated into English in 2010 with the title ''Hate: A Romance''. His most im ...
* Iain Hamilton Grant
Iain Hamilton Grant (born 21 November 1963, in Bristol) is a British philosopher. He is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. His research interests include ontology, European philosophy, German I ...
* Graham Harman
Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is an American philosopher and academic. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. His work on the metaphysics of objects led to the developm ...
* Adrian Johnston
* Katerina Kolozova
Katerina "Katarina" Kolozova (; mk, Катерина (Катарина) Колозова; born on October 20th,1969 is a Macedonian academic, author and philosopher.
Biography
She is a director of and professor of gender studies and philosophy ...
* Nick Land
Nick Land (born 17 January 1962) is an English philosopher, theorist, short story writer and blogger. He has been described as "the father of accelerationism", and his work has been tied to the development of speculative realism. He was a leade ...
* Quentin Meillassoux
Quentin Meillassoux (; ; born
26 October 1967) is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Biography
Quentin Meillassoux is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux. He is a former student of th ...
* Reza Negarestani
Reza Negarestani (born 1977) is an Iranian philosopher and writer, known for "pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book" ''Cyclonopedia'' which was published in 2008. It was listed in Artforum as one of the best books of 2009. Negare ...
* Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro (; born April 3, 1954) is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981 ...
* Nick Srnicek
Nick Srnicek (born 1982) is a Canadian writer and academic. He is currently a lecturer in Digital Economy in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. Srnicek is associated with the political theory of accelerationism and a p ...
* Isabelle Stengers
Isabelle Stengers (; ; born 1949) is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the philosophy of science. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour am ...
Notes
Note Thanapong Jantanam
References
* Graham Harman
Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is an American philosopher and academic. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. His work on the metaphysics of objects led to the developm ...
, ''Speculative Realism: An Introduction'', John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
External links
*
Speculative Realism: An Epitome
' – a concise introduction to Speculative Realism.
''Post-Continental Voices''
– an edited collection of interviews that contains interviews with speculative realists.
''Collapse''
– a journal featuring contributions by "speculative realists"
Quentin Meillassoux in English at the Speculative Realism Conference
– recording of Quentin Meillassoux's lecture in English at the inaugural Speculative Realism conference
* Pierre-Alexandre Fradet and Tristan Garcia
Tristan Garcia (born 5 April 1981) is a French philosopher and novelist. His first novel, ''La meilleure part des hommes'' (2008), won France’s Prix de Flore. It was translated into English in 2010 with the title ''Hate: A Romance''. His most im ...
(eds.), issue "Réalisme spéculatif", in ''Spirale'', No. 255, winter 2016 – introductio
here
{{DEFAULTSORT:Speculative realism
2007 introductions
Continental philosophy
Metaphysical realism
Metaphysical theories