Turning to Speculation?

Speculations, 2012

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

This article strives to continue the lure of Whitehead's call: that " Philosophy cannot exclude anything ". Thus speculative philosophy extends William James's radical empiricism. Its task is to locate itself on the ground of experience in its multifariousness, and to preserve what experience makes important. But importance can never be reduced to a matter of fact. To make a situation important consists in intensifying the sense of the possible that it holds in itself and that insists in it, through struggles and claims for another way of making it exist.

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

2011

Often a division of concepts can help us better understand unknown or seldom charted philosophical terrain: historically, the distinctions and differences between idealism and materialism have proven helpful, but with Quentin Meillassoux‟s concept of correlationism, the divisions between realism and antirealism which once seemed clean-cut are now harder to understand. Graham Harman has gone a step further than Meillassoux‟s initial definition of correlationism, by which “we mean 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,” 2 claiming in lectures that those who have pledged fidelity to the realism banner after Meillassoux aren‟t realist enough. Instead, says Harman, we should demand that any philosophy which claims to be realist must grant that no entity is more real than any other, whether they be atoms, quarks, institutions, regimes, human beings, bonobos, dreams or dis...

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

Early Phenomenology, Brian Harding and Michael Kelly, eds., 2014

Epigraph: The world is not a correlate of anything. (Hartmann) Introduction: First scene: 1922. Nicolai Hartmann, newly occupying Paul Natorp’s chair in philosophy at Marburg, just made known his definitive break with neo-Kantianism in his Foundations for a Metaphysics of Knowledge (1921), and looks ahead to the full development of a new ontology beyond neo-Kantian strictures. Eager to find conversation partners with whom to share in this vision, he has heard good things about Husserl’s young assistant in Freiburg, who wrote a dissertation on Duns Scotus’ doctrine of categories and, like himself, had a keen interest in Aristotle. Hartmann supports the “call” of this young scholar, Martin Heidegger, to Marburg in 1923. Unfortunately, Hartmann’s desire for dialogue was frustrated. There were many reasons for this, one being the simple fact that their biological clocks were not in sync. Heidegger rose early to work and teach, so by evenings he was fatigued and unable to carry on into the night, which was precisely when Hartmann was fanning the flame of his intellect for an all night vigil. Students in Marburg joked that the round-the-clock philosophizing of these two thinkers amounted to a “philosophia perennis.”

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2024

An interview with Graham Harman about his Object Oriented Ontology. He discusses its relation with phenomenology and other contemporary philosophers. Moreover, he comments on contemporary social problems such as xenophobia and his early academic years in Cairo

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

Historical Materialism, 27.2, 2019

Ernst Bloch's recourse to speculative philosophy has guaranteed him the position of a perpetual outsider in the history of Western Marxism. When Jürgen Habermas described Bloch's philosophy in 1960 as a 'speculative materialism' , it was to denounce him for crossing the boundaries of critical thought set down as much by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as by Marx's critique of political economy. This article argues that Bloch's speculative materialism deserves to be reassessed. Contrary to Habermas's assertion that speculation is divorced from critique, I argue with Bloch that (1) the speculative hypotheses we unavoidably use to interpret the world around us inform our political beliefs and actions, and (2) to stifle speculative thinking as that creative and inquisitive enterprise which questions and transgresses the given is not only a 'crime against reason' , as Hilary Putnam once claimed, but also a crime against freedom.

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right