Abstract
Abstract This essay calls for an independent theory of features in object-oriented philosophy. Theories of features are in general motivated by at least two interconnected demands: 1) to explain why objects have the characteristics they have, 2) to explain how regular divisions in those characteristics can be intuited. While a theory of universal properties may be the most internally consistent means of addressing these demands, an object-oriented metaphysics needs to address them without a concept of shared features. This means that regular divisions of invariant features and our intuitions of them cannot be explained by the repetition of self-same characteristics or natural laws. They can instead be explained by the immanent repetition of similar features. However, this requires a new, radically aesthetic understanding of what it means to be similar in the first place, one in which similarity is an emergent process rather than a state of affairs existing between resembling particulars.
Highlights
It is safe to say that continental philosophy and continental-adjacent fields are in the midst of a turn towards realism
This means that regular divisions of invariant features and our intuitions of them cannot be explained by the repetition of self-same characteristics or natural laws
In a rare display of pathos, Wilfrid Sellars once argued that the abandonment of the Thomistic isomorphism of being and being known was “a cancer at the heart of modern philosophy.”[43]. To abandon any version of that isomorphism, Sellars thought, was to begin the march towards either idealism or skepticism, complimentary pictures of reality in which the things of this world conform to our ideas of them or else our ideas about the world are all we are capable of explaining
Summary
It is safe to say that continental philosophy and continental-adjacent fields are in the midst of a turn towards realism. Insofar as object-oriented philosophy adopts the discourse of trope theory to explain features, this causal dead end in the latter becomes a trojan horse for the former The solution to this impasse is to recover similarity as a purely aesthetic concept. Having addressed the topics of regularity and difference, the essay turns to the other prime motivator for a theory of features, which is intellectual access This would seem to be a fool’s errand in object-oriented philosophy since its ontology denies direct knowledge about an object or its essential features. Armed with an understanding of the ontological conditions in which regularity and intuition are possible, object-oriented philosophy surpasses trope theory in its ability to offer a consistent theory of immanent features
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