Speculative Realism Research Articles

Fetish-Oriented Ontology

Abstract In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light.

Azar y Contingencia: universos en disputa

Lewis Carroll era escritor y matemático. La trama que el autor desarrolla en su magistral Alicia en el país de las maravillas se despliega en el marco de una jugada de naipes sin reglas, o con leyes que cambian sin causa alguna. La lectura de Alicia recrea un piso imaginario y cognitivo propicio para introducirnos en las reflexiones filosóficas de Quentin Meillassoux en su libro Después de la finitud, en el que el concepto de transfinito (infinito de infinito) lo lleva a afirmar categóricamente que las propias leyes que gobiernan nuestro mundo y sus cosas pueden ser de otra manera, sin razón alguna, abonando la idea central del libro: la contingencia radical como absoluto especulativo. El presente trabajo diseña su campo de relevancia en torno al intercambio de categorías, insumos y recursos analíticos entre la Crítica Jurídica y el Realismo Especulativo, específicamente centrado en la lectura de Después de la finitud, de Meillassoux.

Back to Objects? Ontology in a Time of Progress

How could the new movements in contemporary philosophy such as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology give insight into the changes the world experienced in the last decades? We argue that a shift of paradigm inside the philosophical approach to the status of objects is symptomatic of those practical, cultural, historical, and technological issues that emerged from the decline of the modern view on subjectivity and the rise of certain realities, such as the Anthropocene, which gradually escape human control. Thus, the invasion of objects forces philosophy to surpass its post-metaphysical indifference to the outside world, that is to bring into focus the status of objects which transcend human knowledge as defined by Kant. This counter-revolution is expected to overcome the limits of human conscience imposed by the Kantian philosophy and consequently to deal with what we call the complex of Noah in transcendental idealism, namely the idea that human conscience is an ark inside which all species are apprehended by the subject, regardless of the status of the outside world. Instead of trying to conceive the subject in the absence of the outside world, contemporary philosophy steps outside the conscience in the need to grasp the objects and rather conceives the possibility of the world in the absence of human conscience. This shift brings us to the argument of ancestrality proposed by Quentin Meillassoux, namely the pre-human reality approached by today’s sciences, and also to Graham Harman’s theory of withdrawal, according to which real objects are never directly accessible. The main issue is whether human scientific knowledge could indeed enable us to grasp the objects themselves, and whether an absolute knowledge beyond finitude is possible without returning to old metaphysics.

Ecology, Capitalism and Waste: From Hyperobject to Hyperabject

The article develops the notion of the ‘hyperabject’ – coined by Danish poet Theis Ørntoft – into a proper theoretical concept. The term hyperabject is a synthesis of Timothy Morton's concept of hyperobjects and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and in the article we argue that the concept of the hyperabject entails a necessary critique of and correction to Morton's ecological thought, as well as various other versions of speculative realism, new materialism and object-oriented ontology.

Спекулятивный реализм как проект новой набожности

Спекулятивный реализм как проект новой набожности

Hyperobjects, Hyposubjects and Solidarity in the Anthropocene: <i>Anthropocenes</i> Interview with Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer

On behalf of <em>Anthropocenes</em> journal, David Chandler interviewed Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer in advance of the publication of their book <em>Hyposubjects</em>, under review with Open Humanities Press. The authors were asked to consider whether the anthropocene is used too much as a ‘short cut’ restraining thought; regarding the evolution of hyposubjects; about speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) and the role of withdrawal in their approach to hyperobjects.

O UŽASU SPOZNAJE: SPEKULATIVNI REALIZAM I H. P. LOVECRAFT

ON THE HORROR OF KNOWLEDGE: SPECULATIVE REALISM AND H. P. LOVECRAFT This paper provides an account of the relation between the philosophy of speculative realism and H. P. Lovecraft’s poetics of “cosmic horror”. Q. Meillassoux and R. Brassier are taken as representatives of speculative realism. These two philosophers share two fundamental presumptions: first, any philosophy that aspires to the name of “realism” has to provide an answer to the question as to how thought can think a world without thought; and second, insofar as it reveals that this is indeed possible – to think a world without thought – science constitutes the greatest challenge to correlationism. The first two parts of the text provide an account of these two aspects of Meillassoux’s and Brassier’s projects respectively. The third part reconstructs the basic tenets of Lovecraft’s poetics of “cosmic horror”, first through an engagement with his numerous (auto)poetic writings on this genre, and then by a reading of his famous short story “The Call of Cthulhu”. Finally, the conclusion brings these various threads together in order to show that an explication of the relation between these three authors facilitates a better understanding of the specifics of their individual projects.

Pessimism, Futility and Extinction: An Interview with Eugene Thacker

In this interview with Thomas Dekeyser, Eugene Thacker elaborates on the central themes of his work. Addressing themes including extinction, futility, human universalism, network euphoria, political indecision and scientific nihilism, the interview positions Thacker’s work within the contemporary theoretical conjuncture, specifically through its relation to genres of thought his work is often grouped with or cast against: vitalism, speculative realism and accelerationism. More broadly, however, the interview offers a unique insight into Thacker’s approach to the thinking, doing and writing of ‘philosophy’.

Dark pedagogy – speculative realism and environmental and sustainability education

This article draws on the emerging speculative realist philosophical movement in order to develop new understandings of the issues and content of education that needs framing and reframing within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research. We argue for the potential of using speculative realist concepts such as correlationism, hyperobjects, the strange stranger, undermining, overmining and duomining in order to develop a dark pedagogy that could draw on insights from speculative realism and object-oriented ontology in particular in order to develop further key concepts and discussions within ESE. Based on inspiration from speculative realism, our conception of a dark pedagogy could strive to: develop an understanding of the hyperobjects and the strangeness of objects of education at the center of ESE. Our conception of dark pedagogy insists on the inherent withdrawnness of the objects at play in ESE, and envisions to develop a sensibility towards eco-, geo-, infra- and chrono-factors in ESE and make explicit the potential educational implications of speculative realisms.

“Amnesia of the moment” in environmental education

Northern theories like “new materialism” and “posthumanism” are, increasingly, influential in the global productions of knowledge in environmental education (EE). In this latest discursive phase of textualising EE, the conceptual mash of “new/post” idea(lism)s is easily identified, but not critically examined, as is undertaken here via three interrelated critical case studies of key idea(l)s in the new/post. Criticism of the current normative, theoretical, methodological, and empirical mess of environmental education research (EER) must be understood within three historical and structural problems, namely; (i) the formative stages of modern EE in the 1970s, (ii) the escalating importance of theory in the 1990s transition from modern thought to postmodern thinking, (iii) the neo-liberalization of academic identity formations and post-intellectual relations in the audit culture of the corporate university of the 2000s. The first two closely related case studies of the new/post highlight the ahistorical and atheoretical mash of performatively-driven abstract theorizing in EE. Each demonstrates how earlier “founding” policy of EE, its implied pedagogical praxis, and commensurable methodological development in EER have been forgotten. The first critique focusses historically on the allegedly new idea of “agential relations” and its confused discursive claims about “action”. Forgotten is the vital matter of “ecology” and its relational “things”. The second rescues the ecofeminist notion of “embodied materialism”. Ecofeminist praxis has been deactivated by the new/post abstraction of feminist poststructural knowledge claims on “material-discursive practices”. Together, these interrelated critiques retrieve a much needed historical-critical-material frame from which new/post textualism can be conceptually reconstructed and empirically qualified in ways that reactivate the ecopolitical rationale for founding EE. If, indeed, theory is needed in ecopedagogical praxis, an alternative case exists for “bringing theory back in” via, for example, ecophenomenology, ecological anthropology, and ecohumanism. Ecopedagogical practices and their research might then (re)”turn” to a realist ontology via, for example, the “materialisms” of the “new” of “speculative realism” coupled with the “old” (sic) of “critical realism” in, strangely, “post post” claims on knowledge production. At issue in de-abstracting, re-materializing, repoliticizing, and decentering the hubristic authority of theory in new/post EER are numerous axiological commitments, epistemological issues, and methodological dilemmas concerning the onto ∼ ethics ∼ politics of (mis)representation in the global North. Underpinning the two case critiques is a third “criticism” of the postmodern means (mediums/modes) of knowledge production (forms) as they “intersectionally” perform a digitally platformed and instrumental colonization of the global North and South discourse of EER. “Other”wise, in the post-intellectual climate change of a universalizing new\\post technics of “agentialism,”, we misrecognize who we are textually “becoming” and, in being so post-inscribed and newly-mediated, are distracted from what “really” practically matters in the field, and why it “materially” exists.

Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant ed. by Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby

Reviewed by: Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant ed. by Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby Howard Pollack-Milgate Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby, eds. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. 337 pp. The diverse group of theories known as "posthumanism" shares perhaps but one characteristic: the belief that humanism, in our historical moment, has been, or needs to be, overcome. This collection, containing an introduction and a series of fourteen papers, many by frequent contributors to the Goethe Yearbook, might well have been entitled: "On Humanism: Essays for its Cultured Despisers." Its greatest virtue (and source of delight) is its construction of fascinating and often unexpected interfaces between, very broadly speaking, (post-)Kantian writers and natural scientists and various directions of today's posthumanist thought. These connections work both ways: not only do they provide new windows into older texts, more and less familiar, but also offer different ways of understanding the most contemporary of themes, from computational neuroscience to global capitalism. Another virtue of the collection is its very varied discussion of the different species of posthumanism; though names like N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and Rosi Braidotti recur in many papers along with the terms "speculative realism," "critical posthumanism," and "object-oriented ontology," each author has a different take on the nature and balance of these different approaches. Most significant is the question everywhere in the background—but left as an exercise to the reader to answer—what do these texts and authors from the "Age of Humanism" have to tell us today? The essays in this collection are uniformly lucid, balanced in length, and each addresses from its particular angle the relationship between present and past. Since there is not enough space to do justice to them all, perhaps a partial catalogue of the intriguing connections made within and implied between them can demonstrate the richness and breadth of coverage. First, we read of relationships between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers and natural scientists and contemporary cybernetic, systems, and posthumanist theories that demonstrate the constancy of fundamental questions at distinctly different levels of physiological and technological sophistication: Kant's friend, the doctor Markus Herz on vertigo and Marvin Minsky guiding electronic rats through mazes in the 1950's (Jeffrey Kirkwood); Fichtean intersubjectivity and the Turing-test robots of Ex Machina (Alex Hogue); the physiologist Johannes Müller and enactive autopoesis (Edgar Landgraf); Hufeland and Braidotti on the role of death in life (Jocelyn Holland); Gall's phrenology and Derrida's deconstruction of the human/animal distinction (Patrick Fortmann); Hegel's nonhuman Geist and Bateson (John H. Smith). Second, we see classic Goethezeit authors and philosophers [End Page 372] who offer posthumanist insights: Kleist and the limits of the human in the animal and the mechanical (Tim Mehigan), Kantian and Humboldtian natural beauty beyond the human (Peter Gilgen, Elizabeth Millán), and Hegel's dialectical overcoming of Kant as a model for a necessary overcoming of what today's data engineers mean by "ontology" (Leif Weatherby). In their useful introduction, the editors divide the essays into three parts based on subject matter (embodiment and subjectivity, the material and the ideal, the inhuman in technology and animals). It is also useful to parse the basic divisions in terms of the relationship of the past to the present: is this relationship evidence of what the editors call a "transhistorical ethos," or a study of (more or less hidden) influences and anticipations, or rather is the past useful as a resource to challenge, enrich, or bringer farther today's theory? Some essays argue that their proto-posthumanist authors were isolated dissidents in the Age of Humanism, but especially intriguing are those chapters which use the resources of nineteenth-century philosophy and biology to push back against the caricatures produced by and sometimes overarching claims made by recent theory. In particular, various forms of "speculative realism" are the focus of critique, especially the "flat ontology" often posited by these approaches. Quentin Meillassoux's indictment of Kant's original sin of "correlationism" is strongly refuted by Carsten Strathausen's...

Metaphysics of Abstraction: Speculative Photographs in the Anthropocene

Metaphysics of AbstractionSpeculative Photographs in the Anthropocene Bruno Lessard (bio) In the 1970s, New Topographics photographers such as Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, and Lewis Baltz rejected the idea of pristine nature as found in the work of landscape pioneers such as Carleton Watkins or Ansel Adams. The photographers in the New Topographics exhibition focused on the man-altered landscape in their black-and-white images, avoiding the sublime and the monumental. In contrast, one can clearly discern in the series of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century landscape photographers a visual quest different from that of the New Topographics. Indeed, facing the impossibility of documenting mundane landscapes and "nonplaces" as it had been done in the work of the New Topographics photographers, contemporary landscape photographers as diverse as David Maisel, Edward Burtynsky, James Balog, Daniel Beltrá, Peter Goin, Terry Evans, David T. Hanson, Richard Misrach, Mark Ruwedel, Tyrone Martinsson, Ian Teh, J. Henry Fair, and Mishka Henner have poignantly addressed our collective environmental predicament in the Anthropocene.1 The aforementioned landscape photographers, especially those interested in rediscovering the potential of aerial photography, have been engaged in a radical rethinking of the representation of the land in the Anthropocene, and they have contributed to a profound reconsideration of the aesthetics and politics of landscape photography itself, focusing on environmental issues such as global warming, pollution, and land devastation. Most importantly, they have refashioned the humanland relationship in images that have questioned the anthropocentric biases of the genre via their recourse to the aerial perspective afforded [End Page 20] by drones and other custom-made apparatuses. These recent technological innovations and strategies of representation demand a philosophy of photography for the Anthropocene. In this article, I propose to lay the foundation for this critical discourse around the Anthropocene and landscape photography by turning to speculative realism and its related developments in object-oriented ontology. As discussed below, object-oriented ontology, and the notion of the hyperobject in particular, can help to rethink contemporary landscape photography and the ontology of the photographic image itself. In the following pages, I stage a dialogue between three contemporary landscape photographers—David Maisel, Daniel Beltrá, and Edward Burtynsky—and continental philosophy by way of object-oriented ontology and hyperobjects. This discussion generates results to better understand both the fate of realism in landscape photography and the resurgence of realism in philosophical discourse. While realism as an aesthetic notion in the history of visual representation differs from the one found in debates over realism versus antirealism in contemporary philosophy, the aesthetic experiences proposed in the aerial, abstract photograph refract some of the concerns in the human and nonhuman experiences that the new philosophical realisms have produced. The Anthropocene thus offers an ideal case study to examine the type of artistic representation and philosophical conceptualization that realism has produced as both a type of photographic representation and a conceptual operator in continental philosophy. Realism, as an aesthetic and philosophical concept, is transformed in the new aesthetic experiences introduced in the Anthropocene era. In the twentyfirst century, numerous landscape photographers have used both the aerial shot to create a nonanthropocentric viewpoint and the abstract image to represent the land and hyperobjects in the Anthropocene. This predilection for abstraction prompts a reconsideration of the ontology of the photographic image in terms of speculation rather than figurative representation. Apprehending Hyperobjects Contemporary landscape photography, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology inform each other, because they share similar obsessions.2 In the writings of thinkers as diverse as Karen [End Page 21] Barad, Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton,3 provoking reflections abound on the access to the natural world, the relationship between human beings and an environment populated by nonhuman entities, and the apprehension of reality generally speaking. In the work of photographers interested in documenting the Anthropocene, similar issues crop up in the discussion of representational content, which gives access to a world whose reality can be characterized as endangered in the context of climate change. The challenge for landscape photographers is to find the most appropriate visual strategies to make sense of our new reality, which takes the form of an unprecedented environmental...

Non-Wakefulness: On the Parallax between Dreaming and Awakening

Non-wakefulness proves to be a basic condition of experience, since human beings, living in webs of supernumerary information processes, can only build social relations through unacknowledged forms of passive or “interpassive” (Pfaller) structures of transference due to limited forms of being non-awake toward the properties of all kinds of things. This can cause multiple conflicts both for the individual human being reaching out to facts, as well as for political communities where one sees another as blinded by some kind of “dogmatic slumber”. The article tries to show how the concept non-wakefulness explains in what way mental states are – individually as well as collectively – in relation with objects that are necessarily “withdrawn” (Harman) from us as presented especially in contemporary debates on Speculative Realism. Furthermore, the text develops an understanding of waking-up as the latter marks the moment when a mental state of epistemic deficiency is temporarily left behind. Reality exists only insofar as it is smoothed out via unconscious structures of non-wakefulness, while in dreams objects may unconceal themselves for a short period of time when ‘secondary process’ functions (Freud) of our judgmental capacities are dropped.

"Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?": Malabou and Foucault on the Kantian Organism

"Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?"Malabou and Foucault on the Kantian Organism I. A. Roland-Rodríguez Wir fragten nach dem WERTHE [VALUE] dieses Willens [zur Wahrheit]. … Warum nicht lieber Unwahrheit? … Das Problem vom Werthe der Wahrheit trat vor uns hin—oder waren wir's, die vor das Problem hin traten? Wer von uns ist hier Oedipus? Wer Sphinx?1 —Friedrich Nietzsche C'est la vie elle-même et non le jugement médical qui fait du normal biologique un concept de valeur [value] … Valere qui a donné valeur signifie en latin se bien porter. La santé est une façon d'aborder l'éxistence en se sentant non seulement possesseur ou porteur mais aussi au besoin créateur de valeur, instaurateur de normes vitales.2 —Georges Canguilhem 1. the transcendental and the materialist turn We have been called to account for the present philosophical turn towards ontology, matter, the body, the living—to metaphysics at-large. This is therefore an address unto our metaphysical inheritances, namely: Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger (to halt roughly a hundred years ago), and many beyond them, too soon to name in such a sweeping and reductive snapshot. In order to demonstrate that contemporary interest in the living-body in materialist and biological terms is an evolution already sprung into action by the previous movement (i.e., twentieth-century foci on embodiment, affect, phenomenon, and experience), this essay focuses on the genealogical leap between two contemporary interlocutors of Kantian metaphysics: i) Michel Foucault, lost far too soon, a voice surely structuring our episteme today, and ii) Catherine Malabou, central to the current debate on matter and life amidst philosophy's ontological turn (as following its linguistic or poststructural turn). However, new materialisms are challenged by speculative realisms to Relinquish the Transcendental! Malabou responds in a twofold manner: i) one cannot simply relinquish the transcendental without failing to account for the containment and continuity of life and the world (so in short—no, [End Page 60] we cannot), and yet ii) one always relinquishes the transcendental as part of one's engagement with it at all—that this is inscribed not only in the tradition of rereading Kantian metaphysics, but in the very movement of Kant's project through the three Critiques overall (so in short—yes, and we must).3 The prompt of this journal is curiously similar to a prompt by a local newspaper posed to Kant who responded to his own epistemic turn with "Was ist Aufklärung?" (1784).4 This accounting for an imminent crisis in history as a concept, a diagnostic of "today," is observed by Foucault in his "What is Enlightenment?" (1984): "To reflect on 'today' as difference in history and as grounds for a particular philosophical undertaking appears to be what is unprecedented about this text. … Envisioned thus, one recognizes a point of departure: an outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity" (568). The prompt of this journal's issue is exemplary of this modern temporality, of our engagement with and our prognostic of where we are in the course of history-in-the-making. I shall respond by considering how—with Foucault, Malabou, and others—the suspended call initiated by Kant's reconciliation of the living-being with his transcendental philosophy has forwarded through the archive and once again reaches addressees. Relinquishing the transcendental in the first sense (what we cannot), would indeed be to abandon not only Kant but all critical (theory) discourses that flow from this tradition that have resisted the shadow of empiricism from entirely foreclosing a consideration of a priori emergences and conditionings of all that exists or is possible. Speculative realism insists on "post-critical" thought, one coming "after finitude, after the a priori, after Kant,"—after all consideration of the a priori conditioning of the real. This, of course, declines the call initiated by Kant to think that which conditions thinking.5 Accordingly, one shouldn't pay mind to the mere coincidence that the world endures and is contained in a whole, that life evolves, that bodies age, for this could all at any moment be otherwise given "the absolute necessity of everything's non-necessity...

Неопрагматизм и спекулятивный реализм

Неопрагматизм и спекулятивный реализм

Power, Possibility, and Agency: Speculative Realism and Whitehead’s Theory of Relations

Power, Possibility, and Agency: Speculative Realism and Whitehead’s Theory of Relations

P. P. S. OBVERSION: IS A REAL HUMAN BEING WRITTEN?

This article considers the state of human beings in a post-postmodern conditions and focuses on obversion as one version of posthuman reality in polyversion, which is lusciousness. Obversion is regarded as a logical and at the same time dynamic figure of dis-identity and non-presence. Trying to find out if a real human being is written leads one to consider the relationship of real and written reality and the possibility of posthuman writing. Posthuman writing becomes apparent in tracks, traces, scars and vestiges such an @ as a signifier of becoming t@iled. The vestiges of a human being are being investigated through the appeal to an actual post-postmodern conceptions such as speculative realism, speculative posthumanism, dark ecology, etc. In the post-postmodern context concepts such as tru(s)t/h, faith and kindness as a counterweight to the excessive postmodern quotation and theorization are being examined. Thus, a human being as a post-postscript is becoming a preface at the same time. This article explores such crucial postmodern issues as iterability, signature and others in a contingent context, in which an immanence of living itself becomes a writing in the postdigitality, post-Internet and post-media extent in relation to the realization of the disaster of technical or even mechanical as human. This research realizes on a showcase of post-postmodern architecture as an immanent spatiotemporal contingency, en-vironment of a human being. It shows how a minimalistic style in post-postmodern ethics and aesthetics correlates with obversive rocking in contrast to binary opposition logic. Thus, it realizes a movement from human to posthuman as scriptor, writing a postscript, and beyond to post-posthuman as postscriptor, writing a post-postscript as a human being, writing itself in its contingent immanence.

A Few Thoughts on the Possibility of Intercultural Thinking in a Global Age

A Few Thoughts on the Possibility of Intercultural Thinking in a Global Age Kai Marchal (bio) Introduction Until recently, most humanities scholars (including philosophers) in North America and Europe lived in a world where China was notable for its absence. In the great debates of the 1990s and early 2000s on postmodernism, the end of history, the legacy of Marxism, and the future of liberalism, no Chinese contributions were heard, nor were they in the more recent debates on the relationship between Islam and the West, the post-secular age, genetic engineering, the digital age, or Speculative Realism. Only most recently, with the changed geopolitical situation, are Chinese thinkers starting to receive more attention. In this context, Eric S. Nelson’s book Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought makes an important contribution to further opening up the West to Chinese discourses. Nelson’s book is a historical study about the reception of Chinese philosophy by German-speaking philosophers in the early twentieth century. However, it quickly becomes clear that his book is actually much more ambitious; spanning more than three hundred pages, it covers vast periods of Chinese philosophy (from Confucius and Laozi to the late Heidegger), but also seeks to bridge immense historical and cultural differences. The real thrust of Nelson’s book, however, may be found in the implicit claim that the adherents of Western philosophy, as the French Sinologist and philosopher François Jullien has famously asserted, do not need to appropriate Chinese thinking through a form of historical-transcendental self-criticism; rather, the Other has long been embedded in the history of Western (especially German-speaking) philosophy and can thus be brought into effect at any time. The history of Western philosophy, Nelson writes programmatically in his introduction, “is historically already interculturally and intertextually bound up with non-Western philosophy” (p. 3). Philosophers are seldom good historians. Since Plato first elevated the death of Socrates to an almost mythical narrative about the birth of philosophy, many Western thinkers have engaged in writing historical narratives about the development of philosophy with the intent of educating other people on the basis of their philosophical perspective. The way philosophers write histories of philosophy reveals hidden philosophical [End Page 238] commitments and reflects particular commitments that, with hindsight, often appear quite arbitrary. As Nelson demonstrates convincingly, the exclusive identification of philosophy with Europe, argued for most famously by G.W.F. Hegel, is itself a result of cultural interaction, or, as Nelson puts it, “a relatively recent modern invention” (p. 13). In the age of globalization, Nelson’s case studies on how different philosophers in the German tradition (Edmund Husserl, Rudolf Eucken, Hans Driesch, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, and others) interacted with Chinese thought undermine the still widespread idea that philosophy is of Greek origin and can be practiced only in European languages. Particularly convincing is Nelson when he detects “constellations” of intercultural philosophizing that have long since been forgotten, such as the exchanges between Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai 張君勱) and Eucken and Driesch in the 1920s or Georg Misch’s further development of Dilthey’s hermeneutics in the form of a historical-critical reflection regarding the global origins of philosophy (chapters 2 and 5). Reviewers have already highlighted the numerous strengths of this volume. It is a landmark study in intercultural philosophy that will shape the research field for years to come. In my essay, I would like to describe a few difficulties that, in my understanding, still hamper a project like Nelson’s. I want to focus on two aspects: (1) the relationship between philosophy and its history and (2) Heidegger and the “hermeneutic primacy of interpretation.” The Relationship between Philosophy and Its History There can be no doubt that philosophy has a highly problematic relationship with its own historicity. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that historical approaches in philosophy often run counter to problem-oriented ones. Students who take seriously the claims to knowledge of the natural sciences will not necessarily feel the desire to work through the doctrines of philosophers like Plato, Rousseau, Kant, or even Husserl, but rather engage with the ongoing debates among contemporary thinkers and neuroscientists. Nelson...

The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity

The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity Benjamin Boysen and Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen The emergence of the so-called "material turn" (e.g., speculative realism, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory) has been one of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades. The ardent call for a reconnection with and immediate access to reality has left a deep impact. As has the critique of modernity for having endowed us with a fatal misconception of human exceptionality, which (it is argued) has led us into our current predicaments—which, above all, means the climate crisis. With the promise to regain immediate access to reality and to teach us ontological humility, the "material turn" embodies a pledge to revolutionize our understanding of the universe and our place in it, allowing us to join forces with new politico-ethical communities stretching across the human and nonhuman realms—thus aiming at establishing a real political and ethical community with things.1 However, discarding modernity and the human subject comes with a heavy price. For the theories advanced in the "material turn" entail serious theoretical, practical, and political problems.2 Scholars within the material turn make ontological claims about the material world that not only seem unusual or even extravagant, but also self-contradictory and unscientific (dogmatic). However, despite this, the theories have been and remain immensely attractive to many scholars in the humanities and social sciences. From a scientific point of view, this is puzzling. We believe that the answer to the reason for its popularity is not so much philosophical or scientific in nature as it is psychological and socio-political. Indeed, the huge popularity of "the material turn" may in itself be taken as a sign of a deep crisis and as one manifestation among others of the dire nature of the global situation now. But though this movement arguably is ill-suited to provide solutions or answers, an insight into the sources fuelling the contemporary desire or craving for such theories may nevertheless prove helpful in shedding light on the basic tenets behind the crisis facing us today. Inquiring critically with Marx about what it is in an epoch or society that fuels the need and demand for such illusions may entail the possibility of better understanding the contemporary sociopolitical crisis of modernity (the discomfort with autonomy, finitude, and secularism) and adjacent phenomena like the [End Page 7] US presidential election of Donald Trump, the last decades' ascend of right-wing populism in the West (but also globally), and the general discrediting and delegitimization of universal institutions and thinking. If we take a closer look on some of the most towering figures within the different branches of "the material turn," we come across curiously identical assumptions, arguments, and hypothesis. Graham Harman (object-oriented ontology), Jane Bennett (new materialism), and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (presence theory) have gained huge popularity with materialistically swayed theories in fields as disparate as metaphysics, political science, and cultural and literary theory. Moreover, they have worked independently of and seemingly without knowledge of one another. Nonetheless, essentially their theories have strikingly similar traits. And to us this is a suggestive indication of a general Zeitgeist in the "material turn" worth enquiring further. These three authors identify modernity and its secularism as the main cause of the current loss of reality. Therefore, Gumbrecht, Harman, and Bennett seek to break with modernity and its twentieth-century advocates.3 According to these authors, modernity has left behind a world without inner moral structures resulting in homeand rootlessness, while postmodernity has furthermore added insult to injury by reducing everything to images, fictions, and play. With the advent of modernity, we have become alienated not only from the world but also from things in the world. The world is thoroughly mediated: it is never seen as itself but only through pictures and language. The magic and inner life of things together with a sense of meaning-and purposefulness have disappeared with modernity as well as postmodernity, which have destroyed our original unity with the world and things. In the critique of modernity, Gumbrecht, for example, problematises the cultural-theoretical priority of...

Questioning the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Is the Anthropocene Anthropocentric?

The word ‘Anthropocene’ has been controversial scientific concept, to name a new geological epoch that situates ‘Anthropos’ or ‘Man’ as an actor changing geological structure, altering the Earth system, and also making in unpredictable planetary changes. Criticism of the Anthropocene is based on Holocene's formal ratification rather than the Anthropocene findings. In addition, this paper will argue a realism philosophical approach though that the Anthropocene is not merely scientific speculation. This paper provides an ontological justification for humanity’s causal power in geological time based on Bhaskar’s critical realism and Graham’s speculative realism. This ontological turn will be a ‘new conceptual ground’ to define the Anthropocene without being imprisoned in ‘Anthropocentrism’ and will contribute to other fields, such as social sciences and humanities, to remake their understanding of the Anthropocene. Therefore, the result will be able to strengthen the Anthropocene ratification indirectly.