#object oriented philosophy

[sterwood]

From Graham Harman, "Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things" With the solar eclipse going on, I thought it would be nice to read some Harman and get into that fleshy medium of partial relations and vicarious causation, and I was again struck by how nice of a description of phenomenology this is.

[maaarine]

Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes (Peter Wolfendale, 2019)

“This passage suggests that the distinction between sensual and real qualities can be understood in terms of the difference between those properties that are directly given to our senses and those whose presence must be indirectly inferred from this information.

For example, one might distinguish the colour, malleability, and even perhaps the peculiar tangy taste of a piece of copper wire from its electrical conductivity, its melting point, and from a litany of its more interesting chemical and physical properties.

If we understand empirical investigation as the exercise of reason in drawing inferences about the unobservable on the basis of the observable, then this seems to capture the relevant intuitive contrast. (…)

Put differently, what it is like to experience redness and smoothness is distinguished from what it is like to be red and smooth.

This is the archetypal form of the distinction between sensual and real qualities.

What is interesting about it is that it frames the inaccessibility of real qualities as the inaccessibility of the 'inwardness of things' or a thing's 'point of view within itself'.”

[dotomtom]

中央大学　グレアム・ハーマン論 2016 飯森訳

[sterwood]

Lingis also pushes carnal phenomenology in a tentatively realist direction with his conception of the levels of the world. For Lingis, the carnal medium is not something permanently fixed along a thin wedge between human self and inanimate world, as remains the case even in Merleau-Ponty's later work. For Lingis, carnality exists less between myself and the things than in the things themselves - and always at a very specific level to which I must adjust myself. Humans are not the preciously unique site of carnal reality, but only supple vehicles built to explore the various levels on which carnality is found. With our tools and bodily organs we explore the levels of a conversation, a dangerous forest, a seedy waterfront, the Karakoram Range, the works of a poet, the keys of a saxophone, or the patterns on a fish. These levels fill up the world with or without my permission, and merely summon me to enter them - just as any given restaurant or opium den enacts its style in the world even when I refuse to enter. The flesh does not first appear when humans arrive on the scene, but is already there linking the parts of the forest to one another as they invite me into their midst.

Graham Harman - Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things

[neutralstrata-blog]

As always, the battles that swirl around epistemology are ultimately questions of ethics and politics. As Bacon noted, knowledge is power. And knowledge is not simply power in the sense that it allows us to control or master the world around us, but rather knowledge is also power in the sense that it determines who is authorized to speak, who is authorized to govern, and is the power to determine what place persons and other entities should, by right, occupy within the social order. No, questions of knowledge are not innocent questions. Rather, they are questions intimately related to life, governance, and freedom. A person's epistemology very much reflects their idea of what the social order ought to be, even if this is not immediately apparent in the arid speculations of epistemology.

Levi Bryant - Democracy of objects

[nfinitum]

[sterwood-blog]

Hey, Rhizombie!

Sorry if I'm belaboring a point here, especially if you've already decided to move beyond the whole OOO/SR discussion, but I just found this post by Bryant that I thought you might find interesting in trying to answer the question of "what's the point of looking into OOO?"

I mean, you can disagree with the claims of people working in OOO and stuff, but it seems really hard to see them as absolutely useless, or not worth looking into. They're worth looking into, and I don't think enough people are giving them a good enough chance, especially when that whole "toy story of philosophy" comment actually passes at all as being a description of OOO (even jokingly).

[I know I could have just sent this to you via a message or something, but I thought it was a good post generally, so I wanted to post it here as well.]

[lospajarosatacan]

Looking for books on Speculative realism.

Anyone with a digital  copy of Harman's "Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things", Land's "Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings" or even Meillassoux's "After Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency"... you name it, Ill thank any clue on where i can get a digital copy on the subject of speculative realism, since its impossible geting anything from them here.