Iain Grant on Speculative Realism
Posted by | Anonymous | 6.9.10 | 2 Comments
I noticed the following short article over at TPM, written by Iain Grant. It's a brief description of the nature and method of the Speculative Realism happening.
I particularly liked this part:
The challenge speculative philosophers therefore pose to standard realists is how they propose to account for the domain of experience within their realisms, since any realism that cannot do this must be considered simply to deny that experience, with all its objects, moods and stable characteristics, takes place at all.
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9/9/10 09:18
i thought the whole article was really interesting, and i'm liking the sense that there is a really large collective-interest building up around speculative realism.
building on the bit you've highlighted zach (about experience) makes me think of something Chris and I were talking about yesterday with regards to OOP.
Harman talks about objects being fourfold. i wont go into that here, but it is interesting in light of panpsychism since the fourfold is a way of doubling up dualism, not reducing it. panpsychism is a dualism of a kind, could this perhaps also be doubled up?
i.e
experience - non experience
becomes
known experiential ---- known non-experiential
| |
unknown experience ---- unknown non-experiential
now i know this doesn't really solve anything but it has lead to me thinking some new thoughts.
such as, that unknown experiential could be the unconscious perhaps, or that the known non-experiential could potentially be facts deduced about thing-in-themselves beyond those realised inductively by an experiential agent. eg. meillassoux's deduction that things in themselves are non-contradictory, non-absolute entities; or Harman's stance that objects withdraw from relations (although that last one is a tad odd, since we "know" that objects are more than their relations and withdraw, yet we do not know what it is that withdraws - also, on a different note, i think this is similiar to Galen Strawson's argument that we do not know what matter is and his differentiation between structural and non-structural features)
what du guys think?
13/9/10 15:47
The post I just made expands precisely on yours and Strawson's point. I think in regards to panpyschism it's an important argument to make. The alternative is an impoverished actualism of dull matter.