Tag: Realism

Correlationist Spawn

  (Image from http://eden.rutgers.edu/~kmg215/425/ewp-final/ewp-background.html) Recall Well’s time traveller  on the terminal beach, billions of years in the future; his encounter with a tentacled creature on that dark shore. He learns nothing of it but only experiences an abject terror that results in his return to Edwardian Richmond. What if this entity is not only uninterpreted but, in […]

During on Speculative Aesthetics and Weird Co-existence

From an insomniac moment re-reading my notes for Elie During‘s challenging and thought provoking keynote paper: “Weird Coexistence or What Speculative Aesthetics Could Be” [Hotel air conditioning in England has its not-so-speculative noise aesthetic btw] at the 10th SEP-FEP conference, Regents University, London. Speculative Realism [SR] expresses a somewhat elusive taste for estrangement and the […]

Entering the Phenomenological Cul-de Sac

My last post ended with a modest conclusion about the relationship between pragmatist accounts of agency and world-hood: “For Davidson, and for pragmatists more generally, then, the ability to interpret and be interpreted in turn is a condition of intentionality and thus agency. But this requires both that each agent understand the other to believe […]

Evan Thompson on Dark Phenomena

In a Notre Dame review of Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature, edited by Havi Carel and Darian Meacham, Evan Thomson criticizes my claim that the existence of dark phenomenology implies that phenomenology must be a naturalistic discipline without transcendental warrant. He is correct about my aims and provides a neat […]

Realism, Indeterminacy and the Eye of the Mind

Epistemic indeterminacy concerns our representations of things rather than things. Thus the location of a mobile phone with a nokia ring tone may be represented as indeterminate between your pocket and your neighbor’s handbag. This epistemic indeterminacy is resolvable through the acquisition of new information: here, by examining the two containers. By contrast metaphysical indeterminacy […]

CFP: Philosophy After Nature in Utrecht 3-5 September

CFP: SEP-FEP 2014 Utrecht, 3-5 September February 19th, 2014 | Author: johnm CALL FOR PAPERS The Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Joint Annual Conference   Philosophy After Nature Utrecht University 3-5 September 2014 The Joint Annual Conference of The Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy in 2014 will be […]

Putnam and Speculative Realism

Stephen Shakespeare has an interesting post over at An und für sich discussing Hilary Putnam’s argument against Metaphysical Realism and the positions of contemporary speculative realists like Meillassoux and Harman. Putnam (circa Reason Truth and History) treats Metaphysical Realism (MR) a package deal with three components: Independence (there is a fixed totality of mind-independent objects); Correspondence (there are […]