Professor Corey Anton’s video about the impossibility of speculative realism, of an account of nature that doesn’t already include consciousness:
My response, ending with an excerpt from Schelling‘s “Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature” :
Phenomenology and Reality, Philosophy and Nature
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2 responses to “Phenomenology and Reality, Philosophy and Nature”
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The good professor seems to have missed the point that it is ‘speculative’! SR for the most part resists the notion that just because one cannot ever provide an account of the world that is not coloured, structured, formed by our own consciousness or sociality that is no reason to fixate purely on this impossibility – it remains possible to speculate, this speculation is valuable and it is a legitimate task for philosophy. Indeed it follows in a grand metaphysical tradition of doing just that. The only reason for rejecting realism because it is necessarily speculative would be if philosophising that which is immanent to consciousness can reach absolute, unmediated certainty. Such a notion is just as ridiculous as any naive realism vis-a-vis the world.
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@perc,where in this video do you find Anton addressing speculative realism and or the issue of whether or not one can have a position ‘outside’ of consciousness/sociality?
@ mds, my only objection to Anton here is his final leap to the cosmos having wonder at be-ing as opposed to some people having such experiences/intuitions, the “realist” position he caricatures here is not that this universe could have been otherwise but that, as Nietzsche noted, when homo-sapiens pass the universe will be (carry on) overwhelmingly unchanged, this is fear that haunts John Caputo even as he banks his hope in the weakness of God.
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Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?