Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Tag: object-oriented philosophy

  • Tim Morton lecturing on object-oriented poetry.

    Romanticism 20: Keats and Shelley and OOO. I’m reminded of an earlier reflection on Whitehead’s and Schelling’s process ontology of organism and the principle of non-contradiction. Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn.

  • The Varieties of Causal Experience

    Michael over at Archive-Fire has a new post up distinguishing his notion of epistemic withdrawal from Harman’s ontological withdrawal. While claiming to hold tight to an embodied account of mind, Michael nonetheless wants to carve out a distinction between two kinds of interaction: mental and physical. Mental interaction is always detached and abstract due to…

  • Further evidence that Whitehead was already object-oriented…

    From his 1927 lectures published as Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. While speaking about the way ordinary language can mislead us about the nature of reality, Whitehead begins reflecting on the common term “wall.” “This so-called ‘wall,’ disclosed in the pure modes of presentational immediacy, contributes itself to our experience only under the guise of…

  • Knowledge-Ecology on Alphonso Lingis: Cosmopolitical Selfhood and Ecology

    Adam has posted a brilliant reflection on A. Lingis’ words about words. A few highlights: “…words act as objects in the world and the manner by which they act is ecological. Words transform not just the environments which they disclose, but also feedback upon the one who uses them, transforming the subjectivity of the speaker in an…

  • SR/OOO and Nihilism: a response to Harman and Bryant

    I’ve already posted a short response to Harman, but I wanted to re-visit the issues explored in that post concerning the difference between Homo Sapiens, as an object among objects, and the Anthropos, as an ideal toward which every object tends. I will also try to disentangle my own “cosmotheandric” position from the generic anti-nihilism…

  • Object as subject-superject, or why Harman is wrong about Whitehead

    Graham Harman and Alfred North Whitehead have a lot in common, but they differ in what they say about substance as a metaphysical category. I think Harman overstates this difference. Whitehead suggests “the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects” (Process and Reality, p. 166). This multiple disclosure of the One…