Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Where, in the History of Thought, is OOO?

The Object-Oriented Ontologists, along, I suspect, with the Speculative Realists, seem to think that their turn to metaphysics is a New Philosophical Beginning. And perhaps it is. Stylistically, though, it rather reads like earlier philosophy in the (20th century) Continental tradition. That is, at least from more or less the outside, it seems more or less of a piece with that older work.

Not a rupture at all, and thus not New Beginning. Not necessarily more of the same, but more of something similar.

Latour – We Have Never Been Modern, Politics of Nature – seems rather closer to a New Beginning. Though there’s more than a little Continental indirection and metaphor in his style, it doesn’t seem quite so bound up in the style.

By way of comparison, consider the relationship between Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian mechanics. Could we say that OOO surpasses Kant and Hegel as Einstein surpasses Newton?

In terms of the account that David Hays and I have offered of the major transitions in the development of human culture, is OOO philosophy rank 4 while Kant and Hegel are rank 3?

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