Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access

Volume 1 Issue 1

January 2018

Issue of Open Philosophy

Contents
Journal Overview

Open Access January 25, 2018

Editorial for the First Volume of Open Philosophy

Graham Harman

Page range: 1-2

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Open Access March 24, 2018

Perceptual Spaces Are Sense-Modality- Neutral

Ingvar Johansson

Page range: 14-39

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Abstract

The paper presents and discusses phenomenological facts about perceptual spaces and percepts, but ends with a few thoughts about possible causal explanations of such spaces. The overarching double-sided hypothesis claims that - from a phenomenological point of view - each individual animal has at each consciously perceived moment of time a sense-modality-neutral perceptual space, and that these perceptual spaces are so-called container spaces. This means, to be concrete, that blind persons, deaf persons, and all perceptually non-handicapped persons have the same kind of phenomenological perceptual space, a sense-modality-neutral container space. The causal reflections bring in James J. Gibson’s work on such matters.

Open Access May 24, 2018

Despair as Defiance: Kierkegaard’s Definitions in “The Sickness unto Death”

Alastair Hannay

Page range: 40-49

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Abstract

How are we to read and how translate the brief formulae with which ‟The Sickness unto Death” introduces two forms of ‛authentic despair’? In response to Michael Theunissen’s claim that, to conform with the actual drift of Kierkegaard’s thought, the first of the two forms of despair should be given priority, an alternative reading that conforms with the published ordering is defended on the strength of both the text itself and the development of Kierkegaard’s thought up to the time of its writing. The further aim, shared with Theunissen, is to widen the basis for assessing the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair.

Open Access July 18, 2018

The Intermediate World: A Key Concept in Beautiful Thinking

Dorthe Jørgensen

Page range: 50-58

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Abstract

The term ‘the intermediate world’ is a key concept in Den skønne tænkning (Beautiful Thinking) and the metaphysics of experience presented by this book. The metaphysics of experience is about the experiences of transcendence and beautiful thinking that take place in the intermediate world. In the article “The Intermediate World,” this subject is introduced through a discussion of thoughts and concepts formulated by Paul Klee (Zwischenwelt), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (beautiful thinking), Aristotle (phantasia), Immanuel Kant (expanded thinking), Mark C. Taylor (imagination), and Eugenio Trías (the limit). The text depicts the intermediate world as the level of experience at which the understanding does not yet distinguish between subject and object. The intermediate world is thus not a realm between human and world, nor is it something outside the world we know. The intermediate world is rather the present world in its most original state: the ‘place’ where we find the source of all experience and cognition, a source called ‘basic experience’ characterized by sensation, faith, and comprehension. In this realm, imagination is active and takes the form of an objective force rather than a subjective mental power. Imagination opens mind and world, thus allowing not-yetactualized possibilities to become perceivable.

Topical issue: The New Metaphysics: Analytic/Continental Crossovers, edited by Jon Cogburn and Paul Livingston

Open Access December 13, 2018

Editorial Introduction for the Topical Issue “The New Metaphysics: Analytic/Continental Crossovers”

Paul Livingston, Jon Cogburn

Page range: 401-407

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Open Access August 25, 2018

Quine, Davidson, Relative Essentialism and the Question of Being

Samuel C. Wheeler

Page range: 115-128

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Abstract

Relative essentialism, the view that multiple objects about which there are distinct de re modal truths can occupy the same space at the same time, is a metaphysical view that dissolves a number of metaphysical issues. The present essay constructs and defends relative essentialism and argues that it is implicit in some of the ideas of W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson. Davidson’s published views about individuation and sameness can accommodate the common-sense insights about change and persistence of Aristotle and Kripke. Aristotle and Kripke have to give up unmediated direct reference resting on a unique correct articulation of reality into entities. Davidson has to acknowledge a distinction between descriptions giving accidental and those giving essential features of an object. Quine and Davidson were in a position to be a relative essentialist, but were over-impressed by supervenience. The relative essentialist view of beings developed from Quine and Davidson strongly suggests the Heideggerian distinction between beings and Being, and is the perspective from which analytic philosophy can engage that topic. Relative essentialism also connects analytic philosophy to Derrida’s thinking about differance.

Open Access October 23, 2018

Heidegger, the Given, and the Second Nature of Entities

Graham Bounds

Page range: 256-274

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Abstract

In this paper I draw from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of the 1920s to outline some basic features of his theory of intentionality that I believe have not been fully appreciated or utilized, and that allow for both novel and fruitful interventions in questions about meaning, the relationship between mind and the world, and epistemic justification, principally as they appear in John McDowell’s synoptic project in Mind and World. I argue that while elements of McDowell’s picture are ultimately unsatisfying and problematic, much of his conceptual framework can and should be put into dialogue with Heidegger’s, and that in so doing we make available powerful resources for amending the McDowellian account. Moreover, these emendations have attractive implications for his distinctive desiderata. In particular, they provide original conceptions of normativity’s place in nature, of the boundaries of the space of reasons, and of the relationship between the answerability of thought both to the world and to human beings as a rational community.

Open Access September 25, 2018

Metaphysics or Metaphors for the Anthropocene? Scientific Naturalism and the Agency of Things

Patrick Gamez

Page range: 191-212

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Abstract

In this paper, I provide the outlines of an alternative metaphilosophical orientation for Continental philosophy, namely, a form of scientific naturalism that has proximate roots in the work of Bachelard and Althusser. I describe this orientation as an “alternative” insofar as it provides a framework for doing justice to some of the motivations behind the recent revival of metaphysics in Continental philosophy, in particular its ecological-ethical motivations. In the second section of the paper, I demonstrate how ecological-ethical issues motivate new metaphysicians like Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Graham Harman to impute to objects real features of agency. I also try to show how their commitments lead to deep ambiguities in their metaphysical projects. In the final section, I outline a type of scientific naturalism in Continental philosophy that parallels the sort of naturalism championed by Quine, both conceptually and historically, and suggest that it might serve our ecological-ethical purposes better.

Open Access November 10, 2018

Return to the Repressive: Re-thinking Nature- Culture in Contemporary Feminist Theory

Deborah Goldgaber

Page range: 245-255

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Abstract

In “History of Sexuality” (Vol I.) Foucault argued that repression is the wrong model of power, understanding it in exclusively negative terms, as external to the body it constrains and inhibits. Power may also be positive, productive, and constitutive of the body and its possibilities. Thus, an adequate account of the relation between cultural forces and the body, Foucault argues, must challenge the “repressive hypothesis” (RH). Contemporary feminist accounts of the body are structured by this same oppositional view of power Foucault assumed: to call on Rosi Braidotti’s distinction, discursive (cultural) forces are either negative or repressive (potestas) or positive and empowering (potentia). In this paper I argue that this opposition forecloses several possibilities for thinking the morphogenetic role of culture. In particular, it assumes wrongly that repressive relations cannot be productive.

Open Access August 29, 2018

Fields of Sense and Formal Things: The Ontologies of Tristan Garcia and Markus Gabriel

Arjen Kleinherenbrink

Page range: 129-142

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Abstract

A striking feature of the relatively new philosophical genre of speculative realism is that it includes theories that explicitly seek to bridge or overcome the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Two such theories are Markus Gabriel’s ontology of fields of sense and Tristan Garcia’s ontology of formal things. Both theories hold that all entities - be they physical, mental, fictional, technical, or otherwise - are equally and irreducibly real. This article first describes the core features of these ontologies. This provides insight into these theories themselves and also gives us a glimpse of what philosophy ‘beyond the divide’ might look like. In addition, both theories are shown to be examples of what I will call ‘relational’ philosophy, or philosophy that exhaustively defines entities in terms of how they appear to or feature in other entities. I argue that all such philosophies are haunted by the ‘infinite deferral of specification,’ a specific problem that I argue renders them inconsistent. Finally, I oppose such ‘relationist’ philosophies to ‘substantialist’ ones, and suggest that this distinction might one day succeed the division between analytic and continental philosophy.

Open Access August 29, 2018

The “Ontological Difference” Again. A Dialetheic Perspective on Heidegger’s Mainstay

Francesco Gandellini

Page range: 143-154

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Abstract

This paper intends to offer a new assessment of the “Ontological Difference” (OD), one of Martin Heidegger’s mainstays, in the light of the metaphysical view called “dialetheism”. In the first paragraph I briefly summarize the main argument of Heidegger’s contradiction of Being, where OD is present as a premise. In the second paragraph I introduce dialetheism, indicate two kinds of dialetheic solutions to the paradox and explain why they face comeback troubles from OD. The third paragraph is devoted to a review of Heidegger’s uses of OD and underlines the crucial role of negation in it. In the fourth paragraph I investigate the philosopher’s account of negation and show similarities with the account provided by the paraconsistent logic called “Logic of Paradox”. The fifth paragraph puts forward two possible readings of OD, the first based on the classical notion of negation and the second on the notion of negation pointed out in the previous paragraph. The second reading is proved suitable for dialetheists and in accordance with the exegesis of some textual passages from Heidegger’s late works.

Open Access December 5, 2018

Minimal Sartre: Diagonalization and Pure Reflection

John Bova

Page range: 360-379

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Abstract

These remarks take up the reflexive problematics of Being and Nothingness and related texts from a metalogical perspective. A mutually illuminating translation is posited between, on the one hand, Sartre’s theory of pure reflection, the linchpin of the works of Sartre’s early period and the site of their greatest difficulties, and, on the other hand, the quasi-formalism of diagonalization, the engine of the classical theorems of Cantor, Godel, Tarski, Turing, etc. Surprisingly, the dialectic of mathematical logic from its inception through the discovery of the diagonal theorems can be recognized as a particularly clear instance of the drama of reflection according to Sartre, especially in the positing and overcoming of its proper valueideal, viz. the synthesis of consistency and completeness. Conversely, this translation solves a number of systematic problems about pure reflection’s relations to accessory reflection, phenomenological reflection, pre-reflective self-consciousness, conversion, and value. Negative foundations, the metaphysical position emerging from this translation between existential philosophy and metalogic, concurs by different paths with Badiou’s Being and Event in rejecting both ontotheological foundationalisms and constructivist antifoundationalisms.

Open Access October 30, 2018

The Metaphysical Subject and Logical Space: Solipsism and Singularity in the Tractatus

M. Curtis Allen

Page range: 277-289

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Abstract

This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), out of which the whole of the TLP can be re-read. Inspired by, though not dependent on, the themes of virtuality and singularity found in Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ (presented as a Wittgensteinian ‘immaculate conception’), Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘logical space’ is here complexly related to the paradoxes of the ‘metaphysical subject’ and ‘solipsism,’ within which the strictures of sense are defined, and through which the logico-pictorial scaffolding of the TLP precipitates its own systematic dissolution. It shows how nonsense envelopes not only not idle chatter, and metaphysical confusion, but sense itself.

Open Access October 23, 2018

Reading Problems: Literacy and the Dynamics of Thought

Jeffrey A. Bell

Page range: 223-234

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Abstract

In this article, we address the problem of predication, or the problem of connecting conceptual predicates to the sets of properties and attributes that correspond to these predicates. We take as our starting point Mark Wilson’s work, especially “Predicate meets Property,” and add to it a metaphysics of problems that one finds in the work of Gilles Deleuze. This enables us to understand the relationship between a predicate and the set of properties in terms of the relationship between a solution to a problem. The advantage of this approach is that it helps to illuminate the key issues involved in contemporary work on human reasoning. We sketch some of these advantages by looking to recent work on literacy and how literacy affects the capacity to engage in formal reasoning.

Open Access September 14, 2018

Deleuze and Heidegger on Truth And Science

Michael James Bennett

Page range: 173-190

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Abstract

Deleuze and Guattari’s manner of distinguishing science from philosophy in their last collaboration What is Philosophy? (1991) seems to imply a hierarchy, according to which philosophy is more adequate to the reality of virtual events than science is. This suggests, in turn, that philosophy has a better claim than science to truth. This paper clarifies Deleuze‘s views about truth throughout his career. Deleuze equivocates over the term, using it in an “originary” and a “derived” sense, probably under the influence of Henri Bergson, who does similarly. Moreover, William James and pragmatism were to Bergson what the early analytic philosophers Frege and Russell are to Deleuze: excessively scientistic foils whose confusions about truth arise as a result of failing to distinguish science from philosophy. By situating Deleuze’s conception of truth in relation to the early Heidegger’s, which it to some extent resembles, the paper concludes by suggesting that, surprisingly, neither kind of truth Deleuze licenses applies to science, while both apply to philosophy. Science is indifferent to truth in the way that some of Deleuze‘s readers have incorrectly wanted to say that he thinks philosophy is.

Open Access September 14, 2018

Negation, Structure, Transformation: Alain Badiou and the New Metaphysics

Becky Vartabedian

Page range: 213-222

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Abstract

In this article, I discuss Alain Badiou’s 2008 address titled “The Three Negations.” Though the text was originally presented in a symposium concerning the relationship of law to Badiou’s theory of the event, I discuss the way this brief address offers an introduction to the broad sweep of Badiou’s metaphysics, outlining his accounts of being, appearing, and transformation. To do so, Badiou calls on the resources of three paradigms of negation: from classical Aristotelian logic, from Brouwer’s intuitionist logic, and in paraconsistent logics developed by DaCosta. I explain Badiou’s use of negation in the three primary areas of his metaphysics, as well as to diagnose the degrees of transformation that may have occurred in a situation. My analysis of Badiou’s use of negation in this text is aided by examples from his broader ontological oeuvre. I also explain the underlying requirement in Badiou’s work that formal considerations - mathematical or logical - get their sense by being tethered to readily-identifiable political, aesthetic, scientific, or interpersonal concerns. I conclude by addressing the foundation Badiou’s work establishes for pursuing a new metaphysics, and by discussing certain of the liabilities that remain in the wake of his account.

Open Access August 29, 2018

Badiou and Frege: A Continental Critique of Logical Form

Joseph M. Spencer

Page range: 94-114

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Abstract

Various critiques of important (early) analytic thinkers made by Alain Badiou in the late 1960s have been largely overlooked by continental philosophers and entirely overlooked by analytic philosophers. This paper looks in detail at Badiou’s 1969 essay ‟Mark and Lack,” providing an exposition and clarification of his direct and sustained critique of Gottlob Frege’s supposed ideological (rather than scientific) philosophical commitments. Badiou’s intellectual context is analyzed in some detail, not only explaining his theoretical debt to his then-master Louis Althusser, but also clarifying his understandings of the notions of ‟the scientific” and ‟the ideological” in light of the projects of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. A philosophical exposition of Badiou’s point-by-point critique of Frege’s conception of logic follows. Finally, the paper concludes with an analysis of the more general relevance of Badiou’s half-century-old critiques in light of developments in contemporary analytic metaphysics, especially those indebted to W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson. In essence, Davidson’s Fregean reconfiguration of Tarski’s work on truth (more explicit than, but not unrelated to, Quine’s work) places contemporary analytic metaphysics within the scope of what Badiou directly criticizes. It is suggested that Badiou’s critique find a place in discussions of analytic metaphysics.

Open Access September 6, 2018

Towards an Indexical Paradoxico-Metaphysics

Hilan Nissior Bensusan

Page range: 155-172

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Abstract

This paper sketches a metaphysical view according to which the furniture of the universe is made of indexicals. The view draws from work in the philosophy of language and thought concerning demonstratives, proper names and other deictic operations (by Perry, Kaplan, Kripke among others). It also draws on Levinas‘ conception of the Other as beyond any substantive description. Indexicalism, as I call it, is compared with object-oriented views such as Harman‘s and Garcia‘s. Indexicalism lapses into paradox concerning totality and proves to be self-destructive. It is defended, however, as a paradoxico-metaphysics.

Open Access March 21, 2018

Process Metaphysics of Consciousness

Robert Prentner

Page range: 3-13

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Abstract

In this article, we look at the hard problem of consciousness from the perspective of process metaphysics. We thereby identify three problematic premises of the problem that pertain to the constitution of consciousness and its causal relation to the world. We argue for the necessity of re-thinking the corresponding phenomena in terms of internally-structured processes. The hard problem would then cease to be an insurmountable obstacle to a science of consciousness. Furthermore, this line of reasoning is shown to be continuous with philosophical projects from the early 20th century that preceded the contemporary philosophy of mind. Specifically, we investigate the relationship of parts and wholes, and translate metaphysical problems of consciousness into mereological language. Despite this being a philosophical project, we frequently note and discuss links to the empirical sciences, in particular those of quantum mechanics, systems theory and the embodied cognition framework.

Open Access October 2, 2018

What Laws? Which Past?: Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos and the Epistemological Limitations of Retro-Causation

Michael J. Ardoline

Page range: 235-244

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Abstract

The question of the metaphysical status of the laws of physics has received increased attention in recent years. Perhaps most well-known among this work are David Lewis’s Humean supervenience and Nancy Cartwright’s dispositionalism, both of which reject the classical conception of the laws of physics as necessary and real independent of the objects they govern, arguing instead that what we call laws are shorthand for the regularities of local states of affairs (on Lewis’s account) or the dispositions of objects (on Cartwright’s). The properties of necessity and reality are generally taken to go hand-in-hand when physical laws are concerned; however, this leaves aside the possibility that the laws of physics are independently real (i.e. not just a description of regularities of objects) yet contingent. This paper will explore this third option which is found in the work of Quentin Meillassoux. We will ask: if laws both exist independent of their objects and are contingent, what happens when laws change? Specifically, the possibility of metaphysical retro-causation becomes a live option. This raises both questions of the ontological status of the past as well as our epistemic access to the past after a change in physical laws. Meillassoux’s ontology of hyper-chaos weathers this challenge with its consistency intact; however, it is an open question of whether or not saving the reality of physical laws by sacrificing their necessity is worth the epistemic limits and metaphysical strangeness that it implies.

Topical issue: Objects Across the Traditions, edited by Tom Sparrow

Open Access December 5, 2018

Editorial Introduction for the Topical Issue “Objects Across the Traditions”

Tom Sparrow

Page range: 408-409

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Open Access November 24, 2018

Immanuel Kant’s Theory of Objects and Its Inherent Link to Natural Science

Rudolf Meer

Page range: 342-359

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Abstract

In the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the term object has an extensive and far-reaching significance, and it can therefore be understood as a theory of objects. This becomes particularly clear when it is observed that all of his guidelines can be traced to different concepts of objects and their combination. With his concept of the object of experience, he attempts to mediate incompatible aspects in this: in relation to the object of experience, we have apodictic claims but at the same time our knowledge of the object develops and contains the possibility of historical progress. This theory of objects was elaborated by Kant with regard to natural science and the claim of its metaphysical foundation. For this reason, Kant’s concept of object is inherently linked with his concept of science. Astronomy is at the core of his investigation, because it represents a perfect example of a so-called proper and rational natural science.

Open Access December 5, 2018

Nietzsche and James on the Value of Constructing Objects

Justin Remhof

Page range: 392-400

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Abstract

In this paper, I first suggest that Nietzsche and James, two otherwise very different thinkers, both endorse the controversial constructivist view that human representational practices bring all material objects into existence. I then explore their views concerning why and how constructivism can play a vital role in helping us find reality and our lives valuable.

Open Access November 8, 2018

Meinong’s Multifarious Being and Russell’s Ontological Variable: Being in Two Object Theories across Traditions at the Turn of the 20th Century

Ivory Pribram-Day

Page range: 310-326

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Abstract

This paper discusses the problems of an ontological value of the variable in Russell’s philosophy. The variable is essential in Russell’s theory of denotation, which among other things, purports to prove Meinongian being outside of subsistence and existence to be logically unnecessary. I argue that neither Russell’s epistemology nor his ontology can account for the ontological value of the variable without running into qualities of Meinongian being that Russell disputed. The problem is that the variable cannot be logically grounded by Russell’s theory of denotation. As such, in so far as being is concerned, Meinong and Russell’s theories are much closer than is typically thought. The arguments are supported with concerns raised by Russell, Frege, and Moore regarding the ontological value of the variable. The problem can be summarised as follows: the variable is the fundamental denoting-position of a formal theory that is meant to explain the structure of the ontological. If such a formal theory is meant to ground the ontological, then the formal must also represent the actual structure of the ontological. Yet the variable, the fundamental symbol of denotation in a theory that defines objects, is ontologically indefinable.

Open Access October 31, 2018

Ontology of The Possible: on the Structure of the Object

Giuseppe Armogida

Page range: 299-309

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Abstract

This paper, through a realist reading of Husserlian phenomenology, aims to explain how the consciousness-sense has access to reality and, in general, to objectivity. There is a ‘strife’ between the essence of a thing and the specific concreteness in which it always becomes manifest, such that the identical object is indicated by changeable predicates, but at the same time always distinguishes itself from them. Language can express the evidence of the thing - which makes the determinable aspects of the thing exist and which is inexpressible through definitions - only “for conjectures”, showing the difference between its own expression and the thing. And it can do this by analogy, the only device that exhibits the antinomic relationship between the object and its determinations, and, in the meantime, makes possible not so much their composition, but rather their transformation. Analogy, in fact, operating through a logic of contradiction, grasps, within each object, the tension between the element of permanence and the element of emergency; shows how the object is a unity-without-a-mixture of absolutely distinct forms; and so it comes to think about the relationship between the in-definable forms of the possible representations of the thing and the impossible expression of its singularity.

Open Access August 25, 2018

The Ontology of Social Objects: Harman’s Immaterialism and Sartre’s Practico-Inert

Arjen Kleinherenbrink, Simon Gusman

Page range: 79-93

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Abstract

In his recent Immaterialism, Graham Harman develops a theory of social objects based on his object-oriented ontology. Whereas some of the more mainstream theories in the humanities would dissolve such objects into their material constituents or their various effects on others, object-oriented social theory theorizes them as inert, resilient entities with a private reality that exceeds their components and actions. Harman’s theory focuses on what social entities are qua objects, and consequently says little about their specificity as social objects. A more complete social theory would also outline how human existence is to be understood in relation to a social world comprised of discrete and inert entities, as opposed to, for example, far more continuous material fields or networks of associations. We argue that an unexpected yet solid candidate for such an extension of object-oriented social theory already exists in Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of practico-inert being and group formation. We first outline Harman’s and Sartre’s respective ontologies of social objects, and then discuss how their many complementarities make the latter a suitable extension of the former.

Open Access November 20, 2018

How to be a Realist about Similarity: Towards a Theory of Features in Object-Oriented Philosophy

Noah Roderick

Page range: 327-341

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Abstract

This essay calls for an independent theory of features in object-oriented philosophy. Theories of features are in general motivated by at least two interconnected demands: 1) to explain why objects have the characteristics they have, 2) to explain how regular divisions in those characteristics can be intuited. While a theory of universal properties may be the most internally consistent means of addressing these demands, an object-oriented metaphysics needs to address them without a concept of shared features. This means that regular divisions of invariant features and our intuitions of them cannot be explained by the repetition of self-same characteristics or natural laws. They can instead be explained by the immanent repetition of similar features. However, this requires a new, radically aesthetic understanding of what it means to be similar in the first place, one in which similarity is an emergent process rather than a state of affairs existing between resembling particulars.

Open Access October 23, 2018

Touching Without Touching: Objects of Post-Deconstructive Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology

Sam Mickey

Page range: 290-298

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Abstract

This paper presents a juxtaposition of the understanding of objects in Jean-Luc Nancy’s postdeconstructive realism and Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, particularly with reference to their respective notions of touch. Nancy incorporates a tension between the phenomenological accounts of touch and embodiment given by Merleau-Ponty, who focuses on the relationality of the flesh, and Levinas, who focuses more on non-relational alterity. Furthermore, Nancy does not accept the anthropocentric assumptions whereby phenomenology accounts for objects insofar as they correlate to human existence. Following the deconstruction of sovereign humanity, Nancy approaches what Derrida calls “post-deconstructive realism,” accounting for touch with regard to the relationality and alterity of all objects, human and nonhuman. However, abjuring the metaphysical interiority posited by panpsychists, Nancy admits that his philosophy cannot account for the discrete, atomistic differences between beings. Graham Harman agrees with much of Nancy’s philosophy, but he criticizes Nancy on this point, offering a corrective supplement in the form of his object-oriented ontology, which avoids panpsychism while nonetheless accounting for the discrete differences between objects.

Open Access August 28, 2018

Towards an Object-Oriented Ethics: Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and the Physics of Objective Evil

Drew M. Dalton

Page range: 59-78

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Abstract

Objects are inert, passive, devoid of will, and as such bear no intrinsic value or moral worth. This claim is supported by the argument that to be considered a moral agent one must have a conscious will and be sufficiently free to act in accordance with that will. Since material objects, it is assumed, have no active will nor freedom, they should not be considered moral agents nor bearers of intrinsic ethical vale. Thus, the apparent “moral neutrality” of objects rests upon a kind of subject/object or mind/body dualism. The aim of this paper is to explore two paths by which western thought can escape this dualism, re-valuate the alleged “moral neutrality” of material objects, and initiate a sort of “object oriented ethics,” albeit with surprising results. To do so, this paper explores the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Baruch Spinoza to interrogate both the claim that material objects have no will and that freedom is the necessary condition for ethical responsibility. This paper concludes by arguing that not only should objects been seen as bearers of their own ethical value, a determinate judgement can be made regarding that value through a basic understanding of the laws of physics.

Open Access November 24, 2018

“Get the Tone Right”: Reading with the Realism of Object-Oriented Ontology

Gabriel Patrick Wei-Hao Chin

Page range: 380-391

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Abstract

This paper investigates the consequences of taking seriously the metaphysics of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), as defined by Graham Harman, in the field of literature. Acutely focusing on just one possible mobilisation and application of the theory, the essay deploys OOO to read two major writers of the late 20th century, Don DeLillo and Murakami Haruki, in novel configurations made possible by applying an Object-Oriented method to the genre of Magic Realism. Using this method, the essay unearths an unarticulated avenue for studying the genre and these authors against established national, cultural, and canonical boundaries in literature, putting into conversation various literary traditions based on formal characteristics found in the texts through OOO’s metaphysics, and suggesting wholly untested paths for literary study in the wake of Object-Oriented philosophies.

About this journal

Open Philosophy is an international Open Access, peer-reviewed academic journal covering all areas of philosophy. The objective of Open Philosophy is to foster free exchange of ideas and provide an appropriate platform for presenting, discussing and disseminating new concepts, current trends, theoretical developments and research findings related to the broadest philosophical spectrum. The journal does not favour any particular philosophical school, perspective or methodology.

Article Processing Charges

Call for proposals for topical issues

Open calls for papers:

Lukács and the Critical Legacy of Classical German Philosophy, edited by Rüdiger Dannemann (International Georg-Lukács-Society) and Gregor Schäfer (University of Basel) - deadline for submissions: October 31, 2023.
The Human Being and Time: From Kant to Existentialism, edited by Addison Ellis (The American University in Cairo) - deadline for submissions: October 31, 2023.
Dialogical Approaches to the Sphere ‘in-between’ Self and Other: The Methodological Meaning of Listening, edited by Claudia Welz and Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen (Aarhus University, Denmark) - deadline for submissions: November 15, 2023.
Theory Materialized—Art-object Theorized, edited by Ido Govrin (University of Tessaly, Greece) - deadline for submissions: January 31, 2024.
Happiness in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, edited by Ype de Boer (Radboud University) - deadline for submissions: January 31, 2024.

Published Topical Issues:

2018:

The New Metaphysics: Analytic/Continental Crossovers (ed. Jon Cogburn and Paul Livingston)
Objects Across the Traditions (ed. Tom Sparrow)

2019:

Does Public Art Have to Be Bad Art? (ed. Mark Kingwell)
Computer Modeling in Philosophy (ed. Patrick Grim)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics (ed. Graham Harman)
Experience in a New Key (ed. Dorthe Jørgensen)

2020:

Imagination and Potentiality: The Quest for the Real (ed. Graham Harman and Kristupas Sabolius)
Changing One's Mind: Philosophy, Religion and Science (ed. Yossef Schwartz, Paul Franks and Christian Wiese)
Philosophy of the City (ed. Sanna Lehtinen)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics II (ed. Graham Harman)

2021:

Philosophy and Sonic Research - Thinking with Sounds and Rhythms (ed. Martin Nitsche and Vít Pokorný)
Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (ed. Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics III (ed. Graham Harman)

2022:

Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic: A Re-Evaluation (ed. Michael Lewin and Rudolf Meer)
Conceptual Personae in Ontology (ed. Carlos A. Segovia)
Ethics and Politics of TV Series (ed. Sandra Laugier)
Home and Exile - Feminist Philosophy in Thought, History and Action: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach (part II) (ed. Nicole des Bouvrie and Laura Hellsten)