[Download] "Editors' Introduction (Editorial)" by Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Editors' Introduction (Editorial)
- Author : Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 177 KB
Description
The present issue is a collection of essays inspired by a conference which took place in March 2010 at the University of Dundee entitled, 'Real Objects or Material Subjects?' While some of the essays in this issue are extensions of papers presented at the conference, others are original pieces inspired by the event. Although the essays contained in this issue cover topics ranging from psychoanalysis, contemporary French metaphysics, the re-appropriation of German Idealism for twenty-first century philosophy, to object centered approaches to metaphysics; they all share one thing in common: a concern with exploring the future of speculative metaphysics in the context of twenty-first century European philosophy. In particular, these essays, and the conference that inspired them, critically explore two growing sensibilities in continental metaphysics: materialist accounts of subjectivity and realist accounts of objects. The object oriented approach to philosophical realism is a recent philosophical movement inspired primarily by the work of Graham Harman, and recently taken up by philosophers and theorists such as Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, Steven Shaviro, and Ian Bogost. Materialist accounts of subjectivity, or transcendental materialism, are a sensibility first articulated by Adrian Johnston in his systematic reading of the work of Slavoj Zizek, which can equally describe aspects of the projects of figures such as Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, and Quentin Meillassoux. One thing in common to both of these movements is a renewed emphasis on the speculative aspect of philosophy, and by this we mean the attempt of philosophical speculation to move past the bounds of the human-world correlate and 'think' the absolute in-itself. The common reference for both movements on this point is the argument against correlationism presented in Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude, a work that serves as a point of reference for many of the papers contained in this issue. (1) Meillassoux relies on the argument that post-Kantian philosophy has been largely trapped within the bounds of strong correlationism, meaning that any account of the existence of an object or entity is necessarily correlative to its being perceived by a conscious subject. Meillassoux problematizes correlationism through his employment of the concept of the arche-fossil, which signifies any object whose existence pre-dates the emergences of human consciousness. The question arising from this example is how is it possible for us to affirm the existence of these isotopes while acknowledging that they existed before the possibility of any subject-object correlation.