Although Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy desires to be postmetaphysical and posttheological, I argue in this paper that it remains structurally theological. Specifically, I argue that Meillassoux’s speculative thesis on the contingency of nature and its laws repeats at a formal level the medieval theological distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. The first part of this paper discusses how this distinction allowed medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus to understand and have faith in the stable contingency (...) of the present order of things in light of divine omnipotence. The second part of this paper discusses how Meillassoux repeats this distinction, intentionally or not, between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power in his attempt to think the absolute contingency of the laws of nature as an effect of hyper-Chaos. Although, unlike the medieval God, Meillassoux’s hyper-Chaos remains fundamentally without reason and devoid of any moral valence, I argue in the third section of this paper that Meillassoux sneaks in an existential faith in the present and future order of things with his appeal to hope in a speculative resurrection of the dead, a move that brings him further in line with the substance of the distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. (shrink)

У статті досліджується місце об’єкта в полі спекулятивного реалізму загалом та об’єктно-орієнтованої онтології зокрема. Описується особливе положення об’єкта, яке йому надає ООО на противагу «кореляційному» відношенню. Взята за основу чотирична структура Ґ. Гармана доповнюється уявлюваним модусом об’єкта, чиє місце знаходиться на межі суб’єкт-об’єктної дихотомії. Сама дихотомія розглядається у контексті дослідження можливості її подолання завдяки підходу, який був запропонований прибічниками ООО. Стверджується неможливість повного переходу до цілковито об’єктної реальності, перепоною для чого слугує неможливість відокремлення останньої від поля уявлюваного.

This paper aims at the construction of a structural coupling between object-oriented philosophy and Whitehead’s philosophy of organism by making a case for the primacy of the ontological principle through the proposal of a social object hypothesis. The social object here differs from traditional renderings of sociology, which are centered on humans’ activity and personalities, by way of recuperating Tarde’s social theory of associations. This theory provides us with a non-anthropocentric reading of sociality. This hypothesis will be furthered by the (...) introduction of the systemic category of internal/external, or system/environment, as a self-enclosure feature of social objects. Equipped with these two notions, we will discuss Graham Harman’s paper “Whitehead and Schools X, Y, and Z,” while rerouting his assessments to our own social object hypothesis. The final idea is to propose an alliance through the conception of a macro-ontological approach to philosophy of organism. We intend to show that this is not only coherently feasible regarding Whitehead’s own categoreal scheme, but also meets the requirements of being a real object in object-oriented ontology’s directives. (shrink)

The work of Jacques Derrida is often characterized as anti-scientific, and his philosophy of language taken to mean we are sealed off from empirical reality, confined to our metaphysical prison. This position is reinforced by the fact that his forerunners, Heidegger and Nietzsche, did diminish the importance of the sciences, and argued that we are enclosed within the limits of language. Today, philosophy continues to deconstruct the nature/culture distinction, and challenge the meaning of materialism, but in recent decades has realized (...) that this work requires, in addition to a critique of the modern concept of science, a rehabilitation of the sciences outside their metaphysical definition. The fact that Derrida continues to be understood as an anti-science thinker has led to the exclusion of his work from this project. In this paper, I show that Derrida, while deconstruction the metaphysical concepts of science, nature and empiricism, in fact takes the mathematical sciences as an important force of deconstructing, and develops an interpretation of empiricism that points to a non-metaphysical understanding of it. From this perspective, Derrida's work is useful for thinking through the relation of the human to language and nature in the age of globalization and anthropogenic climate change. (shrink)

The development of the discussion on “Speculative Realism” and “Speculative Materialism” is very well documented. However, in order to better understand the overall project of this “New Realism” it is helpful to draw light to the genealogy and context in which the problem evolved in. In this paper, I map out a genealogy of the complex problem of “New Realism” in order to understand what it is that is “new” about this realism. The central argument of the paper is that (...) the new problem of realism is in essence a question of method, resulting from a tension between philosophical and sociological epistemology. (shrink)