This is a contribution to the debate on speculative realism deriving from the book The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. It is also in part a response to Fabio Gironi’s review article on the subject, ‘Between naturalism and rationalism: a new realist landscape’ 2012: 361–87).

This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.

Basing on the philosophers that are primarily associated with speculative realism, the author of the article examines the place of this phenomenon in the context of contemporary philosophy. The discourses concerning these thinkers are structured according to the central tendencies, or motives, of the philosophical thought that is close to speculative realism. The research shows that these tendencies are as follow: realism, anti-Kantianism, materialism, anti-anthropocentrism, and philosophical attention to mathematical and natural sciences. Speculative realism is an ontological realism that affirms (...) the possibility of human thought to know a thought-independent reality. Thus, it is anti-Kantian by its nature. However, for the most part, philosophers associated with speculative realism propose to transgress the Kantian frame through the radicalization of Kantianism itself. Speculative realism is often considered along with new materialism, but this concept is too wide and polisemantic today to provide considerable clarification concerning the nature of speculative realism. The latter is also characterized by its opposition to anthropocentrism, but this relation is not homogenous among speculative realists and, moreover, is somehow paradoxical, as their speculative stance reserves for humans the noblest ability: to know a thought-independent reality. Finally, the attempt to philosophically engage with natural and mathematical sciences plays a significant role in most of the examined philosophical projects. Speculative realism is inscribed in the speculative shift, or speculative turn, that is happening in the contemporary continental philosophy. This shift is a change in the attitude of the philosophical community towards the questions about “reality in itself” and about the “Great Outdoors.” The relevance of such problems is being restored, and they are becoming the subject of emerging realistic and speculative projects.Manuscript received 06.09.2020. (shrink)

Este artigo procura apresentar a filosofia orientada a objetos de Graham Harman, filósofo pertencente ao movimento do Realismo Especulativo, movimento esse que vem tendo uma crescente influência no cenário atual da filosofia continental. A filosofia de Harman, ao procurar pensar para além do acesso humano às coisas, predominante no pensamento filosófico desde Kant, pode colocar em xeque nossas noções sobre o que seria a filosofia. Para Harman, as filosofias do acesso pensam os objetos como profundos demais, ao passo que as (...) filosofias do pré-individual e os materialismos cientificistas rejeitam os objetos pelo motivo oposto: eles seriam superficiais demais. Procurando retomar a filosofia a partir do problema do ocasionalismo moderno, do problema da relação entre coisas quaisquer, Harman busca reviver o espírito das fenomenologias de Husserl e de Heidegger. O resultado disso é uma orientação a objetos que preserva da Crítica Kantiana a noção de finitude. Ao final, procuro mostrar algumas dificuldades que podem colocar em risco o modelo de orientação a objetos de Harman. (shrink)