From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead's work to the rise
of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology,
there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a
way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and
existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging
speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how
we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans
are not the measure of all things.
"The Universe of Things" explores the common insistence of
speculative realism on a noncorrelationist thought: that things or
objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and
comprehend them. Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates
and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought,
moving between Whitehead's own panpsychism, Harman's
object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of
Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier.
The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought--of the
effort to develop new ways of grasping the world--are enormous as
it becomes clear that our inherited assumptions are no longer
adequate to describe, much less understand, the reality we
experience around us. As Shaviro acknowledges, speculative realist
thought has its dangers, but it also, like the best speculative
fiction, holds the potential to liberate us from confining views of
what is outside ourselves and, he believes, to reclaim aesthetics
and beauty as a principle of life itself.
Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, and
evenhandedly assessing its current debates, "The Universe of
Things" is an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative
realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead's
pathbreaking work.
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