Philosophy For Real

Φ4R = Philosophy For Real

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What is Φ4R?

"Philosophy for Real" is a pet project that I have intended to create for some time now in order to introduce and explicate the work of speculative realism and its proponents. Its intended audience is one who's background may or may not include academic philosophical study yet nevertheless entertains a fascination and curiosity in philosophy at a deeper level than the fairly regular “history of philosophy” series already out there. 

 

The philosophies highlighted on this site are those which aren't as readily available in the majority of academic settings—at least as of the time I write this—due to a predominant fixation amidst today's philosophy departments in one of either two extreme poles of the academic philosophical spectrum: namely, philosophies of presence or those of science and materialism.

 

The hope for this site is to further expand into a YouTube channel and interactive forum for discussion and contributions by others interested in engaging in realist philosophies (speculative and otherwise) of the 21st Century.

 

Who is Φ4R?

While this website and most of its content is created and managed by me (“KP”), philosophical realism can be argued to date back to the very beginnings of philosophy as a discipline itself―which some of us would consider to have started with Socrates. With that said, more modern-day renditions of it include Roy Bhaskar's critical realism, Hilary Putnam's internal realism, and Karen Barad's agential realism, all of which are markedly different in flavor and content. 
 
However, it is the recent movement of speculative realism that we are primarily concerned with here. Speculative realism was born at a 2007 conference held at University of London's Goldsmith College that was attended by Quentin Meillasoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant. All four philosophers presented at this conference with an eye on calling into question―if not outright calling out―the predominant philosophies of today that Meillasoux consolidated under the umbrella term “correlationist philosophy.” (See below for details.)
 
Since 2007, many other philosophers and their ontologies have surfaced from the depths of academia―the majority of them being continent but often open to engaging with those of the analytic tradition as well―with speculative realist agendas. Those including Manuel Delanda, Levi Bryant, Tristan Garcia, and Bruno Latour will be given privileged attention here as well.
 
Socrates
The problem of doubling the square (Plato’s Meno 82b)

What is speculative realism?

If correlationism corresponds to any philosophy built at least in part on (or fundamentally advocating) a basic assumption that things (call them if you wish “entities,” “objects,” “bodies,” etc.) cannot really be referred to or thought about on the ontological level (or at least to do so is essentially nonsense), speculative realism founds itself on the premise that many such things are real and autonomously exist in their own right. Different philosophies falling under the latter category may, however, be in stark contrast to each other. 
 
For instance, a transcendental materialist might prioritize the reality of flows and movements over individual discrete entities; meanwhile, in object oriented ontology, such discrete entities themselves comprise the whole of reality, even the relations between other entities. 
 
Nonetheless, all speculative realist philosophers advocate for, or at least intentionally take for granted, the existence of real entities outside the mind (contra idealism) and beyond the constraints of the correlation between thinking and being as a limited criterion of access (contra correlationism or “speculative idealism”). It goes without saying perhaps that it also therefor shares practically no territory at all then with the likes of philosophies that presume the world to be comprised of nothing more than language, power structures, or social dynamics, as are often found in psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and in the much broader category of anti-realist philosophies.
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