- Graham Harman
Graham Harman is a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. Harman is often associated with the
Speculative Realism movement in philosophy that features such other authors asRay Brassier ,Iain Hamilton Grant , andQuentin Meillassoux .Biography
Born in
Iowa City , Iowa on May 9, 1968, and raised inMount Vernon, Iowa . Harman attended St. John's College inAnnapolis, Maryland , receiving his B.A. in 1990. He then pursued graduate study under philosopherAlphonso Lingis atPenn State University , receiving his M.A. in 1991. Transferring toDePaul University in Chicago, he received his Ph. D. there in 1999. While in Chicago, he worked briefly as a sportswriter for sportsextra.com (now defunct).Since 2000, he has been a member of the Department of Philosophy at the
American University in Cairo .Thought
Through an interpretation of the tool-analysis of Heidegger's "Being and Time", Harman sets out to develop what he calls an "object-oriented philosophy". Taking the tool-analysis as the defining moment in twentieth-century continental philosophy, Harman finds in
Heidegger the roots of a metaphysics of things which does justice to the things themselves. Although working from within it, he finds the broad history ofphenomenology to be deficient in that it constantly subordinates the independent life of objects to our (human) access to them. Against the Kantian tradition, his object-oriented approach considers the neglected real life of objects to be fertile ground for a resurgent metaphysics. Emphasizing the notions of substance and occasional cause (seeoccasionalism ), he affirms the autonomy of objects while aiming to reveal their shadowy underground life and covert interactions. Cutting across the phenomenological tradition, and especially itslinguistic turn , Harman deploys a brand of metaphysical realism that attempts to extricate objects from their human captivity and uncover a strange new subterranean network of object relations.Bibliography
*"Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects" (2002)
*"Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things" (2005)
*"Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing" (2007)ee also
*
linguistic turn
*Bruno Latour
*Martin Heidegger
*Alfred North Whitehead External links
* [http://blog.urbanomic.com/urbanomic/ Webpage for "Collapse" journal featuring contributions by Graham Harman and other "speculative realists"]
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