School of thought
Speculative Realism
Movement
Classification
- Period
- c. 2007 CE onward
- Regions
- Europe (origin)
- Domains
- Metaphysics
Overview
Speculative Realism is a diverse movement united by its rejection of what Meillassoux named 'correlationism': the assumption that thought can reach only its own relation to the world, never reality in itself. Meillassoux argues we can access the absolute through mathematics, while Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology insists that objects have a hidden reality that withdraws from all relations.
Key ideas
- Against Correlationism: Meillassoux's After Finitude (2006) names the trap and argues that the absolute can be thought after all, since mathematics describes a world indifferent to whether anyone thinks it.
- Object-Oriented Ontology: Harman: objects (of all kinds) have a hidden depth that withdraws from every relation. No object is exhausted by its effects on other things — reality exceeds all access.
- Ancestrality: Meillassoux: science tells us about events before any consciousness existed (the formation of stars, the age of rocks). This is a problem for correlationism but not for realism.
Key figures
Quentin Meillassoux · Graham Harman · Ray Brassier · Iain Hamilton Grant
Positions held
Reacts to
- Kantian Critical Philosophy
Rejects correlationism — the post-Kantian thesis that we can only think the correlation of thought and being, never the world in itself — seeking access to a mind-independent reality.
- Phenomenology
References
- Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (Polity, 2018)
- Robin Mackay (ed.), Collapse III (Urbanomic, November 2007), 'Speculative Realism' — Formation: the transcript of the founding workshop, held at Goldsmiths, University of London, on 27 April 2007 with Brassier, Grant, Harman and Meillassoux.
- Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (2006; trans. 2008), ch. 1 'Ancestrality' (the demand to think a reality that is not relative to its being given to thought)
- After Finitude — Quentin Meillassoux
- Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything — Graham Harman