School of thought

Speculative Realism

Movement

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Classification

Period
c. 2007 CE onward
Regions
europe
Domains
Metaphysics

Overview

Speculative Realism is a diverse movement united by its rejection of 'correlationism' — the post-Kantian assumption that we can only know the correlation between thought and 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: since Kant, philosophy has been trapped in 'correlationism' — the view that we can only know the thought-world correlation. Speculative Realism breaks free to think the absolute.
  • 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

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)
  • After Finitude — Quentin Meillassoux
  • Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything — Graham Harman