Volume 2, Issue 1

Not all public art is bad art, but when public art is bad, it tends to be bad in an identifiable way. In this paper, I develop a Waltonian theory of the category of public art, according to which public art standardly is both accessible to the public and minimally site-specific. When a work lacks the standard features of the category to which it belongs, appreciators tend to perceive the work as aesthetically flawed. I then compare and contrast cases of successful and unsuccessful public art to show that accessibility and site-specificity are features which tend to preclude the other. It is difficult, although hardly impossible, for a site-specific work to remain accessible, and difficult for an accessible work to engage adequately with the site on which it is situated. As a result, while not all public art is bad, the features peculiar to public work encourage a latent tendency toward badness.

This essay looks to re-evaluate sculptor Richard Serra’s famous claim that “to remove the work is to destroy it.” Using OOO, and particularly Graham Harman’s interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis, in order to analyze the now famous moment when Tilted Arc was de-installed from Federal Plaza, Manhattan in 1989, this paper argues that the work was not in fact destroyed but rather that its ontological autonomy was even more absolutely revealed in that moment as such. Although it is the case that art objects and sites are prone to discursive co-construction and evaluation, it is this analysis’ claim that they both are possessive of a deep, substantive form also, a form resistant to appropriation. Tilted Arc therefore revealed something even more insidious and dangerous to those who opposed it than the power of art to speak back to its surroundings. Rather, it uncovered the substantive objecthood of the site itself.

The role and function of public art is currently undergoing some large-scale changes. Many new artworks which are situated within the already existing urban sphere, seem to be changing the definition of public art, each in their own way. Simultaneously, there exists a trend that endorses more traditional forms of public art. Juxtaposing and comparing the aesthetic implications of different types of artworks, it is possible to see how they contribute to the contemporary understanding of the urban sphere. In this paper, I take a look at the explicit and implicit aesthetic values that these simultaneously existing contemporary forms of public art are based on. The cases selected for closer look are examples of prominent and recent works of public art from downtown Helsinki: He who Brings the Light (unveiled in 2017) by Pekka Kauhanen and Running Man (performed in 2016-17) by Nestori Syrjala. What space and what kind of position is subscribed to the perceiver by these very different types of yet equally established artworks? What kind of experiences and possibilities of participation do these works entail? The focus is on the undergoing redefinition of public art that revolves around these questions.

In this paper, I argue for what I define as the multiplicity thesis (MT). According to MT, there is not a single public of public art, but a multiplicity of them. I defend MT both as a descriptive and a normative claim. I explore different types of publics of public art that can be distinguished from one another in terms of their different sizes. I expand my analysis of the differences among separate publics of public art by considering temporary and enduring ones.

Suzanne Lacy introduced the term ‘New Genre Public Art’ (NGPA) to refer to art practices that depart from those traditional of public art (such as installing works in parks and plazas) and focus instead on the direct engagement of artists with audiences to deal with pressing socio-political issues. In this paper, I argue that some works of NGPA should be valued for the intellectual value grounded in their artistic features, not dissimilarly to works of conceptual art. In developing my argument, I take distance from Vid Simoniti’s recent account of ‘Socially Engaged Art’, offer a thorough analysis of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002) and Kathrin Bohm’s and Stefan Saffer’s Mobile Porch (1999), and submit that both such works qualify as good works of NGPA.

Much of the literature on public space focuses on physical inclusion and exclusion rather than social inclusion or exclusion. In this paper, the implications of this are considered in the context of two monuments, The Volunteers/Les Bénévoles , and The Emigrant , located outside the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These monuments, while perhaps designed to celebrate Canadian multiculturalism, can be read instead as signaling Canada’s enduring commitment to white supremacy, Eurocentricity and colonization, when viewed through the eyes of racialized immigrants. Thus the “public space” becomes exclusionary. In the context in which the monuments are situated, the racial subtext cannot be ignored. This article purports that images, text and placement, regardless of intention, have significant implications on public space and public demeanor.

This paper focuses on how the social, dialogical and collaborative strategies and practices of The Artists Village openly intervened in the public spaces of Singapore at various times in the city-state’s history from 1989 to 2015. The objective of this paper is to draw out how the artists collective used social situations to openly produce relational, participatory and socially engaged art in public spaces with specific functions, history and importance. These various forms of artistic interventions took place on a farm, in shopping malls, on public transport networks and at national monuments during different moments in Singapore’s rapid urban transformation. From these examples, one is able to understand why The Artists Village openly intervened in the public spaces of Singapore and how these interventions functioned in their limited scope. Through this study we are able to assess how the varying levels of collaboration, openness and criticality present in their public art projects enabled them to grow outside the centralised system of the nation-state in inserting their practice into the public sphere and engaging the masses.

Responding to Open Philosophy’s call ‘Does public art have to be bad art?’, in this paper we argue that this discussion should pay attention to the consequences of structural transformations that guide the production and presentation of public art in today’s increasingly private city. While entrepreneurial governance and corporate branding strategies generate new opportunities, they might also result in increased risk averseness and control over the content of public art, thus putting its critical potential at risk. That observation ushers in urgent questions about control, complicity and criticality. We aim to reflect on those questions through two public art projects in Hong Kong: Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon (2015) and Our 60-second friendship begins now (2016) by Sampson Wong Yu-hin and Jason Lam Chi-fai. After drawing conclusions on the justification of public funding for co-productions, the legitimacy for artists to sometimes not ‘follow the rules’, and the problematic nature of a narrow definition of professionalism as a means to discredit artists, our analysis underlines the urgent need to develop a framework that can guide discussions on the consequences of control and complicity for the critical potential of public art.

Connectionist research first emerged in the 1940s. The first phase of connectionism attracted a certain amount of media attention, but scant philosophical interest. The phase came to an abrupt halt, due to the efforts of Minsky and Papert (1969), when they argued for the intrinsic limitations of the approach. In the mid-1980s connectionism saw a resurgence. This marked the beginning of the second phase of connectionist research. This phase did attract considerable philosophical attention. It was of philosophical interest, as it offered a way of counteracting the conceptual ties to the philosophical traditions of atomism, rationalism, logic, nativism, rule realism and a concern with the role symbols play in human cognitive functioning, which was prevalent as a consequence of artificial intelligence research. The surge in philosophical interest waned, possibly in part due to the efforts of some traditionalists and the so-called black box problem. Most recently, what may be thought of as a third phase of connectionist research, based on so-called deep learning methods, is beginning to show some signs of again exciting philosophical interest.

A central theme in western philosophy was to find formal methods that can reliably discover empirical relationships and their explanations from data assembled from experience. As a philosophical project, that ambition was abandoned in the 20th century and generally dismissed as impossible. It was replaced in philosophy by neo-Kantian efforts at reconstruction and justification, and in professional statistics by the more limited ambition to estimate a small number of parameters in pre-specified hypotheses. The influx of “big data” from climate science, neuropsychology, biology, astronomy and elsewhere implicitly called for a revival of the grander philosophical ambition. Search algorithms are meeting that call, but they pose a problem: how are their accuracies to be assessed in domains where experimentation is limited or impossible? Increasingly, the answer is through simulation of data from models of the kind of process in the domain. In some cases, these innovations require rethinking how the accuracy and informativeness of inference methods can be assessed. Focusing on causal inference, we give an example from neuroscience, but to show that the model/simulation strategy is not confined to causal inference, we also consider two classification problems from astrophysics: identifying exoplanets and identifying dark matter concentrations.

Spite (in the biological or evolutionary sense) is behavior that harms others at a cost to the actor. The presence of spite in human and animal populations presents an evolutionary puzzle. Recent work has suggested small populations and pre-play signaling can have a significant effect on the evolution of spite. Here, we use computational methods to explore these factors in fluctuating populations that may go extinct. We find that the presence of spite can make a population significantly more likely to go extinct, but that this does not preclude the possibility of spite reliably evolving. Additionally, we find that the stochastic effects of small fluctuating populations allow for the evolution and predominance of signal-mediated conditional spite across a wide range of conditions. These results suggest that directed harm, even if costly, can play a significant early role in the evolution of social behaviors and this provides a possible origin for punishment.

This article presents two approaches for computer simulations of virtue ethics in the context of agent-based modeling, a simple way and a complex way. The simple way represents virtues as numeric variables that are invoked in specific events or situations. This way can easily be implemented and included in social simulations. On the other hand, the complex way requires a PECS framework: physical, cognitive, emotional, and social components need to be implemented in agents. Virtue is the result of the interaction of these internal components rather than a single variable. I argue that the complex way using the PECS framework is more suitable for simulating virtue ethics theory because it can capture the internal struggle and conflict sometimes involved in the practice of virtue. To show how the complex way could function, I present a sample computer simulation for the cardinal virtue of temperance, the virtue that moderates physical desires such as food, drink, and sex. This computer simulation is programmed in Python and builds upon the well-known Sugarscape simulation. 1

The ways in which languages have come to divide the visible spectrum with their color terminology, in both their variety and the apparent universal tendencies, are still largely unexplained. Building on recent work in modeling color perception and categorization, as well as the theory of signaling games, we incrementally construct a color categorization model which combines perceptual characteristics of individual agents, game-theoretic signaling interaction of these agents, and the probability of observing particular colors as an environmental constraint. We also propose a method of transparent evaluation against the data gathered in the World Color Survey. The results show that the model’s predictive power is comparable to the current state of the art. Additionally, we argue that the model we suggest is superior in terms of motivation of the principles involved, and that its explanatory relevance with respect to color categorization in languages is therefore higher. Our results suggest that the universal tendencies of color categorization cannot be explained solely in terms of the shape of the color space induced by our perceptual apparatus. We believe that only by taking the heterogeneity of the phenomenon seriously can we acquire a deeper understanding of why color categorization takes the forms we observe across languages.

The relationship between philosophy and research on artificial intelligence (AI) has been difficult since its beginning, with mutual misunderstanding and sometimes even hostility. By contrast, we show how an approach informed by both philosophy and AI can be productive. After reviewing some popular frameworks for computation and learning, we apply the AI methodology of “build it and see” to tackle the philosophical and psychological problem of characterizing perception as distinct from sensation. Our model comprises a network of very simple, but interacting agents which have binary experiences of the “yes/no”-type and communicate their experiences with each other. When does such a network refer to a single agent instead of a distributed network of entities? We apply machine learning techniques to address the following related questions: i) how can the model explain stability of compound entities, and ii) how could the model implement a single task such as perceptual inference? We thereby find consistency with previous work on “interface” strategies from perception research. While this reflects some necessary conditions for the ascription of agency, we suggest that it is not sufficient. Here, AI research, if it is intended to contribute to conceptual understanding, would benefit from issues previously raised by philosophy. We thus conclude the article with a discussion of action-selection, the role of embodiment, and consciousness to make this more explicit. We conjecture that a combination of AI research and philosophy allows general principles of mind and being to emerge from a “quasi-empirical” investigation.

Recent advances in philosophical thinking about consciousness, such as cognitive phenomenology and mereological analysis, provide a framework that facilitates using computational models to explore issues surrounding the nature of consciousness. Here we suggest that, in particular, studying the computational mechanisms of working memory and its cognitive control is highly likely to identify computational correlates of consciousness and thereby lead to a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness. We describe our recent computational models of human working memory and propose that three computational correlates of consciousness follow from the results of this work: itinerant attractor sequences, top-down gating, and very fast weight changes. Our current investigation is focused on evaluating whether these three correlates are sufficient to create more complex working memory models that encompass compositionality and basic causal inference. We conclude that computational models of working memory are likely to be a fruitful approach to advancing our understanding of consciousness in general and in determining the long-term potential for development of an artificial consciousness specifically.

Computational philosophy is the use of mechanized computational techniques to unearth philosophical insights that are either difficult or impossible to find using traditional philosophical methods. Computational metaphysics is computational philosophy with a focus on metaphysics. In this paper, we (a) develop results in modal metaphysics whose discovery was computer assisted, and (b) conclude that these results work not only to the obvious benefit of philosophy but also, less obviously, to the benefit of computer science, since the new computational techniques that led to these results may be more broadly applicable within computer science. The paper includes a description of our background methodology and how it evolved, and a discussion of our new results.

The comments accompanying Proposition (Prop.) 11 (“God ... necessarily exists”) in Part I of Spinoza’s The Ethics contain sketches of what appear to be at least three more or less distinct ontological arguments. The first of these is problematic even on its own terms. More is true: even the proposition “God exists” (GE), a consequence of Prop. 11, cannot be derived from the definitions and axioms of Part I (the “DAPI”) of The Ethics ; thus, Prop. 11 cannot be derived from the DAPI, either. To prove these claims, I use an automated deduction system (ADS) to show that Prop. 11 is independent of the DAPI. I then augment the DAPI with some auxiliary assumptions I believe Spinoza would accept and that sustain an automated derivation of (GE). The results illustrate how an ADS can facilitate the analysis of arguments and yield an apparently novel argument cast in the style of Spinoza.

How might philosophy of religion be impacted by developments in computational modeling and social simulation? After briefly describing some of the content and context biases that have shaped traditional philosophy of religion, this article provides examples of computational models that illustrate the explanatory power of conceptually clear and empirically validated causal architectures informed by the bio-cultural sciences. It also outlines some of the material implications of these developments for broader metaphysical and metaethical discussions in philosophy. Computer modeling and simulation can contribute to the reformation of the philosophy of religion in at least three ways: by facilitating conceptual clarity about the role of biases in the emergence and maintenance of phenomena commonly deemed “religious,” by supplying tools that enhance our capacity to link philosophical analysis and synthesis to empirical data in the psychological and social sciences, and by providing material insights for metaphysical hypotheses and metaethical proposals that rely solely on immanent resources.

Under the label of scientific metaphysics , many naturalist metaphysicians are moving away from a priori conceptual analysis and instead seek scientific explanations that will help bring forward a unified understanding of the world. This paper first reviews how our classical assumptions about ordinary objects fail to be true in light of quantum mechanics. The paper then explores how our experiences of ordinary objects arise by reflecting on how our neural system operates algorithmically. Contemporary models and simulations in computational neuroscience are shown to provide a theoretical framework that does not conflict with existing fundamental physical theories, and nonetheless helps us make sense of the manifest image. It is argued that we must largely explain how the manifest image arises in algorithmic terms, so that we can pursue a metaphysics about ordinary objects that is scientifically well founded.

This essay offers a reflection on the notion of experience considered within the context of framework of relational ontology. The primary advantage of such a consideration is that it escapes the consequences of subject-object accounts of experience, accounts which either laud the cognitive subject as master of the experienced world or exile it to an existence in a world it does not experience as its own. Setting experience within a relational ontology and developing a participatory epistemology around the concept offers an inter-active account of experience as an ontological process and an integrated account of knowing and being. This ends the traditional privileging the human as a cognitive subject and opens the way to thinking of all elements within interactive processes as interpretive agencies. Furthermore, it allows the category of interpretation to be freed from the domain of cognitive subjects and to become a descriptor of ontological interaction in general.

At a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth. In their empirical critique of religion L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap accepted two forms of religious experience, which they described with an optical and acoustic metaphor. They denied their cognitive truth value, but not their value for life. However, an extended concept of truth, which encompasses every correspondence between experience and reality, can also find truth in religious experiences of “transparency” and “resonance”. They differ from aesthetic experience not only by the depth of transparency and resonance, but also by their cognitive interpretation. What is experienced is cognitively referred to a final reality: either to a “summum ens” in this world, or to the whole of this world or something unknown beyond of this world. This final point of reference is a unity of “being” and “value”. Religion makes experiences of the everyday transparent for both aspects of an ultimate reality und motivates to a life full of resonance with this reality.

Atmospheres constitute an ordinary perceptual phenomenon that can become a new experience, as the former are more than the sum of single-sensory perceptual factors. Drawing on the terminological pair ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and its interdependencies, the atmospheric phenomenon can be approached in an essayistic fashion (and by means of applying an aesthetic focus in the broadest sense). In so doing, it becomes clear that the atmosphere serves as a condition for the emergence as well as actualization of special perception. Based on Gernot Böhme’s research and further studies, specific (ontological) determinants are identified and differentiated according to the definitional facets of the ‘and’, the ‘in-between’ and the ‘whereby’ or ‘in what way’. These considerations demonstrate to what extent perception precedes the separation of subject and object in that the atmospheric ‘whereby’ is responsible for creating tuned spaces and situations. Turning to the objects of perception and their concomitant ecstasies as well as to the subject of perception with its reception helps to clarify which components of an atmosphere work in what way. In this context, methods of exploratory involvement and participation (in the Parcours Commenté but even more so in the Aesthetic Fieldwork) gain in importance in order to explore atmospheres from a lifeworld perspective.

Is there really an atmospheric turn? The concept of “atmosphere” as a qualitative-emotional prius of sensory experience seems today to have encouraged the convergence of many interdisciplinary studies focused on the qualitative aspects of our “surroundings”. Based on the neo-phenomenological theory of atmospheric perception as a first pathivc impression and a felt-bodily communication, this paper explores and synthesises the relationship between atmospheres and expressive qualities. It thus clarifies the key features of a general “pathic” aesthetics. It considers perceivers as beings who are touched by atmospheric feelings in emotional and tactile ways. These are widespread and vary in their modulation of lived space. They are also ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things of the lifeworld. By realising how they (especially in an unintentional way) expose themselves to what happens, perceivers turn out not to be “subjects of something” but rather “subjects to something”: that is, human beings who are only “sovereign” when they are free, at least in their daily experience, from the dogma of rational and methodological autonomy imposed by Western Modernity.

This article is an inquiry into the concept of metaphysical experience through a joint discussion of two authors and philosophers with different approaches that nevertheless converge in the reclamation of the concept and rely both on the experience of death as an example. In both cases, the authors are guided by the central problem of how not to relinquish metaphysical experience to unscrutinized immediacy or a powerful conversion which enjoins subjection, putting it in contact with aesthetics and ethics at once. Theodor Adorno situates metaphysical experience as a problem of philosophy of history and devotes attention to the contemporary possibility of experiences that evoke transcendence. The transformations he identifies in the concept also lead him to propose art as a domain where metaphysical experience is alive. The implicit personal investment Adorno makes is much more clear in Lacoue-Labarthe who, in a dialogue with Maurice Blanchot, shows the experience as deeply bound up with literature and its links to subjectivity. The article argues that the main difference between the two approaches is modal and temporal from the side of the object, aside from the different modes of interrogation recognized with the labels deconstruction and critical theory.

I argue that Hegel’s Phenomenology is an attempt to prove that human experience displays a sui generis logical structure. This is because, as rational animals who instinctively create a universe of meaning to navigate our environment, the perceptual content of our conscious experience of objects, the desires that motivate our self-conscious experience of action, and the beliefs and values that make up our sociohistorical experience all testify to the presence of rationality as their condition of possibility. As such, Hegel’s Phenomenology not only requires of us that we transform the mission of logic into a description of the immanent logic at the basis of human experience, thereby making the task of logic “anthropological.” It also presents us with a novel model of human experience—one that: demonstrates the rationality already instinctively at work in our bodily sensations, perceptions, and desires; gives an account of the origins of human society and history; and also makes human experience irreducible to cognitive processes in the brain, psychological mechanisms, and the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction.

Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) thought is widely used in the humanities and social sciences for investigating experiences of madness, illness, marginalization and social conflicts. However, the meaning of the word “experience” is not always clearly defined, and the French word expérience has a whole variety of meanings. In this article I explicate Foucault’s most relevant concepts of experience and their theoretical functions. He refers to experience throughout his career, especially in his early texts on existential psychiatry from the 1950s and 1960s and in his late work from the 1980s. Texts such as Mental Illness and Psychology and Dire vrai sur soi-même have received less attention than Foucault’s most famous books, but they show that references to experience form significant theoretical and thematic links between his earlier investigations of mental distress and his late work on ethics. When Foucault reorganizes his work in the 1980s, he looks back to his early work in his search for a new concept of experience. I argue that in these contexts, experience cannot be understood as an outcome of activity that organizes perceptions and leads to objective knowledge, but experiences are not defined as events produced by discourses, either. I demonstrate in this article how Foucault uses the concept of experience to structure his research on ethical subjectivity and cultural practices of care. At the same time the article questions some standard interpretations of his work.

This paper employs Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the social , which lacks location and mandates conformity, to evaluate social media’s: a) challenge to the polis , b) relationship to the social, b) influence on private space, d) impact on public space, and e) virus-like capacity to capture, mimic, and replicate the agonistic polis, where “everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.” Using Arendt’s exact language, this paper begins by discussing how she differentiated the political, private, social, and public realms. After explaining how online activities resemble (or not) her notion of the social, I demonstrate how the rise of the social, which she characterized as dominated by behavior (not action), ruled by nobody and occurring nowhere, continues to eclipse both private and public space at an alarming pace. Finally, I discuss the ramifications of social media’s setting the stage for worldlessness to spin out of control, as the public square becomes an intangible web. Unlike an Arendtian web of worldly human relationships that fosters individuality and enables excellence to be publicly tested, social media feeds a craving for kinship and connection, however remotely. Leaving such needs unfulfilled, social media risks to trump bios politicos.

John Dewey’s philosophical pragmatism offers a reformatory approach to the arduous relationship between natural sciences and humanities. The crucial issue, which Dewey sets himself to resolve, is the pre-Darwinian influence of classical philosophy upon various scholarly practices. Ancient background assumptions still today permeate a considerable proportion of academic research and argumentation on both sides of the debate. Even evolutionary accounts appear to be affected. In order to avoid the often implicit, but nonetheless problematic, consequences that ensue from such archaic premises, I examine Dewey’s reappraisal of the concepts of art, science and knowledge. An analysis of these key concepts renders it possible to understand the proper function of aesthetic experience. In this paper, natural constitution of an aesthetic experience, which carries one of the intrinsic relations between art and science, comprises the core of the proposed solution. Furthermore, establishment of an integral aesthetic connection forms a fruitful basis for further bridging of the gap between hard sciences and humanities.

This article proposes a direction—inspired by a reading of Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture— in which thinking enriched by artistic experience can unfold an alternative mode of being-in-the-world. Heidegger points out that, in contrast to a scientific understanding of space as an empty container, the special character of space in sculpture is characterized by a clearing-away ( Räumen ), which presupposes and points to an open, receptive attitude toward experience that is necessary for dwelling to take place. From Heidegger this article proceeds to reflect on artworks by Eduardo Chillida and Janet Echelman. These offer concrete examples of how a thinking of sculpture can apply to different notions of place. While Chillida’s sculptures present a sense of place as rooted and embedded in the landscape, Echelman’s artworks explore an expanded notion of place through a multisensory sense of immersion. Applying Heidegger’s meditations on Räumen , it turns out that the differences between these artworks are of greatest significance in illustrating the breadth of the experiential space that they share: an openness to dwelling and a receptivity toward being-in-the-world. In this way, Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture are unfolded in a contemporary context and the potential of sculpture for a thinking of experience is established.

The purpose of the present contribution is to develop an understanding of experience that accounts for its need to be continuously uncovered and recovered in order to consolidate itself. Through critical dialogue with modern phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions I posit that this consolidation process proves porous and discontinuous as experience contains caesuras and limits, which break open and even fracture what is already known by individual consciousness so as to make room for something new to appear over the horizon. Thinking about how to engage with the phenomena given in experience draws us into a dynamic movement at the limits of singular subjectivity and the world which transcends it to all sides. After following and exploring this movement, it remains a question, which will be discussed in the end, whether all experience can be retrieved.

This essay considers the ambiguous sense in which Badiou is a Platonist. It alleviates this ambiguity by considering how two characteristics of Platonism are treated in the metaphysics of Being and Event: (1) the split between being/appearing, and (2) Platonic Ideas. It considers how in Badiou and Plato’s metaphysics the treatment of both these characteristics of Platonism is comparable. Accordingly, it compares both such characteristics in relation to Being and Event and the Theaetetus and Phaedo , and, using concepts from each philosopher, explores three possible ways in which being/appearing and Platonic Ideas may be interrelated, thereby constituting a philosophy of experience. These explorations necessitate parallel consideration of how the sense in which Badiou is a Platonist is determinable by the interrelation of Platonic Ideas with being/appearing in his metaphysics. It is determined that how being/appearing and Platonic Ideas interrelate in Badiou is markedly different from how they do so in Plato, making it questionable whether Badiou is a Platonist in this sense. However, it is indicated that an esoteric sense in which Badiou is a Platonist (the dialectic of the One and the multiple) has been considered throughout this essay, and that more such senses deserve consideration.

By comparing Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Baudrillard through the lens of a study of the notion of withdrawal in Heidegger’s tool analysis and “The Question Concerning Technology”, this article explores the extent to which an Object-Oriented Baudrillard is possible, or even necessary. Considering an OOO understanding of Mauss’s gift-exchange, a possible critique of duomining in Baudrillard and a revision of Baudrillard’s understanding of art, the prospects of a new reading of Baudrillard and interpretation of OOO’s genealogy are established. These lines of comparison qualify the role of withdrawal in Baudrillard and symbolic exchange for OOO, and lead towards the conclusion that an Object-Oriented Baudrillard is possible, but may not, conversely, be considered necessary.

Relational ontologies that postulate the primacy of relations over their relata may seem like a contrary and incompatible approach to object-oriented ontology (OOO). Therefore, this paper aims to clarify the relationship between Barad’s and Escobar’s relational ontologies and Harman’s OOO by comparing and contrasting the relative coherences between them. After outlining the central assumptions of the different accounts, I discuss the problems of relational ontologies with regard to several ethical, political, and posthumanist issues. I argue that OOO is able to avoid their pitfalls without rejecting the major benefits of relational ontologies. After a critique of the pluralization of worlds within relational ontologies, I argue for the rejection of the concept of world(s) in favor of understanding space and time as emerging from polar tensions within the quadruple objects. Consequently, this highlights the potential of OOO to encounter the Anthropocene beyond scientific realism and to account for the plurality of reality without granting any hegemonic access to it. This paper, therefore, argues for a conceptualization of ontological difference without one or many worlds.

Object-oriented ontologists understand relations of cause and effect to be sensory or aesthetic in nature, not involving direct interaction between objects. Four major arguments are used to defend an indirect view of causation: 1) that there are analogies between perception and causation, 2) that the indirect view can account for cases of causation which a direct view cannot, 3) an Occasionalist argument that direct interaction would make causation impossible, and 4) that the view simply fits better with object-oriented ontology’s own premises. However, each argument is fallacious or otherwise unconvincing. The first affirms the consequent. The second fails because the relevant cases can easily be accounted for with a direct view. The third makes false assumptions about the relation between parts and wholes. And the fourth can also be used to argue against object-oriented ontology. Many of these problems can be traced to the methodological aspects of object-oriented ontology and might be avoided by emphasizing the role of non-argumentative justification in metaphysics.

This article begins by addressing a critique of my book Immaterialism by the archaeologists Þóra Pétursdóttirr and Bjørnar Olsen in their 2018 article “Theory Adrift.” As they see it, I restrict myself in Immaterialism to available historical documentation on the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and they wonder how my account might have changed if I had discussed more typical archaeological examples instead: wrecked and sunken ships, released ballast, deserted harbors, distributed goods, and derelict fortresses. In response, I argue that my account was not therefore non-archaeological, since ruins are the topic of archaeology only by accident: the real subject of the discipline is what Marshall McLuhan describes as “cold media,” in the sense that they are low in information. McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold media is shown to be surprisingly analogous to Aristotle’s difference between continua and discrete substances, and some consequences are drawn from this analogy.

Philosophical critiques are prone to relapse into a sort of entrenchment in which the basic elements of a philosophy are kept from exposure, so that instead of advancing, philosophy easily becomes compartmentalized into specific trends. This article thus seeks the conditions of a non-entrenched, open-field philosophical critique in general and, in particular, of an open-field critique of Harman’s OOO (object-oriented ontology). For that purpose, the idea of precariousness is introduced, which is then confronted with some ideas concerning philosophical critique and practice, in particular those of François Laruelle. Since we can find in Harman’s OOO an outline of what we call here an open-field critique, the field of combat against Harman will be the one concerning the idea of an open field itself.

This paper aims at the construction of a structural coupling between object-oriented philosophy and Whitehead’s philosophy of organism by making a case for the primacy of the ontological principle through the proposal of a social object hypothesis . The social object here differs from traditional renderings of sociology, which are centered on humans’ activity and personalities, by way of recuperating Tarde’s social theory of associations. This theory provides us with a non-anthropocentric reading of sociality. This hypothesis will be furthered by the introduction of the systemic category of internal/external, or system/environment, as a self-enclosure feature of social objects. Equipped with these two notions, we will discuss Graham Harman’s paper “Whitehead and Schools X, Y, and Z,” while rerouting his assessments to our own social object hypothesis. The final idea is to propose an alliance through the conception of a macro-ontological approach to philosophy of organism. We intend to show that this is not only coherently feasible regarding Whitehead’s own categoreal scheme, but also meets the requirements of being a real object in object-oriented ontology’s directives.

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a philosophy that asks us to step outside the human-centric view of the world to recognize that objects have realities of their own. Although we cannot directly access a thing-in-itself, we can still come to know something about it through an indirect access that Graham Harman suggests is provided by aesthetics, specifically the metaphor. In the metaphor, we step into the place of the object-in-itself (that withdraws) and experience a taste of its reality. This main purpose of this article is to show that the visual arts—specifically Haim Steinbach’s art works—offer a different way to know objects. Steinbach “arranges” found objects on shelves; this emphasis on “arrangement” raises questions about the nature of the space between objects. I argue that it is this space between objects (rather than the indirect contact with objects) that grants us some access to the thing-in-itself. By relating the spaces between objects to silence, I show that it is in these spaces that objects speak. In other words, the theatricality of the metaphor Harman privileges for understanding the object only exists in a silence that emerges from the spaces between objects.

Exploring the links between Speculative Realism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this article examines OOO’s entanglement with the ‘uncanny’. Reading OOO against three notable treatments of the concept - Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’”, Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, and Martin Heidegger’s discussion of uncanniness in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) - it argues that OOO reconfigures the ‘uncanny’ as a profoundly ontological concept premised on aesthetic enstrangement. Using E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” as a case study, it assesses what the consequences of this reconfiguration are for literary criticism and, in particular, the study of the Gothic. By splicing OOO into the history and practice of Gothic scholarship, this article traces the outline of an “object-oriented uncanny”, pushing the ‘uncanny’ out of Freud’s shadow and into the “great outdoors”.

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.

In this paper, I attempt to argue alongside Clayton Crockett that Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects can be extended to encompass every object, not merely those that are large in comparison to human beings. However, unlike Crockett who uses the works of Derrida and Lacan to achieve this goal, I turn to Husserl’s underdeveloped theory of hyletic phenomenology and hyle. Despite Husserl’s articulation of hyletic phenomenology ending as quickly as it is announced, I argue that three lessons can be learned from what Husserl does have to say about hyle. Specifically, hyle is non-intentional, it is co-constitutive of intentionality, and hyle contains the possibility of broadening our traditional understanding of objects. Taken together, I suggest that Husserl’s understanding of hyle caries considerable overlap with both Crockett and Morton’s understanding of hyperobjects.

One of the main criticisms of object-oriented ontology in its current formulation by Graham Harman is that it includes a notion of time that, upon closer inspection, renders the overall theory inconsistent. I argue that while this is indeed the case, Harman’s notion of time can be modified in a way that leaves the framework of object-oriented ontology intact. More specifically, Harman’s theory of time as a single surface tension between sensual objects and their qualities should be expanded into a theory of time as a twofold of related yet irreducible temporalities. Such a theory can already be found in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense . I argue that much of the latter theory is already tacitly presupposed in Harman’s ontology, and show that the proposed modification successfully addresses the most salient criticisms that have been voiced at Harman’s notion of time.

This article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fiction studies by focusing on a particular type of science-fictional artifact, the category of ‘Big Dumb Objects.’ Big Dumb Objects is a terminology used—often quite playfully—to describe things or structures that are simultaneously massive in size and enigmatic in purpose: they stretch the imagination through both the technical aspects of their construction and the obscurity of their purpose. First used to designate the subjects of several science fiction novels written in the 1970s, Big Dumb Objects (often called BDOs) have been understood in terms of science fiction’s enduring interest in the technological sublime and the transcendental. While object-oriented ontology has often turned to science fiction and weird fiction for inspiration in rethinking the possibilities inherent in things and their relations, it has not considered the implications of BDOs for a theory of the object more broadly. The goal of this article is to consider how extreme size and representations of scale in science fiction can help expand an understanding of the object along lines that are similar to those pursued by object-oriented ontology, especially Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects.

This paper is focused on the possibility of a dialogue between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and phenomenology, a dialogue concerning the problem of objects and relations. In the first part, the author shows what is interesting in OOO from a phenomenological perspective and why it should be considered as a challenge for contemporary philosophy. The second part develops the phenomenological perspective of the author, a perspective based on Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal” phenomenology, as well as some suggestions coming from the Italian school of Gaetano Kanizsa. The third part is dedicated to the objections of the author to the OOO view regarding the separation between objects and relations: a separation which leads to Harman’s quadruple object. In the concluding portion, the author shows that, despite evident differences between phenomenological and OOO’s views of relations, OOO offers new starting points for phenomenological reflections, thanks to its specific focus on objects and its pluralistic view of reality.

Walking is an activity that always unfolds within a certain landscape. Tim Ingold has used the notion of “taskscape” to denote pragmatic uses of terrain. Whilst walking, we come to intersect with a variety of taskscapes. As Julia Tanney has highlighted, formal language can only get us so far when thinking about spontaneous, non-theoretical and non-representational activities. Borrowing Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “knowing that” and knowing how”, I argue for a concept of walking that does not privilege intentions. When somebody walks, they melt into a taskscape not entirely of their own design. Mind is inherently ecological. It is enacted within a certain ecology, and is actually inseparable from its environment. Mind is the sum of intelligent enactments. According to the position I seek to advance in this article, walking may be approached in an object-oriented manner. Each form of behavior composes an enactment that meshes with a certain ecology, what W. Teed Rockwell has called a “behavioral field.” Mind is the inherently relational enactment of a set of behavioral dispositions which are always already enmeshed within a field. When these dispositions enter what, following Markus Gabriel, may be called “fields of sense”, mind and walking become independent objects in their own right.

The structural-systematic philosophy requires a moral theory. This essay seeks to determine whether either of two recent works, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and Michael Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality , should influence that theory. It first argues that Greene’s fails to make its case for utilitarianism over deontology. It then argues that Tomasello’s thesis that early humans developed moralities of sympathy and fairness, particularly when taken in conjunction with aspects of Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, fits well with the moral theory envisaged by extant works on the structural-systematic philosophy. The envisaged theory maintains the objectivity of human rights.

An extended definition of “observation” is developed in order to account for the usage in the physical sciences and in neuropsychology. An observation is initially defined as a perception that has a focus of attention and is guided by theoretical considerations. Since the focus may change, one adopts a pluralist position according to which the object of perception may involve any stage of the causal chain that leads to perception, such as the source of light or sound, the obstructions, the medium or even the receptor. The “neutral” observations of the empiricists are seen as involving only low-level or medium-level theorization. Examples are examined, such as a lunar eclipse, the rainbow, and observations mediated by instruments, whose “artifacts” are considered observations of the instrument itself. One also defines null-effect observations. Observations of photographs and drawings may be considered either the observation of a printed sheet of paper or the observation of the pictured object or people. This causal-pluralist metatheory of observation also accepts that one may “observe light”, observe the retina, and observe parts of the brain which are outside the region of the “sensorium”. Illusions and hallucinations are analyzed within this “observational materialism”, which considers that qualia are self-observations of the brain. Criticisms that the approach is too wide in scope are analyzed in the conclusion.