Search Results for philosophy

In part 1 of this series, I introduced the idea of a metaphysics videogame and described why such a thing might be a good idea for philosophy. That was the easy part. In this post I’m going to explore what such a game might look like, in the abstract. The idea is not to suggest only the most viable approach,… read more

Graham Harman has been posting a series of enlightening thoughts on writing as he races toward a book deadline, taking only two months from start to finish. The book in question has a word limit (a character limit, really) because it is destined for immediate translation, and the translation has to be done on a budget. The whole series is… read more

Behold this wonderful endorsement on the old Hackett edition of Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History: It suggests an amusing party game for philosophers (or academics of all kinds): devise the most subtly derisive quip possible for a given book. (thanks to Mark Nelson)

A brief history. Back in the late summer of 2006, a few months after the publication of Unit Operations, I exchanged a few emails with Graham Harman, whose book Tool-Being I had cited in the early pages of mine. We talked about a few things, including Leibniz, Badiou, Heidegger, Meillassoux, D.W. Griffith, and McLuhan. Sometime in early 2007, over a… read more

In a lengthy comment on my pragmatic speculative realism post, philosopher Levi Bryant asks what issues in technology and media studies prompted my interest in object-oriented ontology. I’d like to try to answer the question for the benefit of readers finding their way here from sources in philosophy rather than game studies. In some ways, I think I was doing… read more

After my post of yesterday, Graham Harman made a few helpful observations about the term “object-oriented philosophy.” First Harman observed that the “parallels seem plenty apt,” that “terms can be borrowed freely across disciplines with slight changes of meaning” that “plenty of other names can be used,” and that “it doesn’t matter unless people have such strong preconceived notions of… read more

Even though we didn’t really talk much about philosophy, after visiting Graham Harman in Cairo two weeks ago, I was reenergized to think about philosophy in general and speculative realism in particular. In the short time since, a number of friendly bonfires have flared up around the web, most of them camps emanating from Graham’s blog and that of Levi… read more

Last week I had the opportunity to visit in Cairo with philosopher Graham Harman, someone whose work I’ve known and admired for some time now. It was nice to meet him in person for the first time, not to mention having a local guide for getting around this enormous, insane city. I also got to deliver Graham’s first copy of… read more

After an unintentional hiatus, last week I resumed following Georgia Tech CS colleague Mark Guzdial’s Amazon blog. His latest salvo is a thought-provoking piece called Using computing to teach computing (Hint: Don’t use the “P” word). The post centers around a question Mark posed to Jeannette Wing, Director of the Computing & Information Science & Engineering branch of the NSF… read more

Along with several others, contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has been instrumental in rekindling the thirsty brush of philosophy, igniting a new and exciting fire in this tired old field. It has become known as Speculative Realism. Harman’s work has become tremendously influential in my recent thinking, despite my not (yet) having made this influence as apparent in print as I… read more