Graham Harman

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world's most influential philosophers How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory? In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction - the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world - permeates every area of human life. What's more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter. To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.

What is reality, really? Are humans more special or important than the non-human objects we perceive? How does this change the way we understand the world? We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. At the heart of this philosophy is the idea that objects - whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or non-human - are mutually autonomous. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out the history, ideas and impact of Object-Oriented Ontology, taking in everything from art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles. A key figure in the contemporary speculative realism movement in philosophy and for his development of the field of object-oriented ontology, he was named by Art Review magazine as one of the 100 most influential figures in international art.

In this book the metaphysical system of Graham Harman is presented in lucid form, aided by helpful diagrams. In Chapter 1, Harman gives his most forceful critique to date of philosophies that reject objects as a primary reality. All such rejections are tainted by either an "undermining" or "overmining" approach to objects. In Chapters 2 and 3, he reviews his concepts of sensual and real objects. In the process, he attacks the prestige normally granted to philosophies of human access, which Harman links for the first time to the already discredited "Menos Paradox." In Chapters 4 through 7, Harman brings the reader up to speed on his interpretation of Heidegger, which culminates in a fourfold structure of objects linked by indirect causation. In Chapter 8, he speculates on the implications of this theory for the debate over panpsychism, which Harman both embraces and rejects. In Chapters 9 and 10, he introduces the term "ontography" as the study of the different possible permutations of objects and qualities, which he simplifies with easily remembered terminology drawn from standard playing cards.