New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy

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This open access book advances the current debate in continental realism. In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative Realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian “correlationism” which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates.
The debate over a new kind of realism has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Gregor Kroupa is a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Jure Simoniti is a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Preface by Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti, University of Ljubljana, SloveniaAcknowledgements
1. “Philosophical Snuff”: the Speculative Story of the Mind by Miran Božovic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia2. Leibniz’s Linguistic Realism by Gregor Kroupa, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia3. Desert Islands and the Origins of Antirealism by Jure Simoniti, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia4. To Make Truth: Ontology, Epistemology, Technology by Maurizio Ferraris, University of Turin, Italy5. The Real Scandal by Lee Braver, University of South Florida, USA6. Realism with a Straight Face: A Response to Leonard Lawlor by Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture, USA7. A Return to the Pre-critical? On Meillassoux’s Speculative Realism and a More General Problem by Zdravko Kobe, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia8. Meta-transcendentalism and Error-First Ontology: The Cases of Gilbert Simondon and Catherine Malabou by Adrian Johnston, University of New Mexico, USA9. On the Essence and Existence of So-called “Fictional Objects” by Markus Gabriel, University of Bonn, Germany10. Klein Bottle: Le tube de caption, or, the Subject’s Snout by Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana, SloveniaNotes on contributors
Index

“From the metaphor of the desert island to that of the Klein bottle, these fascinating essays present multiple models of the inscription of subjectivity into reality.” —Andrew Cutrofello, Professor of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago, USA“‘New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy brings together a most impressive alignment of philosophers, thinking and discussing the intriguing and insistent philosophical question of realism in its present historical context. Fresh and original in the perspectives it proposes, the collection constitutes an extremely stimulating reading – an absolute must for anyone truly interested in contemporary philosophy.’” —Alenka Zupancic, Professor of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia

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