Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy (also known as post-Continental philosophy)Paul John Ennis, Post-continental Voices: Selected Interviews, John Hunt Publishing, 2010, p. 18. that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against its interpretation of the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy (or what it terms "correlationism").
Origins Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College, University of London in April 2007. The conference was moderated by Alberto Toscano of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by Ray Brassier of American University of Beirut (then at Middlesex University), Iain Hamilton Grant of the University of the West of England, Graham Harman of the American University in Cairo, and Quentin Meillassoux of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Credit for the name "speculative realism" is generally ascribed to Brassier,Graham Harman, "brief SR/OOO tutorial." though Meillassoux had already used the term "speculative materialism" to describe his own position.
A second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at the UWE Bristol on Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths. The line-up consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place of Meillassoux, who was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano.
A third conference, entitled "Object Oriented Ontology: A Symposium", was held at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Literature, Communication and Culture (now the School of Literature, Media, and Communication) on April 23, 2010. This symposium was hosted by Ian Bogost and included Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Steven Shaviro, Hugh Crawford, Carl DiSalvo, John Johnston, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Eugene Thacker.
While speculative realism's status has gained significant popularity, there are philosophical positions which some consider analogous. According to Graham Harman's forward in Maurizio Ferraris' Manifesto of New Realism, contemporary writings in "new realism" are thematically parallel to speculative realism, sharing common themes and interests. Harman states that it was an "inadvertent injustice" to not include Ferraris' ideas among contemporary continental realists, as he had held this philosophical position earlier than speculative realists at a time when realism in the continental tradition was a "lonelier" commitment. However, despite analogous interests, the two perspectives of realism remain mostly separate conversations. In Hysteresis, a book published in Edinburgh's Speculative Realism series, Ferraris positioned his thoughts more explicitly in relation to the works of many of the names previously mentioned. He fashions a critique similar to Meillassoux's of Kant.
Nick Land has also been noted as an influence on speculative realism, having taught Brassier and Grant as well as influencing associated figures such as Robin Mackay and Reza Negarestani.
Critique of correlationism While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a shared resistance to what they interpret as philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel Kant.
What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both "correlationism" and "philosophies of access". All four of the core thinkers within speculative realism work to overturn these forms of philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism against the dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary Continental philosophy.
In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines correlationism as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other."Quentin Meillassoux (2008), After Finitude, p. 5. Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over other entities. For speculative realists, both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism. Many critiquing correlationism and philosophies of access typically are critiquing the excessive association of ontology with human-centric phenomenology. New realism, ultimately is critiquing thinking and being's association, and as such is within the same conversation. However, Ferraris approaches this problem slightly differently than Meillassoux. Ferraris structures his critique of the "thinking and being" association in relation to the areas of epistemology and ontology respectively instead of phenomenology and ontology.
Variations While sharing in the goal of overturning the dominant strands of post-Kantian thought in Continental philosophy, there are important differences separating the core members of the speculative realist movement and their followers.
Speculative materialism In his critique of correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux (who uses the term speculative materialism to describe his position) finds two principles as the focus of Kant's philosophy. The first is the "principle of correlation" itself, which claims essentially that we can only know the correlate of Thought and Being; what lies outside that correlate is unknowable. The second is termed by Meillassoux the "principle of factiality" which states that things could be otherwise than what they are. This principle is upheld by Kant in his defence of the thing-in-itself as unknowable but imaginable. We can imagine reality as being fundamentally different even if we never know such a reality. According to Meillassoux, the defence of both principles leads to "weak" correlationism (such as those of Kant and Husserl), while the rejection of the thing-in-itself leads to the "strong" correlationism of thinkers such as late Ludwig Wittgenstein and late Martin Heidegger, for whom it makes no sense to suppose that there is anything outside of the correlate of Thought and Being, and so the principle of factiality is eliminated in favour of a strengthened principle of correlation.
Meillassoux follows the opposite tactic in rejecting the principle of correlation for the sake of a bolstered principle of factiality in his post-Kantian return to Hume. By arguing in favour of such a principle, Meillassoux is led to reject the necessity not only of all physical laws of nature, but all logical laws except the Principle of Non-Contradiction (since eliminating this would undermine the Principle of Factiality which claims that things can always be otherwise than what they are). By rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason, there can be no justification for the necessity of physical laws, meaning that while the universe may be ordered in such and such a way, there is no reason it could not be otherwise. Meillassoux rejects the Kantian a priori in favour of a Humean a priori, claiming that the lesson to be learned from Hume on the subject of causality is that "the same cause may actually bring about 'a hundred different events' (and even many more)."Quentin Meillassoux (2008), After Finitude, p. 90.
The primary foundation from which Meillassoux extends the rest of his theory by arguing for a principle: the necessity of contingency itself. That is, the only thing objectively necessary is that no thing/object is necessary to every subject. Thus, all things are contingent. Using this as an objective position, he proceeds to redevelop a metaphysics for science and technology which recovers what he calls ancestral events: materially real events which occur outside of phenomenological subjectivity. He claims that without the objectivity of contingency, a philosopher of metaphysics should reject that such events like the Big Bang are legitimate. Although, some have argued that the problem is not that these ancestral events are outside of human notions of time, since many such examples of these events in fact do have materially sensible data which places them in terms of human interpretations of time, but rather it applies more strongly to real things which are not empirically observable: e.g. quarks or genetic information. While not committed entirely to speculative materialism, Yuk Hui references and uses an analogous line of reasoning in Recursivity and Contingency in his development of cosmotechnics, and actively works within similar philosophical lineages.
Object-oriented ontology The central tenet of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant's object-oriented ontology (OOO) is that objects have been neglected in philosophy in favor of a "radical philosophy" that tries to "undermine" objects by saying that objects are the crusts to a deeper underlying reality, either in the form of monism or a perpetual flux, or those that try to "overmine" objects by saying that the idea of a whole object is a form of folk ontology. According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox, electromagnetic radiation, curved spacetime, the Commonwealth of Nations, or a propositional attitude; all things, whether physical or fictional, are equally objects. Sympathetic to panpsychism, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone".Graham Harman (2009), Prince of Networks, p. 213.
Harman defends a version of the Aristotelian notion of substance. Unlike Leibniz, for whom there were both substances and aggregates, Harman maintains that when objects combine, they create new objects. In this way, he defends an a priori metaphysics that claims that reality is made up only of objects and that there is no "bottom" to the series of objects. For Harman, an object is in itself an infinite recess, unknowable and inaccessible by any other thing. This leads to his account of what he terms "vicarious causality". Inspired by the occasionalists of medieval Islamic philosophy, Harman maintains that no two objects can ever interact save through the mediation of a "sensual vicar".Graham Harman, "On Vicarious Causality," in Collapse II (1997), p. 201. There are two types of objects, then, for Harman: real objects and the sensual objects that allow for interaction. The former are the things of everyday life, while the latter are the caricatures that mediate interaction. For example, when fire burns cotton, Harman argues that the fire does not touch the essence of that cotton which is inexhaustible by any relation, but that the interaction is mediated by a caricature of the cotton which causes it to burn.
Transcendental materialism Iain Hamilton Grant defends a position he calls transcendental materialism. He argues against what he terms "somatism", the philosophy and physics of bodies. In his Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, Grant tells a new history of philosophy from Plato onward based on the definition of matter. Aristotle distinguished between Form and Matter in such a way that Matter was invisible to philosophy, whereas Grant argues for a return to the Platonic Matter as not only the basic building blocks of reality, but the forces and powers that govern our reality. He traces this same argument to the post-Kantian German idealists Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, claiming that the distinction between Matter as substantive versus useful fiction persists to this day and that we should end our attempts to overturn Plato and instead attempt to overturn Kant and return to "speculative physics" in the Platonic tradition, that is, not a physics of bodies, but a "physics of the All".