Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
This guide was created to help students, faculty, and other interested parties find
materials related to the emerging school of philosophical thought known as Speculative
Realism. I have linked each of the texts listed in the final section to their Google Books
entry in an attempt to make this guide useful to all; Google Books lists the prices of
various book retailers and has a "Find in a Library" link which can be used to find a
freely-available copy near you.
A. Reference Websites
These sites provide useful overviews of the Speculative Realism movement as well as
its many variants and sub-species. While they range in depth from a blog aggregator with
hundreds of posts to a brief encyclopedia entry, all are valuable overviews of the field.
Collapse Vol. II – “Speculative Realism”: The Collapse journal has strong ties to
speculative realism, including this feature issue containing essays by premier
speculative realists Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and
Reza Negarestani.
B. Blogs
Speculative Realism promises to be the first philosophy meaningfully engaged with
Web 2.0: several of its primary figures are bloggers. The movement gains momentum
from discussions between graduate students, interested amateurs, and philosophy
professors alike. Many of the bloggers listed here make an effort to respond to intriguing
comments posted on their blogs and welcome public debate.
• Speculative Heresy by Ben Woodard, Nick Srnicek, and Taylor Adkins: This trio
of graduate student bloggers have created perhaps the most comprehensive
resource of all via a collaborative approach. This blog is notable for its tabs
featuring Resources (a collection of pertinent articles), Events (conferences and
speeches), Faculty (a list of hyperlinks to speculative realist professors), and
Translations (hard-to-find translations of works by major French theorists).
• Another Heidegger Blog by Paul John Ennis: This blog houses a multitude of
interviews with speculative realists and related philosophers, including fellow-
bloggers Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Ennis is a graduate
student of philosophy at University College in Dublin, Ireland.
• Naught Thought by Ben Woodard: Like most Wordpress blogs, Naught Thought
features useful tags on each article which can help identify its topic and whether
or not it specifically addresses Speculative Realism. Woodard is a graduate
student in philosophy at the European Graduate School.
• The Accursed Share by Nick Srnicek: As Srnicek’s personal blog, this deals more
with issues of politics and social change using the tools of Speculative Realism
and Actor-Network Theory. However, it also functions as a source of conference
and call for papers information. Nick Srnicek is a PhD student at the London
School of Economics.
• Complete Lies by Michael Austin: A pithy blog which frequently sums up inter-
blog debates and provides the author’s own opinion. Austin is a graduate student
at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and frequently updates the
Wikipedia page for Speculative Realism under the name Zorio.
C. Twitter Accounts
The three philosophers below have been associated with Speculative Realism and
published extensively on the philosophy, in online forums as well as in traditional print
mediums. Though Twitter is too concise for rigorous discussion, it can provide glimpses
into the lives of these theorists as well as useful links.
D. Fundamental Texts
While Speculative Realism may be the first philosophical movement to fully
benefit from social media and other recent web trends, the most serious work is still done
in the form of dense texts littered with citations from theorists old and new. Here is a list,
far from comprehensive, of the first few speculative realist books which founded the
school of thought and are generally representative of its views. Each text is linked to its
Google Books entry or, if available, the UIUC online catalog record.
Philosophies of Nature after Schelling by Iain Hamilton Grant: In his first original
book, Grant argues for a renewed focus on the inorganic realm, drawing
supporting arguments from 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Schelling
and arguing against the legacy of Immanuel Kant, which is seen as unjustly
privileging the position of humans in existence. ISBN-13: 9780826479020
(hardcover), 9781847064325 (paperback).
E. Terms
Speculative Realism is generally considered “a useful umbrella term, chosen
precisely because it was vague enough to encompass a variety of fundamentally
heterogeneous philosophical research programmes.” (Brassier, 2009) These philosophies,
while at once radically different from one another, could be said to find some coherence
in their opposition to correlationist philosophies; to quote Ray Brassier again, “the only
thing that unites us is antipathy to what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’—the
doctrine, especially prevalent among ‘Continental’ philosophers, that humans and world
cannot be conceived in isolation from one other—a ‘correlationist’ is any philosopher
who insists that the human-world correlate is philosophy’s sole legitimate concern”
(2009). An analogy could be drawn to the term “postmodernism,” which is used to label a
very diverse set of theories which nonetheless could be said to be united in their
opposition to the modernist project of enlightenment.
To the terms themselves! Each is listed alongside theorists whose positions have been (at
one point) identified with the term.
• Actor-Network Theory (Bruno Latour, Michel Callon)
• Assemblage Theory (Manuel DeLanda)
• Eliminative Materialism (Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland)
• Methodological Naturalism (Ray Brassier)
• Neo-Vitalism (Iain Hamilton Grant)
• Object-Oriented Philosophy (Graham Harman, Levi Bryant)
• Revisionary Naturalism (Ray Brassier)
• Spectral Realism (Michael Austin)
• Speculative Materialism (Quentin Meillassoux)
• Speculative Realism (Ray Brassier originally coined this term, but in the
aforementioned interview he dismisses it as having become “singularly unhelpful”
[2009])
• Transcendental Materialism (Iain Hamilton Grant)
• Transcendental Nihilism (Ray Brassier)
• Transcendental Realism (Ray Brassier, Roy Bhaskar)
Any comments or additions are welcome, I don't pretend to know everything about these
labels.
Eric Phetteplace
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
This views on this website are solely the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the University
of Illinois, GSLIS, the philosophers themselves, or any of the many firebreathing bloggers out there in the
web.
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