thinking rocks (object-oriented ontology)

[northrop_fried]

In my field-- medieval literary studies-- there's this trendy thing, Object-oriented ontology"The rejection of post-Kantian privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Beginning with Kant's "Copernican revolution," modern philosophers began articulating a transcendental anthropocentrism, whereby objects are said to

Comments

[a_priori]

This sounds like what one of those needlessly dressed up Bold Revisions of Ontology that turns out to be either (a) trivially true, or (b) unbelievably silly.

Excepting dear old Bishop Berkeley and his intellectual progeny, philosophers do not deny that plenty of objects and relations among objects exist independently of our cognition concerning these objects. What most philosophers deny is that we can have knowledge of these objects and their relations independent of our cognition concerning them.

Even Kant allowed that there (possibly) existed objects entirely independent of human perception; they are what populate the noumenal world. He just insisted that we have no way of learning about these objects directly. All of our acquaintances with the world are filtered through the fundamental constituents of the human conceptual apparatus: space, time, etc. Kant stressed that the resulting objects-of-our-acquaintance therefore might bear marks of that filtration, and so lack properties present in objects-in-themselves or acquire new ones. All of this is consistent with accepting that objects-in-themselves are somehow "out there" - they're just beyond our understanding.

Meanwhile, I can't make any sense at all of the claim that "nonhuman object relations distort their relata in the same fundamental manner as human consciousness". Is this just half-hearted panpsychism? Or perhaps Leibniz all over again --break out the monads?

[northrop_fried]

I appreciate your input. I'm virtually philosophically illiterate, so I hoped someone in the group could put this in perspective.

It reminds me of Romantic transcendentalism, but I really don't understand what critical purchase it gives people trying to understand human social and cultural practices.