Philosopher Graham Harman to join SCI-Arc faculty

2016-02-23T19:40:00-05:00

Earlier today, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) announced that Graham Harman, Ph.D. will be joining its Liberal Arts faculty. Harman, who taught previously at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, has played a pivotal role in the development of "speculative realism" and "object-oriented ontology" (OOO), two related strands of contemporary philosophy.

Since his early exploration of the concept of "tool-being" in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Harman has laid the groundworks for a popular and influential revision of metaphysics, characterized by the rejection of anthropocentrism, which privileges the human over the nonhuman, and "correlationism", or the post-Kantian assumption that reality emerges from human thinking.

“Graham is a unique and notorious figure in philosophy and the arts. His fresh metaphysical project offers a way of understanding reality not as a product of the human mind, but rather as a cornucopia of independent and vibrant objects, la...

Don't Forget to Thank Your Socks (And Other Organizing Tips)

2014-10-23T18:47:00-04:00

[Marie] Kondo’s decluttering theories are unique, and can be reduced to two basic tenets: Discard everything that does not “spark joy,” after thanking the objects that are getting the heave-ho for their service; and do not buy organizing equipment — your home already has all the storage you need [...] “When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly,” she writes, “we are, I believe, transmitting energy, which has a positive effect on our clothes.”

The article goes on to quote Leonard Koren, a design theorist who has written extensively on Japanese aesthetics: "The idea of non-dualism is a relationship to reality that proposes that everything is inextricably connected and alive, even inanimate objects. If we are compassionate and respectful to everything that exists, then we would have to be compassionate about the socks in the drawer that aren’t folded properly.”

While perhaps laughable to some – particularly within the context of home-organizing –, taking seriously the idea that inanimate objects have a life of their own parallels a lot of emerging thought in contemporary philosophy. In particular, the philosophical school of "Object-Oriented Ontology" (OOO) seeks to destabilize the tradition of Western philosophy since at least Kant that relegates the reality of objects to their conforming to the human subject's perception. Graham Harman, whose doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects" sparked the O...

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Philosopher Graham Harman to join SCI-Arc faculty

Don't Forget to Thank Your Socks (And Other Organizing Tips)