OOO: a second try at some parameters

The rains have trheatened again in Manchester, but have not come. That allowed me to walk extensively around the center of the city this morning. Not only did I see lots of Pre-Raphaelite artwork, I also saw the site of the old Roman settlement. Roughly 2,000 people for 300 years, which when you think about makes for a significant settlement: my own hometown was 3,000 people in my youth (now more like 4,000) and has been there for only 160 years or so, though it feels quite venerable when you are there and see the old buildings.

As for the title of this post…

Lack of cut-and-paste ability still hampers me here. But in my second try at some OOO parameters I want to change point 3 a bit.

The reason is simply this: I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to exclude Leibniz and Aristotle. If I were running an OOO journal and was offered a previously untranslated work by one of them, I can easily imagine it fitting.

Obviously, this has nothing to do with “good” or “bad” philosophers. Descartes is a great philosopher, but would have no place in an OOO journal, whereas Leibniz clearly would. Plato is at least as great as Aristotle, but would have no place in an OOO journal whereas Aristotle would. In any S.R. journal, you’d naturally accept anything written by Meillassoux, but there wouldn’t be much point including him in an OOO journal.

So, I would probably change point 3 to something like: “Individual entities are the basic reality in the cosmos.” This would suitably include both Aristotle and Leibniz while excluding such interesting but rather different thinkers as, say, Deleuze and Simondon, who are obviously by no means OOO figures, whereas Latour certainly is. (And Whitehead too, I would say.)

The point isn’t some useless haggling over terminology. The point is a more practical one: when some sort of OOO journal gets going (perhaps sooner rather than later; there is already talk of it) then you need to know how to advertise what sort of material is welcome, and I think 3 or 4 basic “Dogma”-type rules may be the way to go. Set some fairly basic parameters, then let people do whatever they want within them.

When I read Levi’s blog, I see OOO. When I read Speculative Heresy (an outstanding site run by very bright people) I see plenty of S.R., but almost none of it of the OOO variety, because that’s simply not their interest.