Levi’s Table of Contents

Here’s Levi GIVING US THE TABLE OF CONTENTS for his forthcoming treatise The Democracy of Objects. Though he’s been test-driving much of it on his blog for the past 6 months, reading the book itself will be even better.

And in the meantime, I agree with him that people in our vicinity ought to be reading Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Philosophy of Science more seriously and more frequently. When a book still feels fresh at age 35, it’s a good sign.

There is still a tendency in our circles to assume viscerally, rather than to “argue,” that philosophy makes more progress the less realistic it becomes. Realism = fossilized and oppressive, and must be left in the past. How many times do we have to hear “but that’s Platonism!” whenever a realist argument is made, as if the word “Platonism” were an automatic knockout punch? (And by the way, go back and read Plato again. He’s great!)

One of the thrills of authors such as Bhaskar and DeLanda (who admires Bhaskar a great deal) is that they give a rather different story in which it is the anti-realist alternative that looks fossilized and oppressive and in need of being left behind.

This discussion is necessary within continental philosophy. It wouldn’t be such a big deal among analytics, who have always more or less looked realism in the eye and either embraced or rejected it. The continental tendency, by contrast, is simply to assume that the realism/anti-realism dispute is a pointless pseudo-problem, such that even to raise it is treated as a sort of vulgar gaffe. Meanwhile, while pretending to be beyond this dispute altogether, they instantly adopt the anti-realist side of things while pretending to remain neutral. Unfortunately, it is my own favorite recent philosophical school (phenomenology) that is most guilty of getting us stuck in this trap.

Hence the great value of Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World, which with all the candor required by the present situation, pretty much says: “yup, continental philosophy is an anti-realist movement all the way.” And though in my view Braver ought to be a lot angrier about that fact, I think he sizes up the situation perfectly well. (I disagree on his big gap between early and late Heidegger, and also disagree with the near-total exclusion of Husserl from his history, and also with the celebration of Foucault and Derrida in the last chapters. But he’s a strong reader of all these texts anyway, and has emerged as a rather important author among the younger continentals due to the encyclopedic power of his book.)