Speculative Realism on PhilPapers

Yesterday David Chalmers kindly invited me to edit the new Speculative Realism section on PhilPapers, which aspires to be the definitive online Bibliography of philosophical work done in the English language. If you’re not familiar with PhilPapers, see HERE.

(Chalmers, if by chance some readers of this blog aren’t familiar with him, is one of the world’s most prominent philosophers of mind, and teaches at NYU as well as in his native Australia. You can read my account of his The Conscious Mind in an essay I wrote entitled “Zero-Person and the Psyche,” in the David Skrbina anthology Mind That Abides.)

Speculative Realism is listed under Continental Philosophy. Once I get the Speculative Realism category fairly well filled up with entries, Chalmers and I will discuss breaking it down into further subcategories, including a discussion of what subcategories there should be. (It shouldn’t be individual names except under very rare circumstances.)

Tonight I began by uploading all of my own Speculative Realism writings, simply because that was the easiest first step. My personal Bibliography was already in good shape, since I just went up for my final promotion last year.

Next, I will probably vet the lengthy Bibliography in The Speculative Turn to see which of those entries are most appropriate for inclusion.

Then I will add other publications by some of the key players in SR so far, including not just the original four members plus OOO, but also people such as Steven Shaviro who have played a major role in this part of the world, along with a group I would call “fellow travellers” of Speculative Realism: Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda, Bruno Latour, et al.

SR is big enough now (and not just “online” or among “impressionable graduate students”) that there is a lot of material being published on the topic that my friends and I don’t immediately hear about anymore.

Consider this post an invitation to help me in my task by sending Bibliographical entries that, in your opinion, merit inclusion in any definitive SR Bibliography.

Here are some points to consider:

1. Everything listed on PhilPapers has to be in English. That’s simply one of their rules. (Tristan Garcia will have to wait until he’s translated.)

2. Everything on the list should be philosophy writings. In other words, there is something of a disciplinary constraint here. SR is being applied these days to lots of different fields, but anything included in this Bibliography should be plausibly packagable as a piece of philosophy writing– as opposed to, say, art criticism that uses SR peripherally. I’ve excluded even some of my own writings from the list on the basis of this principle. But I’ve certainly included my own publications on McLuhan, for instance, since they’re looking at the ontological side of McLuhan rather than just the “media theory” side.

3. If you have abstracts for any pieces you suggest, please include them.

4. If you have URL’s for any online versions of pieces you suggest, please include those as well.

5. Although technically still-unpublished work can be included on the list (there’s a pull-down menu option for that), I strongly prefer not to include any of it unless Chalmers pressures me to do otherwise (I’ll ask his views on the matter). The problem with including not-yet-published work in Bibliographies of any sort is that people have a natural tendency to jump the gun and list such material before it’s even really written. In fact, I’d like to restrict the Speculative Realism Bibliography only to writing that has actually already been published.

6. I’ve added the Speculative Realism category to some things that had already been put in the system by other area editors. For instance, the Paul Ennis interview collection Post-Continental Voices was already in the system, and I simply added “Speculative Realism” as a new category to it, so that it will show up from now on in Speculative Realism searches.

Please send any suggestions for inclusion to my university email address: gharman@aucegypt.edu

Please put “PhilPapers” in the subject heading.