Graham Harman
| Graham Harman | |
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Graham Harman
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| Born |
May 9, 1968 Iowa City, Iowa |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | DePaul University (PhD, 1999) |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Speculative Realism |
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Main interests
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Metaphysics, Realism |
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Notable ideas
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Object-oriented ontology, vicarious causation, allure. "The comet itself, the monkey itself, Coca-Cola itself, resonate in cellars of being where no relation reaches." |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. His work on the metaphysics of objects led to the development of object-oriented ontology. He is a central figure in the speculative realism trend in contemporary philosophy.
Harman was born in Iowa City and raised in Mount Vernon, Iowa. He received a B.A. from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland in 1990 and went on to graduate school at Penn State University to earn a master's degree, studying under philosopher Alphonso Lingis, in 1991. While pursuing a Ph.D. at DePaul University, Harman worked as an online sports reporter, an experience which he credits for developing his writing style and productivity. After finishing his degree in 1999 he joined the Department of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, where he has taught since 2000.
Harman starts the development of his work with Martin Heidegger's concept of "tool-analysis" from Being and Time. To Harman, tool-analysis was a key discovery which establishes the groundwork for taking seriously the autonomous existence of objects and, in doing so, highlights deficiencies in phenomenology due to its subordination of objects to their use by or relationship with humans.
Harman is considered part of the speculative realism trend, a nebulous grouping of philosophers united by two perspectives: a rejection of anthropocentric "philosophies of access" which privilege the perspective of humans in relation to objects, and a support of metaphysical realism via rejection of "correlationism", an assumption in Post-Kantian philosophy that fellow speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." Harman's object-oriented approach considers the life of objects to be fertile ground for a metaphysics that works to overcome anthropocentrism and correlationism.
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