Real Objects/Material Subjects Journal Issue (finally.)

So I’ve let this blog wither away into nothingness….but would like to try to insert a spark of being into it again by posting the table of contents for an upcoming issue of Cosmos and History edited by Brian Smith and myself. It features papers that are based on presentations given at the ‘Real Objects or Material Subjects?’ conference which took place at the University of Dundee in March, 2010. As C&H is open access, the issue will be available for everyone. I’ll post again once it’s online. Until then, here is what you can expect:

Real Objects or Material Subjects?

The Future of Continental Metaphysics

Table of Contents

Editors Introduction

Michael O’Neill Burns & Brian Anthony Smith

The Problem with Metzinger

Graham Harman

The Transcendental Core of Correlationism

Paul Ennis

Critical Idealism and Transcendental Materialism: A Speculative Analysis of the Second Paralogism

Michael Olson

Objects in manifold times: Deleuze and the speculative philosophy of objects as processes

James Williams

Becoming L’Homme Imaginaire: The Role of the Imagination in Overcoming Circularity in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason

Austin Smidt

Beyond Objects, Beyond Subjects: Giorgio Agamben on Animality, Particularity and the End of Onto-theology

Colby Dickinson

Fanon and Political Will

Peter Hallward

The Necessity of Contingency or Contingent Necessity: Meillassoux, Hegel, and the Subject

John Van Houdt

Aufhebung and Negativity

Ryan Krahn

Lacanian Materialism and the Question of the Real

Tom Eyers

Materialism, Subjectivity and the Outcome of French Philosophy

Interview with Adrian Johnston

Being No One: Symposia

I’ve been quite useless as far as ‘worthwhile’ blogging goes recently; mostly because I’ve been deeply caught in the throes of both dissertating and procrastinating.

I did recently stumble upon something quite interesting and figured I would share it. In 2005 the journal PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness published a symposia issue focusing on Metzinger’s ‘Being No One’. The full issue is available in free PDF files and consist of a very useful precis of the work by Metzinger, which serves to be quite helpful as not many of us have the time to read the 700+ work in its entirety; as well as commentaries from leading figures who work in what can broadly be defined as ‘neurophilosophy’, or, ‘phenomenology of mind’.  So far I’ve only had the chance to skim the first and last pieces, the later being Dan Zahavi’s essay ‘Being Someone’, and the former being Shaun Gallagher’s ‘Metzinger’s Matrix: Living the Virtual Life with a Real Body’.

Speaking of Zahavi and Gallagher, they recently published a work entitled ‘The Phenomenological Mind’ which seems to be an important intervention in phenomenological approaches to mind and consciousness.  Oddly enough, the journal ABSTRACTA recently published a symposia issue on this work which is also available online here. I haven’t read any of these essays yet, but the precis and response from Gallagher and Zahavi should prove helpful in getting a quick grasp of their overall project at this point.

I hope to get my hands on both these works (Being No One and The Phenomenological Mind) sometime this fall when I start my PhD research, so hopefully I’ll be able to write about each a bit here and have some debate on the ideas present in each work.

That’s all I’ve got for now, back to my comparative study of the subject  in ‘Being and Event’ and ‘Logiques des Mondes’….