Iperoggetti

Part I: A Theory I'm pretty sure Timothy Morton is a Hyperobject. He is Viscous: he won't let you leave without sticking repetition after repetition to you. He is Non-Local: no single argument exists at any single point in his book. His Temporality is Undulating: I'm not sure what future Timothy want Leggi tutto

I work as a researcher at an assessment startup (well, scaleup) company. It's a really cool assessment company, and I work with some incredible people. But it's an assessment company, and it's stewed in a host of concerning philosophical issues. The one most pertinent to this review (aside from the

An English professor writes about metaphysics, very badly. The root problem is that he takes Graham Harman at his own estimation, and thinks that the new Object-Oriented Ontology is a boost to the sort of writing that the New Atheist crowd dismiss as "quantum woo". Things to note about OOO: it wants Leggi tutto

Nuclear materials may present us with a very large finitude, but not an infinitude. . .They are not objective lumps limited in time and space, but unique beings. They have everything that Heidegger argues is unique to Dasein. This isn’t a plea for help. There isn’t a program on display about how to t Leggi tutto

There are some interesting ideas here (like the titular hyperobjects), but to get to them you have to wade through paragraph after paragraph of wildly overheated prose that resembles the ravings of a madman. There are no real arguments here -- just endless (often bizarre) assertions. And while this

Fantastic book. Viscous and unsettling and overwhelming, like its subject matter—but promising, if not a way through, then a framework through which to interpret our moment, and a context for our growing anxieties about our place in the "world" or something like it. Readable and dense.

Do you want to read the word hyperobject three times per sentence? Do you want to read pseudoscience with just the right amount of philosophy ? Do you want unnecessary big words and pompous writing?! A potpourri of subjects all of them leading to global warming? If so, then yes, this is the book for Leggi tutto

So I'm still reading Morton's Hyperobjects, despite the slightly artificial veneer of "let's talk to a broader and therefore more fun audience" that in Canada we call "knowledge mobilization" -- hey the future of scholarship. But the real book is an attempt to situate what we normally think of as la Leggi tutto