Jure Simoniti - Böcker

This open access book advances the current debate in continental realism. In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative Realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian “correlationism” which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates. The debate over a new kind of realism has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book advances the current debate in continental realism. In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative Realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian “correlationism” which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates. The debate over a new kind of realism has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

There may exist something like the most unbearable of all philosophical thoughts. It is the thought of contingency and universality converging, intersecting, and being one and the same thing, approached from two different perspectives. Hardly anything is as unsettling as the insight into the absolute contingency of the emergence of universals, and the correlative realization that the only true universality is one of the contingency of everything. The goal of this book is to think this unbearable thought through to the end and face up to its most binding and disconcerting consequences.The history of science is full of theoretical unifications of two previously mutually exclusive concepts or two opposite realms (natural and unnatural motion in Galilei, terrestrial and celestial physics in Newton, man and animal in Darwin, electricity and magnetism in Maxwell, mass and energy, space and time, acceleration and gravity in Einstein, etc.). This book is based on the conjecture that what philosophy is lacking is a similar unification of the concepts of “contingency” and “universality.” The book will thereby try to accomplish an operation that is implicit in the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek. In doing so, it will provide new answers to questions on the nature of contingency, necessity, predictability of the future, the validity of the laws of nature, the role of singularity in relation to universality, chaos and order, reality and truth. These answers will differ starkly from the ones advocated by contemporary philosophers such as Badiou, Meillassoux, some other speculative realists, and some analytical philosophers of science.

We are said to live in a ‘post-truth’ era, yet our time is equally marked by an obsession with reality. From new realism in philosophy to the cult of authenticity in culture and the hyper-technological tracking of bodies and minds, countless efforts seek ever more direct access to what is supposedly ‘most real’. This volume challenges the crisis-ridden formula of truth striving to grasp reality directly—forever approaching it, yet always falling short. Instead, it rethinks truth through the lens of indirectness and allows it to unfold in the here and now. Drawing on philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives, the essays examine how erring is inherent to genuine insight, how fictions reveal facts, how illusions can enable emancipatory struggles, and how strategies of indirectness in literature, cinema, and popular culture produce the effect of truth.

The common feature of many present-day “new realisms” is a general diagnosis according to which, with Kant, Western philosophy lost any contact with the outside world. In The Untruth of Reality, Jure Simoniti, in contrast, points out the necessary realist side of modern philosophy, arguing that the possibility of realism has always been there. The epistemological self-inauguration of the subject goes hand in hand with his anthropological dethronement, the god-like centrality of the “ego” is constantly counterbalanced with his creatural marginality, the activity of the constitutive subject is juxtaposed with the growing indifference of the world, and the linguistic appropriation of the world simultaneously performs operations of the de-symbolization of reality. However, with these precarious equilibria, the conditions of possibility of realism have become more complex and intricate. It is therefore the goal of this book to demonstrate how the paradigms of consciousness and language are not necessarily incompatible with realism, but rather open new and broader possibilities for the world behind and beyond consciousness and language to disclose itself.This book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars in the fields of German idealism, continental philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science.

This book intends to broaden the study of idealism beyond its simplistic characterizations in contemporary philosophy. After idealist stances have practically disappeared from the mental landscape in the last hundred years, and the term "idealism" has itself become a sort of philosophical anathema, continental philosophy was, first, plunged into one of its deepest crises of truth, culminating in postmodernism, and then, the 21st century ushered in a new era of realism. Against this background, the volume gathers a number of renowned philosophers, among them Slavoj Žižek, Robert B. Pippin, Mladen Dolar, Sebastian Rödl, Paul Redding, Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, James I. Porter, and others, in order to address the issue as to what exactly has been lost with the retreat of idealism, and what kind of idealism could still be rehabilitated in the present day. The contributions will both provide historical studies on idealism, pointing out the little known, overlooked, and surprising instances of idealist impulses, and set out to develop new perspectives and possibilities for a contemporary idealism. The appeal of the book lies in the fact that it defends a philosophical concept that has been increasingly under attack and thus contributes to an ongoing debate in ontology.