Reviews for Leibniz Re-Interpreted

The average rating for Leibniz Re-Interpreted based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-05-15 00:00:00 Charles Hammonds The core idea sustaining OOO (object-oriented ontology) is so misguided that one has to wonder how it gained any parlance within contemporary philosophical circles in the first place. With Tool-Being, Harman takes a bewildering, and to his credit, original interpretive leap in his reading of early Heidegger, arguing that the conception of Dasein's non-thematic "background" comportment to beings--Zuhandenheit, or ready-to-handness--is a brilliant kernel of thought surrounded by superfluity, and that Heidegger himself was unable to bring this idea to full fruition on account of his entrenchment within a Kantian anthropocentric subjectivity. Harman's move, then, is to expand Zuhandenheit beyond human-to-being relations such that it may be applied to any being-to-being relation whatsoever. In other words, a flat-ontological account for this mode of comportment allots no greater significance to one's engagement with the world than to one's desk chair's "engagement" with the floor beneath it, however one attempts to give a rigorous definition of said relation. From what I've gathered through watching a couple of Harman lectures, he argues something to the effect of "an object interacting with another object only does so through a 'caricature'--fire burns cotton but it does not 'grasp' cotton in its entirety", i.e. no object can engage with the entire chemical, physical, or metaphysical substrate of another, a trivial point if there ever was one, and it remains to be seen how this bears any significance to comportment. Even a surface-level reading of Heidegger should understand that Zuhandenheit is inextricable from existential temporality, and therefore cannot be extrapolated beyond Dasein without entering into metaphysical folly. Does my chair really exist for-itself within a hermeneutical horizon? It is of great disrespect to Leibniz that Harman's naive anthropomorphism is compared to his grand architectonics, and it is of even greater absurdity that this philosophy is still taken seriously.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-22 00:00:00 Martin Oswald What do you know, a Graham Harman book on "relational ontology" that doesn't mention Latour once. I'm uniquely unqualified to write a philosophical review of Tool-being: I'm entirely new to Heidegger (other than trying to read - and giving up before a third of the way - Miguel de Beistegui's Truth and Genesis a couple of years ago) and I read it over the course of a few days/many hours a day as if it was a crime novel. What I can say is that charges of repetitiveness are true: the man does revisit his ongoing, gradually transforming position every few paces so we don't get lost, which was really helpful for me. I often review philosophical books saying that people should read the conclusions first so they don't get lost (this is true for Deleuze & Guattari, for example), but here what one'd expect in "the conclusions" is well-spread throughout the book as it develops. Also, there's a plot twist near the very end. Hidden gem: a whole section comprising a rather positive appraisal of Slavoj Zizek's work from The Ticklish Subject on. This on a dry tome that tries to squeeze the "speculative realist" position (a reality independent of human access, etc.) Harman is impressively erudite, and knows his Lacan better than I know my English.