Gestell Living

So I'm just finishing up a brief return trip to Dublin and remain shocked at the rapid pace with which Dublin seems to be disintegrating on some fronts (albeit improving slightly in some others).

It got me thinking a lot about Heidegger (from Freiburg to Dublin is from dwelling to Gestell...) and I managed to write up some notes for a possible Heidegger paper. I'm going to try incorporate it into an upcoming talk for a black metal conference happening in Dublin soon...details as I get 'em.

On that front it is worth noting I finally got to meet Michael O' Rourke and we managed to visit the Tool-Use exhibition exhibition here in Dublin. It was weird to see this happening at all since for a while I felt like the only person in Ireland with any interest in OOO.

Now things are happening quite a bit on that score and certainly on the aesthetics front. However the visit made me quite aware that I need to talk to artists a lot more. That being said it was nice to be able to talk to Michael about all this over a pint of Guinness. Hopefully Dublin can become a hideout for para-academic exiles.

Equally cool is that I will be able to attend the SEP-FEP conference in York (with none other than Graham Harman as a keynote) alongside two Irish academics - Francis Halsall and Tim Scott (even better is that there will also be two excellent continentalists from UCD there too). The panel is called Aesthetic Objects: Art and Object Orientated Philosophy (details here including abstracts) and my own paper is called More than Theory: On Speculative Realism and Aesthetics. It will be a hybrid of my Basel and Ecotone papers so I'm not sure how it will look by September, but I'm getting more relaxed about giving papers these days so I'm going to see how things pan out.

Tomorrow I head off to Nottingham for the Eco-tone event (schedule, abstracts) organized by the ever-helpful and forward-looking David Reid. My paper is called Melancholic Coexistence amongst Objects and I am hoping that I can at least fulfil the minor role of discussing some OOO metaphysics before letting the properly interesting people show me what thinking the outside is really like. Since I'm on early in the morning I am going to be in a nice position to sit back and take it all in. I'm also getting to meet Robert Jackson for the first time and I'm certain I'll learn a thing or two from him. I'm also hoping I'll get to meet some of Nottingham theology crew again.

For now I need to relax a litte...my body took a lot of beating this week from all that booze!

Continental Realism out on the Kindle

Just noticed Continental Realism has just been released for the Kindle. I'm just downloading it now, but as a Kindle convert I am quite happy about this. In a way it feels very much like a Kindle-generation book (it's compact and could feasibly be read on a longish train or plane trip).

Updated Academia.edu Page

OK I just took a look at my academia.edu page and it seems I have not updated it in quite a while. I've added all the papers I have on file (one from a long time ago seems to have vanished from my hard-drive but is available online) and updated my CV to reflect new papers and articles. Link here.

Another Article - Copernican Metaphysics in 'Continent'

Another article (these things always seem to happen around the same time) and this time it is on Copernican Metaphysics (PDF link on page). It appears in the second issue of Continent and I am a huge fan of the venture.

My early Heidegger article out in 'Thinking Nature'

My article on 'What did the early Heidegger think about Nature' for Thinking Nature has just been uploaded. The rest of the issue looks awesome so do check it out.

Update: PDF Version for Download

Difficult Atheism Released

Order here. Christopher Watkin was kind enough to let me read this a few months back just prior to submitting my thesis. I had wanted to make sure I was not covering too much of the same ground (esp. with Continental Realism which covers quite a bit of Meillassoux). As Graham Harman notes the book deals quite a bit with L’Inexistence divine which was the appeal for me as I had no other way, bar a miracle where suddently I learned French and could afford a research trip to France, to find out too much about it whilst also being able to quote someone on it. Anyway it's an awesome book. Do check it out.

Speculative Realism/OOO Workshop (Cyprus, 2012)

Apropos the recent call for panel participants our proposal has been accepted for The 13th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas. The SR/OOO panel will be included under Section V: Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Language. You can see the abstract and call for further participants here. So far we have 8 pledges, but more are welcome especially since the conference takes place in July 2012 and spots may open up again.