immanence

I’m glad to see that Steven Shaviro and Levi Bryant have stepped into the fray of the debate over the relative virtues of object-centered versus relation-centered ontologies. (Among others, e.g. kvond, Peter Gratton, Graham Harman of course, and see the commenters to Levi’s posts on Harman and Whitehead). With some of the best blogging philosophers going at it, I’m content to sit on the sidelines and watch things unfold. To be fair, Shaviro and Harman, as well as Bryant, have been going at this kind of thing for a while now, but it’s nice to think that my review of Harman’s book helped to catalyze a little bit of the current flare-up. It’s fine to wait around for the print publication of Shaviro’s and Harman’s critiques of and responses to each other, but blogs are so much quicker at quenching one’s philosophic thirst. (And it’s nice to see Whitehead taking a more central place in this discussion.)