The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast · Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey

Ep. 385: Guest Graham Harman on Object vs. Continuum (Part Two)

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Harman reduces knowledge to two moves: say what something is made of, or say what it does.

1. The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast episode 385, part two, centers on Graham Harman’s Waves and Stones and object-oriented ontology. 2. Wes, Dylan, Mark, and guest Graham Harman are the speakers, and Harman is the author of the book being discussed. 3. The episode asks whether objects, facts, and unity can be known directly, or only through mediated access and theory change. 4. Wes revisits Kant’s “thing in itself” and says skepticism about reality is self-limiting because it already depends on phenomena, causality, and observation. 5. Harman answers that he does not like “skepticism” as a word, but he does think knowledge is incomplete because theories change over time. 6. The hosts press the cat-on-the-mat example, asking whether the cat’s unity is directly available if the proposition remains true. 7. Harman says the cat’s being on the mat is a contingent fact that could be translated into code-like terms without losing truth. 8. The discussion turns to “undermining” and “overmining,” two terms Harman uses for explanations that go downward into parts or upward into functions. 9. Harman uses Gatorade, electrolytes, hydration, sugar, and rocket fuel to show that chemical composition and function do not exhaust what an object is. 10. He says object-oriented ontology places the thing itself at a “mezzanine level” between those two kinds of knowledge. 11. Dylan pushes the issue of unity, saying H2O, a dog, or a hog has a real unity produced by an underlying dynamic system. 12. Harman replies that unity may be a formal aspect of objects, but he will not claim an unshakable foundation in philosophy. 13. The conversation shifts to a hog bandsawed from head to tail, with Harman distinguishing carving along joints from cutting across a continuum. 14. Harman says a continuum has no parts until someone creates them, while an object in his system is always made of parts. 15. The episode then takes up fictional and ideal objects, including Sherlock Holmes, the Penguin, a “bad Hamlet,” and a three-by-three square. 16. Harman argues that critics can say an adaptation misses the essence of Sherlock Holmes or the Penguin, even when opinions differ about boundaries. 17. He also mentions Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations as a reason to treat mathematical truth as less neatly exhausted than he once thought. 18. The tone is analytic and argumentative, with long back-and-forth exchanges rather than a formal lecture or a fast interview. 19. Listeners who like Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, Kripke, and philosophy of science will likely follow it closely. 20. Listeners looking for light banter or a simple summary of object-oriented ontology may skip it.

As heard by us

A lively ontology debate that stays human, messy, and concrete.

This philosophy episode works best when it stays scrappy. The hosts and Graham Harman keep circling object-oriented ontology, and the strongest stretch comes when bigger claims are tested against concrete cases: Kant's thing in itself, direct access to reality, a square imagined…

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Why you'd press play

If you want philosophy that keeps arguing with itself, this one keeps sparring.

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