perhaps the most astonishing development in philosophy during the time i've been doing it is that movement has emerged that believes in a reality external to the human mind. now, that might strike you as not all that impressive, considering that everyone - including all the philosophers that denied it - believes in a world external to the human mind, and you might think that reality would have some strange reactionary defenders all the way along. maybe so, but the disease had many forms and has seemed more or less inevitable as death since descartes, who argued that we only have acquaintance with our own ideas. so then...hume, kant, hegel. phenomenology, logical positivism, hermeneutics, narrativism, postmodernism: all asking the bizarre question of how the mind constructs a world, rather than the perfectly sensible question of how the world constructs a mind. to say that, circa 1993 i felt alone is an understatement, though compared with most people i'm comfortable alone.
at any rate 'speculative realism' has emerged incredibly quickly in continental philosophy, in large part due to the prodigiously energetic writer/wheeler-dealer graham harman. the 'movement' encompasses a number of eccentric figures in continental philosophy, formed up by harman into a group. it recovers bits of deleuze, badiou, zizek, and constructs a new canon out of figures such as latour and quentin meillasoux (whose book after finitude is a key, though strange, moment), on both of whom harman has published books in the last few months. also it's very internetish, and the books appear incredibly quickly, often with open access, from presses such as re, zero, and open humanities. (re's anthology the speculative turn is the place to start). really it has had to forge its whole own world of publishing, blogs, mini-conferences, because it is obvious to everyone who does philosophy of any sort that they themselves are making up their world, or that we're making it up together by telling stories, etc.
that would really be the dawn of the popomo period, and one has to think that sr is opened up by the death of the pomo generation: baudrillard, rorty, derrida, gadamer etc. it is also, perhaps, a response to the fact that we actually do live more than ever in representations and before screens; that would make you yearn for the real.
there could be a corresponding development in analytic philosophy, and indeed for twenty years and more ontology has re-emerged in analytic philosophy as a legit enterprise.
i have to say that - even though harman publishes a book every month or two (the quadruple object, he says on his blog, took 86 hours) - the whole idea is still nascent. whenever harman builds it up, he does it by clawing his way out of phenomenology: he uses and attacks husserl and heidegger. well, ok, but obviously we're headed someplace else and the origins of this thing in phenomenology are contingent and will, i think, eventually be irrelevant to what develops (i'll give harman one big insight out of heidegger for making objects inward, mysterious etc, but little else, really). also it is developing in many directions at once, and each figure (paul levi bryant, manuel delanda, iain hamilton-grant) has his own eccentric metaphysics. that part is just good, but a little canon will have to settle in.
they're also groping toward new ways of writing, and harman's prose style - kind of rollicking and anti-obscurantist - is as radical within continental philosophy as his positions. reading harman i have the sense that everything is open: you actually can write how you want or how what you're saying demands you write. again, that's why there has to be a new publishing world.
anyway, for the first time in my career, i want in. here is more or less a movement i endorse, something i wouldn't have believed possible.
