Graham Harman

Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968, Iowa City, Iowa) is a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. Harman is associated with Speculative Realism in philosophy, which was the name of a workshop that also included the philosophers Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux.

Biography
Born in Iowa City and raised in Mount Vernon, Iowa, Harman attended St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, receiving his B.A. in 1990. He then pursued graduate study under philosopher Alphonso Lingis at Penn State University, receiving his M.A. in 1991. Transferring to DePaul University in Chicago, he received his Ph. D. there in 1999. While in Chicago, he worked briefly as a sportswriter for sportsextra.com (now defunct). Since 2000, he has been a member of the Department of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo.

Thought
Through an interpretation of the tool-analysis of Heidegger's Being and Time, Harman sets out to develop what he calls an object-oriented philosophy. Taking the tool-analysis as the defining moment in twentieth-century philosophy, Harman finds in Heidegger the roots of a metaphysics of things which does justice to the autonomous existence of objects. Although working from within it, he finds the broad history of phenomenology to be deficient in that it constantly subordinates the independent life of objects to our (human) access to them. Against the Kantian tradition, his object-oriented approach considers the neglected real life of objects to be fertile ground for a resurgent metaphysics. Emphasizing the notions of substance and occasional cause (see occasionalism), he affirms the absolute autonomy of objects from all other objects while aiming to "allude" to their shadowy underground life and covert interactions by means of metaphor.

According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox, a gas, the Commonwealth of Nations, Popeye, spacetime or an eclipse. However, drawing on phenomenology, he does distinguish between two categories of objects: real objects and sensual objects (or intentional objects), which sets his philosophy apart from the flat ontology of Bruno Latour.

According to Harman, since no object can exhaust the reality of another object, there is a metaphysical problem regarding how two objects can ever interact. His solution to this problem is to introduce the notion of "vicarious causation", according to which objects can only ever interact on the inside of an "intention" (which is also an object).

Expressing strong sympathy for panpsychism, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone" (Harman 2009: 213).

Cutting across the phenomenological tradition, and especially its linguistic turn, Harman deploys a brand of metaphysical realism that attempts to extricate objects from their human captivity and metaphorically allude to a strange subterranean world of "vacuum-sealed" objects-in-themselves: "The comet itself, the monkey itself, Coca-Cola itself, resonate in cellars of being where no relation reaches." Harman rejects scientism on account of its anthropocentrism: "For them, raindrops know nothing and lizards know very little, and some humans are more knowledgeable than others."

He has written an article that draws a fresh parallel between the cognitive styles of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and philosopher Edmund Husserl.