As part of a reading/writing group that I’m participating in, I’ve been catching up with the impact of the wider material turn in philosophy. In particular, I’ve been trying to get a handle on speculative realism and Grant Harman’s call for an “Object Oriented Philosophy”. On the one hand, the project seems (reading selfishly) to provide a robust argument for the centrality of an archaeological engagement with the world, one attentive to particular things rather than a homogeneous class defined as “the object”. On the other hand, the work leads to a peculiar imputation of psychic faculties to things modeled on a generic human psyche. So although things become critical to the world at large, it is not a specifically social world where things work differently than we do but rather a generic world where things act in human terms. Does ending anthropocentrism in our theoretical engagement with things necessarily end in anthropomorphism? Is that a significant improvement in our analytical stance? For sources and discussion, here is a link to Harman’s blog.