Tom Sparrow: From Anti-Realism to Speculative Realism

Finally able to begin a back log of reading material that I’ve put off for several months. Several works in the past year or so have come out dealing with Speculative Realism (SR). Four in particular I’m in process of reading are

1. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects by Peter Gratton
2. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro
3. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism by Tom Sparrow
4. Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes by Peter Wolfendale

For personal reasons I started with Tom Sparrow’s work which outlines a case against the anti-realist tradition of phenomenology which he argues lacks both a method and a hard core kernel of realist philosophy. He takes Merleau Ponty to task in his appraisal of phenomenology as a style of philosophy, when Ponty states that in his opinion: “the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be practised and…