Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism

ISBN-13: 9783031480263 / Angielski

Brian Hisao Onishi

Spis treści

Introduction – Wonder and the Question of Speculation in Phenomenology

The Allure of Phenomenology

Correlationism and the Critique of Phenomenology

An Epiphany in Virginia

Diffractive Reading

Chapter One – Placing Wonder: Merleau-Ponty, New Materialism, and Object-Oriented Ontology

Thaumazein, Epistemological Wonder, and Ontological Wonder

Merleau-Ponty and an Ontological Wonder

New Materialism

Object Oriented Ontology

Placing Wonder in the Flesh

Chapter Two – Aesthetics, Causality, and Operative Wonder

Aesthetics of Wonder: Rare Experiences

Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment: Why Art Matters

Aesthetic Causality and the Law of Noncontradiction

Language and the Dramatization of Aesthetic Causality

1Q84: A World that Bears a Question

Chapter Three – Ontological Wonder as Operative Wonder

The End of Phenomenology and the Case for Realism

Realism, Ontological Wonder, and Quantum Physics

Onto-Cartography and Operative Wonder

Diffractive Reading and Alien Phenomenology

Chapter Four – Museums, Gardens, and the Possibility for Care in Operative Wonder

The Living Museum

Cabinets of Curiosities

Enchantment in the Museum

Cathedrals of Enchantment and Being Lost in a Horror Store

The Garden of Care

Chapter Five – Speculative Wonder: Toward a Weird Environmental Ethics

                The Weird

            The Need for a Weird Ethics

            An Environmental Virtue of Wonder

             

Conclusion

            Weird Wonder: A Speculative Eco-Phenomenology

O autorze

Brian Hisao Onishi is an assistant professor of philosophy at Penn State Altoona, USA. His research focuses on the intersection between environmental philosophy and continental thought, with particular emphasis on wonder.

Blurb

This book connects recent developments in speculative realism, new materialism, and eco-phenomenology to articulate an approach to wonder that escapes the connected traps of anthropocentrism and correlationism.  Brian Onishi argues that wonder has explanatory power for the constitution of the world and the organization of meaning. To do this, he appeals to both fiction (speculative and Weird fiction in particular) and quantum physics. More specifically, he argues that the focus of Weird fiction on impossible experiences and a feeling of something just beyond the limits of one’s grasp dramatizes the speculative reach beyond the limits of our understanding. But more than a tool for knowledge acquisition, wonder is an organizing property of objects. Like the collapse of superposition in quantum physics, reality is constituted when objects reveal themselves to other objects and thereby organize themselves into complex objects. Since no relation is exhaustive, the capacity to wonder remains at a material level, and the possibility of reorganization is ever present. Ultimately, Onishi argues for a speculative eco-phenomenology with wonder as an engine for a Weird environmental ethics.

Brian Hisao Onishi is an assistant professor of philosophy at Penn State Altoona, USA. His research focuses on the intersection between environmental philosophy and continental thought, with particular emphasis on wonder.