AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Have to say I've never quite got Object-oriented ontology. And was starting to have a bad reaction to this episode, which discusses it via Harman's essay The Third Table. The gist: the idea of TWO tables come from an old pop science work of Eddington – the ordinary view of a table from everyday human cognition and society, and the science! view of the table as a collection of particles and empty space. Philosophically, these correspond to idealism and materialism, locked in an endless war over what is really real. Harman postulates a third table, the table itself and for itself, which transcends and solves this battle, because table is really real.
At this point I'm tempted to use my amateur status to make the very non-scholarly argument that all this is extremely stupid. Idealism or materialism, at least in their fundamentalist forms, are obviously wrong and fighting about them has distracted smart people from reality for thousands of years. Arguing about what is really real is stupid. (this is equivalent to Latour's Irreductions which expresses it more politely).
Harman agrees with the first part of the above – idealism and materialism are inadequate, but his solution seems more obfuscatory, requiring the granting of souls or something soul-like to objects like chairs and rocks that can't really support them.
[quote!]
But listening to this episode made me realize what Harman is talking about, which is not some abstract theory of the real, but an attempt to convey one of the more intriguing aspects of the psychedelic experience – the one where objects get this vivid glow of thisness, their being seems to shine out in a way that does indeed transcend their mundane material surfaces or everyday uses. I've always been fascinated by this, because I don't have a very good theory for it. Visual hallucinations, eg, are easy to explain as glitches in low-level visual processing layers. But why should a drug make random objects seem more alive, or charged with a strange sort of energy?
Harman doesn't exactly explain this either, in fact he is against the explanations offered by either of the two mainstream theories, which he calls "shams". The third table is not propositional, it isn't even knowledge as such, it's more relational, like love or sympathy or compassion. Sounds like I and Thou.
That makes a lot of sense, but it means OOO is closer to a kind of spiritual practice than it is science or any other kind of reasoned inquiry. That leaves open the question of why we need academic writing about it.