Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy
Keywords:
Object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, new materialism, continuous matter
Abstract
In this paper I make a case for a philosophy of continuous matter, in dialogue with object-oriented ontology. A continuous-matter philosophy is one that focuses not on the identity, properties, and relations of discrete, countable objects, but on the nature of extended substances, both in relation to human experience and in terms of their own “inner life.” I explore why and under what conditions humans might perceive the world as objects or as continuous substances, and the language that humans use for talking about both. I argue that approaching the world as continua requires the foregrounding of concepts that emphasize the immanent (internal to a region of space), the inclusive (with contrasting properties coexisting in the same substance), the gradual (manifesting differentially at different points), and the generative or virtual (involving the constant production of form and new gradients). I suggest that starting philosophy from continuous matter rather than objects also has wider implications for speculative thought
References
Aristotle (1956). Metaphysics. Trans. John Warrington. London: J. M. Dent & Sons.
Aristotle (1963). Categories and De Interpretatione. Trans. J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bergson, Henri (1921). Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan.
Bloom, Paul (2000). How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bowerman, Melissa, and Stephen C. Levinson (2001). “Introduction.” In Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, ed. Melissa Bowerman and Stephen
C. Levinson, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brassier, Ray, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux (2007). “Speculative Realism.” Collapse 3: 306–449.
Bryant, Levi R. (2011). The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.
Butterfield, Nicholas J. (2011). “Animals and the Invention of the Phanerozoic Earth System.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 26.2: 81–87.
Carey, Susan (2001). “Whorf Versus Continuity Theorists: Bringing Data to Bear on the Debate.” In Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, ed. Melissa Bower-
man and Stephen C. Levinson, 185–214. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, Nigel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2021). Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988). Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deo, Ashwini, Itamar Francezm, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden (2013). “From Change to Value Difference in Degree Achievements.” In Proceedings of the 23rd Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, 97–115.
Dupré, Louis (1993). Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Elder-Vass, Dave (2005). “Emergence and the Realist Account of Cause.” Journal of Critical Realism 4.2: 315–38.
Esfeld, Michael (2020). “Thing and Non-Thing Ontologies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, ed. Ricki Bliss and J. T. M. Miller, 459–67. Abingdon: Routledge.
Gibson, James J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Grant, Iain Hamilton (2006). Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. London: Continuum.
Haff, Peter K. (2010). “Hillslopes, Rivers, Plows, and Trucks: Mass Transport on Earth’s Surface by Natural and Technological Processes.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 35.10: 1157–66.
Haldane, J.B.S. (1928). “On Being the Right Size.” In Possible Worlds, 20–28. New York: Harper.
Harman, Graham (2005). Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court.
Harman, Graham (2011). The Quadruple Object. Washington D.C: Zone Books.
Harman, Graham (2016). Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2010). The Science of Logic. Trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hesse, Mary B. (1962). Forces and Fields: the Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Imai, Mutsumi, and Dedre Gentner (1997). “A Cross-Linguistic Study of Early Word Meaning: Universal Ontology and Linguistic Influence.” Cognition 62.2: 169–200.
Ingold, Tim (2000a). The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim (2000b). “Stop, Look and Listen! Vision, Hearing and Human Movement.” In The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill,
243–87. London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
Irigaray, Luce (1999). The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Jay, Martin (1993). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, Christopher, and McNally Louise (2005). “Scale Structure, Degree Modification, and the Semantics of Gradable Predicates.” Language 81.2: 345–81.
Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Lautrup, Benny (2005). Physics of Continuous Matter: Exotic and Everyday Phenomena in the Macroscopic World. Bristol: Institute of Physics.
Levin, David Michael, ed. (1993). Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Lucy, John Arthur (1992). Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marder, Michael (2013). Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Co- lumbia University Press.
McMullin, Ernan (2002). “The Origins of the Field Concept in Physics.” Physics in Perspective 4: 13–39.
Mirowski, Philip (1989). More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morton, Timothy (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. London: Methuen.
Ostwald, Wolfgang (1917). An Introduction to Theoretical and Applied Colloid Chemistry: The World of Neglected Dimensions. Trans. Martin Fischer. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Pelletier, Francis Jeffry (2010). “Mass Terms: A Philosophical Introduction.” In Kinds, Things, and Stuff: Mass Terms and Generics, ed. Francis Jeffry Pelletier, 123–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peters, John Durham (2015). The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prasada, Sandeep, Krag Ferenz, and Todd Haskell (2002). “Conceiving of Entities as Objects and as Stuff.” Cognition 83.2: 141–65.
Quine, W. V. (2013). Word and Object, new ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Romanyshyn, Robert D. (1989). Technology as Symptom and Dream. London: Routledge.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (1999). The Primacy of Movement. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Simondon, Gilbert (1964). L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Simondon, Gilbert (1992). “The Genesis of the Individual.” In Zone 6: Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter,
297–319. New York: Urzone.
Spelke, Elizabeth S., Ann Phillips, and Amanda L. Woodward (1995). “Infants’ Knowledge of Object Motion and Human Action.” In Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack, 44–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steen, Mark (2016). “The Metaphysics of Mass Expressions.” In The Stanford Ency- clopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CT: Stanford University.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2016). “Planetary Mobilities: Movement, Memory and Emer- gence in the Body of the Earth.” Mobilities 11.4: 614–28.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw (forthcoming). “Colloidal Social Theory: Thinking about Material Animacy and Sociality Beyond Solids and Fluids.” Theory, Culture & Society.
Tabatowski, Michael (2019). “Toward a unified analysis of internal and external comparison.” In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23: Volume 2, ed. M. Teresa Espinal, Elena Castroviejo, Manuel Leonetti, Louise McNally, and Cristina Real-Puigdollers, 335–46. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Ikerbasque & UPV/EHU, Universidad de Alcalá and Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Tallis, Raymond (2003). The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tolman, Richard C. (1917). “The Measurable Quantities of Physics.” Physical Review 9.3: 237–53.
Verran, Helen (2001). Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle (1963). Categories and De Interpretatione. Trans. J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bergson, Henri (1921). Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan.
Bloom, Paul (2000). How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bowerman, Melissa, and Stephen C. Levinson (2001). “Introduction.” In Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, ed. Melissa Bowerman and Stephen
C. Levinson, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brassier, Ray, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux (2007). “Speculative Realism.” Collapse 3: 306–449.
Bryant, Levi R. (2011). The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.
Butterfield, Nicholas J. (2011). “Animals and the Invention of the Phanerozoic Earth System.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 26.2: 81–87.
Carey, Susan (2001). “Whorf Versus Continuity Theorists: Bringing Data to Bear on the Debate.” In Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, ed. Melissa Bower-
man and Stephen C. Levinson, 185–214. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, Nigel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski (2021). Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988). Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deo, Ashwini, Itamar Francezm, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden (2013). “From Change to Value Difference in Degree Achievements.” In Proceedings of the 23rd Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, 97–115.
Dupré, Louis (1993). Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Elder-Vass, Dave (2005). “Emergence and the Realist Account of Cause.” Journal of Critical Realism 4.2: 315–38.
Esfeld, Michael (2020). “Thing and Non-Thing Ontologies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, ed. Ricki Bliss and J. T. M. Miller, 459–67. Abingdon: Routledge.
Gibson, James J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Grant, Iain Hamilton (2006). Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. London: Continuum.
Haff, Peter K. (2010). “Hillslopes, Rivers, Plows, and Trucks: Mass Transport on Earth’s Surface by Natural and Technological Processes.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 35.10: 1157–66.
Haldane, J.B.S. (1928). “On Being the Right Size.” In Possible Worlds, 20–28. New York: Harper.
Harman, Graham (2005). Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court.
Harman, Graham (2011). The Quadruple Object. Washington D.C: Zone Books.
Harman, Graham (2016). Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2010). The Science of Logic. Trans. George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hesse, Mary B. (1962). Forces and Fields: the Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Imai, Mutsumi, and Dedre Gentner (1997). “A Cross-Linguistic Study of Early Word Meaning: Universal Ontology and Linguistic Influence.” Cognition 62.2: 169–200.
Ingold, Tim (2000a). The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim (2000b). “Stop, Look and Listen! Vision, Hearing and Human Movement.” In The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill,
243–87. London: Routledge.
Ingold, Tim (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.
Irigaray, Luce (1999). The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Jay, Martin (1993). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, Christopher, and McNally Louise (2005). “Scale Structure, Degree Modification, and the Semantics of Gradable Predicates.” Language 81.2: 345–81.
Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Lautrup, Benny (2005). Physics of Continuous Matter: Exotic and Everyday Phenomena in the Macroscopic World. Bristol: Institute of Physics.
Levin, David Michael, ed. (1993). Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Lucy, John Arthur (1992). Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marder, Michael (2013). Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Co- lumbia University Press.
McMullin, Ernan (2002). “The Origins of the Field Concept in Physics.” Physics in Perspective 4: 13–39.
Mirowski, Philip (1989). More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morton, Timothy (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. London: Methuen.
Ostwald, Wolfgang (1917). An Introduction to Theoretical and Applied Colloid Chemistry: The World of Neglected Dimensions. Trans. Martin Fischer. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Pelletier, Francis Jeffry (2010). “Mass Terms: A Philosophical Introduction.” In Kinds, Things, and Stuff: Mass Terms and Generics, ed. Francis Jeffry Pelletier, 123–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peters, John Durham (2015). The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prasada, Sandeep, Krag Ferenz, and Todd Haskell (2002). “Conceiving of Entities as Objects and as Stuff.” Cognition 83.2: 141–65.
Quine, W. V. (2013). Word and Object, new ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Romanyshyn, Robert D. (1989). Technology as Symptom and Dream. London: Routledge.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (1999). The Primacy of Movement. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Simondon, Gilbert (1964). L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Simondon, Gilbert (1992). “The Genesis of the Individual.” In Zone 6: Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter,
297–319. New York: Urzone.
Spelke, Elizabeth S., Ann Phillips, and Amanda L. Woodward (1995). “Infants’ Knowledge of Object Motion and Human Action.” In Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack, 44–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steen, Mark (2016). “The Metaphysics of Mass Expressions.” In The Stanford Ency- clopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CT: Stanford University.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw (2016). “Planetary Mobilities: Movement, Memory and Emer- gence in the Body of the Earth.” Mobilities 11.4: 614–28.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw (forthcoming). “Colloidal Social Theory: Thinking about Material Animacy and Sociality Beyond Solids and Fluids.” Theory, Culture & Society.
Tabatowski, Michael (2019). “Toward a unified analysis of internal and external comparison.” In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23: Volume 2, ed. M. Teresa Espinal, Elena Castroviejo, Manuel Leonetti, Louise McNally, and Cristina Real-Puigdollers, 335–46. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Ikerbasque & UPV/EHU, Universidad de Alcalá and Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Tallis, Raymond (2003). The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tolman, Richard C. (1917). “The Measurable Quantities of Physics.” Physical Review 9.3: 237–53.
Verran, Helen (2001). Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Published
2021-07-29
How to Cite
Szerszynski, B. (2021). Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy. Stasis, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-21-11-1-181-207
Section
Thematic Articles
Copyright (c) 2021 European University at Saint-Petersburg
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
