Ep. 385: Guest Graham Harman on Object vs. Continuum (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In our continuing Q&A with Graham, we engage him about Kantian Things-In-Themselves, complex things (that if divided, must be cut at the joints) vs. mere heaps, fact ontology, natural kinds, fictional objects, why philosophy is not knowledge, and philosophical style.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the partially examined life. This is episode 385, part two, discussing Gran Harmon's Waves and Stones with Graham himself, as well as whatever was issues were hanging on us from the object-oriented ontology, a new theory of |
| 0:21.7 | everything that we discussed in our last episode. Wes, you wanted to start us off with some talk |
| 0:25.9 | about the thing in itself? Sure. I did used to get a lot of flack for being a conscient on this |
| 0:30.9 | podcast. Now I have to say I'm more sympathetic to the idea that we have direct access to reality, |
| 0:37.8 | or at least to the reality that matters, in part because of Hegel, in part because of Aristotle. |
| 0:44.3 | And really, I don't know that I ever considered myself a Kantin. |
| 0:46.4 | I just thought he was an important point of departure for understanding everything that came |
| 0:50.7 | after. |
| 0:51.7 | In fact, in a way, I think the central preoccupation of epistemology |
| 0:55.5 | since Kant on both the analytic and the continental side of things is whether we can make sense |
| 1:02.5 | of things in themselves. And if so, how? The criticisms of that idea started immediately with people |
| 1:08.5 | like Yakubi and Schultz. And one of the important |
| 1:11.1 | criticisms was that, well, the whole model of the thing in itself assumes a kind of causal |
| 1:15.7 | interaction between the thing and itself and the mind. And causality is one of the things that was |
| 1:19.1 | supposed to be reduced to the level of a phenomenon, supposed to become something, another thing |
| 1:24.3 | that was like a secondary quality, along with space and time and all the other |
| 1:28.3 | categories. And that, I think that kind of critique can be expanded. And in a way, I thought it was |
| 1:33.8 | in Hegel. And I think it also has a legacy and say, Vittgenstein's uncertainty and then Moors, |
| 1:39.7 | you know, Morian propositions. And the idea is that there's something importantly self-limiting about skepticism. |
| 1:45.7 | And if we don't like that word, we could just say about any theory that suggests that we have |
| 1:49.1 | a, have mediated access to reality. And that's because our intuitions about skepticism are |
| 1:55.1 | predicated about observations, about phenomena, about things that are supposed to be mediated. |
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