Naturalism or materialism are hardly perspectives struggling to disseminate novel insights to a population ignorant of their ‘virtues’. Their outlooks are well-known.
In actual ‘Contental philosophy’, on the Continent, Bachelard, Serres, Thom, and Monod, have been hugely influential. In the Anglophone reception of this tradition, these thinkers have been well-represented over the years. They are not ‘outlier’ figures. If you’re claiming they are ‘outliers’ for you, and your milieu, you are the best judge of that, but it certainly doesn’t apply to the rest of the philosophical world.
When you speak of ‘dominant tendencies’, in the Anglophone world there is one, and one only, the Anglo-American analytical tradition and all its sub-schools. ‘Speculative Realism’ is merely an intermediary form that has developed in response to the perceived ‘excesses’ of some Continental thought, it is an attempt to domesticate such thought to the basic outlook exemplified by a large, hegemonic strain in the Anglo-American tradition.
There is nothing in my response that can be construed as implying the rejection of Althusser or Foucault, not that I would hesitate to do this if it was necessary. But I would actually read them first.
Your silence regarding the rest of the points in my response is notable.
You are very prolific, philosophy takes time.
Bryant plays out the ambiguity of whether he is talking about Continental Philosophy as it is produced on the Continent, or as practiced in the USA. In both cases he is wrong. Some form of naturalism and/or materialism is the default position in French philosophy and has been for a long time. Existentialism is a naturalist philosophy. I live in France and last Sunday I had a look at a philosophy programme on TV. Raphael Enthoven, a philosopher who hosts a a weekly programme where he interviews other philosophers had this time invited a French high school student. In response to her evoking Cartesian doubt he quoted Sartre about the world before human beings and said that to talk about this prehuman world was the main task of philosophy. She accepted this without a demur. If Bryant is talking about continental philosophy in the Anglophone world, it is rife with people trying to prove that Lacan, phenomenology, structuralism etc are compatible with analytic philosophy. Bryant is just one more late comer to that party, his continental naturalism is post festum.
Bryant has given up on the term “correlationism”. This is a wise choice as it designates a bogus concept of minimum intension but maximum, and arbitrary, extension. It also sounds too continental. So now he has trouble finding a new negatively valued critical term. He has toyed with “anthropocentric” but that is of dubious use, and not very philosophical. Now he has fallen back on “anti-naturalist”, as if this term can inherit the aura and extension of the first term, and the intuitive facility of the second. But he will have problems demonstrating how, for example, “social constructivism” (I suppose one can think of the strong programme of the sociology of knowledge here) is anti-naturalist when its whole point is naturalist.
Perhaps he’s doing a historical revisionism?
I think he’s a teacher or professor, his blog is busy, he writes lots of posts, he must be very busy. Unfortunately, in a society that stresses productivity, pressures are high.
If quantity is emphasised, quality can suffer.
I’m just in the process of starting my blog, I can see that if I had a lot of comments to respond to, it would be difficult to do that within a limited time.