Books by Tom Sparrow

In the 20th century, phenomenology promised a method that would get philosophy 'back to the things themselves'. But phenomenology has always been haunted by the spectre of an anthropocentric antirealism. Tom Sparrow shows how, in the 21st century, speculative realism aims to do what phenomenology could not: provide a philosophical method that disengages the human-centred approach to metaphysics in order to chronicle the complex realm of nonhuman reality. Through a focused reading of the methodological statements and metaphysical commitments of key phenomenologists and speculative realists, Sparrow shows how speculative realism is replacing phenomenology as the beacon of realism in contemporary Continental philosophy. He draws on phenomenologists including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, speculative realism's original creators Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant and key figures in speculative realism's second wave, including Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton.

Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.