[6] He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally intended to study 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan.
[9] His own version of object-oriented thought, called 'onticology', disprivileges human experience from a central position in metaphysical inquiry, while holding that objects are always split between two domains, virtuality and actuality.
Like other object-oriented ontologists, Bryant opposes the anthropocentrism of the Copernican Revolution proposed by Immanuel Kant, wherein objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition.
He states: For, in effect, the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap.
[13]To counter the form of post-Kantian epistemology, Bryant articulates an object-oriented philosophy called 'onticology', grounded in three principles.
[15] Consequently, for Bryant, the thesis that things-in-themselves exist outside the boundaries of knowledge is untenable because it presupposes forms of being that make no differences.
[20] Since onticology construes anything that produces differences—including fictions, signs, animals, and plants—as being equally real, albeit at different scales, it is what Manuel Delanda has called a "flat ontology.
[23] The actualization of an object's power into qualities or properties at a specific place and time is called local manifestation.
[25] As objects are distinct from local manifestations and one another, referred to as withdrawal, their being is defined by the relations forming their internal structure, or endo-relations, and retained powers.
Additionally, Bryant has proposed the concept of 'wilderness ontology' to explain the philosophical pluralization of agency away from human privilege.