[2] Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College, University of London in April 2007.
[4] A second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at the UWE Bristol on Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths.
[5] The line-up consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place of Meillassoux, who was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano.
[6] This symposium was hosted by Ian Bogost and included Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Steven Shaviro, Hugh Crawford, Carl DiSalvo, John Johnston, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Eugene Thacker.
In Hysteresis,[8] a book published in Edinburgh's Speculative Realism series, Ferraris positioned his thoughts more explicitly in relation to the works of many of the names previously mentioned.
While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a shared resistance to what they interpret as philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel Kant.
While sharing in the goal of overturning the dominant strands of post-Kantian thought in Continental philosophy, there are important differences separating the core members of the speculative realist movement and their followers.
In his critique of correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux (who uses the term speculative materialism to describe his position)[4] finds two principles as the focus of Kant's philosophy.
Although, some have argued that the problem is not that these ancestral events are outside of human notions of time, since many such examples of these events in fact do have materially sensible data which places them in terms of human interpretations of time, but rather it applies more strongly to real things which are not empirically observable:[17] e.g. quarks or genetic information.
While not committed entirely to speculative materialism, Yuk Hui references and uses an analogous line of reasoning in Recursivity and Contingency[18] in his development of cosmotechnics, and actively works within similar philosophical lineages.
Sympathetic to panpsychism, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone".
Inspired by the occasionalists of medieval Islamic philosophy, Harman maintains that no two objects can ever interact save through the mediation of a "sensual vicar".
A recent example is found in Steven Shaviro's book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, which argues for a process-based approach that entails panpsychism as much as it does vitalism or animism.
Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the "threat" of nihilism.
Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland and Thomas Metzinger, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning.
[31] In an interview with Kronos magazine published in March 2011, Ray Brassier denied that there is any such thing as a "speculative realist movement" and firmly distanced himself from those who continue to attach themselves to the brand name:[32] The "speculative realist movement" exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy.
[33] Despite this, many of those who discuss different approaches to escape Meillassoux's correlationist cycle, suggesting active philosophical discourse on a particular topic.
Speculative realism has close ties to the journal Collapse, which published the proceedings of the inaugural conference at Goldsmiths and has featured numerous other articles by 'Speculative Realist' thinkers; as has the academic journal Pli, which is edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.
In 2013, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies journal published a special issue on the topic in relation to anarchism.
[39] Websites have formed as resources for essays, lectures, and planned future books by those within the speculative realist movement.