Indie Street Reads #74: Alien Phenomenology

Indie Street Radio reviews Ian Bogost's ALIEN PHENOMENOLOGY, OR WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A THING.

bogost_alien coverIan Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology is a book of philosophy that ultimately embraces a newer strand of speculative metaphysics (Object-Oriented Ontology or OOO) with the promise of taking the theory and applying it to real objects. Roughly, OOO holds that all things on all scales have their own mind-independent and equal existence and being. Thus, insofar as Bogost as committed to the radical equality of being, Alien Phenomenology is an attempt to characterize how things perceive and interact with their world, employing their own “internal logic.” As the last chapter reveals, this is primarily in service of recapturing wonder—not the wonder of solving a puzzle, but of basking in a larger mystery.

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Published in: Indie Street Radio