Speculative realism

Speculative realism is a philosophical movement that rejects the assumption that reality can be known only through its relation to human thought. Its thinkers pursue accounts of a mind-independent world.

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Correlationism: The view that humans can know only the correlation between thought and being, never either term independently. Speculative realism takes this restriction as its central target.
Quentin Meillassoux: A French philosopher who argues that contingency is the only necessary feature of reality. His critique of correlationism and argument from ancestral events helped launch the movement.
Ancestrality: The existence of events that occurred before the emergence of life and human observers. Meillassoux uses ancestral events to challenge claims that being and thought are inseparable.
Transcendental idealism: The view that objects as experienced conform to the mind’s conditions of possible experience. Its emphasis on those conditions exemplifies the philosophical limit speculative realists challenge.
Metaphysical realism: The view that reality exists independently of how people think or perceive it. It supplies the broad realist commitment the movement seeks to renew.
Ray Brassier: A British philosopher whose work connects realism with scientific naturalism and philosophical nihilism. His version rejects human-centered meaning while defending the reality described by science.
Principle of factiality: Meillassoux’s claim that only the contingency of things is necessary. It grounds his attempt to establish absolute claims without relying on fixed laws.
Phenomenology: A philosophical method that studies structures of experience as they appear to consciousness. Its focus on experience highlights the human-centered starting point many speculative realists reject.
Kantianism: A philosophical tradition deriving from Immanuel Kant, centered on the conditions and limits of human knowledge. Kant’s limits on knowledge helped shape the correlationist position challenged here.
Graham Harman: An American philosopher who developed object-oriented ontology, treating objects as irreducible to their relations. His object-centered metaphysics became one of the movement’s most distinct branches.