One with important links to Shaviro and Dominic on pantheism and speculative realism HERE. From reading Shaviro's stuff it's clear that Whitehead is now added to the list of great philosophers I need to catch up on in the next decade or so.
One on Williams, Heidegger, and the importance of the R7 thesis HERE. On this point, I think that Williams really is in a dilemma. Either you read Heidegger as affirming Harman's R7 (that the ontological relation between subject and object is not different in kind than that between object and object), or Hermann Phillipse is correct that Heidegger fails to rid himself of the Cartesian problematic, if not the external world then certainly the mind-body problem.
I think the Heidegger of Being and Time is incoherent exactly where Phillipse alleges,so that any consistent reading of the material is going to depart from what Heidegger wrote to some extent. So the question is how philosophically insightful the readings end up being, and on this score Dreyfus, Okrent, and Harman beat everybody else hands down.
[UPDATE: Levi has a reaction post HERE. I know that Allison tries to interpret "empirical realism" more along the lines that Williams does in the comments below. I hope to read Allison's book this year at some point. My point about Schultze, Jacobi, Maimon, and Schopenhauer's gripe is that even if you allow that Kant's version of "empirical realism" somehow recovers common sense (and I think Levi is absolutely correct that it does not), it doesn't really matter because transcendental idealism is *still* incoherent because it simultaneously requires and prohibits causality between things and themselves and phenomena. Moreover, I think that Phillipse and Harman are right that Being and Time is incoherent in the same way (though with Harman, I think that many of Heidegger's insights are really important).
I'm worried my tone in this exchange and the comments below is too testy because all of this has been hastily typed in between kid wrangling. I should just note that smart, informed people disagree about all of this, and more importantly I always find Williams' work on his blog and elsewhere to be worth thinking about.]
[UPDATE 2: Another round (with link to Williams' most recent post) HERE, and a nice reaction from Levi HERE]. Money quote from Harman.
Well, reality is spooky. We’re so stuck in the rut of automatically assuming that thinking = demystifying and demythologizing that we forget things might sometimes be of a more mythic character than we realize. Enlightenment doesn’t just go in one direction, turning spooky depths into easily surveyable surfaces. There are times for that and times for the opposite gesture, just as boxers need to be able to use both hands.
A conviction that this is right is in part why Harman and I take Lovecraft to be as philosophically important a fiction writer as many take Mark Twain or Fyodor Dostoevsky (Neal Hebert and I have one paper we're shopping around on the metaphysics of magic that crucially uses Lovecraft and Harman has a book on Lovecraft either in the pipeline or forthcoming).
Harman also explains nicely in his post the part of his position that is oddest to me, where presence at hand is thematized as essentially relational and readiness to hand as essentially non-relational. By odd I just mean that this is one place where one could agree with Harman's distinctive radical exteriorization of scheme-content and R7 thesis but still disagree with the specifics of how it goes. I'm not sure where I come down on this. The metaphysics of relations is one of the oldest and most difficult in philosophy (see all the papers about bundle theory versus bare particulars in analytic metaphysics; Harman's view entails a distinctive position on this that deserves to be part of the dialogue).]
