3 Quotes & Sayings By Graham Harman

Graham Harman is the author of numerous books, including Vibrant Universe (1998), Virtual Philosophy (2000), The End of Time (2001), The Intuitionist (2002), Art and Fear (2004), and A Hacker Manifesto (2005). He directs an interdisciplinary center at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he teaches classes on the philosophy of computation, virtual reality, the history of technology, and other topics. He serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy and Phenomenology and Technology and Culture. Harman has also worked as a researcher in robotics for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology.

1
A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger’s or Whitehead’s best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of “obligatory passage point” (Latour’s term) in the discussions that follow. Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made “fewer mistakes” than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress. . Graham Harman
2
To create something does not mean to see through to its depths; we do not drain our children to the dregs by begetting them, but set them loose in the world like wild dogs, beyond our control and often beyond our knowledge. Graham Harman