Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/3

Rh return to speculative metaphysics, the second, an embrace of realism. There is, however, little that is particularly easy or straightforward about the implementation of either of these things. A major overhaul in the commitments of continental philosophy would seem necessary in order for them to acquire any purchase or momentum. The recent history of continental philosophy has tended to dismiss all talk of realism as part of a naive ‘pseudo-problem’. The choice between realism and antirealism, or realism and idealism, has been critiqued and caricatured as far too brutal a bifurcation of the world to be taken seriously. Moreover, when one does examine recent continental philosophy more closely, one is confronted with arguments that are, at their core, antirealist in nature. So, on the one hand, continental philosophy displays an unwillingness to make the choice between realism and antirealism, while, on the other, it encompasses arguments and traditions that are antirealist. Clearly, for anyone with metaphysical and realist commitments this is difficult and frustrating terrain to traverse. The intellectual legacy here is that of Immanuel Kant and his Copernican Revolution, instituted with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. It was Kant who placed severe limits on metaphysical speculation, elaborating and systematizing how a priori categories of human cognition and understanding impose order on the world. Following Kant, knowledge of the things-in-themselves is rendered illegitimate. The concerns of philosophy shift toward interrogating the gap between human and world, problems of access and critique. Always and everywhere the world is structured by human cognition, rather than vice versa. Any differences between analytical and continental philosophers are remarkably minor in this regard. Both take Kant’s arguments seriously, implicitly affirming Slavoj Žižek’s identification of Kant as the first philosopher; and many concur with Frederick Ferre’s observation that metaphysics has become a ‘miserable word.’ Only very recently has this state of affairs been called into question.

The revival of metaphysics and realism in continental philosophy might be traced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour’s ActorNetwork-Theory, or, more plausibly, the Anglo-American influence of A. N. Whitehead’s process metaphysics. However, it was not until 2002 that the 46