Graham Harman · 2009 · EPUB · Calibre ID 389
Resurfaced in The Two Clocks Problem (2026-09-25).
Role in the triad
The lineage named and decentralized: occasionalism made secular and local (‘vicarious causation’), where any actor can be the mediator and the bridge can fail.
Why this book
Harman makes the Geulincx edge explicit (al-Ash’ari, Malebranche and the occasionalist tradition) and takes the monopoly away from God, custom or the mind. This gives the triad its conflict: one artificer, none, or many.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “This brand of philosophy, widely known as ‘occasionalism’, was as acceptable in the seventeenth century as it is ridiculed today.” (ch. 2, p. 35)
- “Latour is probably the first thinker in history to invent a local option for occasional cause—one not passing through God (as in al-Ash’ari, Malebranche, and even Whitehead) or the human mind (as when Hume and Kant turn human habit or categories into the seat of all relations).” (ch. 4, p. 81)
- “More occasionalist than Bergsonian, Latour’s actors have no choice but to occupy punctiform cinematic frames.” (ch. 5, p. 105)
- “they allow a single pampered entity to break the ban on relations that is cruelly enforced on all others.” (ch. 5, p. 113)
- “Bruno Latour is the first secular occasionalist” (ch. 5, p. 115)
- “Custom is to Hume what God is to the occasionalists: the only genuine link between separate realities” (ch. 5, p. 115)
Themes
actor-network theory · mediation · object-oriented philosophy · occasionalism · relations · vicarious causation