A talk given by Graham Harman on materialism from a few years back. After discussing two kinds of materialism, Harman goes on to specifically discuss James Ladyman's and Don Ross's famous book "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized", which defends a kind of (ontic) structural realism. Graham Harman is part of the object-oriented and speculative realist movement. For Harman, objects aren't reducible to mere bundles of qualities, relations, effects, etc. Instead, Harman understands the nature of objects as real independent substances in their own right, over and above their manifold appearances and qualities. Otherwise, objects lose their underlying identity as something real, and end up being mere appearances, analyzable in terms of something else (like qualities, relations, structure, etc.). Harman's object-oriented approach leads him to a pluralistic vision of the world, in contrast to the more holistic and monistic tendency which has characterized much traditional and contemporary philosophy.
This is from a conference on Continental Metaphysics called "Real Objects or Material Subjects?" given at the University of Dundee, Scotland, in 2010.
The image is the famous 1818 painting "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. Don't ask why it was chosen.
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