"The issue I have is not with either Levi's onticology or Graham's OOO as it is with the general perception (a perception I don't think I've gotten from either of them, but from others) that "object-oriented" philosophy, as a kind of generic term, is a new and important development within Continental philosophy. Used in this broader sense, especially with the "-oriented" attached to the "object," one can't help but to think this means "object" in the everyday English sense of the word. And when I get asked (as I have been) why I'm interested in this trend, it's difficult for me to answer that, because the term sounds too much like "objectivity," "objectivism," and all the other things the word "object" has been philosophically associated with.
The general answer others might give, I imagine, goes something like this: it's a move away from X (subjectivity, perception, phenomenology, correlationism, Kantianism, relationism, or whatever else) and back to the actual real THINGS that make up the world. (That of course sounds, unintentionally I'm sure, a lot like Husserl's "Back to the things themselves!" The difference is that here it's the actual things, not our perceptions of those things. But I'm not willing to concede that we can purify the world of our perceptions.) While I can't pinpoint where I've heard this, it's still made to sound too much like a swing of the pendulum from one side (subjectivity, relationality) to the other (objects). And I dislike that both because I'm tired of swings of the pendulum, when what we need is more integrated accounts of how all these things (objectivity and subjectivity, etc.) work together, and because I think it will have a hard time doing much work outside the limited circles of (mostly) young Continental philosophers who use the term now. So my issue is really a strategic one."
extracted from a blog-post let a thousand objects bloom
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