Iain Hamilton Grant

In this course

Iain Hamilton Grant is a speculative realist philosopher concerned with rescuing nature from philosophical idealism and recovering the priority of the material and organic against rationalist reduction. The course readings invoke him primarily through his engagement with Schelling and German Idealism to argue that philosophy has systematically denied nature's autonomy—a position that becomes crucial when thinking about biology, artificial life, and whether intelligence can be attributed to non-human substrates. His work enables the seminar's broader push against treating nature as merely a conceptual or computational problem, insisting instead on its irreducible materiality and capacity for self-organization independent of human thought or design.

Mentioned in 1 reading