ontology: the philosophical study of existence

• what in the world is object-oriented ontology?
  • Google: ‘a school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.‘
  • Bogost:
    • ‘puts things at the centre of being’,
    • ‘that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally’

• what in the world is flat ontology?
  • Google: ‘a model for reality that says that all object, even those that are imagined, have the same degree of being-ness as any other object. No object is more a subject than any other. All subjects are simply objects.’ 

• what in the world is tiny ontology? why does Bogost seek to expand flat ontology?
  • instead of the ‘plane of flat ontology’, Bogost suggests the ‘point of tiny ontology’: ‘a dense mass of everything contained entirely—even as it’s spread about haphazardly like a mess or organised logically like a network’

• how is it possible for one to wrap their head around this high concept talk? where does one start?
  • Bogost brushes over so many individual philosophers’ works that it makes my head spin

nonetheless, I am interested in the class discussion that will follow all this. At this point I’m dying for any drop of clarification.

extra notes:

• Bogost proposes that in our current age, two system operations are dominant: ‘scientific naturalism’ and ‘social relativism’
• Turing Test: how do I delete The Imitation Game from my mind?