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The Chemical Paradigm
"The Chemical Paradigm" belongs to Grant's nature-philosophy line, where Schelling, world, and transcendental speculation reframe the archive through cosmology rather than cybernetic meltdown.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they give the archive a different philosophical afterlife from Brassier's rationalist critique. Grant reopens nature, world, and Schelling as live speculative resources rather than treating modernity as exhausted by capital or nihilism.
The mechanism is transcendental and cosmological at once. Nature is treated as productive, self-differentiating, and conceptually generative, so philosophy becomes a way of tracking world-process rather than merely critiquing representation.
That matters because the site needs to distinguish Grant's nature philosophy from both CCRU accelerationism and speculative-realist branding. This cluster keeps visible a cosmological branch of the afterlife that would otherwise be flattened into generic realism.
How to read this text
Read first for how nature or world is being defined before moving into the denser speculative vocabulary around it.
Track where Schelling, cosmology, or transcendental argument stop being historical reference and become live conceptual machinery.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
COLLAPSE VII The Chemical Paradigm Iain Hamilton Grant, one ef the four philosophers who spearheaded 'Speculative Realism', 1 is distinguished h'y being the sole proponent among them ef a renewed philosophy ef nature.
Definition · paragraph 1
COLLAPSE VII The Chemical Paradigm Iain Hamilton Grant, one ef the four philosophers who spearheaded 'Speculative Realism', 1 is distinguished h'y being the sole proponent among them ef a renewed philosophy ef nature. He has argued convincingly2 for the erroneousness ef the modern and contemporary dismissal ef the N atur philosophen who sought to think the absolute according to the generative power ef nature, integrating knowledge ef the contemporary deliverances ef the sciences into their speculative systems.
Definition · paragraph 23
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm in bodies, then powers do not explain the origins of bodies; and therefore we have a fundamental dualism between powers and bodies. If bodies are the products of powers, then not only do we heal the dualism, but also the decay of the body then tells us nothing about the nature of matter. C: Thus we arrive at field theory, which you discuss at length in Philosophies ef Nature After Schelling.
Definition · paragraph 25
Grant - Tue Chemical Paradigm we have achieved the elimination of animism? One strategy in this (and I take this to be the one that rests on the interminable reciprocity of nature and culture) is the Adorno/Horkheimer one, which is to say, as the response to positivism, that this brave new world is as animistic as can be imagined: Tue archons continue to haunt the surface of the earth even as they're ensconced around ocean-floor volcanic vents.
Definition · paragraph 21
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm extensity with respect to the all. That's how I prefer to think of it. I talk about the 'extensity test' in Phi losophies ef Nature After Schelling.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.