Apparently The Speculative Turn crashed Re.Press’s system! The head editor tells me that over 2000 copies were downloaded in a single night, which is a years worth of sales for most academic books. The site should be up and running again now. Alex Andrews has also kindly posted a pdf. of the book here.
In other news, I’m nearly finished with the editing of The Democracy of Objects. It should head off to the publisher in the next couple of days.
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December 29, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Wow, that’s way beyond the usual yearly sales if I may. Most academic books only run to about 500.
December 30, 2010 at 1:53 am
Tim – downloaded, not sold. Unfortunately!
I’m not sure how to get to make my purchase in American dollars via the re.press site. I suppose I’ll just have to wait for Amazon!
December 30, 2010 at 1:53 am
As one of those 2000+ downloaders, I’d say it’s not surprising. I know plenty of intelligent young poor people who simply cannot afford academic texts, despite a rabid interest. When a good one (especially one with articles by so many names in contemporary philosophy) goes online for free, servers tend to crash. It is great to have this book available online and to have it so clearly and widely linked to. This has made it much more convenient than fishing scribd for academic articles or shoplifting Zizek from Borders. So thanks for the distro.
December 30, 2010 at 4:46 am
Glad to hear it’s back. I had posted a link to the pdf on my site because people kept asking. I can take it down now.
December 30, 2010 at 7:11 am
Congrats on both pieces of fine news!
December 30, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Still not listed in Amazon (uk or .com)… How exactly am I going to get a copy of Democracy of Objects? :-/ Enquiring minds want to know…
December 30, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Hey Chris,
The Democracy of Objects will be a little while yet. Hopefully sooner, rather than later, though.
December 31, 2010 at 2:21 pm
As for The Speculative Turn on Amazon, Chris, that should be at most a few days away. The Christmas season has apparently slowed down the posting of it.
December 31, 2010 at 5:37 pm
I do hope everybody writes their marginalia legibly and indelibly so we can laugh about it all over double-yoked eggnog later. I won’t disclose the bit of pith I jotted down on page 13 at the on-the-money characterization of Levi as one who “strives to straddle…”
I couldn’t shake off that hilarious image two pages later while reading that “Wonder, Stenger writes, is…the true scientific spirit that refuses the tendency towards ordering and reduction in favor of an openness…”
January 2, 2011 at 3:05 am
Thanks for the blogging and best wishes for this year’s projects….
Still fascinated by the harmanian 000 argument that a ‘whole’ is either fully known or not known at all. It cannot be partially known – or encountered because the whole is not made of parts. Thus abs withdrawal.
I’m no scholar but this seems like the kernel (ha ha) of the issue.
If this whole ‘unum per se’ has a ‘being-toward’ and is not an isolated substance that ‘enters into’ intentional being (the scholastic esse intentionale – not Brentano) then we do enter into relation with its being. ‘When we think of the Heidelberg bridge, we stand thru the distance to the bridge.’
January 2, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Just wanted to add that the withdrawal thesis may indeed apply to wholes.
The question then would be when are we dealing with wholes…
For example a kilogram of sugar, or to use Heidegger’s example, the wholeness of the earth’s moon, arise in their observers mental represenations (or intentional objects).
‘Wholes’ would include psyches and the discrete increments in field excitation modes (“elementary particles”) that, independently of the physicists’ multiple mental representations occur as wholes with extramental intactness. The Dirac sea. This would be an object ‘undermining’ thesis.
January 5, 2011 at 10:17 pm
To the above posters taking their copies down – the Creative Commons License means that you can distribute the text as you see fit, providing you don’t charge. Therefore to have your own copy on your server, or to e-mail it about, print it out and so on is fine and not at all illegal, so don’t sweat it. Hence my Amazon Cloudfront mirrored version. This said obviously it’s nice to use the re.press site so the authors can track it’s success.