[spectre] Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2nd edition, with a new Preface) by Timothy Morton

[Gary Hall]

As we edge toward 2026, if we were to track back over some of the books 
Open Humanities Press has published in 2025, we would begin with October's

Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2nd edition, with a new 
Preface) by Timothy Morton.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Realist Magic is available open 
access (= it can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/realist-magic-2nd-ed/


Book description

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about 
causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. 
Causality, argues Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this 
book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come 
into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from 
examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton 
demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO 
for thinking causality.

With a new Preface by Timothy Morton.


Author Bio

Morton is the author of the libretto Time, Time, Time (opera by Jennifer 
Walshe, 2019), and of numerous artworks including We Are the Asteroid 
(with Justin Guariglia, 2019); Come Fast from the Dark (with Andrew 
Melchior, 2024); and This Huge Sunlit Abyss From The Future Right There 
Next To You (with Björk, 2015). In 2018 Morton co-wrote and appeared 
with Jeff Bridges in Living in the Future’s Past, directed by Susan 
Kucera. Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University.

Morton has written Hell: in Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia, 
2024), All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 
2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with 
Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future 
Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism 
(Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of 
the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality 
(Open Humanities Press, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), 
Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 300+ essays on 
philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.


Series

The book is published as part of the New Metaphysics series: 
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/new-metaphysics/


Series Design

The New Metaphysics series design is by Katherine Gillieson with cover 
illustrations by Tammy Lu.


-- 
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University

Director of Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Blog: http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/

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