Abstrakt
"What makes possible the existence and persistence of a mundane object like the ketchup bottle I hold in my hand?" (2021, p. 3) As in his previous works, Thomas Nail finds a manner of writing that manages to elaborate a very different style of thought in ways accessible to laypeople. "We live in an age of objects", (ibid., p. 1) he opens, and the innovation he seeks to immediately introduce, the central problem he wants to tackle, is to think a kinetic object. That is an object as "a metastable formation of matter in motion." (ibid., p. 4) A world then, that is all matter as motion and difference, and what appears stable is so due to relative difference of movement.
A central problematic that emerges is how to explain that for much of Western history thought, the world or abstraction in general, whether as ideas in philosophy or numbers in mathematics, were anything but conceived as primary motion. To be successful, Nail's argument will explain how (the illusion of) stasis [the capacity to treat as if static] emerges out of constant motion.
As such, Theory of the Object expands on the theory of motion established in his earlier magnum opus, Being and Motion (Nail, 2019). "We may find it useful sometimes to treat objects as if they were static, but when we do we tend to overlook what creates, sustains and changes them." (2021, p. 23)