Form and Object ─ A Treatise on Things

What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposed derivative nature of objects and in so doing provides deep insights about the world and our place in it.

Garcia's original and systematic formal ontology of things strips them of any determination, intensity or depth. From this radical ontological poverty, he develops encyclopaedic regional ontologies of objects. By covering topics as diverse as the universe, events, time, the living, animals, human beings, representation, arts and rules, culture, history, political economy, values, classes, genders, ages of life and death, he shows that speculative metaphysics and ontology are alive and well.

Tristan Garcia is a French novelist and philosopher based at Universite de Picardie Jules Verne. He is the author of philosophical works, including L'Image and Nous, animaux et humains.

Tristan is also the author of fictional works, including Les cordelettes de Browser, En l'absence de classement final and Memoires de la jungle. In 2008, he received the Prix de Flore for La meilleure part des hommes, translated into English as Hate: A Romance.

Mark Allan Ohm is a graduate research assistant in the Department of French Studies and the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. He is lead editor of the English translation project of the Atelier de metaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

Jon Cogburn is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of several articles on the philosophy of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetics, co-author with Mark Silcox of Philosophy through Video Games, and co-editor with Mark Silcox of Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy.