Graham Harman is a key figure in the field of speculative realism and his work grounded the development of object-oriented ontology. This philosophy puts objects at its centre, arguing that they exist independently of human perception or other objects. Of bananas, Graham writes, ‘A police officer eating a banana reduces this fruit to a present-at-hand profile of its elusive depth, as [does] a monkey eating the same banana...Banana-being is a genuine reality in the world.’
Graham is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and has written nearly 20 books which have been translated into twenty-one languages. This year he published Art and Objects in which he argues that aesthetics is the central discipline of philosophy. For his work in aesthetics, Art Review magazine named Graham ‘one of the most powerful personalities in the art world.’