Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

by Timothy Morton

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.

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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. More at Timothy Morton.

Series Design

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