Text page
Interview with Iain Hamilton Grant by Leon Niemoczynski (2013)
"Interview with Iain Hamilton Grant by Leon Niemoczynski (2013)" makes Grant's nature philosophy unusually public, turning Schelling, cosmology, and transcendental method into a more open exchange.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they give the archive a different philosophical afterlife from Brassier's rationalist critique. Grant reopens nature, world, and Schelling as live speculative resources rather than treating modernity as exhausted by capital or nihilism.
The mechanism is transcendental and cosmological at once. Nature is treated as productive, self-differentiating, and conceptually generative, so philosophy becomes a way of tracking world-process rather than merely critiquing representation.
That matters because the site needs to distinguish Grant's nature philosophy from both CCRU accelerationism and speculative-realist branding. This cluster keeps visible a cosmological branch of the afterlife that would otherwise be flattened into generic realism.
How to read this text
Read first for how nature or world is being defined before moving into the denser speculative vocabulary around it.
Track where Schelling, cosmology, or transcendental argument stop being historical reference and become live conceptual machinery.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
Leon Niemoczynski: Tell us, how did you get started in philosophy? What made you become a philosopher? Iain Hamilton Grant: Two things got me started: art and material.
Definition · paragraph 14
Thus it is creation rather than creativity with which I think speculative philosophy must be concerned if it is to sacrifice neither the powers of the concept nor the nature of which they form part. Creativity consists in the efficacy of additional powers, creation in the emergence of power where there was none. This is why the concept “thing” is, as again Schelling says, simply “the abstract concept of worldly essences” (VII, 349), and also why a powers ontology must entail their ungrounding.
Definition · paragraph 3
Specifically, elements of such a philosophy also appear in Bergson, Whitehead, or Peirce, but it is Schelling’s naturephilosophy that is most important for you (it is probably important to note here just how close philosophically Peirce and Schelling were to each other, especially with respect to their outlooks concerning philosophical cosmology and physics).
History · paragraph 2
2 (2013): 32–43. 1. Leon Niemoczynski: Tell us, how did you get started in philosophy?
Method · paragraph 2
What made you become a philosopher? Iain Hamilton Grant: Two things got me started: art and material. Before I discovered that limitations of talent and technique made this improbable, I was attempting to be a performance artist, a sculptor, and a musician and had therefore enrolled on a BA Fine Art at Reading University.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.