I thought that was a great idea.

Engineering would appear to resonate with the concerns for construction/composition that Latour addresses. At the same time, Harman's quote suggests something far more interdisciplinary, so it's "engineering plus." How about poetics? Sure, poetics is probably more vexed with the kinds of humanistic-corelationist problems speculative realism critiques, but there are also schools of poetics that are more convivial to SR (e.g. objectivist poetics). I've always thought that some poets shared more with engineers than literary critics.

Philosophy and engineering do share a relentless investment in system building.

1. They take an enormous amount of effort to compose.
2. They stand as self-supporting pieces of work, once enough bugs have been fixed.
3. Once this self-supporting occurs, it seemingly appears that you can throw any input into it, and the same formal output can result. But not always.

Graham Harman's prose is impressively lucid for an academic philosopher!
As to Metaphysics though, I wonder where that came from, not from his posts? Metaphysics is not philosophy per se (at least to me), and there seems a grey /fuzzy? area between metaphysics as route and Metaphysics as terminal..ever since that accidental confusion of Aristotle's book labels that is. I could argue that this confusion is something Kierkegaard rebuked Hegel for (though he used the analogy of system builders watching from the ditch as their edifice of knowledge was built). Closer to home early modernist architects were inspired by engineers* and look where that got us!

*A viewpoint of somebody who either works for Engineering/IT schools or Fine Arts-led colleges (and unfortunately for nothing in between).

Whew, I'm late to this thread.

@Alex
Right, I take Harman to suggest engineering as a frame, more like engineerifying the liberal arts, to some extent. That's just a frame, really, not a literalism.

@Robert
The difference, perhaps, is that the systems engineers build have to work more often than the ones philosophers do. Then again, it's not truth so much as method that's at issue here. The engineer can't afford to build a Wittgensteinian friction-free universe.

@Erik
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking about metaphysics?

Ian, Harman talks about philosophy in general or metaphysics in particular? The latter is your blog post titled specifically in the Harman posts so my question was merely who first mentioned metaphysics-you or Harman? And if you, were you mentioning metaphysics for a specific reason?

I was using metaphysics stylistically here, because it's the branch of philosophy (ontology in particular) that interest Harman and me. I'm not sure why you say that metaphysics is not philosophy, unless you're talking about the use of that term in new age/spirituality.