Tim Morton has just announced his "coming out" as an object-oriented ontologist. For those of you haven't been following Morton, he's the author of The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature, and his views on an interconnected "mesh" of life forms is one you should know about.

There is something both wonderful and horrifying about having to "come out" as a new realist, but I think that's not a bad verbal frame for it. We've become so entrenched in the philosophy of language and meaning and representation that being a materialist (unless by that you mean a Marxist, of course) is still a secret meant to be kept private. Perhaps that's changing, and philosophy will soon once again take place in the great outdoors.