The label was Ray Brassier's; a small workshop at Goldsmiths on 27 April 2007 began a debate that would run for a decade. The four speakers — Quentin Meillassoux (École Normale Supérieure), Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut), Iain Hamilton Grant (West of England), and Graham Harman (then American University in Cairo) — came from very different philosophical places but agreed on a common target: 'correlationism'.

The term came from Meillassoux's Après la finitude (After Finitude), also published in 2006. Correlationism, he argued, has been the implicit assumption of Continental philosophy since Kant: the only 'world' we can think is the world given inside the correlation of thought and world; nothing can be said about a 'thing-in-itself' independent of the human. Meillassoux dismantled this frame through palaeontology: if events that took place before any human existed (the 'arche-fossil') can be thought by science, then reality is outside the correlation.

The four wings opened different paths. Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) holds that everything — atom, society, wind — is an 'object', and that objects are never exhausted in their relations with one another; each retains a 'withdrawn' dimension of its own. Brassier developed a nihilist scientific naturalism; Grant a Schellingian philosophy of nature; Meillassoux a radical ontology of contingency. The workshop was not the founding of a coordinated school but a beginning. Over the next decade OOO found wide use in architecture (Patrik Schumacher, Mark Foster Gage), climate thought and the Anthropocene (Timothy Morton's 'hyperobjects'), art, and critical theory — it is the most current of today's ontological movements.