Historical Materialism, Cluj/Kolozsvar, August 29-31 2024

Hastapenak, 2023

Quentin Meillassoux´s philosophical project aims at challenging some of the most fundamental assumptions of contemporary philosophy. His polemic against "correlationism", which he understands as the main paradigm of philosophy from Kant onwards, is grounded in a vindication of a materialism of absolute contingency that he deems "speculative". The latter furnishes its "divinological" speculations about the possibility of a "God-to-Come". In this essay, I will argue that Meillassoux fails to deliver all the ambitious promises of his project. The hypostatization of contingency relinquishes mediation in its search for an Absolute. As a result, Meillassoux becomes as unable to ground the claims of contemporary science whilst he threats to dissolve politics in the dubious sphere of religious thinking.

Quentin Meillassoux has recently leveled a controversial attack on critical philosophy and the transcendental turn through his concept of correlationism. This critique is motivated by the attempt to move away from a philosophy of human finitude towards a speculative materialism. In this paper I argue that Meillassoux’s understanding of correlationism does not adequately depict the critical turn, especially in regards to the distinction between the epistemological problem of realism and the problem of materialism. I attempt to show that by reading the critical turn as anti-epistemological one can think of its turn away from things themselves towards relation and mediation in ways that are not necessarily against either science or materialism.

Journal of Philosophical Research , 2016

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we examine the Sellarsian concept of the (myth of the) categorial Given, focus on its wide application and suggest that it can be applied to those post-Kantian philosophical views, currently fashionable in Continental philosophical circles, for which Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou’s protégé and a rising star in French philosophy -although, unfortunately, not well known outside continental philosophical circles-, coins the term ‘correlationism’: the view that mind and world are primordially or ‘always already’ given to us as essentially related to one another, and only subsequently can they be ‘objectified’, i.e. thought of as being independently existing and meaningful ‘entities’. Second, it is pointed out that Sellars uses an argument against the explanatory adequacy of the manifest image (an image with essential ‘Givenist’ elements in its descriptive and explanatory dimension) which is exactly of the same form as Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism, but, which, when combined with other crucial Sellarsian views concerning the transcendental/empirical distinction, can avoid a problematic feature of Meillassoux’s argument, and, in this way, constitute a better philosophical weapon against correlationism. Finally, it is suggested that by not drawing the transcendental/empirical distinction in the right (i.e. Sellarsian) way, Meillassoux himself is exposed and, in the constructive (‘speculative realist’) part of his work, indeed succumbs to a version of the myth of the categorial Given.

Philosophy Today, 2022

This paper analyzes Quentin Meillassoux's concept of cessation. First, the paper argues that this concept plays a decisive role in Meillassouxian philosophy. Second, by taking into consideration medieval and early modern debates on annihilation, it critically examines the conclusions elaborated in After Finitude. After that, it conceptualizes the relation between absolute time and absolute contingency, keeping in mind the critical reception of Meillassoux's philosophy. Finally, the article turns to his insights into death and resurrection, and it confronts them with phenomenological theories of mortality. The conclusion is that Meillassoux faces several essential difficulties with regard to the concept of cessation that seem to be unsalvageable.

The realist credentials of post-Kantian philosophy are often disputed by those who worry that grounding ontology on the human standpointvariously construed by Kant, German idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism-bars us from an otherwise accessible reality, impoverishing our cognitive grasp, and betraying the promise of natural science. While many such critics ally with the so-called analytic tradition, the past decade has seen the rise of thinkers versed in the so-called continental tradition who, under the loose and controversial banner of "speculative realism," seek to overcome the alleged anthropocentrism of Kantian and post-Kantian thought by developing theories of cognitive access to human-transcendent being.

MATERIALISM: A HISTORICO-PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION

Materialism – the philosophical doctrine that ‘Everything that exists, is material’, including human beings, who cannot then have an immortal soul – has been a heretical or clandestine teaching since the beginnings of philosophy. Its main crime is “explaining the higher level in terms of the lower level,” as Auguste Comte put it; this in turn is supposed to lead straight to immoralism: even Darwin denied that he was a materialist! At the same time, materialism is said to be the position which somehow facilitated and prepared the advent of modern science, particularly physical and biological science. What then is materialism? Is there only one, or are there many variants? I will mainly examine the first sustained materialist school in modern philosophy, in eighteenth-century French thought, chiefly represented by La Mettrie and Diderot, but also other figures notably in England. In addition, I will draw some contrasts between ‘French materialism’ and contemporary philosophy of mind, in which the dominant question is the relation between mind and brain.

I argue that Quentin Meillassoux's taxonomy of philosophical positions -- dogmatic metaphysics, strong correlationism, and speculative materialism -- does not account for Wilfrid Sellars's pragmatic naturalism. Sellars adopts a methodological interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason as a constraint on explanations, rather than as a ontological principle of justification.

Open Philosophy, 2020

Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism aims to define access to reality of the natural world apart from its giveness to sentient subjects. This world apart is designated by Meillassoux as the “Great Outdoors” which was marginalized as a topic of philosophy after Kant’s critiques. The question of the incommensurability of human subjects and physical objects is taken up by Meillassoux and addressed by allowing mathematizable properties of physical objects to be referred to objectively in mathematical statements. In this paper we follow the discussion with speculative materialism conducted by Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in The Ends of the World (2017). These authors show that Meillassoux’s conception of the “Great Outdoors” includes, yet insufficiently explores, the notion of ancestral humanity in Amerindian myth – and intimately related to the practice of hallucinogenic trance – as the means to address the problem of said incommensurability.