Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Category: quentin meillassoux

  • Alexander Bard on Network Metaphysics

    I really dig Alexander Bard’s “network-dynamic persepective.” Geometrogenesis is also extremely relevant to my research on Whitehead’s and Rudolf Steiner’s ether theories (the former articulated an alternative to Einstein’s theory of relativity based on an “ether of events”; the later spoke of an etheric dimension of nature mediating between the material and spiritual dimensions). The idea…

  • The Eternal Form of Philosophy (a response to Archive Fire)

    Michael/Archive Fire has just written a gracious and astute response to my recent comment about Whitehead’s reformed Platonism. He has made me aware of the fact that my referring to Whitehead or to Plato in the hopes that they offer some sort of authoritative disambiguation is insufficient to support the arguments I am trying to…

  • After Finitude and Fideism comes Speculative Christianity?

    Quetin Meillassoux is an important philosopher, according to Graham Harman, “not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives…

  • Integrating Panpsychism and Eliminativism in Processual Panentheism

    I’ve just watched a good chunk of Shaviro’s lecture at OOOIII. I agree with his premise concerning the fork in the philosophical road between eliminativism and panexperientialism created by speculative realism’s anti-correlationism [See Adam over at Knowledge-Ecology’s recent post for a refreshingly novel perspective concerning the supposed courageous soberness of eliminativism]. There is no middle…

  • In Defense of Wonder: A response to Naught Thought on Whitehead’s Philosophy of Dawn

    I cannot, without much hesitation, identify myself as either a “prickly” or a “gooey” philosopher. It depends on who my interlocutors are. If I am in a philosophical conversation with, say, a professional biochemist with a reductionistic orientation, my attempt to wipe away and retrace the horizons of their world will inevitably come off as vague, pretentious,…

  • The Poetics of Copernican Cosmology

    In his cosmographic study of the Copernican Revolution,The Poetic Structure of the World (1987), Fernand Hallyn entirely re-envisions the foundations of modern science. Instead of reading Copernicus’ break with the geocentric scheme as a rejection of the enchanted cosmos of the ancient world, Hallyn makes clear that Copernicus himself believed he was only making ancient…

  • Intuitive Thinking vs. Reflective Thought: Harman on Meillassoux

    I’ve just read Graham Harman‘s essay for continent. entitled “Meillassoux’s Virtual Future” (2011). As usual, it is primarily Harman’s style of philosophizing that really excites me. I am fascinated by the way he juggles and plays with ideas, even when I don’t finally agree with his attempts to securely mold a certain set of them into…

  • Michael Persinger and the Extended Mind

    I’d like to follow up on my recent post about Michael Persinger’s research on the non-local electromagnetic aspects of consciousness. There is a growing contingent of cognitive scientists taking what has come to be called the “extended mind” theory quite seriously. Andy Clark is most associated with the idea, but Levi Bryant has been blogging…

  • Towards a Christological Realism: Thinking the Correlation with Teilhard and Barfield

    Preface Quentin Meillassoux‘s lucid text, After Finitude (2008), comes at a time when Continental philosophy finds itself engaging more closely with what might be called  “poetico-religious” modes of thought. Rationality of the Cartesian sort has been thoroughly deconstructed, and no longer seems capable of providing what it once promised: a clear and distinct picture of…

  • “Here Comes Everything” Speculative Realism Panel summary (via Knowledge-Ecology)

    Adam Robbert has written a nice summary of the panel discussion last week (4/8) on Speculative Realism. I’ve pasted it below. For the audio from the event, click HERE. Here are a few reflections on last Fridays event “Here Comes Everything: An Introduction to Speculative Realism.” Video of the event will be posted later today (hopefully!). The…

  • Thinking and Sensing, Space and Time

    Philosophy and science can be distinguished: the former is primarily concerned with thinking, the latter with sensing. This distinction is superficial, however, since there can be no pure science or pure philosophy; no pure concept or pure intuition. Phenomenologically, what exists is an interpenetration of cognitive action and carnal reaction, a vast network of felt…

  • Teilhard de Chardin and the Christ-Cosmos Correlation

    Speculative realism has emerged out of a phenomenological tradition that originally sought to provide a transcendental defense of human existence against any scientific reduction to the merely natural. Phenomenology succeeds in this defense (on some accounts) to the extent that it is able to convincingly reduce the objects of “nature” to their human correlates. Pierre…

  • Whitehead: Aesthetics as First Philosophy

    I’ve jumped from Meillassoux‘s After Finitude to reading Steven Shaviro‘s book on Whitehead, Kant, and Deleuze Without Criteria (2009). A few thoughts have occured to me… Whitehead’s philosophy of organism possesses an immunity to post-Kantian skepticism, since it arises out of a radically embodied characterization of sensory experience. Empiricism, for Whitehead, does not mean paying…

  • Meillassoux and Post-Secular Philosophy

    “So long as we believe that there must be a reason why what is, is the way it is, we will continue to fuel superstition, which is to say, the belief that there is an ineffable reason underlying all things” (After Finitude, p. 82). This belief, according to Meillassoux, is logically unnecessary, since there is…

  • Owen Barfield and Quentin Meillassoux

    Meillassoux and Barfield may at first seem like strange bedfellows, but by unmasking the pervasiveness of correlationism in post-Kantian philosophy, the former steps right into an issue that works its way into nearly all of Barfield’s published works. In perhaps the most complete and cogent explanation of his position, Saving the Appearances, Barfield writes: “…the…