Quentin Meillassoux
Quentin Meillassoux (* 1967 in Paris ) is a French philosopher. Meillassoux describes his own philosophy as Speculative Materialism, but since the event of the same name in 2007 at Goldsmiths College in London, it has often been attributed to Speculative Realism .
biography
Meillassoux is a son of the neo-Marxist anthropologist and Africanist Claude Meillassoux (1925–2005). He studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , then with the philosophers Bernard Bourgeois and Alain Badiou . He was also influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger . Meillassoux teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne .
Philosophical work
His first and so far best-known work is Après la finitude ("After the End ", 2006). Alain Badiou wrote the preface to it and states that Meillassoux is sketching a completely new way in this work, unlike Immanuel Kant , who named three fundamental alternatives for thinking about the external world: dogmatism, skepticism and criticalism.
Meillassoux is interested in natural sciences and mathematics, because these offer access to the world independent of language and beyond social constructivism . He introduces the terms ancestrality, archefossil and correlationism. Ancestrality means the time before conscious life; with Archefossil he describes scientific data on the basis of which we are able to, e.g. B. to make statements about the formation of the earth; Correlationism means that every thinking has a being and vice versa, which means that there is no conceptual access to the world without being independent of thinking; d. H. the world we know exists only in us and our thoughts exist only in the world.
Meillassoux equates Kant's transcendental philosophy with the position of "weak correlationism", since Kant asserts that something exists in itself and that something is conceivable. A position of “strong correlationism”, on the other hand, postulates that we can only know that there is an in-itself because it can be thought.
In his Critique of Correlationism, Meillassoux returns to the classical “pre-critical” ontology , but without giving it up entirely; rather, he wants to radicalize correlationism and push it over its borders. Meillassoux also questions the pre-Kantian " metaphysical realism" with his principle of sufficient reason (for example: if something exists, this must have a cause) and thus the principle of causality in general: speculative realism is not based on the necessary existence of, like classical metaphysics something or the assumption of a causa sui , that is, of something that is a cause of its own being. The only necessity is that of contingency , i.e. non-necessity, but this is not a being. So even rational thinking has no external reason. In doing so, he criticizes both materialistic determinism and the idealistic notion of reflexive freedom: the choices made by the individual are also contingent; there is no difference between voluntary and involuntary decisions.
While physics cannot rely on empirical regularities or laws of nature (which could change at any time), mathematics is able to think of fundamental qualities such as "things of themselves". The only criterion for the correctness of thinking is not its agreement with the world, but its consistency. Therefore we are fundamentally thrown back on absolute thinking, as Descartes already postulated.
Meillassoux continues to try to show that scientific statements about the formation of the earth cannot be brought into agreement with correlationism, since there were no thinking people at the time of the formation of the earth.
Reception and criticism
The German philosopher Markus Gabriel described Meillassoux's book After Endlichkeit as "an almost groundbreaking work" and as "one of the turning points in the current return to realism in contemporary philosophy ."
The English philosopher Ray Brassier points out that correlationism is called into question not only by the existence of archefossils, but by the whole picture of reality as described by the modern natural sciences, the objects of which cannot be thought without contradiction. It should also be noted critically that the technologies with which the age of archefossils can be proven today, e.g. Partly based on the fact that the principle of consistency does not apply at the subatomic level.
Furthermore, one must accept that there is a considerable contingency between the way in which reality appears to us and its real existence; so it can seem contingent to us, although in reality it may not be. It is therefore not acceptable to use the limits of scientific knowledge as an argument for a positive ontological construction.
Works
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Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Éditions Seuil, Paris 2006.
- German edition: After finiteness. Attempt on the need for contingency. Translated by Roland Frommel. Diaphanes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-03734-847-5 .
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Le nombre et la sirène. Fayal, Paris 2011.
- German edition: The number and the siren. Diaphanes, Zurich 2013, ISBN 9783037342602 .
- Alignment. To pave the way for speculative thinking. Translated from French by Roland Frommel, Merve, Leipzig 2017, ISBN 978-3-88396-352-5 .
- Iteration, reiteration, repetition. A speculative analysis of the meaningless sign. Merve, Leipzig 2019, ISBN 978-3-88396-346-4 .
literature
- Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Eds.): The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. re-press, 2011. PDF (open access)
- Peter Gratton, Paul Ennis (Eds.): The Meillassoux Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2014. Online excerpts
- Graham Harman: Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2015.
Web links
- The number and the siren. Lecture (at Vimeo, English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin: New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies . In: New Metaphysics . 2012, doi : 10.3998 / ohp.11515701.0001.001 ( umich.edu [accessed December 16, 2019]).
- ^ Graham Harman: Brief SR / OOO tutorial. (at Wordpress)
- ↑ Thomas Palzer: Speculative Realism: About a new way of living on earth. In: Deutschlandfunk, February 21, 2016.
- ↑ Quentin Meillassoux: After finiteness, first chapter.
- ↑ https://www.zeit.de/2015/07/slavoj-zizek-weniger-als-nicht
- ^ Ray Brassier: Nihil Unbound. Enlightenment and extinction. Basingstoke 2007, p. 59.
- ↑ Interview with Slavoj Žižek in: The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism , p. 413.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Meillassoux, Quentin |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French philosopher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1967 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |