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After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency | 
| Author: Quentin Meillassoux
Creators: Alain Badiou, Ray Brassier
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 36762
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 148
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0826496741
Dewey Decimal Number: 194
EAN: 9780826496744
ASIN: 0826496741
Publication Date: June 7, 2008
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Book Description
From the preface by Alain Badiou: It is no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy, understood here as the history of what it is to know ... This remarkable "critique of critique" is introduced here without embellishment, cutting straight to the heart of the matter in a particularly clear and logical manner. It allows the destiny of thought to be the absolute once more. "This work is one of the most important to appear in continental philosophy in recent years and deserves a wide readership at the earliest possible date ... Apres la finitude is an important book of philosophy by an authnted emerging voices in continental thought. Quentin Meillassoux deserves our close attention in the years to come and his book deserves rapid translation and widespread discussion in the English-speaking world. There is nothing like it." --Graham Harman in Philosophy Today Quentin Meillassoux's remarkable debut makes a strikingly original contribution to contemporary French philosophy and is set to have a significant impact on the future of continental philosophy. Written in a style that marries great clarity of expression with argumentative rigour, After Finitude provides bold readings of the history of philosophy and sets out a devastating critique of the unavowed fideism at the heart of post-Kantian philosophy. The exceptional lucidity and the centrality of argument in Meillassoux's writing should appeal to analytic as well as continental philosophers, while his critique of fideism will be of interest to anyone preoccupied by the relation between philosophy, theology and religion. Meillassoux introduces a startlingly novel philosophical alternative to the forced choice between dogmatism and critique. After Finitude proposes a new alliance between philosophy and science and calls for an unequivocal halt to the creeping return of religiosity in contemporary philosophical discourse.
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A Great Work of Contemporary Philosophy June 24, 2008
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
Meillassoux's first book is nothing less than a completely original and meticulously argued philosophical manifesto. Drawing upon the ontology of his teacher, Alain Badiou, Meillassoux aims to prove what was only implicit in Badiou's "Being and Event": the absolute contingency of all being. A writer working largely within the tradition of continental thought--often decried for its putative obscure prose and shoddy methods of argumentation--Meillassoux (unlike Badiou) never sacrifices clarity, and displays a stunning capacity to take down canonical philosophers with implacable reasoning. Although he will doubtless be exposed to criticism as his argument gains a wider readership, Meillassoux has already, in this slim volume, circumvented the many of the critiques that could be thrown his way.
"After Finitude" targets two principal philosophical opponents: the metaphysician and the correlationist. The prime representative of the metaphysical tradition here is Descartes, whose assertion of the absolute goodness of God allowed him to "prove" the existence of an objective world exterior to the human subject. Although Meillassoux is sympathetic to Descartes' attempt to think the absolute--and takes Descartes' metaphysical presumptions seriously--he also recognizes that the metaphysician's reliance on either the principle of sufficient reason or at least one necessary entity (God, atom, history, etc.) hinders any engagement with unconditional truth.
This repudiation of metaphysical dogmatism not withstanding, Meillassoux's primary adversary is the correlationist (Kant and his disciples fall under this category), who subordinates knowledge of the "great outdoors" to its relation with a human being, a thinking subject, Dasein, etc. The correlationist cannot properly interpret the "ancestral" realm that preceded all forms of life. He either rejects the claims of science altogether or qualifies them by confining their truth-value to the world of the scientist and his instruments. Thus, the correlationist "retrojects" this ancestral past and denies its temporal priority with respect to the human present. Meillassoux's most ambitious project in AF is to break the "correlationist circle" whereby human access to the world is hypostatized at the expense of both world itself and thinking as such. Meillassoux shows that the correlationist must either covertly presuppose a world without humans, or "absolutize the correlation" and hence reinstate the dogmatic position he claims to have eschewed.
So what remains to be thought after correlationism? For Meillassoux, philosophy's objective is to reinvestigate ancient metaphysical problems and find new solutions. Meillassoux takes a large first step here by arguing that contingency alone is necessary. While David Hume had already debunked the notion that one can know the truth of the principle of sufficient reason, he failed to convert this deficit into a positive gain for epistemology. Moreover, Hume smuggled in metaphysical presuppositions about a necessity internal to things themselves even as he claimed that our access is limited by our understanding of probability. (Thus, Hume's skepticism has no answer for the fideist who maintains that things and events may harbor some unfathomable necessity residing beyond the reach of human thought.) Guided by Badiou's use of set theory, Meillassoux argues that Hume's probabilistic reasoning rests upon the dubious assumption that the set of possible outcomes of an event can be totalized. Probability as a metaphysical fact is undermined by Cantor's discovery of "transfinites"--that is, the multiplicity of infinities that cannot be gathered into a single "meta-set." Thus, if probability can no longer be secured, one is forced to concede that contingency, and thus, "hyper-Chaos," constitutes an absolute reality. This omnipotent chaos can produce anything other than a necessary entity or event. Lurking immediately beneath Meillassoux's clean prose (Ray Brassier's translation is superb) and cold logic is a terrifying vision--"something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare."
Meillassoux's debut, though a stunning achievement, is not without problems. First, he too readily conflates the registers of pure and applied mathematics and uncritically suggests that all deployments of mathematics have equal purchase on the absolute. For instance, he levels off the distinction between, say, a physicist's use of mathematical equations and his own use of transfinites. Similarly, he does not explore the distinctions within "primary qualities" such as the difference between an object's being-contingent and, for example, its temperature or speed. Furthermore, as Ray Brassier points out in his lengthy critique of Meillassoux (see his book "Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction"), "AF" does not answer the tricky question of thought's ontological status within the world. Brassier poses the following problem. If one argues that the truth of absolute contingency is necessary, one would also have to concede that the thought that generated that truth is necessary--unless, of course, one were a Platonist and believed in the existence of an ideal realm. Hence, Brassier's charge is that Meillassoux either unwittingly confers a necessary existence on the bio-physical contingency, that is, Meillassoux's thought itself; or, he exempts thought from the material world. It will be interesting to see whether Meillassoux renounces his Cartesianism on this point, or finds another way to refute Brassier's critique.
These reservations aside, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. "AF" represents not only a challenge for continental philosophers, but also followers of Wittgenstein who claim that ontology is obsolete because its claims are nonsensical. Proponents of both traditions are bound to be surprised, and possibly horrified, by what they encounter: metaphysics not dispelled but turned inside out: an absolute without absolute entity; a foundational truth without security.
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