Quentin Meillassoux
| Quentin Meillassoux | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1967 Paris, France |
| Alma mater | École Normale Supérieure |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Speculative realism |
| Institutions |
École Normale Supérieure Paris I |
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Main interests
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Materialism, Philosophy of mathematics, Realism |
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Notable ideas
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Speculative materialism, correlationism, factiality, arche-fossil, absolute time |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Quentin Meillassoux (French: [mɛjasu]; born 1967) is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux.
Meillassoux is a former student of the philosophers and Alain Badiou. Badiou, who wrote the foreword for Meillassoux's first book Après la finitude (2006), describes the work as introducing an entirely new option into modern philosophy, one that differs from Immanuel Kant's three alternatives of criticism, skepticism, and dogmatism. The book was translated into English by philosopher Ray Brassier. Meillassoux is associated with the speculative realism movement.
In this book, Meillassoux argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls "correlationism," the often unstated theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans. In Meillassoux's view, this is a dishonest maneuver that allows philosophy to sidestep the problem of how to describe the world as it really is prior to all human access. He terms this pre-human reality the "ancestral" realm. In keeping with the mathematical interests of his mentor Alain Badiou, Meillassoux claims that mathematics is what reaches the primary qualities of things as opposed to their secondary qualities as manifested in perception.
Meillassoux tries to show that the agnostic scepticism of those who doubt the reality of cause and effect must be transformed into a radical certainty that there is no such thing as causal necessity at all. This leads Meillassoux to proclaim that it is absolutely necessary that the laws of nature be contingent. The world is a kind of hyper-chaos in which the principle of sufficient reason is abandoned even while the principle of non-contradiction must be retained.
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