After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux, ISBN-13: 978-1441173836
[PDF eBook eTextbook]
- Publisher: Continuum (January 5, 2010)
- Language: English
- 160 pages
- ISBN-10: 1441173838
- ISBN-13: 978-1441173836
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 … Après 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.
Table of Contents:
Preface by Alain Badiou vi
Chapter 1: Ancestrality 1
Chapter 2: Metaphysics, Fideism, Speculation 28
Chapter 3: The Principle of Factiality 50
Chapter 4: Hume’s Problem 82
Chapter 5: Ptolemy’s Revenge 112
Notes 129
Bibliography 139
Index of concepts 143
Index of names 147
Quentin Meillassoux teaches Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.
Ray Brassier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.
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