In Defense of Correlationism

2018

Talk given at the XVIII Meeting of the National Association of Post-Graduation in Philosophy (ANPOF) in October, 27, in Vitória (ES, Brazil). I revisit the concept of correlate and correlationism in Meillassoux's philosophy, but bringing other contributions from myself, Hägglund, Whitehead and Luhmann.

This is a heavily revised version of my earlier piece on Meillassoux. The paper is currently under review. In a widely discussed essay that was originally published in 2006, Quentin Meillassoux launches a sweeping attack against “correlationism”. Correlationism is an umbrella term for any philosophical system that is based on “the idea [that] we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 2012, p. 5). Thus construed, Meillassoux’ critique is indeed a sweeping one: It comprises major parts of the philosophical tradition since Kant, both in its more continental and in its more analytical outlooks. In light of this critique, the aim of this paper is twofold: On the one hand, I shall defend phenomenology against Meillassoux’ main argument, the “argument from ancestrality”. On the other hand, I will argue that this argument, albeit unsuccessful in its original form, can be modified to pose a more serious threat. Although this modified version can also be circumvented, it forces phenomenologists to clarify their stance towards the natural sciences.

The realist credentials of post-Kantian philosophy are often disputed by those who worry that grounding ontology on the human standpointvariously construed by Kant, German idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism-bars us from an otherwise accessible reality, impoverishing our cognitive grasp, and betraying the promise of natural science. While many such critics ally with the so-called analytic tradition, the past decade has seen the rise of thinkers versed in the so-called continental tradition who, under the loose and controversial banner of "speculative realism," seek to overcome the alleged anthropocentrism of Kantian and post-Kantian thought by developing theories of cognitive access to human-transcendent being.

2016

The theoretical movements known as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology depend on the “critique of correlationism” offered by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his 2009 After Finitude. There Meillassoux claims to have shown that Kant and all philosophers following him committed a grave and unseen philosophical error that he calls “correlationism,” in failing to see that humans can have access to absolute knowledge. Meillassoux’s demonstration fails to deliver on this promise by equivocating on just the key argumentative points that philosophers from Kant onward have worked to clarify with precise language and argument, and by ignoring tremendous amounts of countervailing textual evidence. Far from blindly committing the correlationist “error,” much of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy takes the issues Meillasoux raises as central ones for any philosophical investigation, with a significant number of philosophers and theorists adopting the realist position Meillassoux claims has been eliminated.

Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2011

In this paper I will offer a survey of Quentin Meillassoux’s thought, focusing on what I identify as the central node of his thought, the link between mathematics and contingency. I will then proceed to question the compatibility of his principle of radical contingency with the philosophy—and the practice—of science, and I will propose a possible solution to this problem by pushing Meillassoux along the Pythagorean path. Finally, I will argue that 1) his project of evacuating metaphysical necessity via a mathematization of reality can be read on a continuum with the critiques of metaphysics of presence (and with the special status assigned to mathematical formalism) operated by Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou; and 2) his philosophy can be understood as a philosophy of science only if we allow speculations aimed at subverting core metaphysical conceptual structures to have a bearing upon empirically-based scientific practice.

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 21.1 (2013), 132-60

The article argues that Meillassoux's 'After Finitude' underestimates the nature and profundity of Hume's sceptical challenge; it neglects the fact that Hume's scepticism concerns final causes (and agrees fundamentally with Bacon and Descartes in this respect), and that in Hume even the operations of reason do not furnish entirely a priori knowledge. We contend that Hume himself institutes a form of correlationism (which in part showed Kant the way to counter the sceptical challenge via transcendental idealism), and sought not merely to abolish the 'principle of sufficient reason' but to salvage it in a weak form, in turning his attention to the grounds for our beliefs in necessity. We argue further that the 'mathematizability' of properties is not a sufficient criterion to yield realist, non-correlational knowledge, or to demonstrate the 'irremediable realism' of the 'ancestral' statement. Finally, we contend that Meillassoux himself relies on a certain 'Kantian moment' which exempts the reasoning subject from otherwise 'omnipotent' chaos, and that ultimately the 'speculative materialist' position remains exposed to the original Humean sceptical challenge.

First of all I would like to thank COIN for the invitation to give a short talk and to participate in today's discussion. Let me start with some background. In 2010 I completed my master thesis in philosophy, to which I later-on added an addendum.

Philosophy Today, 2013

Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency advocates a “speculative materialism” or what has come to be called “speculative realism” over against “correlationism” (his term for [nearly] all post-Kantian philosophy). “Correlationism” is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” As part of his criticism of “correlationism,” Meillassoux argues that it necessarily leads to fideism, referencing the return of the religious in contemporary phenomenology and the fundamentalist fanaticisms of contemporary religion to make his point. It is this criticism of “correlationism” that I will explore in this paper—in two ways. On the one hand, I argue that, at least in the work of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, what Meillassoux calls “correlationism” leads to faith in doubt rather than fideism. On the other hand, I argue that “correlationism” has resulted in fideism only to the extent that it follows Hegel and becomes speculative, which raises questions for Meillassoux’s own “speculative realism” and his faith in mathematics as the means to accessing reality in itself.