Quentin Meillassoux (; ; born 26 October 1967) is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Biography

Quentin Meillassoux is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux. He is a former student of the philosophers and

Alain Badiou Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Fouca ...

. He is married to the

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

and philosopher Gwenaëlle Aubry.

Philosophical work

Meillassoux's first book is ''After Finitude'' (''Après la finitude'', 2006). Alain Badiou, Meillassoux's former teacher, wrote the foreword''.'' Badiou describes the work as introducing a new possibility for philosophy which is different from

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...

's three alternatives of criticism,

skepticism Skepticism, also spelled scepticism, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the p ...

, and

dogmatism Dogma is a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted. It may be in the form of an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Roman Catholicism, Judaism, Isla ...

. The book was translated into English by 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 theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans. In Meillassoux's view, this theory allows philosophy to avoid the problem of how to describe the world as it really is independent of human knowledge. He terms this reality independent of human knowledge as the "ancestral" realm. Following the commitment to mathematics of his mentor Alain Badiou, Meillassoux claims that mathematics describes the primary qualities of things as opposed to their secondary qualities shown by

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

. Meillassoux argues that in place of the agnostic scepticism about the reality of cause and effect, there should be a radical certainty that there is no causality at all. Following the rejection of causality, Meillassoux says 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 not necessary although Meillassoux says that the

principle of non-contradiction In logic, the law of non-contradiction (LNC) (also known as the law of contradiction, principle of non-contradiction (PNC), or the principle of contradiction) states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the sa ...

is necessary. For these reasons, Meillassoux rejects Kant's

Copernican Revolution The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar Sys ...

in philosophy. Since Kant makes the world dependent on the conditions by which humans observe it, Meillassoux accuses Kant of a "Ptolemaic Counter-Revolution." Meillassoux clarified and revised some of the views published in ''After Finitude'' during his lectures at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

in 2012. Several of Meillassoux's articles have appeared in English via the British philosophical journal '' Collapse'', helping to spark interest in his work in the Anglophone world. His unpublished dissertation ''L'inexistence divine'' (1997) is noted in ''After Finitude'' to be "forthcoming" in book form; as of 2021, it had not yet been published. In ''

Parrhesia In rhetoric, parrhesia is a figure of speech described as "speak ngcandidly or ... ask ngforgiveness for so speaking". This Ancient Greek word has three different forms, as related by Michel Foucault. ''Parrhesia'' is a noun, meaning "free speec ...

'', in 2016, an excerpt from Meillassoux's dissertation was translated by Nathan Brown, who noted in his introduction that "what is striking about the document... is the marked difference of its rhetorical strategies, its order of reasons, and its philosophical style" from ''After Finitude'', counter to the general view that the latter merely constituted "a partial précis" of ''L'inexistence divine''; he notes further that the dissertation presents a "very different articulation of the Principle of Factiality" from that in ''After Finitude''. In September 2011, Meillassoux's book on Stéphane Mallarmé was published in France under the title ''Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du coup de dés de Mallarmé''. In this second book, he offers a detailed reading of Mallarmé's famous poem " Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard" ("A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance"), in which he finds a numerical code at work in the text.

Bibliography

Books

*''After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency'', trans. Ray Brassier (Continuum, 2008). ISBN 978-2-02109-215-8 *''The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarme's Coup De Des'' (Urbanomic, 2012). ISBN 978-0-98321-692-6 *''Time Without Becoming'', edited by Anna Longo (Mimesis International, 2014). ISBN 978-8-85752-386-6 *''Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction'', trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Univocal, 2015). ISBN 978-1-937561-48-2

Articles

*"Potentiality and Virtuality," in ''Collapse'', vol. II: ''Speculative Realism''. *"Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory," in ''Collapse'', vol. III: ''Unknown Deleuze''. *"Spectral Dilemma," in ''Collapse'', vol. IV: ''Concept Horror''.

Notes

*Pierre-Alexandre Fradet, « Sortir du cercle corrélationnel : un examen critique de la tentative de Quentin Meillassoux », ''Cahiers Critiques de philosophie'', num. 19, dec. 2017, p. 103-119, online : https://www.academia.edu/34706673/_Sortir_du_cercle_corr%C3%A9lationnel_un_examen_critique_de_la_tentative_de_Quentin_Meillassoux_publi%C3%A9_dans_le_dossier_Le_r%C3%A9alisme_sp%C3%A9culation_probl%C3%A8mes_et_enjeux_coordonn%C3%A9_par_A._Longo_Cahiers_Critiques_de_philosophie_no_19_d%C3%A9cembre_2017_p._103-119 *Pierre-Alexandre Fradet and Tristan Garcia (eds.), issue "Réalisme spéculatif", in ''Spirale'', no 255, winter 2016—introduction here : "https://www.academia.edu/20381265/With_Tristan_Garcia_Petit_panorama_du_réalisme_spéculatif_in_Spirale_num._255_winter_2016_p._27-30_online_http_magazine-spirale.com_dossier-magazine_petit-panorama-du-realisme-speculatif *Olivier Ducharme et Pierre-Alexandre Fradet, ''Une vie sans bon sens. Regard philosophique sur

Pierre Perrault Pierre Perrault (29 June 1927 – 24 June 1999) was a Québécois documentary film director. He directed 20 films between 1963 and 1996. He was one of the most important filmmakers in Canada, although largely unknown outside of Québec. In ...

'' (dialogue between Perrault, Nietzsche, Henry, Bourdieu, Meillassoux), foreword by Jean-Daniel Lafond, Montréal, Éditions Nota bene, coll. "Philosophie continentale", 2016, 210 p. * Harman, Graham.
Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making
'. Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press
2011. *Watkin, Christopher.
Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux
'. Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press
paperback: March 2013; hardback: 2011. *Ennis, Paul. ''Continental Realism''. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011. * Edouard Simca
"Recension: Q. Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence, Paris, Seuil, 2006"
* Michel Bitbol. ''Maintenant la finitude: Peut-on penser l'absolu?''. Paris, Flammarion, 2019.

External links

« Deuil à venir, dieu à venir »
Critique, janvier-février 2006, no 704-705 (revised edition, Éditions Ionas, 2016).
« Potentialité et virtualité »
Failles 2, Printemps 2006 (revised edition, Éditions Ionas, 2016).
Recording of Meillassoux's 2007 lecture in English at the Speculative Realism Conference at Goldsmiths, University of London

Conferences by Meillassoux (in French)

Speculative Heresy blog resources page, which contains articles by Meillassoux
{{DEFAULTSORT:Meillassoux, Quentin 1967 births 21st-century French essayists 21st-century French male writers 21st-century French philosophers Action theorists Continental philosophers Deleuze scholars École Normale Supérieure alumni École Normale Supérieure faculty Epistemologists Existentialists Free University of Berlin faculty French logicians French male essayists French male non-fiction writers Hermeneutists Kant scholars Living people Lycée Louis-le-Grand alumni Materialists Metaphysical realism Metaphysicians Ontologists Phenomenologists Philosophers of logic Philosophers of mathematics Philosophers of time Philosophical realism Philosophy academics Philosophy teachers Philosophy writers