Nathan Brown ntbrown@ucdavis.

edu

After FinitudeBasic Concepts and Positions

correlationism (pp. 5, 36) - any current of thought which maintains that we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other - insists upon the inseparability of the act of thinking from its content - all we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself weak correlationism/transcendental idealism (p. 35) - proscribes any knowledge of the thing-in-itself (any application of the categories to the super sensible) - maintains that we can think the in-itself (eg. that the thing-in-itself is non-contradictory and that it exists) - insists upon the facticity of the correlation - eg. Kant (transcendental idealism) strong correlationism (p. 35) - proscribes any knowledge of the thing-in-itself - deligitimates any claim to be able to think the thing-in-itself - insists upon the facticity of the correlation - it is unthinkable that the unthinkable be impossible (p. 41) - eg. Wittgenstein, Heidegger subjectivist metaphysics/speculative idealism (p. 37) - absolutizes the correlate itself - radicalizes unthinkability of in-itself by abolishing any such notion - hypostatizes some mental, sentient, or vital term as metaphysical subject - insists upon the necessity of the correlation - eg. Hegel (or Leibniz, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze) speculative materialism (p. 36) - afrms that absolute reality is an entity without thought - asserts that thought is not necessary (something can be independently of thought) - asserts that thought can think what there must be when there is no thought - it is possible to think a given reality by abstracting from the fact that we are thinking it - eg. Epicurus, Meillassoux speculation (p. 34) - claims to be able to access some form of absolute metaphysics (p. 34) - claims to be able to access some form of absolute being, or access the absolute through the principle of sufcient reason * all metaphysics is speculative by denition, but not all speculation is metaphysical, and not every absolute is dogmatic: it is possible to envisage an absolutizing thought that would not be absolutist ancestral (p. 10) - any reality anterior to the emergence of the human speciesor even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth arche-fossil (p. 10) - materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event

Nathan Brown ntbrown@ucdavis.edu

ancestral statement (p. 13) - event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans codicil of modernity (p. 13) - event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humansfor humans problem of ancestrality (pp. 26, 121) - what are the conditions under which an ancestral statement remains meaningful? - how are we to conceive of empirical sciences! capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm? - how is mathematical discourse able to describe a world from which humanity is absent; a world crammed with things and events that are not the correlates of any manifestation; a world that is not the correlate of a relation to the world? - how is thought able to think what there can be when there is no thought? paradox of the arche-fossil / paradox of manifestation (pp. 26, 123) - how can being manifest being!s anteriority to manifestation? - how is empirical knowledge of a world anterior to all experience possible? Galilean-Copernican revolution (p. 117) - whatever is mathematicaly conceivable is absolutely possible - what is mathematizable cannot be reduced to a correlate of thought - it is meaningful to think that all those aspects of the given that are mathematically describable can continue to exist regardless of whether or not were are there to convert the latter into something that is given-to or manifested-for Ptolemaic counter-revolution (p. 118) - even as thought realized for the rst time that it possessed inn modern science the capacity to actually uncover knowledge of a world that is indifferent to any relation to the world, transcendental philosophy insisted that the condition for the conceivability of physical science consisted in revoking all noncorrelational knowledge of this same world (rather than making knowledge conform to the object, the Critical revolution makes the object conform to our knowledge) dia-chronicity (p. 112) - a temporal discrepancy between thinking and being - a temporal hiatus between world and relation-to-the-world - characterizes statements about events that are anterior or ulterior to every terrestrial-relation-to-theworld dia-chronic referent (p. 117) - contingent while simultaneously being considered to be absolute - pertains to possible factial existence outside of thought, not necessity of existence outside of thought - possesses speculative but hypothetical import real necessity (p. 32) - the absolute necessity of a determinate entity - the ontological register of necessity which states that such and such an entity (or determinate res) necessarily exists - this type of necessity can be found in all variants of dogmatic metaphysics principle of sufcient reason (p. 33) - for every thing, every fact, every occurrence, there must be a reason why it is thus and so rather than otherwise principle of unreason (p. 60) - there is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is - this is an anhypothetical principle

Nathan Brown ntbrown@ucdavis.edu

contingency (p. 39) - expresses the fact that physical laws remain indifferent as to whether an event occurs or notthey allow an entity to emerge, to subsist, or to perish facticity (p. 39) - pertains to those structural invariants that supposedly govern the worldinvariants which may differ from one variant of correlationism to another, but whose function in every case is to provide the minimal organization of representation: principle of causality, forms of perception, logical laws, etc. - these forms are xed (I never experience their variation), but they constitute a fact, rather than an absolute, since I cannot ground their necessitytheir facticity reveals itself with the realization that they can only be described, not founded - if contingency consists in knowing that worldly things could be otherwise, facticity just consists in not knowing why the correlational structure has to be thus principle of factiality (p. 79) - to be is necessarily to be a fact - upholds the non-factual essence of fact as such - factiality refers to the non-facticity of facticity - the only absolute necessity available to non-dogmatic speculation: the necessity for everything that is to be a fact empirical contingency (p. 62) - the precariousness of a perishability that is bound to be realized sooner or later - a possibility of not-being which must eventually be realized absolute contingency (p. 62) - a pure possibility; one which may never be realized - the destruction and the perpetual preservation of a determinate entity must equally be able to occur for no reason - absolute contingency is such that anything might happen, even nothing at all, so that what is, remains as it is - the absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being chance/contingency (cf. Potentiality and Virtuality) - chance: ! every actualization of a potentiality for which there is no univocal instance of " " determination on the basis of initial conditions - contingency: " the property of an indexed set of cases (not of a case belonging to an indexed set) of not " " itself being a case of a set of sets of cases - virtuality: " the property of every set of cases of emerging within a becoming which is not dominated " " by any pre-constituted totality of possibles absolute time (pp. 61, 64) - a time that would be capable of bringing forth or abolishing everything - cannot be conceived as having emerged or as being abolished except in time, which is to say, in itself - not just a time whose capacity for destroying everything is a function of laws, but a time which is capable of the lawless destruction of every physical law - a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, xity, stasis, and death - only unreason can be thought as eternal, because only unreason can be thought as at once anhypothetical and absolute