This discussion is part of the solo exhibition Du Mort Qui Saisit Le Vif (la maison du dehors) by Fabien Giraud, held at Rosascape from November 28th to December 3rd 2011.
Quentin Meillassoux is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. His first book, After Finitude (2006) introduces an entirely new option into modern philosophy, which avoids Kant's three alternatives of criticism, scepticism and dogmatism. By using the term "speculative realism" to describe his own position, Meillassoux suggests that philosophy doesn't have to think what is but what could be: speculation allows philosophy to access not the reality of things as they are, but rather the possibility that they may always be otherwise. In this book, Meillassoux argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls "correlationism," the often implicit and unstated theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor, conversely, the world without humans. In Meillassoux's view, this presupposition reveals a dishonest maneuver that allows philosophy to sidestep the problem of how to describe the world as it really is independently from human thinking.
It is on the basis of such a critique of critique that Quentin Meillassoux develops his enterprise as a philosophy of the world without us.
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