dry Amazon review line of the day

I couldn’t help chuckling at the final line of the one reader review from the AMAZON.UK LISTING FOR MEILLASSOUX’S AFTER FINITUDE:

“He is very learned and argues very cogently for his philosophy but I think that Anglo-saxon philosophers will not see what he regards as a problem as really being one requiring dispensing with all natural laws.”

True, I wouldn’t dump all natural laws myself either. But Meillassoux has brought some bold speculation into our midst. In my student years in the continental tradition, one simply didn’t make any definite claims about how the world is. It was tacitly viewed as a clumsy way of approaching philosophy.

I would also still say what I said in my initial 2007 review of the book in Philosophy Today: that absolute contingency leads Meillassoux to a kind of hyper-occasionalist standpoint (even if we forget about his virtual God) since it breaks off connections between any two entities and lets them stand alone, without reason.

In conversation, Meillassoux has objected to this characterization. As he puts it, he does believe in laws, he just doesn’t think they are necessary. If true, this would edge him more toward a position like Whitehead’s shifting “cosmic epochs.” But I think Meillassoux’s position actually entails the larger claim that all things are cut off form one another. They would even be cut off from their own parts: absolute contingency would not just mean a contingency from one moment to the next, after all, but would suggest that there is a merely contingent relationship between a car and the parts of that car at this very moment. It might be merely contingent that the engine in the car is what powers its movement, rather than my own thoughts, or the engine of another car on the other side of the world.

To some extent this happens because Meillassoux does work from a radicalization of the idealist tradition, and it’s difficult and perhaps impossible to allow for real subphenomenal part-whole relations in that tradition.