Eric Weislogel on SPEP

By clicking HERE you can read Eric’s interesting summary of the recent SPEP meeting at Villanova.

Eric was a few years ahead of me in graduate school, a little over two decades ago. The first SPEP I ever attended (indeed, the first full-blown academic conference I ever attended) was also at Villanova, in the now distant-seeming year of 1990.

As for Caputo’s talk on SR as summarized by Eric, it’s much appreciated. However, it seems like he might not have given a sufficient account of the internal differences within the group. Only two of the original four Speculative Realists can be said to have been deeply under the influence of Badiou (I.H. Grant has shared my reservations about him), and I’m definitely the only one of the four who was influenced by Lingis.

It’s true that we’re all against correlationism, but not true that we’re all against “fideism.” That’s really Meillassoux’s personal crusade, and fideism doesn’t bother me much. I’m not a hard-core rationalist like Meillassoux. Anyway, readers of the excerpts from L’Inexistence divine will see that Meillassoux’s rationalism doesn’t preclude a rather weird sort of virtual theism.

But as for the other sort of materialism, which might be called “Dalek Materialism” (i.e., “Exterminate! Exterminate!”), I really don’t see what’s so horribly catastrophic about people believing in God. Worst-case scenario: they’re wrong. Yet I don’t see the biggest problem in philosophy as being that people are wrong about things. We’re all wrong about an awful lot of things, as we all realize when modifying our previous views on anything. When reading people’s work let’s look for depth, seriousness, originality, commitment, and insight, and not measure people by what we ourselves think to be their ratio of true to false explicit propositions.