Online research in philosophy

Quentin Meillassoux has recently leveled a controversial attack on critical philosophy and the transcendental turn through his concept of correlationism. This critique is motivated by the attempt to move away from a philosophy of human finitude towards a speculative materialism. In this paper I argue that Meillassoux?s understanding of correlationism does not adequately depict the critical turn, especially in regards to the distinction between the epistemological problem of realism and the problem of materialism. I attempt to show that by reading (...) the critical turn as anti-epistemological one can think of its turn away from things themselves towards relation and mediation in ways that are not necessarily against either science or materialism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are two distinct senses of contingency operative within Hegel’s philosophy, and that the failure to sufficiently distinguish between them can lead to a misrepresentation of Hegel’s idealism. The first sense of contingency is the categorical one explicated in the Science of Logic, in which contingency carries the meaning of dependence and conditionality, while the second sense of contingency, predominantly found within the Philosophy of Nature, means irrationality and chance. Not only does Hegel acknowledge (...) a systematic place for the necessity of contingency within his ontological logic, but he also admits the existence of real chance and multiplicity in nature. However, I claim that these two acknowledgements should not be collapsed since they involve different senses of contingency. (shrink)