ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines the very notion of a limit itself. Benoist specifically questions whether a putative opposition of philosophical “camps” emphasized in recent years is actually tenable. This opposition is taken to hold between classical approaches in a Kantian spirit, operating with the notion of necessary limits to human cognition and sense-making, and a recent “speculative” turn in philosophy championed by Quentin Meillassoux, looking to overcome such limits. Benoist’s contention against this dichotomy is that the rhetoric of unlimitedness depends on ideas about limits that are rooted in the very Kantian way of thinking it claims to oppose. What is more, these ideas are just as questionable as they, in turn, rely on a notion of “the Absolute” which they claim to undermine. Benoist goes on to investigate the foundations of modern thought about limits and finitude in perception and thought, and the consequences these ideas have had. He closes the chapter by arguing that the notion of a limit as it has been formative for recent philosophy is inconsistent, and that our focus in philosophy should rather rest on the contextual conditions of thought: on this picture, thoughts articulate a contextually determined grip on reality, which presupposes that reality is used in a certain way.
