• schopenhauer1
    9.9k
    In preparation of the discussion of "Concepts and Objects" by Ray Brassier, can anyone sum up his views? I've asked this before on the other PF, but it's been a while and I'd like a fresh understanding as things I do not clearly understand to begin with seem to fade from memory much more easily. That lack of clarity can also be in part due to the (what I think to be) obscurantist writing due to years of jargon being used and reused. The writing style and use of technical jargon in continental philosophical circles can be debated elsewhere...What I am asking here is to get a good understanding of what he is saying (if he is really saying anything really) I put the question to the members of this forum: What the hell he is trying to say? But, my humble request in regards to your reply is:

    Please, do NOT use self-referential jargon. I know that the typical response is "read this this and this before reading this... and come back to me in the morning", but I am really just interested in an ordinary language understanding of his main ideas.

    Wikipedia (I know..) says: In Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment, Ray Brassier maintains that philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinction, instead attempting to find meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, who work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the "threat" of nihilism. Instead, drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland, and Thomas Metzinger, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism, Brassier embraces it as the truth of reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe is founded on the nothing,[16] but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction," that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all.[17] Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.

    Here is my stab at it from reading this, some of his own excerpts and other secondary sources:

    The universe, some billion billion years (or whatever astronomical number) or so from now will completely be destroyed. We have this knowledge about the inevitability of the annihilation of the universe. Ok, that's it. I have nothing else that I get from what he is saying. I know he says other things along the lines of Dennett/Churchland's eliminative materialism in regards to philosophy of mind, but other than those things, I have no idea what else he is trying to say with it.

    Help?

    P.S. I realize the irony of asking about Ray Brassier's philosophy in an internet forum since he seems to deplore internet philosophy detached from academia. Good, even better impetus to post this!
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