This post is a translation of a review of Après la finitude (After Finitude), the debut book of Quentin Meillassoux. The original is Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher (Graham Harman, 2009).
Meillassoux is sometimes funny and witty, as a continental philosophers aspire to.
It offers bold readings of the history of philosophy—Aristotle is not realist enough, Hume not skeptical enough. It shows bursts of scathing wit, as when drawing wry parallels between the anti-Darwinian reveries of creationism and major schools of present-day philosophy.
What is this wry parallel? We will see.
The very title After Finitude will be enough to startle present-day continental thought, since human finitude has been perhaps the central credo of the field from the time of its birth.
Okay. How does that work? Basically, "continental philosophy" has been based on the idea that humans are finite and can know nothing absolute, since absolute knowledge should be true everywhere, everywhen, and to know that requires one to check it for an infinite amount of time, at an infinite amount of places, and after thinking an infinite number of thoughts about it.
But what about math?
No Platonism! Math is just thought-patterns that humans have managed to reproduce faithfully through the years. It does not point to a higher reality, and it does not lead to absolutely true knowledge, only knowledge that is currently useful.
"After Finitude" means just "Get over this talk of finitude! Humans can know absolute things.".
One of the typical features of recent continental thought is its contempt for so-called “naïve realism.” The human being is now firmly established as the point of entry for all serious philosophy... The notion of an objective world-in-it-self seems to elude our grasp. Nonetheless, few authors have faced this predicament with full-blown absolute idealism à la Berkeley—if not quite “naïve,” such extreme idealism strikes most of us as gratuitous and bizarre amidst the undeniable blows of the world. This leaves philosophy in an ambiguous position, neither realist nor idealist.
