rexallen314.domain.name.hidden wrote:
> Possibly of interest. I haven't read it, but it sounds intriguingly
> Brunoesque.
Sounds more like David. :-) Bruno is always clear.
Brent
>Perhaps Bruno could comment.
>
> After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,
> Quentin Meillassoux
>
> http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14447
>
> Particularly:
>
> By claiming that physical laws are contingent, Meillassoux proposes in
> chapter 04 a speculative solution to Hume's problem of primary and
> secondary qualities. The author's treatment of what at first could
> have passed for an innocuous metaphysical non-problem is implemented
> in order to transform our outlook on unreason. A truly speculative
> solution to Hume's problem must conceive a world devoid of any
> physical necessity that, nevertheless, would still be compatible with
> the stability of its physical laws. Here contingency is the key
> concept that, insofar as it is extracted from Humean-Kantian
> necessitarianism and thus distinguished from chance, enables
> Meillassoux to explain how and why Cantor's transfinite number could
> constitute a condition for the stability of chaos. Here we find the
> transition from the primary absolute to the secondary or
> mathematically inflected absolute. The demonstration thus consists in
> implementing the ontological implications of the Zermelo-Cantorian
> axiomatic as stipulated by Alain Badiou in his Being and Event. This
> axiomatic enables Meillassoux to show that for those forms of aleatory
> reasoning to which Hume and Kant were subservient, what is a priori
> possible can only be conceived as a numerical totality, as a Whole.
> However, this totalization can no longer be guaranteed a priori, since
> Cantor's axiomatic rules out the possibility of maintaining that the
> conceivable can necessarily be totalized. Thus Cantor provides the
> tool for a mathematical way of distinguishing contingency from chance,
> and this tool is none other than the transfinite, which Meillassoux
> translates into an elegant and economical statement: "the
> (qualifiable) totality of the thinkable is unthinkable." (104) This
> means that in the absence of any certainty regarding the totalization
> of the possible, we should limit the scope of aleatory reasoning to
> objects of experience, rather than extending it to the very laws that
> rule our universe (as Kant illegitimately did in the Critique of Pure
> Reason), as if we knew that the these laws necessarily belong to some
> greater Whole.
>
>
>
>
>
> >
>
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Received on Sun Sep 20 2009 - 18:07:11 PDT