Rationalist Empiricism (eBook)

A Theory of Speculative Critique

Nathan Brown (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8232-9002-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Rationalist Empiricism is a study of the dialectical relation between reason and experience in ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, engaging as well with political theory, the science of measurement, and experimental photography. Across these fields, it shows that coordinating the discrepant claims of rationalism and empiricism is the key to reconciling the speculative and critical vocations of theory and practice.

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Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant's transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

Autor

lt;b>Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics.

Inhalt

Introduction: The Philosophical Conjuncture | 1

Part I: Rationalist Empiricism

1. Absent Blue Wax: On the Mingling of Methodological Exceptions | 35

2. Althusser’s Dream: The Materialist Dialectic of Rationalist Empiricism | 50

Part II: Speculative Critique

3. Hegel’s Cogito: On the Genetic Epistemology of Critical Metaphysics | 73

4. Hegel’s Apprentice: From Speculative Idealism to Speculative Materialism | 90

Part III: Science, Art, Structure

5. Hegel’s Kilogram: Taking the Measure of Metrical Units | 125

6. The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier | 141

7. Where’s Number Four? The Place of Structure in Plato’s Timaeus | 166

Coda: Structure and Form | 181

Part IV: Theory and Praxis

8. Badiou after Meillassoux: The Politics of the Problem of Induction | 185

9. The Criterion of Immanence and the Transformation of Structural Causality:
From Althusser to Théorie Communiste | 204

10. The Analytic of Separation: History and Concept in Marx | 228

Conclusion: The True, the Good, the Beautiful | 249

Acknowledgments | 263

Notes | 265

Works Cited | 291

Index | 301

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.1.2021
• Reihe/Serie: Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory
• Zusatzinfo: 29 b/w illustrations
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Badiou • Dialectic • Digital Art • Empiricism • Hegel • Marx • Materialism • Meillassoux • Metrology • Rationalism • speculative realism
• ISBN-10: 0-8232-9002-6 / 0823290026
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-9002-4 / 9780823290024