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Full Idea
The central notion of philosophy since Kant is 'correlation' - that we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.
Gist of Idea
Since Kant we think we can only access 'correlations' between thinking and being
Source
Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 1)
Book Ref
Meillassoux: 'After Finitude: the necessity of contingency', ed/tr. Brassier,R [Bloomsbury 2008], p.5
A Reaction
Meillassoux's charge is that philosophy has thereby completely failed to grasp the scientific revolution, which has used mathematics to make objectivity possible. Quine and Putnam would be good examples of what he has in mind.
| 7822 | A neo-Stoic movement began in the late sixteenth century [Lipsius, by Grayling] |
| 7504 | Modern science comes from Descartes' view that knowledge doesn't need moral purity [Descartes, by Foucault] |
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| 7662 | Romanticism is the greatest change in the consciousness of the West [Berlin] |
| 8060 | In the 17th-18th centuries morality offered a cure for egoism, through altruism [MacIntyre] |
| 8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
| 9307 | Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen] |
| 19648 | Since Kant we think we can only access 'correlations' between thinking and being [Meillassoux] |
| 19674 | The Copernican Revolution decentres the Earth, but also decentres thinking from reality [Meillassoux] |
| 21855 | Only in the 1780s did it become acceptable to read Spinoza [Lord] |
| 20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
| 20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |