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Ideas for 'After Finitude', 'A Philosophy of Boredom' and 'Vindication of the Rights of Women'

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4 ideas

1. Philosophy / B. History of Ideas / 5. Later European Thought
Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen]
     Full Idea: Foucault was right to say that Jena in the 1790s was the arena where the fundamental interests in modern Western culture suddenly had their breakthrough.
     From: Lars Svendsen (A Philosophy of Boredom [2005], Ch.2)
     A reaction: [Hölderlin, Novalis, Tieck, Schlegel, based on Kant and Fichte] Romanticism seems to have been born then. Is that the essence of modernism? Foucault and his pals are hoping to destroy the Enlightenment by ignoring it, but that is modern too.
Since Kant we think we can only access 'correlations' between thinking and being [Meillassoux]
     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.
     From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 1)
     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.
The Copernican Revolution decentres the Earth, but also decentres thinking from reality [Meillassoux]
     Full Idea: The Copernican Revolution is not so much the decentring of observers in the solar system, but (by the mathematizing of nature) the decentring of thought relative to the world within the process of knowledge.
     From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 5)
     A reaction: In other words, I take it, the Copernican Revolution was the discovery of objectivity. That is a very nice addition to my History of Ideas collection.
1. Philosophy / B. History of Ideas / 6. Twentieth Century Thought
In Kant the thing-in-itself is unknowable, but for us it has become unthinkable [Meillassoux]
     Full Idea: The major shift that has occurred in the conception of thought from Kant's time to ours is from the unknowability of the thing-in-itself to its unthinkability.
     From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 2)
     A reaction: Meillassoux is making the case that philosophy is alienating us more and more from the triumphant realism of the scientific revolution. He says thinking has split from being. He's right. Modern American pragmatists are the worst (not Peirce!).