Rationalist Empiricism

Rationalist Empiricism

A Theory of Speculative Critique

  • Auteur: Brown, Nathan
  • Éditeur: Fordham University Press
  • Collection: Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory
  • ISBN: 9780823290000
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780823290031
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823290024
  • Lieu de publication:  New York , United States
  • Année de publication électronique: 2021
  • Mois : Janvier
  • Langue: Anglais

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.

  • Cover
  • RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • CONTENTS
  • Introduction: The Philosophical Conjuncture
  • PART I Rationalist Empiricism
    • 1. Absent Blue Wax: On the Mingling of Methodological Exceptions
    • 2. Althusser’s Dream: The Materialist Dialectic of Rationalist Empiricism
  • PART II Speculative Critique
    • 3. Hegel’s Cogito: On the Genetic Epistemology of Critical Metaphysics
    • 4. Hegel’s Apprentice: From Speculative Idealism to Speculative Materialism
  • PART III Science, Art, Structure
    • 5. Hegel’s Kilogram: Taking the Measure of Metrical Units
    • 6. The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier
    • 7. Where’s Number Four? The Place of Structure in Plato’s Timaeus
    • Coda: Structure and Form
  • PART IV Theory and Praxis
    • 8. Badiou after Meillassoux: The Politics of the Problem of Induction
    • 9. The Criterion of Immanence and the Transformation of Structural Causality: From Althusser to Théorie Communiste
    • 10. The Analytic of Separation: History and Concept in Marx
    • Conclusion: The True, the Good, the Beautiful
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
  • Index

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