Ray Brassier – the term speculative realism , is just another market label.
European philosopher has stopped talking about reality.
Kant: arguing that time n space are not ‘out there’, but are concepts of the understanding that we place over the world or the ‘in-itself’, therefore, philosophers were less interested in reality itself, but focus on how we come to know the world or ideas they form about it.
Arguing there is no truth since all is socially constructed. Failures of philosophy claim the real, bring about by what we’ll see gets call ‘correlationism’.
– speculative realists come in, arguing it’s time to give the real its due.
Correlationism – correlationim is closely connected/related to reality.
Speculation that derived from Kant – was to describe the conditions of possibility for our knowledge of the world.
– speculation occurs when we attempt to think the world as it is beyond what appears to us.
– we can know there is a reality and that we can speculate about it.
Meillassoux – the correlationists: think that the ‘world is meaningful’ only if it is ‘given-to-a-living (or thinking)-being’. If there is no experiencing in it, then it’s not meaningful.
1. Naive realism – real things exist n we can have direct access to them. Natural attitude. You never question the existence of the book while reading it. Our default common sense way of conceiving the world.
2. Weak correlationism – the view that reality exists n we can think it, but we cannot know about it given the filters through which reality is understood.
3. Strong correlationism – there is no thinking about what is outside our own being in the world. social construction, ‘worldmaking’ phenomenologist.
4. Speculative Idealism: there is a necessary relation between being n thinking, the relation between thinking n being is the absolute.
The idealism is ‘speculative’ in that it advances into thinking reality as it is: the correlation is taken as the absolute in-itself.
‘correlation’ in everyday language = putting your hand on fire is correlated to a decent amount of pain. we don’t need a textbook to know this. but ppl mistake correlations for causation.
Meillassoux: 2 dominant relations to reality, ‘correlationism‘ & ‘idealism‘.
‘reality’ as it is outside of human access.
Graham Harman: correlationism the ‘philosophy of access’.
Weak Correlationism n the case Against Naive Realism
As a human being, you take it for granted that others don’t perceive the world completely differently. For you to describe this world, first has to be ‘given’ to you, Hence, the world has reality, you also know that things that ‘given’ to you for you to have knowledge of them, all you can know about the world depends/comes through how the world is given to you.
Weak Correltionist : all one’s knowledge must come out of one’s relationship with the world, one can still think the fact that there is a world beyond subjective perception
Kant: certainty was based on the shared sensible ‘form’ of experience.
What we perceive is actually there, how we perceive the world does provide you a measure of certainty > weak correlationism.
Things had ‘primary’ n ‘secondary’ qualities. Primary – objective: size, shape, time.. Secondary – those produced through experience.
Color is part of our subjective experience .
Kant: color is both primary n secondary qualities are developed in cognition, and thus we can’t ever say what they are independent of human knowledge.
Kant: things-in-themselves are presented to us and conform to our manner of experience. Cognition is a correlation of empirical sensation n the concepts of the understanding.
How animals are able to see objects that are dark for you/there are more color wavelengths than you can see with your eyes, Kant: we are limited in the way the thing-in-iself is filtered by the concepts of our understanding. We can think it, but not know the in-itself.
‘weak correlationism’ is that knowledge of reality is a correlation of subject n the object of its experience.
Dummett: all realism is ultimately a ‘correlationism’ where there is a relation between a knower and the objects of knowledge. You work on how it is logically coherent within a given of statements.
Kant: about the in-itself
a. it is not available to us through experience.
b. that it exists.
c. it is non-contradictory.
Strong Correlationism: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty & Heidegger
Meillassoux’s category of ‘strong’ correlationism is targeted at phenomenology and its post-structural heirs.
Studying phenomena, means setting aside any external/independent reality.
In Phenomenology of Perception, ‘it is born of my relation with things’ that ‘time is not a real process’
Science is a drying out of the ‘life-world’ that its basis in the human perceptual relation.
Heidegger: our existence is engaged in the world of things and not engrossed primarily in theorizing through the correlation.
Meillassoux think Heidegger a ‘strong correlationist’ because he denies reality to beings outside the circuit of their relation through Dasein.
Dasein – a being out in the world among things, without a separation.
Heidegger: Newton’s laws were not true Newton’s discovery, but neither were they false. It is Newton’s assertion of the laws of motion that made entities accessible as obeying these laws.
Realism 1. the independence of some set of entities of the human consciousness, cultural constructs, conceptual schemes, stcutures, linguistic signs.
2. that these entities exist.
Heidegger: ‘phenomenology is our way of access’ to ‘the things themselves’
‘world is only if and as long as Dasein exists, not animals, not rocks.’
who can go along with others in their access to things n in their dealings with those things.
‘Fundamental feature of man’s own immediate experience of existence.’ Dasein’s access.
Realisms are representational and treat the world as an object presented to or correlated to a subject engaged in theoretical understanding.