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The Technique of Thought: Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, and Stiegler after Naturalism
Interrogating the work of four contemporary French philosophers to rethink philosophy’s relationship to science and science’s relationship to reality The Technique of Thought explores the relationship between philosophy and science as articulated in the work of four contemporary French thinkers—Jean-Luc Nancy, François Laruelle, Catherine Malabou, and Bernard Stiegler. Situating their writings within both contemporary scientific debates and the philosophy of science, Ian James elaborates a philosophical naturalism that is notably distinct from the Anglo-American tradition. The naturalism James proposes also diverges decisively from the ways in which continental philosophy has previously engaged with the sciences. He explores the technical procedures and discursive methods used by each of the four thinkers as distinct “techniques of thought” that approach scientific understanding and knowledge experimentally. Moving beyond debates about the constructed nature of scientific knowledge, The Technique of Thought argues for a strong, variably configured, and entirely novel scientific realism. By bringing together post-phenomenological perspectives concerning individual or collective consciousness and first-person qualitative experience with science’s focus on objective and third-person quantitative knowledge, James tracks the emergence of a new image of the sciences and of scientific practice. Stripped of aspirations toward total mastery of the universe or a “grand theory of everything,” this renewed scientific worldview, along with the simultaneous reconfiguration of philosophy’s relationship to science, opens up new ways of interrogating immanent reality.
272 pages, Paperback
Published February 26, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 17, 2023
An expedition into the recent French cerebral parlour, which Ian James titles as “Post-continental naturalism”.
James sets up the four postfoundationalist realist and materialist vantages (Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, Stiegler) in a seemingly stark contrast against the vogue of para-scientific “Deleuzianisms” (new materialisms, posthumanisms, Latourianisms), postpositivist relativisms and constructivisms, as well as naturalisms anchored in totalities (eliminativism, reductive naturalism, naturalized metaphysics).
The post-continental naturalists, as they are denominated, all seem to affirm a methodological continuity between the scientific research programs and philosophical considerations which comprise an encounter with the “limit of thought” -- a domain of the unknown, of the “determination-in-the-last-instance”, groundlessness, vacuity.
Thus, instead of the preoccupation with metaphysics of completion, James envelops the “technique of thought” as the repudiation of metaphysics and dives into the biosemiological voids, that both ontologically bridge and epistemologically separate the quantitative and the qualitative, the empirical anteriority and the psychic immanence:
“… as nonfoundationalist and nonphilosophical”, for the technique of thought, “there is no return here to a first philosophy that is abandoned by naturalism in favor of scientific knowledge. As experimental, thought here is unmoored from the pretensions of traditional first philosophy and free to, as it were, experimentally engage with the sciences anew. … both philosophy and science are no less encounters with and of the real. They have their cause or determination in the real and therefore articulate a radical realism of both philosophical thought and scientific knowledge.” (p. 54)
James sets up the four postfoundationalist realist and materialist vantages (Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou, Stiegler) in a seemingly stark contrast against the vogue of para-scientific “Deleuzianisms” (new materialisms, posthumanisms, Latourianisms), postpositivist relativisms and constructivisms, as well as naturalisms anchored in totalities (eliminativism, reductive naturalism, naturalized metaphysics).
The post-continental naturalists, as they are denominated, all seem to affirm a methodological continuity between the scientific research programs and philosophical considerations which comprise an encounter with the “limit of thought” -- a domain of the unknown, of the “determination-in-the-last-instance”, groundlessness, vacuity.
Thus, instead of the preoccupation with metaphysics of completion, James envelops the “technique of thought” as the repudiation of metaphysics and dives into the biosemiological voids, that both ontologically bridge and epistemologically separate the quantitative and the qualitative, the empirical anteriority and the psychic immanence:
“… as nonfoundationalist and nonphilosophical”, for the technique of thought, “there is no return here to a first philosophy that is abandoned by naturalism in favor of scientific knowledge. As experimental, thought here is unmoored from the pretensions of traditional first philosophy and free to, as it were, experimentally engage with the sciences anew. … both philosophy and science are no less encounters with and of the real. They have their cause or determination in the real and therefore articulate a radical realism of both philosophical thought and scientific knowledge.” (p. 54)
June 23, 2019
To date the best book I have ever read on the relationship between philosophy and science.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews