Category Archives: cartesian dreaming

Penelope Maddy — Defending the Axioms

Posted on March 19, 2018 by JTH

Infinity is a puzzling concept in itself and also in the way it has shaped the development of mathematics. Take for example the number line, the infinity of the infinity of the integers and the larger infinity of the real … Continue reading →

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actual and absolute infinity

Posted on December 14, 2017 by JTH

In a footnote to his Berlin paper Meillassoux writes: I distinguish the indefinite from the infinite according to the classical difference between the potential infinite and the actual infinite. The indefinite is the endless augmentation of the finite (1, 2, … Continue reading →

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hegel and nothing

Posted on December 26, 2016 by JTH

Pure being is so indeterminate that it is not even being and so is nothing. This is one gloss on the basic Hegelian idea at the beginning of the Science of Logic. But what does it mean? To achieve a correct … Continue reading →

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follow up on paradox and totality

Posted on July 2, 2016 by JTH

Meillassoux deploys a stock Cantorian argument to conclude that there cannot be a totality of possibilities, i.e. a universal set of all possible ways the world could be. This takes place in the context of his attempt to disqualify an updated rendition of the old … Continue reading →

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note on heller and cogburn’s meillassoux paper

Posted on June 29, 2016 by JTH

Meillassoux’s insistence on both de-totalising the possible and simultaneously exploding correlationism is something that I am trying to preserve in my adaptation of his position. Of course I have since interpreted everything in my own way such that it is no longer fruitful … Continue reading →

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more on waghorn

Posted on June 11, 2016 by JTH

Just a little more to add to my previous post. Consider the following argument: Set theoretical paradoxes such as Russell’s paradox show that we can’t consistently quantify over absolutely everything. If we had a consistent concept of absolutely everything, then we could consistently quantify over … Continue reading →

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may update…

Posted on May 28, 2016 by JTH

At present this blog is as acting as a sort of placeholder for future input, so for those of you who are still following, please bear with me! At the moment I am working a heavy teaching load, which doesn’t leave … Continue reading →

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global anti-representationalism and ‘the world’

Posted on June 13, 2015 by JTH

Huw Price distinguishes between subject naturalism and object naturalism as follows. Object naturalism is the view that all that exists is the world as studied by science (i.e. the physical world), and that scientific knowledge is the only genuine knowledge. By … Continue reading →

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meillassoux and the possibility of nothing

Posted on January 31, 2014 by JTH

According to Meillassoux’s second “figure” of unreason, “it is absolutely necessary that the in-itself exists, and hence that the latter cannot dissolve into nothingness.” (2008: 71, cf. 2011: 165) Meillassoux asserts that although no determinate material reality is absolute, it … Continue reading →

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meillassoux versus schelling

Posted on December 31, 2013 by JTH

I recently took the time to read Schelling’s Grounding of the Positive Philosophy, and got to thinking about how it compares with Meillassoux’s project. As Markus Gabriel observes, there is definitely an onto-theological tendency in Schelling as in Fichte and Hegel, … Continue reading →

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