Rationalist Empiricism
A Theory of Speculative Critique

Nathan Brown (Author)

9780823290000

Hardback, published 5 January 2021

272 pages, 29 b/w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm, 0.636 kg

Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association
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.

Introduction: The Philosophical Conjuncture 1
Part I: Rationalist Empiricism
1. Absent Blue Wax: On the Mingling of Methodological Exceptions 35
2. Althusser's Dream: The Materialist Dialectic of Rationalist Empiricism 50
Part II: Speculative Critique
3. Hegel's Cogito: On the Genetic Epistemology of Critical Metaphysics 73
4. Hegel's Apprentice: From Speculative Idealism to Speculative Materialism 90
Part III: Science, Art, Structure
5. Hegel's Kilogram: Taking the Measure of Metrical Units 125
6. The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier 141
7. Where's Number Four? The Place of Structure in Plato's Timaeus 166
Coda: Structure and Form 181
Part IV: Theory and Praxis
8. Badiou after Meillassoux: The Politics of the Problem of Induction 185
9. The Criterion of Immanence and the Transformation of Structural Causality:
From Althusser to Théorie Communiste 204
10. The Analytic of Separation: History and Concept in Marx 228
Conclusion: The True, the Good, the Beautiful 249
Acknowledgments 263
Notes 265
Works Cited 291
Index 301