Nihil unbound

Enlightenment and extinction

Ray Brassier

pp. 13-275

Palgrave Macmillan

2007

Abstract

Nihilism is not an affliction to be overcome, but a vector of intellectual discovery which philosophy should try to push to its ultimate conclusion. Rather than trying to safeguard the experience of meaning-construed as the defining feature of human existence-from the incursions of science, philosophy should strive to demystify it and deploy its considerable speculative resources to facilitate science's labor of disenchantment. Disregarding the orthodox division between analytic and continental traditions, this book tries to forge a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and speculative realism in contemporary French philosophy.