How philosophy should respond to modern science is a great unresolved question. The Galilean mathematicization of nature and the Baconian controlled experiment undermined the aprioristic method of classical philosophy and medieval scholasticism. Since then, cognisance of nature’s contingency has provoked conflicting responses. In proposing the transcendental aesthetic of space and time, Immanuel Kant’s critical revolution would be the first to respond systematically to the challenge.1 G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic would then seek to supersede Kant’s insights: assimilating finite understanding in the Absolute Idea and speculatively reconciling Reason with natural scientific knowledge.2 Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology would circumvent the dualism of appearances and reality altogether in an imperative to go back to the ‘things themselves’ from the first-person perspective of conscious intentionality.3 That these responses have come to be identified with certain antiscientific implications – Kantianism with agnosticism about the objective world;4 Hegelianism with contempt for determinate objects;5 phenomenology with a reversion to prescientific common sense – indicates that the question of how philosophy should relate to natural science remains open. Still, an epistemological orientation has proved attractive for philosophers wishing to defend the cognitive autonomy of science from philosophical encroachments upon its terrain.6 On the side of analytic philosophy, Rudolf Carnap’s logical positivism, Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion and Wilfrid Sellars’s naturalism have all promised a role for philosophers in clarifying the rational basis of scientific knowledge. Among Continental philosophers, a postwar period encompassing the work of Alexandre Koyré, Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard theorized the epistemic discontinuity of the prescientific and the scientific.
The factions forming after the 2007 Goldsmiths speculative realism workshop thus redraw a well-scoured line of demarcation within philosophy. The clash between Graham Harman’s phenomenological object-oriented philosophy and Ray Brassier’s nihilism provides the case in point: the former’s commitment to philosophy serving as an equal partner to science is opposed by the latter’s claim to defend science by insisting that philosophy justify itself in light of modern science’s sundering of reality and ideality. Or in the words of one of Brassier’s disciples, the astringent theorizing of object-oriented philosophy, unconcerned with the dualism of concepts and world opened up by post-Galilean science, enjoins us to ‘reactivate the methodological primacy of epistemology’.7 Central to Brassier’s critique are two main concerns. The first is the relation between what Sellars termed the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’ – these images respectively corresponding to the world of midsized objects we inhabit phenomenologically and the world of imperceptibles posited by natural science.8 Brassier calls into question philosophies which attempt to tether the scientific image to manifest foundations, and which refuse to cede cognitive priority to science. Brassier’s second move involves a rejection of empiricist epistemology and pragmatist instrumentalism when theorizing changes in scientific theory. This allows him to assert the necessity of philosophy working through new scientific discoveries without ‘engaging in an ontological hypostasis of entities and processes postulated by current science’.9 The pursuit of both desiderata animates Brassier’s advocacy of a Sellarsian ‘critical epistemology-rationalist metaphysics’ nexus, which he believes is well suited for satisfying the demands of scientific realism.
This essay frames Brassier’s interventions with respect to Louis Althusser’s epistemological programme of the 1960s. What justifies the comparison? Importantly, it helps to illuminate the genealogical thread linking Brassier’s realist project to Althusser’s via the influence of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux (whom Brassier translated). For those unacquainted with this lineage, the reasons why realism and a defence of the autonomy of science are such pressing concerns for Brassier may be opaque. Hence, linking Brassier’s project to Althusser’s helps us to understand better the former’s polemical interventions against antirealist tendencies in Continental thought. Another motivation for comparing Brassier’s project to Althusser’s is that setting it within a broader context sheds light on the possible limits of Brassier’s Sellarsian realism. In particular, following Althusser’s project through its key moments of elaboration, culminating in a self-critique of his speculative-rationalist deviation in the 1970s, allows us to reflect on the problems with mobilizing epistemology in the defence of science. Delineating the Althusserian link will then pay further dividends in thinking possible alternatives to Sellarsian epistemology. I introduce Roy Bhaskar’s account of scientific ontology, inspired in part by Althusser’s self critique, to point to what is missing from such critical epistemologies: their lack of an account of scientific experimentation and their reduction of science to the singular (positioning scientific method under the umbrella of a more general theory of knowledge). Given that Brassier’s main target, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory,10 is much more than a mere antirealist provocation with respect to the natural sciences and is instead a fully fledged social metaphysics, Bhaskar’s work is, I argue, important for sensitizing us to the specificity of social science within realist philosophy and alerts us to the current incompleteness of Brassier’s critique. More than just aiming to provide genealogical depth to Brassier’s project, then, the greater ambition of this chapter is to inspire a future encounter between Sellarsian critical epistemology and Bhaskar’s scientific ontology capable of advancing realism in the social sciences.
The discussion that follows is divided into four sections. The first section addresses how Althusser drew inspiration from Bachelard’s notion of the ‘epistemological obstacle’ and enriched it with antisubjectivist, antiempiricist and antiteleological arguments. The second section examines Althusser’s attempt to identify breaks from ideology to science and how this led him to criticize his speculative-rationalist deviation. The third section presents the Sellarsian ‘critical epistemology-rationalist metaphysics’ nexus identified by Brassier, comparing and contrasting it with the Bachelard-Althusser programme. The fourth section offers reflections on the lasting significance of Althusser’s self-critique and argues that Bhaskar’s scientific ontology provides a compelling, though not mutually exclusive, alternative to Sellars’s critical epistemology.
Althusser’s epistemological programme of the 1960s
Given that Althusser was no ordinary scholarly epistemologist and is best known for his innovations in Marxist theory, this section provides the necessary historical background to make sense of why he would turn to epistemology to defend the autonomy of science.11 In so doing, it shows that although Althusser’s motivations were highly idiosyncratic and shaped by the French theoretical conjuncture of the 1960s, his epistemological programme nonetheless prefigures some of the moves taken by Brassier’s realist project. As we will see in subsequent sections, Althusser’s rejection of empiricism and pragmatism, his turn to epistemology to defend scientific realism and his affirmation of a muscular rationalism will be echoed in Brassier’s employment of Sellars’s naturalist epistemology against Harman’s object oriented philosophy and Latour’s Actor Network Theory. Beginning this essay with Althusser’s epistemological programme thus allows us to appreciate the genealogical lineage of which Brassier is a part and to understand better the sometimes cryptic political motivations of Brassier’s appeals to realism and rationality against his theoretical adversaries.
Transforming French historical epistemology
To begin with just a sketch of a complex political and intellectual career, Althusser was a theorist operating on the philosophical fringe of the French Communist Party (PCF), which dominated Marxist politics in postwar France.12 The decisive events animating Althusser’s philosophical work were Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization programme, announced in 1956, and its culmination in the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s. Althusser’s response to these events was to mount a scathing criticism of the humanist critique of Stalinism promoted by existentialist and phenomenological currents. Lenin’s motto ‘Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement’ provided the source of Althusser’s disquiet with this trend. Only by refusing the reduction of Marxist theory to humanist invocations of praxis could the PCF’s opportunist slide towards pragmatism and reformism be resisted theoretically.
On another, closely related front, Althusser’s project was lent urgency by the need to uphold the autonomy of science in the wake of the Lysenko affair.13 The disastrous application of political criteria to Soviet agricultural projects, justified by Engelsian dialectical materialism under the pretext of Stalinist-Zhadanovian proletarian science, far from compelling the abandonment of the project of Marxist science in Althusser’s estimation entailed the need for its thoroughgoing renewal. The ironical result of Althusser’s hard-line position, resisting both humanism and Stalinism, would be a remarkably heterodox synthesis of intellectual traditions. Althusser would partition Marx’s early works from the scientific analysis of his mature political economy by emphasizing the structural determinations of Marx’s scientific breakthrough (hence the temporary alliance with the anthropological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss), as well as thinking the rupture between ideology and science as an epistemological break. His main influences belonged to an historical epistemological school represented by the work of Alexandre Koyré, Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard.14 Although Althusser’s debts would be owed to all these thinkers in seemingly equal measure, the similarities between Bachelard’s notion of the ‘epistemological obstacle’ and Althusser’s ‘epistemological break’ make it the easiest concept through which to trace a line of continuity.
An important text for understanding Bachelard’s influence on Althusser is The Formation of the Scientific Mind, which employs psychoanalysis in order to diagnose the impedimenta to scientific progress. For Bachelard, inferring the ‘epistemological obstacles’ in scientific pedagogy and persisting in the minds of scientists is a matter of grasping the invariant errors of prescientific thought, a claim he illustrates by drawing on examples from a wealth of eighteenth-century scientific texts which revel in spectacle and awe at the expense of the sober elaboration of the abstract laws underpinning phenomena. The lesson Bachelard draws from this is that standing between prescientific thought and scientific thought is an ‘experience that is ostensibly concrete and real, natural and immediate present[ing] us with an obstacle’.15 In search of the science of reality as ‘the mathematical why’ entails resistance against ‘obvious and deep-seated empiricism’ because ‘nothing is given. Everything is constructed’.16 The process of science, where an initial generality about an object can be flawed in the extreme, implies ‘a very real break between sensory knowledge and scientific knowledge’.17
The conclusion Bachelard reaches flies in the face of the empiricist image of science as a method concerned with uncovering the secrets of the object, believed to be there just waiting to be discovered. In Bachelard’s words, ‘the twentieth century has seen the beginning of scientific thought against sensations … we need to construct a theory of the objective against the object’.18 Science, as befits the ideal type Bachelard finds in physics, is an enterprise concerned with the efficaciousness of conceptual innovation, taking us away from the blooming, buzzing confusion of the subjective phenomenological world. Despite the presence of psychological elements in Bachelard’s epistemology, the points below summarize it in the schematic terms in which it would be taken up in Althusser’s appropriation.
1.Discontinuity in scientific practice.
2.A strong divide between the prescientific (errors) and scientific approach (correction).
3.Science as the realm of mathematical abstraction, set against the diverse, sensuous concrete.
4.Development in science as proceeding from initial overgeneralization and proceeding with caution in the increasing particularization of analysis.
5.The objective of science distinguished from the object of scientific investigation.
In his attempt to firm up the line of demarcation with Hegelian humanism, Althusser would enrich Bachelard’s account of the discontinuity of the prescientific and the scientific with antisubjectivist, antiempiricist and antiteleological arguments. While this attempted transformation of French historical epistemology into a new Marxist dialectical materialism would be directed towards thinking Marx’s epistemological break with his youthful humanism, Althusser’s arguments would also comprise genuine interventions in the philosophy of science supporting an implicitly anticorrelationist realism.
Antisubjectivism
Althusser’s critique of the subject is generally associated with political debates concerning structure and agency in Marxist theory. But it is also of great importance for his interpretation of epistemological breaks. With Althusser’s antihumanist insistence on history as a ‘process without a subject’ there can be no recourse to the category of genius, or to the world-historical individual gifted by nature with a capacity to see what others could not.19 The problem thus posed is of ‘the relation between the events of … thought and the one but double history which was its true subject’.20 Where the famous American philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn posited moments of revelation giving rise to a new scientific paradigm, Althusser decries the vacuity of such psychological explanations.21 The passage below from Reading Capital captures well the reasons for Althusser’s resistance to subjective accounts of the origins of knowledge.
To see the invisible … we need an informed gaze, a new gaze, itself produced by a reflection of the ‘change of terrain’ on the exercise of vision … The fact that this change in terrain, which produces as its effect this metamorphosis in the gaze, was itself only produced in very specific, complex and often very dramatic conditions; that it is absolutely irreducible to the idealist myth of a mental decision to change ‘view-points’; that it brings into play a whole process that the subject’s sighting, far from producing, merely reflects in its own place; that in this process of real transformation of the means of production of knowledge, the claims of a ‘constitutive subject’ are as vain as are the claims of the subject of vision in the production of the visible.22
Althusser’s rejection of subjective experience as an account of epistemological breaks also lies behind his rejection of ‘subjective empiricism’.23 Althusser sees a Humean empiricism, in which knowledge derives from impressions tied together solely by subjective ideas, as opening the door to agnosticism about the independence of the objective world (the same concern emerges in Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of ‘correlationism’).
Antiempiricism
Althusser prosecutes empiricist epistemology through a critique of the Hegelian notion of contradiction within the real. In this conception, Althusser argues, the object is considered the source of all knowledge, and science succeeds only insofar as it extracts the essence of the object. On the empiricist account there are thus essential and inessential qualities to objects: the former falling under the purview of science, extracting it from the barriers imposed by the latter.24 This is because in order for empiricism to maintain its realist credentials knowledge has to be posited as preexisting within the internal relations between the object’s essential and inessential traits. Scientific cognition merely takes hold of the essential by way of a relation already lying within the object itself. Science does not construct its scientific object by way of creative mathematical abstractions; according to empiricist epistemology, it grasps the abstraction within the real object itself. To surmise the above using Althusser’s words: ‘for the empiricist conception of knowledge, the whole of knowledge is invested in the real, and knowledge never arises except as a relation inside its real object between the really distinct parts of that real object’.25 Consequently, ‘empiricist abstraction, which abstracts from the given real object its essence, is a real abstraction, leaving the subject in possession of the real essence’.26
Empiricism thereby falls foul of Althusser’s antisubjectivism by enjoining the metaphor of the invisible (essential) being covered up by the visible (inessential), consecrating the conception of the uniquely brilliant scientific subject who can peer through the inessential fog into the essential heart of the object. Vice versa, ‘an empiricism of the subject always corresponds to an idealism of the essence (or an empiricism of the essence to an idealism of the subject)’.27 The empiricist conception of knowledge, Althusser writes, is ‘the twin brother of the problematic of the religious vision of the essence in the transparency of existence’.28 Empiricism is represented as a philosophical (ideological) incursion in the realm of science, embroidering the mobile scientific process into a philosophical tapestry of stable objects. Althusser here repeats Bachelard. For cutting across Bachelard’s writings lies a critique of the way philosophy lags behind science: an observation undermining philosophy’s claims to provide a discourse assuring or dissuading its readers of science’s truth claims. Bachelard’s point is that seemingly innocent words like ‘object’ shared by science and philosophy compel philosophy to criticise its inhibiting drag on science.29 It follows that Althusser could be quoting Bachelard when he declares: ‘I am interested in the play on words itself.’30 For Althusser, the word ‘object’ is the rug under which empiricism’s ideological manoeuvres are swept; the word ‘real’ provides the decoy. Attributing his counter-insight to Marx and Spinoza, Althusser sets up his epistemology in opposition to empiricism when he claims that ‘the production of knowledge which is peculiar to theoretical practice constitutes a process that takes place entirely in thought’.31
Antiteleology
If it is possible to isolate the point at which Althusser transcends Bachelard unequivocally, it is his attempt to subsume these insights into a new Marxist science of history. In Resch’s incisive words, ‘Althusser forces French historical epistemology beyond the limits of its own self-understanding’.32 The problem, Althusser argues, rests with ‘the traditional concept of the history of the sciences, which today is still profoundly steeped in the ideology of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, i.e. in a teleological and therefore idealist rationalism’.33 And since for Althusser science is associated with discontinuous breaks, then Hegel’s teleological philosophy assumes the role of absolute ideology. Rescuing epistemological breaks from teleology demands their extrication from ideologies of history carried over into empiricism. Althusser recognizes in empiricism an originary mythos, whereby knowledge is excavated from the relation of real objects’ essential and inessential features. It is a ‘myth of the origin; from an original unity undivided between subject and object, between the real and its knowledge’.34 What Althusser calls an ‘idealism of the ante predicative’ throws into suspicion philosophical terminology for the production of the new. Origin, genesis and mediation – all these terms are infected by teleological ideology; and empiricist epistemology is on this basis isomorphic with humanist political ideology.
Althusser’s unsparing criticisms of subjectivism, empiricism and teleology therefore sit at the foundations of his new Marxist epistemology. They comprise the key arguments which Althusser employs to enrich Bachelard’s philosophy of scientific discontinuity and to translate it into a Marxist idiom which can map onto the critique of ideology (a critique of the prescientific). Brassier will pursue his realist project in a way only connected tangentially to Marxism, but he shares with Althusser the conviction that a philosophical defence of science is necessary to maintain a place for reason in politics. Equally so, Brassier repeats Althusser’s adoption of an epistemological orientation for distinguishing the prescientific from the scientific; hence the salience of the question of whether Althusser’s epistemology can actually distinguish the break from ideology from science. But can it support the heavy expectations placed on it? The seeds of the problem, we will see, lie in the absence of an account of knowledge of the real object in Althusser’s epistemology – a problem opening up the path to the critique of his speculative-rationalist deviation.
Epistemology without the real object?
Althusser’s work has been criticized from almost every conceivable angle. Its flirtation with structuralism has been accused of denying the creative capacities of human agency, and its defence of science has been seen as shoring up the French Communist Party and the staid hierarchies of the University system. Perhaps the most damning charge of all is that Althusser’s epistemology fails to deliver on its own terms: that it has no account of how science gains traction on the real object and only formalizes processes of ideational transformation. Below we see that this charge carries weight and that Althusser came to recognize the failings of his epistemology. At the same time, I also argue that Althusser’s excoriating self-critique of the 1970s, involving a sweeping Feyerabendian dismissal of epistemology, overgeneralizes from the specific failings of his own epistemological programme.
What ailed Althusser’s epistemological programme, leading to its disavowal by its author in such a short space of time? The rub of the matter comes down to whether Althusser’s claim that he ‘take[s] this transformation [i.e. the epistemological break] for a fact, without any claim to analyse the mechanism that unleashed it’ is a defensible proposition. Given that for Althusser the transformation from ideology to science takes place entirely in thought, the question that he would ultimately be forced to confront is how his epistemology accounts for correspondence between scientific concepts and reality. Aware of the problem of how science is supposed to refine its grasp on the real object, Althusser famously leaves the question unanswered when he writes that the ‘reader will understand that I can only claim, with the most explicit reservations, to give the arguments towards a sharpening of the question we have posed, and not an answer to it’.35 Alex Callinicos takes the consequences of this evasion to their logical conclusion: ‘if theoretical practice [for Althusser] can cognitively appropriate its real object despite the fact that it takes place completely in thought it is because thought and the real are homologous’, to which he continues, ‘to employ an asserted homology between thought and the real as the foundation for an epistemological positions, is to fall into the empiricist problematic’. The damning conclusion in Callinicos’s eyes is that ‘above all, it becomes impossible to avoid idealism’.36
In the 1966 text, ‘The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research’, Althusser conceded how his desire to combat empiricism led to him to bend the stick too far against the empirical and to foment a phoney war with sociology.37 The problem is dramatically highlighted by how Althusser earlier appraised the significance of Marx’s scientific contributions, which subtract them entirely from empirical verification. ‘No mathematician in the world’, Althusser says, ‘waits until physics has verified a theorem to declare it proved … the truth of his theorem is a hundred percent provided by criteria purely internal to the practice of mathematical proof.’ What goes for mathematics goes for Marx: ‘It has been possible to apply Marx’s theory with success because it is “true”; it is not true because it has been applied with success.’38 But if Marx’s discovery of the continent of history is a merely rational transformation of ideological philosophies of history regardless of potential empirical verification, then Marxism retreats into a hermetically self-referential rationalism (or even irrationalism).
Here analogous pitfalls in Alain Badiou’s and Quentin Meillassoux’s neo-Althusserian philosophies become apparent.39 While both thinkers operate in the realm of ontology, in theorizing order and change they repeat Althusser’s identification of science with radical discontinuity, resulting in ambiguous views on real scientific practice. In Badiou’s case, this takes the form of an axiomatic commitment to Marx’s critique of political economy which obviates the need to engage with contemporary political economy.40 At no point does Badiou deem it necessary to recommence Marx’s scientific dissection of the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation; for him, it is enough to affirm the persistent form of capitalism from Marx’s day to the present. In Meillassoux’s case, his rationalist commitments take his defence of science in an even more dubious direction. For if we were to take seriously Meillassoux’s claim to deduce the emergence of matter, life and thought as reasonless ex-nihilo events, then real scientific practice would come to a standstill.41 As Gabriel Cartren has argued perspicaciously, Meillassoux’s ontology of absolute contingency sits in stark contrast to the project of theoretical physics, concerned with uncovering the necessity of the laws governing the Universe.42 And one can equally – in fact, more damningly – extend this point to the more empirically oriented fields of chemistry, biology and neuroscience too. For all the respect for science announced by Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s ontologies, their Platonic belief in the purchase of the logicodeductive method is of a piece with Althusser’s rationalist epistemology.
Althusser’s Feyerabendian self-critique
In his 1974 ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’ Althusser expands upon his earlier critical reflections about his evasion of the empirical, which he now defines as a ‘speculative-rationalist’ deviation within Marxist theory. He presents the deviation as resulting from the identification of science with truth and ideology with error, permitting a representation of Marx’s epistemological break in entirely rationalist terms.43 Although readings of Althusser’s self-critique have tended to focus on his remarks that he left class struggle out of his earlier work, more interesting for our purposes are his intraphilosophical criticisms of his epistemology, and indeed of epistemology tout court. In this text, Althusser defines the speculative-rationalist deviation according to three features:
1.A (speculative) sketch of the theory of the difference between science (in the singular) and ideology (in the singular) in general.
2.The category of ‘theoretical practice’ (insofar as, in the existing context, it tended to reduce philosophical practice to scientific practice).
3.The (speculative) thesis of philosophy as ‘Theory of theoretical practice’ – which represented the highest point of this theoreticist tendency. 44
Divesting philosophy of its pretensions thus entails a revaluation of his earlier identification of philosophy with epistemology. A lengthy footnote to the text recounts how his ‘speculative-rationalist’ deviation was organized, as if often the case, around the manifest form of a word, whose credentials seemed beyond doubt:
Epistemology … [is] the theory of the conditions and forms of scientific practice and of its history in the different concrete sciences … [which can lead to] a speculative way, according to which Epistemology could lead us to form and develop the theory of scientific practice (in the singular) in distinction to other practices: but how did it now differ from philosophy, also defined as ‘Theory of theoretical practice’? … If epistemology is philosophy itself, their speculative unity can only reinforce theoreticism … one must give up this project, and criticize the idealism or idealist connotations of all Epistemology.45
The most significant point here is that in reifying a single category of science, inattentive to the diversity of the practices subsumed under the word, Althusser recognized that his epistemology flattened the distinctions between philosophy, theoretical practice, social science and natural science. Also important to note is how Althusser then generalizes the result of his self-critique by claiming that all epistemology inevitably transits towards idealism in seeking to provide a philosophical guarantee to scientific process (a sweeping dismissal of epistemology in keeping with Paul Feyerabend’s in Against Method).46 This scepticism explains why, after the 1968 texts Lenin and Philosophy and Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, Althusser demoted philosophy from any role in determining truth/error and ideology/science distinctions.47 From this point onwards, all that is left for Althusser to do is to wage an arbitrary philosophical battle of ideas in defence of spontaneous scientific realism – a position just presumed to be favourable to working-class struggle.48
It is my belief that Althusser went too far in his self-critique, generalizing from legitimate criticisms of his epistemology to a broader, illegitimate critique of epistemology. As well as being insufficiently argued – a knee-jerk reaction to disillusionment with his own project – Althusser’s newfound scepticism also undermined the basis for some of his most innovative social ontological concepts such as overdetermination and structural causality (ideas that would be elaborated only cryptically in Roy Bhaskar’s scientific realism).49 Still, for all the unnecessary Sturm und Drang, Althusser was correct in diagnosing his insufficient theorization of how scientific method gains empirical traction on the real object and his critique of how he reduced science to the singular. With Althusser’s story in mind we will judiciously employ elements of his self-critique when reflecting on the limits of Brassier’s Sellarsian critical epistemology over the following sections.
Brassier’s Sellarsian epistemology
Bringing the discussion forward to the present, what might Althusser’s story tell us about the recent speculative turn? Despite the lesser role of class struggle and political intrigue today, it is possible to see the debates since the Goldsmiths speculative realism workshop of 2007 as reviving elements of the theoretical conjuncture of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the rift between Graham Harman’s and Brassier’s realisms, the latter aiming for coherence with the findings of cognitive neuroscience, resuscitates old lines of demarcation concerning the legitimacy of philosophical conceptualization in the wake of developments in natural science. Here I want to focus solely on one side of this debate by providing a sympathetic yet critical assessment of Brassier’s contribution.50 My proposition is that while Brassier’s Sellarsian ‘critical epistemology-rationalist metaphysics’ nexus might be adequate to call into question the legitimacy of Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, in light of Althusser’s self-critique it may however not be adequate to defend the cognitive autonomy of science. The question, then, is whether Brassier’s adoption of Sellars’s naturalist epistemology exempts him from the problems diagnosed in Althusser’s self-critique or if it just runs into them from a different direction. In order to find answers it is first necessary to present core components of Brassier’s Sellarsian critical epistemology and to flag up continuities and discontinuities with Althusser’s epistemological programme.
To trace genealogically Brassier’s project back to its Althussersian roots would be to undertake the arduous task of following its branches threading through Meillassoux’s and Badiou’s philosophies (whom Brassier has translated and played a part in promoting in the Anglophone academy). For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that Brassier shares with Althusser an opposition to phenomenology, empiricism and pragmatist-instrumentalist conceptions of science. Most importantly, both Althusser and Brassier oppose these conceptions when theorizing the epistemic discontinuity of the prescientific with the scientific. That Brassier does not adopt the framework of French historical epistemology, but rather endorses Sellars’s account of the relationship between the scientific and manifest image, signals a commitment to naturalism that distinguishes his philosophy from Althusser’s while still remaining genealogically explicable in terms of that tradition.
Sellars’s distinction between the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ image distinguishes between our phenomenal submersion in a world of midsize objects and the scientific world of imperceptibles creating science’s novel categorical framework. However, unlike the stark discontinuity between prescientific and scientific cognition proposed by Bachelard’s philosophy of science – a discontinuity presented as a simple break between falsehood and truth – Sellars’s naturalism will demand a more subtle account of their differences. Sellars insists that the opposition of these images is not ‘that between a prescientific, uncritical, naive conception of man-in-the-world, and a reflected, disciplined, critical – in short a scientific – conception’.51 The manifest and scientific images should not be construed simplistically as a neat break between a naive, mythical understanding of the world opening up to rigorous science. Rather, in permitting valid statistical inferences within its own domain, the manifest image is in many ways ‘itself a scientific image’.52 Sellars expressly refuses to endorse a stereoscopic view of both images in which the manifest is ‘overwhelmed in the synthesis’.53 Sellars therefore leaves his discussion on an equivocal note: on the one hand, while the scientific image emerges from the manifest image it has the potential to break free of its tethers and displace it entirely; on the other, as a matter of practical necessity we will continue to rely upon the manifest image for understanding our place in the world.
Initially, Brassier’s project in Nihil Unbound was to affirm the metaphysical consequences of the scientific image against philosophy’s recalcitrant attachment to the manifest image.54 While this compels him to lend a sympathetic ear to philosophers willing to engage cutting-edge science in revising their categorical frameworks, it does not, mutatis mutandis, entail an unbridled endorsement of the eliminative materialism of the right-Sellarsian neurophilosopher Paul Churchland. Brassier finds wholly unsatisfactory Churchland’s attempt to eliminate both folk psychology and metaphysics in favour of a neurocomputational notion of vector space, supported by the pragmatic virtue of maximal explanation purchased with the greatest conceptual parsimony. That this account can be found self-contradictory and harbouring impoverished metaphysical presuppositions leads Brassier to instead suggest that the ‘goal is surely to devise a metaphysics worthy of the sciences, and here neither empiricism nor pragmatism are likely to prove adequate to the task’.55 Brassier’s speculative realism will be a ‘metaphysical radicalization of eliminativism’ defending scientific realism without supposing that scientifically informed philosophizing obviates the need for a rational metaphysics.56
If the next stage of Brassier’s project from his essay ‘Concepts and Objects’ onwards marks something of a retreat from the desire to liquidate metaphysically the manifest image (the obverse of his warming to Robert Brandom’s account of inferential rationality), Brassier’s continuing attack on antirationalism is no less fanged.57 The critical force of this work has been directed principally at Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory for its debilitation of truth-falsity distinctions and for promoting an ‘irreductionism’ rendering scientific knowledge a mere instrumentalism.58 For Brassier, this has the result of forcing Latour to lean on rhetoric and metaphor in the place of reasoned arguments addressing the ‘epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things which are not meanings’.59 Placing his reflections in a lineage running from Plato to Hegel to Sellars, Brassier’s two-fronted war against object-oriented philosophy and Actor Network Theory will stress the need for tying a knot between critical epistemology and a rationalist theory of conceptual change.60
The ‘myth of the given’ and conceptual change
Sellars’s critique of the ‘myth of the given’ is an important starting point for understanding this thematic intersection. As most famously presented in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars shows, contra empiricist epistemology, that the desire to locate foundations for knowledge in sense-datum or in an intuitive-rationalist access to objects will always run up against inconsistencies.61 Sellars insists that even objects that are putatively immediately sensed, such as triangles and colours, are conceptually mediated; there is no preconceptual knowledge or facts about things. And once empiricist and rationalist foundational safe harbours are flooded by doubt, the epistemological scrutiny of all knowledge claims becomes imperative. Relatedly, if critical epistemology is not just to involve invoking caution about access and the necessity of deferring truth claims to the normative adjudication of the epistemic community, Sellars needs to show how the scientific image emerges from the manifest without falling into Kuhnian/Feyerabendian relativism or proposing a stark Bachelardian truth/error distinction. Sellars’s theory of conceptual change navigates between these undesirable poles by providing a naturalist evolutionary account of conceptual succession covering both the development of the scientific image from the manifest image as well as developments internal to the scientific image.62
A complete exegesis of Sellars’s theory of conceptual change is impossible within the space afforded by this chapter.63 Let it suffice to note how Sellars’s theory aims to satisfy two desiderata: first, explaining how language can be acquired under the condition of conceptual holism; second, how the addition of new objects to a conceptual system does not render a system incommensurable with that which it supersedes. Sellars’s answer to this problem can be grasped intuitively as a conceptual topography where a concept can be retained even in its transportation into a new conceptual system.64 To use Sellars’s own example, he aims to show how a Euclidean triangle and a triangle in Riemannian geometry can both be said to share the same concept of triangle, even though the categorical space of the latter opens up new, previously unexplored dimensions. Proposing a solution similar to Hegel’s idea of Aufheben, Sellars writes that we must ‘distinguish between the conceptual structure to which a proposition belongs and the conceptual structure with respect to which its truth is defined’.65 That this is possible without defaulting to an instrumentalism wherein it is only our beliefs about concepts that change in a scientific revolution, or without tending towards a Platonism defending the existence of mind-independent abstracta, rests for Sellars on epistemologically interrogating the basis of concepts.
Sellars’s epistemology thus enjoins an account of how a conceptual structure can be more or less adequate to the world it maps when employing first-order, matter-of-factual statements – a process Sellars terms ‘picturing’.66 Sellars’s notion of picturing is intended to resolve the problem of how even though truth-assertability is normatively governed within a conceptual-linguistic system, a conceptual system can nonetheless refer to nonlinguistic reality as a measure of its adequacy. As a derivative of the causal relations between events and physical objects, picturing supplies nonpropositional, atomic statements comprising maps of the world, opening up the nonlinguistic world to a form of linguistic representation.67 This nonconceptual account of correspondence allows for the ‘fact that we can define a sense in which expressions in a different but related conceptual structure can be said to refer to or denote that which is denoted by expressions in our conceptual structure’.68 For Brassier, Sellars’s insight is of the utmost significance and ‘is at once dialectical and materialist’.69 It follows that Sellars’s account of theory-change and picturing furnishes the linchpin for Brassier to resolve the problem of ‘granting maximal (but not, please note, incorrigible) authority to the scientific representation of the world while acknowledging that science changes its mind about what it says there is’.70 Or, to put this in Sellars’s own words:
the importance of this analysis lies in the fact that it permits the extension of epistemic notions to conceptual items in the framework which is other than, but related to, the conceptual structure which is embedded in our language as it now stands. In other words, the connection of these epistemic notions with our current conceptual structure (which is necessarily the point of view from which we view the universe) is loosened in a way which makes meaningful the statement that our current conceptual structure is both more adequate than its predecessors and less adequate than certain of its potential successors.71
The upshot is that Sellars’s account of how we acquire representations of real causal relations allows the scientific image to escape the manifest image even though it evolves out of it. Sellars provides the means by which Brassier can square the need for a line of demarcation between the manifest and scientific images without engaging in the kind of reification of contemporary scientific knowledge that he sees in Churchland’s eliminativism. Significant in terms of Brassier’s broader genealogical context, Sellars’s notion of picturing also provides an interface between a theory of conceptual change and a theory of our access to the real object – the latter being exactly what is sorely lacking in Althusser’s epistemology.
Axiomatic or naturalist epistemology?
As we have seen, although Althusser’s epistemological programme and Brassier’s Sellarsian critical epistemology share similar aims, Brassier’s commitment to naturalism entails notable philosophical differences. In particular, Sellars’s account of conceptual change is squared with a naturalistic epistemological account of how languages are learned and translated. Sellars’s idea of theory-change maintains a nonempiricist theory of representation in the notion of picturing; and these representations can be judged more or less adequate to real objects as measured against prevailing scientific norms. Where Althusser’s demarcation of the break from ideology to science foundered on its lack of a theory of how science gains empirical traction on the real object, Sellars’s evolutionary notion of theory change is, on the contrary, connected intimately with the question of how we gain ingress on the nonlinguistic real. In this sense, Brassier’s turn to Sellars represents an improvement upon Althusser’s epistemology. For though Sellars’s naturalism addresses a number of issues that Althusser was never concerned with, it is still consistent with the core aims of Althusser’s project: namely, a refutation of empiricism, pragmatism and instrumentalist conceptions of science, all of which open up a space for phenomenology (and the likes of Latour’s Actor Network Theory) to claim cognitive equality with science. While there is much to be commended about Sellars’s naturalism, a question remains however as to what extent it matches up to the real practice of science. The scientific ontology proposed by philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar, will show why there are reasons to doubt if this is the case.
Bhaskar’s scientific ontology
Given their affinities, it is odd that Bhaskar’s transcendental realism has rarely been compared to Sellars’s. Perplexing too is the fact that Brassier has not seen fit to engage Bhaskar’s realist oeuvre when considering their many shared commitments. Bhaskar is perhaps the leading realist figure occupying the space between the decline of Althusser’s project in the 1970s and the rise of speculative realism in the late 2000s; and he is responsible for founding the school of critical realism counting among its number famous theorists such as Tony Lawson, Margaret Archer and Andrew Collier.72 Taking inspiration from both Althusser’s epistemological programme of the mid-1960s and his post-’68 rejection of epistemology, Bhaskar’s philosophy is animated by the desire to defend scientific realism against empiricist epistemology and pragmatist instrumentalism.73 Thus, Bhaskar’s philosophy marks a point of intersection between Althusser’s and Brassier’s projects – and this essay will conclude with some brief remarks aiming to encourage their future encounter. In seeing how Bhaskar’s scientific ontology addresses two problems identified by Althusser’s self-critique – his lack of an account of how science gains traction on the real object and the reduction of science to the singular – the aim is to raise questions about the adequacy of Brassier’s Sellarsianism for defending the cognitive autonomy of science. Of course, it might be rightly said that Sellars and Bhaskar count more as allies within the realist camp than they do as rivals. The point of concluding this essay by contrasting Bhaskar’s ontology with Brassier’s Sellarsian critical epistemology therefore lies in a spirit of provocation, hoping to open up new lines of dialogue between these approaches.
Bhaskar’s critique of epistemology
In his most famous texts, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, Bhaskar presents philosophy’s underlabouring role as that of defending an ontology adequate to real scientific practice.74 Pivotal to this endeavour is Bhaskar’s argument against what he calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’: that is, the severing of questions about knowledge from questions about being, resulting in an anthropocentric philosophy of science out of step with its real practice. Throughout his work Bhaskar’s main targets are positivism and empiricist epistemology, neither of which accusations can be levelled against Sellars. But Bhaskar also offers a more general argument against epistemology’s tendency to render the philosophy of science a mere subset of the theory of knowledge. Bhaskar provides a programmatic statement of why philosophy should not neglect scientific ontology:
Philosophers, including philosophers of science, have for too long regarded the philosophy of science as a simple substitution instance of some more general theory of knowledge … If, however, we reverse the customary procedure and substitute the more specific ‘science’ (or even better ‘sciences’) for ‘knowledge’ considerable illumination of many traditional epistemological problems can, I think, be achieved.75
The resonances between Bhaskar’s position and Althusser’s self-critique are plain to see. Not only does Bhaskar see philosophy’s vocation as supporting the practice of science – a position in keeping with Althusser’s Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists – but he also sees this move as being necessary for the demarcation of the specific sciences. In so doing, Bhaskar provides a compelling response to two of the greatest flaws Althusser identified with his epistemology in his self-critique: the lack of an account of how we gain knowledge of the ‘real object’, and the presentation of science in the singular.
The centre of Bhaskar’s case for the necessity of a scientific ontology of invariant generative mechanisms and striated structures lies in his contention that without it the scientific experimental method would be unintelligible. In Bhaskar’s words, the transcendental deduction is that ‘given that science does or could occur, the world must be a certain way’.76 Since experiments involve creating a closed system where findings are repeatable, for Bhaskar scientific practice has to assume that it is hunting generative mechanisms impeded by countervailing tendencies in the open systems of the nonexperimental domain. The upshot for Bhaskar is that we must reject the notion of causal laws grounded in Humean event regularities. In isolating generative mechanisms in a closed experimental setting, scientists evidence their conviction that generative mechanisms must continue to be operative in the open, nonexperimental domain where they only rarely contribute to event regularities. Otherwise, it would be unclear as to why science would need the experimental method in the first place. Bhaskar concludes that when causal laws are conceived as event regularities, à la Hume, this misses the actual purpose of, and methodological approaches taken by, real scientific practice. The idea of a causal law as tracking event regularities is for Bhaskar a philosophical illusion promoted by positivism and empiricist epistemology.
The limits of Sellarsian realism
In that Sellars is one of the great critics of empiricism, he obviously escapes the full brunt of Bhaskar’s critique. Indeed, Bhaskar admits that in maintaining scientific realism, ‘Sellars [is] nearer the position characterized here as transcendental realist’.77 Nevertheless, it should be noted that Sellars’s notion of picturing seems to remain beholden to a notion of science as the generalization of Humean event regularities. So, Sellars’s attempt to understand scientific realism within the remit of a more general theory of knowledge falls squarely in the line of sight of Bhaskar’s critique. In Sellars’s notion of picturing, providing an account of how we represent the nonlinguistic real through mapping causal relations nonpropositionally, we seem to be back to something incommensurate with the experimental method. Bhaskar’s scientific ontology therefore represents a serious problem with employing critical epistemology in the defending science – a problem which to my knowledge has not been addressed by its advocates, Brassier included.
The second major problem identified by Althusser’s self-critique and insufficiently addressed by Brassier’s critical epistemology is the reduction of science to the singular. One of the great virtues of Bhaskar’s scientific ontology is that though monist, traversing both the natural and social scientific domains, it allows for the transcendental deduction of the specificity of the social science and, consequently, informs the application of social scientific research methods.78 For Bhaskar, conceiving the social as an open system allows for a social ontology with emergent properties and causally determinant structures. It opens up a gateway to rich theoretical debates about the causal powers of social structure interlacing with classical sociological debates on structure and agency, and synchronic and diachronic causation.79 What is more, the critical realist school Bhaskar founded has taken these ontological insights and used them as a guide for conducting productive social scientific studies underwritten by a conviction in the efficaciousness of knowledge in transformative social practice.80
Lack of attention to the specificity of social science (or to the social practices of scientists) is a significant weakness of any self-proclaimed realism. Yet, like Sellars, Brassier has little to say about social science. Indeed, Brassier tends to assume that Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism can be transferred to the human sciences relatively unproblematically. For instance, as noted, Brassier laments ‘correlationism’s status as the regnant intellectual orthodoxy throughout the humanities and the social sciences’.81 Or consider the moments when Brassier announces an Althusserian calling for philosophy: ‘philosophy intersects with politics at the point where critical epistemology transects ideology critique.’82 Despite repeated intimations that his project interfaces with social theory, nowhere however does Brassier actually attempt to grapple with the unique properties of the social from a realist perspective: its reflexivity and emergent structures. Nor does Brassier attempt to explain how critical epistemology constitutes ideology critique in light of sophisticated debates on the nature of political ideology.83
Brassier’s curiously insubstantial interaction with social theory is all the more strange when one considers that his principal target, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, has never really claimed to be a philosophy of science as such. From the 1990s onwards, Latour’s main contribution has been to elaborate a new social ontology in which the question of how scientific facts are constructed is subsumed into a theoretical endeavour exploring how the social in its broadest sense is assembled. To continue to focus solely on the status of natural scientific realism in Latour’s work is therefore just to repeat the dismissal of Latour’s contributions by professional philosophers of science since the 1980s. If Brassier’s aim to is to mount a defence of realism capable of engaging Latour on the multiple fronts on which Actor Network Theory operates, then he will need to do more than just continue to pick at Latour’s antirealism about natural scientific objects; Brassier will also have to make explicit his own position on how and in what sense one can also be a realist about social scientific objects. Of course, it may be objected that it is churlish to accuse Brassier of neglecting to also elaborate a social scientific realism when his core concerns lie in exploring naturalism and rationalism at the most universal level (that is, with respect to natural science). Yet from the perspective of Bhaskar’s transcendental realism, Brassier’s insensitivity to the specificity of social ontology follows with necessity from his adherence to critical epistemology, taking us back to reasons why Althusser’s project ran aground in the 1970s. In light of Bhaskar’s scientific ontology, then, Althusser’s critique of his speculative-rationalist deviation continues to pose a series of salient problems which epistemological realisms would be well advised to confront.
Conclusion
The point of this chapter’s entwining of realisms across the twentieth century – from Bachelard to Althusser, from Sellars to Brassier, from Althusser to Bhaskar – is to highlight their shared support for science’s cognitive autonomy against phenomenology and empiricism (today represented by the duumvirate of Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and Latour’s actor-network theory). Although the motivations for Althusser’s epistemological programme of the 1960s were Marxist in orientation, defending the need for theory in political practice, this chapter showed that echoes of this spirit live on in Brassier’s realist project. Insofar as Brassier has embarked upon a full-frontal assault on Latour’s Actor Network Theory, and has associated himself with the accelerationist current’s promotion of rationalism and Prometheanism, it is not hard to see his assault on the French neoliberal’s sophism as a continuation of politics by other means.84 The elucidation of the genealogical thread which ties together Althusser, Brassier and Bhaskar was therefore written with further partnership in mind. It pointed to ways in which these thinkers can inform new theorization about how philosophy can support science against philosophical transgressions running counter to its spirit.
To make the case for a genealogical thread running through the work of Althusser, Brassier and Bhaskar, three arguments were introduced corresponding to the thinkers in question. First, Althusser’s self-critique highlighted the need for epistemology to provide an account of how science gains traction on the real-object and why we should avoid speaking of science in the singular. Second, Brassier’s Sellarsian critical epistemology was shown to provide a more subtle take on how the scientific image can break free of the manifest image. I argued that Sellars’s naturalist commitment to ensuring a theory of conceptual change is commensurate with an account for how we acquire language, marking an improvement on Althusser’s arbitrary demarcation of the break from ideology to science. Third, Bhaskar’s scientific ontology was shown to respond effectively to the problems articulated by Althusser’s self-critique. Not only does Bhaskar provide a convincing account of why scientific method gains traction on the real object; his ontology also supports the heterogeneity of the sciences. Thus, we concluded, Bhaskar’s ontology suggests limits to Sellars’s critical epistemology. From a Bhaskarian perspective, Sellars’s notion of picturing, which is a concomitant of Sellars’s reduction of scientific method to a more general theory of knowledge, seems out of step with science’s experimental method.
However, the aim of this chapter was expressly not to put forward an argument against Brassier’s Sellarsian critical epistemology so as to simply lay the groundwork for endorsing Bhaskar’s scientific ontology. Instead, it was to invite a dialogue between these approaches which has so far remained silent. I agree with the epistemological pitfalls identified by Althusser’s self-critique, but see merits in both Sellars’s naturalism and Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. The aim here, then, is to make the suggestion that it would be highly constructive if Brassier were to engage Bhaskar’s work in the future. After all, Bhaskar’s school of critical realism has done the most to maintain realism within the philosophy of natural and human sciences over the past forty years. The speculative turn need not reinvent the realist wheel. Therein, I hope, lies the value of this genealogy.
1.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).
2.G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1969).
3.Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations – Second Edition, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 168.
4.V. I. Lenin, ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy’, in Clemens Dutt (ed.), V. I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 14, trans. Abraham Fineberg (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1962), pp. 13–358; Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008).
5.For a sophisticated and underappreciated critique of Hegel, see Galvano della Volpe, Logic as a Positive Science, trans. John Rothschild (London: NLB, 1980).
6.By the ‘cognitive autonomy’ of science I do not mean autonomy from the social conditions of knowledge production, about which the field of science and technology studies has left us with no illusions. Rather, the word ‘autonomy’ here signals the intellectual autonomy of scientific practice from philosophy in the Bachelardian sense – science does not need philosophy and philosophy’s engagement with science acts as a fetter on science’s development when it is taken too seriously.
7.Daniel Sacliotto, ‘Realism and Representation: On the Ontological Turn’, Speculations IV (2013): 59.
8.Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, in Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1963), pp. 1–40.
9.Ray Brassier, ‘Concepts and Objects’, in Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), p. 49.
10.Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
11.As a reformulation of dialectical materialism, Althusser’s epistemological theories are situated in a discourse alien to most philosophers of science. Add to this Althusser’s engagement with French historical epistemology – circling theoretical loci foreign to a field dominated by the names of Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos – and his seemingly traceless contribution is not surprising. Unusual indeed is a book like A. F. Chalmers’s What Is This Thing Called Science? (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976) which discusses Althusser’s theories – and even here Althusser is consigned to the end of the book as just a ‘radical critic’. Regarding the broader split in schools of historical epistemology, Dominique Lecourt observes that ‘The New Scientific Mind, Gaston Bachelard’s first great work, was published in 1934, the same year in which Karl Popper’s famous book The Logic of Scientific Discovery appeared in Vienna. During the subsequent thirty years the works of the one and the other have been developed, enriched, corrected and broadcast without it ever being possible to register either the beginnings of a confrontation or a sign of any emulation between them.’ See Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1975), p. 9.
12.For the best account of Althusser’s intellectual and political trajectory, see Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (London: Verso, 1987).
13.For a full account of the Lysenko affair, see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter three.
14.See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957); Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone Books, 1991 [original French publication: 1966]); Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary MacAllester (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002 [original French publication: 1938]).
15.Bachelard, Scientific Mind, p. 18.
16.Ibid., pp. 17, 39, 25.
17.Ibid., p. 237.
18.Ibid., p. 248.
19.Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 81.
20.Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2006 [original French publication: 1965]). p. 71.
21.Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Third Edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996 [original publication: 1962]), pp. 122–3.
22.Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009), p. 28.
23.Joel Reed, ‘Althusser and Hume’, in Stephen H. Daniel (ed.), Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 213.
24.Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 36–40.
25.Althusser, For Marx, p. 41.
26.Ibid., p. 38.
27.Ibid., p. 228.
28.Ibid., p. 40.
29.See Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology, p. 53.
30.Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 42.
31.Ibid., p. 45.
32.Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 181.
33.Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 47.
34.Ibid., p. 68.
35.Ibid., p. 56.
36.Alex Callinicos, Althusser’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1996), pp. 76–7.
37.Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 1–18. The text referred to here was written in 1966.
38.Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 64.
39.The genealogical continuities between Althusser, Badiou and Meillassoux are elaborated in Nathan Coombs, History and Event: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Part II.
40.See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).
41.Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Excerpts from L’inexistence Divine’, trans. Graham Harman, in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 175–238.
42.Gabriel Catren, ‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish the Copernican Revolution’, in Damian Veal (ed.), Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), pp. 455–502.
43.Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Locke (London: NLB, 1976), p. 106.
44.Ibid., pp. 123–4.
45.Ibid., p. 124.
46.Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, Third Edition (London: Verso, 1993).
47.Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy; and Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso Books, 2011).
48.Jacques Rancière objects pointedly to this assumption. He alleges that Althusserian philosophy was used as a discourse to reassert order in the universities after the 1968 student revolts. For Rancière, Althusser accords science neutrality only because for him ‘class struggle is not already there, for example, in the social function of the scientific institution and its concomitant modes of selection … in the double relationship scientific activity entertains with power and with the masses. All of this is replaced by a class struggle conceived through the opposition between a materialist element originating in science and an idealist element intrinsic to it’ (Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista [London: Continuum, 2011], p. 63). Gregory Elliott also demurs: ‘The imputation of a spontaneous materialism to the proletariat integral to the “representative” function of Marxist philosophy is at best implausible’ (Althusser, p. 188).
49.See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1975).
50.The foundational text of Harman’s philosophy is Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002). In this essay I focus on Brassier’s work in recognition of Peter Wolfendale’s penetrating critique of Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and because of my own concerns about the repercussions of Harman’s philosophy throughout the humanities. See Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014). Although Harman has been careful to distinguish his realism from materialism, interpreting the latter as reducing objects to their smallest atomic components and denying reality to composites, his philosophy has emboldened some political thinkers to stake a claim to the term by way of phenomenology. Foremost among this tendency are the ‘new materialists’: see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). As catalogued by Nathan Brown in his review of Timothy Morton’s Realist Magic, the result of such thinkers’ abandonment of prudence in their engagement with science is a litany of nonsensical statements browbeating the reader unfamiliar with the primary scientific material: see Nathan Brown, ‘The Nadir of OOO: From Graham Harman to Timothy Morton’s Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities Press, 2013)’, Parrhesia 17 (2013): 62–71.
51.Sellars, ‘Scientific Image’, p. 6.
52.Ibid., p. 7.
53.Ibid., p. 9.
54.Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
55.Ibid., p. 25.
56.Ibid., p. 31.
57.The key work is Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
58.Brassier, ‘Concepts and Objects’.
59.Ray Brassier, ‘That Which Is Not: Philosophy as Entwinement of Truth and Negativity’, Stasis Journal 1 (2013): 182.
60.I must caution that Brassier is not entirely clear about what he takes from Sellars. Consequently, my reading of Brassier’s Sellarsianism is a somewhat speculative reconstruction. I also do not take account of Brassier’s arguments drawing on the work of Robert Brandom. These are the inevitable drawbacks of attempting to capture a philosopher’s ideas in motion before they have been systematized, as is promised by Brassier’s forthcoming book(s).
61.Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
62.Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Conceptual Change’, in Essays in Philosophy and Its History (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), pp. 172–88. See also Harold I. Brown, ‘Sellars, Concepts and Conceptual Change’, Synthese 68 (1986): 275–307.
63.For a systematic presentation of Sellars’s philosophy of science that puts it into dialogue with Kuhn and Feyerabend, see Joseph C. Pitt, Pictures, Images, and Conceptual Change: An Analysis of Wilfrid Sellars’ Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981).
64.Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 133–9.
65.Ibid., p. 134.
66.Steven M. Levine, ‘The Place of Picturing in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision’, The Philosophical Forum (2007): 247–69.
67.Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 137.
68.Ibid., p. 138.
69.Ray Brassier, ‘Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism: Sellars’s Critical Ontology’, in Bana Bashour and Hans D. Muller (eds), Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 102.
70.Brassier, ‘Concepts and Objects’, p. 64.
71.Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 138.
72.For a welcome encounter between speculative and critical realism, see the following exchange: Fabio Gironi, ‘A New Realist Landscape’, Journal of Critical Realism 11(3) (October 2012): 361–87; Alison Assiter, ‘Speculative and Critical Realism’, Journal of Critical Realism 12(3) (July 2013): 283–300.
73.Roy Bhaskar, ‘Feyerabend and Bachelard: Two Philosophies of Science’, New Left Review I(94) (December 1975): 55; Michael Sprinker, ‘The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science’, New Left Review I(191) (February 1992): 122–44.
74.Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, Third Edition (London: Routledge, 1998).
75.Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, p. 10.
76.Ibid., p. 29.
77.Ibid., p. 26.
78.Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, chapter two.
79.See Dave Elder-Vass, The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
80.For examples of how complexity theory and critical realism have contributed to empirical studies, see David Byrne and Gillian Callaghan, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art (London: Routledge, 2013).
81.Brassier, ‘Concepts and Objects’, p. 59.
82.Ibid., p. 54.
83.See Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
84.See Ray Brassier, ‘On Prometheanism and its Critics’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (eds), #accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), pp. 467–88.