The insider's guide through the difficult terrain of Laruelle’s most complete development of non-philosophy from one of Laruelle's translators
Anthony Paul Smith provides an introduction and guide to Principles of Non-Philosophy that situates you amongst the figures and concepts Laruelle engaged with, giving you a foothold to understanding and, more importantly, use non-philosophy.
Show more
François Laruelle has been engaged in one of the most daring projects in contemporary philosophy, aiming to overturn the standard form of philosophy and renew its practice again. However, he grew dissatisfied with the purely critical form of his work as it seemed to simply subordinate philosophy to science and so simply reversed the old hierarchy.
In Principles of Non-Philosophy Laruelle develops the concepts and method of a more democratic form of thought where neither science nor philosophy is subjected to one another, but brought together in a more productive theoretical and practical relationship. While the potential importance of this project is clear, Laruelle remains famously difficult.
Key Features
Provides you with the essential historical background to non-philosophy, which Laruelle leaves out of his writing
Explains how non-philosophy contributes to contemporary debates in European philosophy, especially in relation to the philosophy of science, theories of the subject and the role of translation in philosophy
Shows you how to use non-philosophy as a research paradigm for interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work
Chapter-by-Chapter Guide
Chapter 1 explores the history of Laruelle’s non-philosophy with special attention to the relationship between science and philosophy, alongside of glosses on the important concepts of ‘the One’ and ‘radical immanence’
Chapter 2 looks at Laruelle’s conception of a ‘unified theory of philosophy and science’ in dialogue with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the metamathematics of Kurt Gödel
Chapter 3: provides the historical background for Laruelle’s conception of the ‘force-(of)-thought’
Chapter 4 does the same for ‘determination-in-the-last-instance’ and also sketches a schematism of his conception of the One in dialogue with Fichte’s Science of Knowing
Chapter 5 turns to the method of dualysis and explores the way it functions. This is carried out by surveying three instances of dualysis:1) Being and Alterity or Otherness (with reference to the Greek and Jewish shape of contemporary European philosophy)2) Reason and mythology (with reference to the notion of universality in philosophy) 3) Life and death (with reference to the concept of the ‘lived’ in non-philosophy)
Chapter 6 presents a reading of non-philosophy’s place on the contemporary philosophical landscape. While I accept that the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy is largely artificial and intellectually untenable, the two terms are operative within academic philosophy and establish boundaries, however fuzzy, for certain concerns and concepts. Here we see how Laruelle takes up these concerns and concepts in a post-Continental form, before turning to look at some specific post-Kantian themes that are mutated and recast by non-philosophy.
AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: A Constellation, Not a Mirror – The Form of a Non-Philosophical Readers’ Guide1. Situating Principles of Non-Philosophy: Introductory Concepts and First Names2. On a Democracy Within Thought: Science and Philosophy as Citizens3. The Subject is Not a Thinking Thing But the Force-(of)-Thought4. Unilateral Causality and the Pragmatic Theory of Philosophy5. Dualysis: Or, How To Do Things With Philosophy6. The Stranger, Nowhere at Home: Non-Philosophy and the Philosophical SceneNotesBibliographyIndex
Francois Laruelle is one of the most radical and challenging of contemporary thinkers. In this book, Anthony Paul Smith provides a road map to Laruelle, guiding us through the rough terrain of the French thinker's "non-philosophy." There are many surprising prospects to be encountered here, as well as the sense of wonder that comes from seeing familiar ideas in an entirely new light.
Anthony Paul Smith is Assistant Professor in Religion at La Salle University. He is the translator of Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy and co-translator of Principles of Non-Philosophy, both by François Laruelle, and co-editor of After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion.
