One Physicist’s reading of Meillasoux’s “After Finitude”

I recently finished reading Quentin Meillassoux’s 2008 book “After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency”. I was coaxed by my good friend, a former grad school philosophy student into studying it page by page with him. In this book, Meillassoux offers a universe where anything can happen for no reason. Yet through a clever train of logic he renders it stable enough for human thought to emerge. This book is part of a new wave of philosophical thought that started at the beginning of the 21st century known as speculative realism. Meillassoux along with philosophers Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant form the most well-known philosophers in this group, though Brassier the purported coiner of the moniker has disputed the existence of any such philosophical movement.

Meillassoux’s version of Speculative Realism or what he calls Speculative Materialism, takes aim at the perceived philosophical dead end of what he terms “correlationism” and a willingness to engage with questions about things “as they are” not mediated by human thought or observation. Meillassoux begins by critiquing “correlationism”. He defines it as the supposition that we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being and never to either term apart from the other. The belief that we cannot say anything about the real things in the…