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متافیزیک و گمانه‌سازی جهان‌های برون‌علم

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فلسفه‌ی اروپایی یا به‌عبارت دقیق‌تر قاره‌ای از کانت به این‌سو پیچ‌و‌خم‌های بسیاری را از سر گذرانده است. فلسفه‌ی قاره‌ای با هر جهش به‌سوی آینده همواره به ریشه‌های متکثر و چندگانه‌اش رجوع می‌کند تا بتواند تاریخش را از نو مورد بازبینی و بازخوانی قرار دهد.کانتن میاسو در زمره‌ی نسل نوجو و خط‌شکنی است که می‌کوشد نسبت و درک رادیکالی از دو حوزه‌ی فلسفه و علم را تولید کند و وجوه افتراق و اشتراکشان را بار دیگر بسنجد. میاسو متعلق به نسلی از فیلسوفان پس از ‌بدیو‌ست که در پی تدارک سنخی فلسفه‌ی علم قاره‌ای بوده و هستند. این کتاب یک بیانیه یا مانیفست فلسفی درباره‌ی هستی یا وجود در خارج از قلمرو فهم فلسفی است و به‌عبارتی به ریشه‌های علمی‌تخیلی فلسفه‌های وجود می‌پردازد و می‌خواهد جهان‌ها و هستی‌هایی را درک کند که از قلمرو فلسفه گریخته‌اند.

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2013

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297 people want to read

About the author

Quentin Meillassoux

17 books114 followers
Quentin Meillassoux is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux.

Meillassoux is a former student of the philosophers Bernard Bourgeois and Alain Badiou. Badiou, who wrote the foreword for Meillassoux's first book After Finitude (Après la finitude, 2006), describes the work as introducing an entirely new option into modern philosophy, one that differs from Immanuel Kant's three alternatives of criticism, skepticism, and dogmatism. The book was translated into English by philosopher Ray Brassier. Meillassoux is associated with the speculative realism movement.

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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
Profile Image for J. Moufawad-Paul.
Author 18 books295 followers
August 2, 2016
I quite liked the premise of this book but, as a previous reviewer here has pointed out, its limitations are revealed by Meillassoux's ignorance of SFF literature. (Maybe this is because the person he used to find examples of his theory of "Extro-Science Fiction" [XSF], Tristan Garcia, is also woefully unread in genre fiction.) The fact that Meillassoux argues that this new literary genre of XSF hasn't fully emerged, when entire examples of what he's looking for already exist (better examples than the ones he has chosen) in the conjunction between Science Fiction and Fantasy (the sub genre of the "New Weird" for example is filled with examples) that has blossomed of late, or in what is called "slipstream", is a serious weakness.

To cite just example, he uses Robert Charles Wilson's *Darwinia* as a possible example of what he calls Type-1 XSF ("introducing a single break, a unique physical catastrophe that would plunge the protagonists, overnight, into a world in which an inexplicable phenomena is massively produced") is in fact rather pedestrian and derivative. A far better example, which would not be pulled back into what Meillassoux thinks of as the proper boundaries of SF, would be Vandermeer's *Southern Reach Trilogy*. Hell, we could go back to The Strugatsky Brothers' *A Roadside Picnic* or, closer to Vandermeer, M. John Harrison's *Nova Swing*.

Point being, the field of speculative fiction has been dominated by these breaks from the Asimov type of science fiction from the New Wave onwards and it is completely bizarre that, lodged within the SFF genre, there have been countless examples of what Meillassoux wants to describe as something "new" which really isn't that new. The fact that he conflates "fantasy" with "heroic fantasy" or Carroll-esque absurdity also demonstrates he knows nothing about that aspect of the genre and its multiple, strange intersections with SF that would completely fit the boundaries he wants to call XSF? Valente's Prester John or Orphan Tales books spring to mind, as do Sriduangkaew's *Hegemony* short stories.

While I agree that a literary genre that oversteps traditional SF and concerns a world "in principle inaccessible to a scientific knowledge so that it cannot be established as the object of a natural science" [this is his definition of XSF] is philosophically interesting and possesses much potential, I think it has already been built, though not conceived as a specific sub genre but as multiple ones with other names, and its foundations were laid a long time ago and expanded upon since then. He (or the person he got to find him examples) should probably do far more investigation before making pronouncements that demonstrate to any SFF critic that they are woefully under read.
Profile Image for Simona B.
928 reviews3,151 followers
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February 6, 2023
For once I find myself in agreement with the majority (as seen here on GR) in thinking that this brief monograph exceedingly suffers from Meillassoux's poor familiarity with SF. And not just with the actual texts and fictions that exist in the SF genre, but also and especially with what SF is in potentia--with what, that is, you could call the theory of SF, its critical history and contemporary criticism.

I also understand that much of the philosophical groundwork that underpins Meillassoux's theory of "extro-science fiction" was laid out in his previous work After Finitude, which I haven't read. I don't have a background in philosophy either, strictly speaking, although you do have to learn how to read that when you work in the humanities. This is to contextualize my position when I say that I found some of Meillassoux's premises and lines of reasoning a bit shaky, sophistic, and/or artfully manipulated so as to suit Meillassoux's argument. For example, he alternatively identifies "Hume's problem" as "the problem of induction" or as "the potential changeability of natural processes," thus incurring in that same slippage between epistemology and ontology of which he accuses Popper. Moreover, induction itself has been theorized as a logical operation capable of blurring the line of demarcation between epistemology and ontology (for example by Eco), which would have constituted an interesting expansion of Meillassoux's study not only on a theoretical level, but also in its application to fiction (which is supposedly the point of the pamphlet).

All in all, a rather disappointing read.
Profile Image for Gala.
480 reviews1 follower
April 29, 2022
Buenísimo, un montón de ideas nuevas sobre la ciencia ficción que nunca había pensado. Ahora quiero leer el otro libro de él, Después de la finitud.
547 reviews68 followers
January 10, 2016
The full text of a lecture by Meillassoux presented at a conference in 2006, paired with the Isaac Asimov short story "The Billiard Ball", which he discusses.

In this short work Meillassoux is concerned to draw a distinction between 2 forms of "science fiction" - the stuff that stays within the precincts of accepted science, and a further category of "extro-science fiction", which considers worlds in which science is impossible. The interest of this distinction is that the latter would be illustrative of the kind of lawless universe posited in the metaphysics of his book "After Finitude", one of the foundational texts of the "speculative realist" movement in current philosophy. Much of the argument of that book is simply assumed here, though he does recap his differences with Kant and Popper.

I've already reviewed "After Finitude", so you can see what I think of philosophical position. On the lit crit questions posed here, he doesn't seem to be very attentive to actual SF: "hard SF" is a pretty narrrow sub-genre, and mainstream SF simply operates with genre conventions and cliches that seem "sciencey" or quasi-physicalistic due to their familiarity, not because of any distinct ontological commitments. The boundaries with "horror" (not mentioned here, though Graham Harman has written a book about Lovecraft's fiction viewed from a SR perspective) and "fantasy" (very briefly mentioned and set aside) are blurrier than Quentin assumes. He does admit himself that the Asimov story isn't really an example.

More positively, he does name one example: "Ravage" by Rene Barjeval, which surprisingly hasn't had an English edition. This is a tale of a world in which electricity suddenly stops working, which turns into a fable about the triumph of French anti-modernism and conservatism (it was written during the Vichy years). I think there is a Vladimir Nabokov story (in "Nabokov's Dozen") that plays with a similar idea, or at least a world in which "we found out what electricity truly is", if I remember it rightly.

What I want now is for Quentin to step up and finally do the job of writing the definitive fictional treatment of The Philadelphia Experiment, since he has the vision for it. Alternatively, he could try reading any Anglophone philosophy written in the past 40 years, as like all the Speculative Realists he seems a bit under-informed about what has been written about laws and induction and modality, and could greatly benefit from it.
Profile Image for rokas.
8 reviews18 followers
May 18, 2023
French man destroys falsificationism and the transcendental deduction of the objective categories with a single billiard ball using this one small trick...
Profile Image for Anson MacKeracher.
25 reviews4 followers
October 13, 2015
Pretty cute little book. Not sure I agree with the conclusions but it generated a lot of discussion around the dinner table. Makes you wonder... are we living in an extro-science universe ourselves and just don't know it? Could we ever actually know for sure?
Profile Image for Nawak.
19 reviews1 follower
February 2, 2025
Tiene conceptos novedosos que sin duda voy a agregar a mi vocabulario común, pero me parece que es demasiado desarrollo para una conclusión tan pobre.

(Del cuento de Asimov adjunto nada que decir)
Profile Image for Deniz.
Author 7 books96 followers
June 13, 2020
Zihinsel olarak hayat kendini bilim olmadan deneyimler ve bu mühim ayrılma kendine ya da bilime dair daha önce hiç gerçekleşmemiş bir keşfi mümkün kılabilir. Boğulma noktasına kadar itilmiş bir eidetik varyasyon; deneyimlenemez bir dünyada kendini deneyimlemek. Kırılgan bir yoğunluk, kelimelerin olmadığı bir varoluşun hakikatinin keşfedildiği, enkazdan ibaret bir çevrenin içinde kendi saf tekliğine sonsuzca dalacaktır.


Bilim olmayan deneyimler üzerine okumalara devam etmek isteyenlere önerim Georges Bataille'dan İç Deney olacak.
961 reviews19 followers
February 12, 2025
Quentin Meillassoux lays out his concept of extro-science fiction. Science fiction can be designed as a genre that introduces a departure from our world that can be articulated through the principles of science (basically, the novum, as sci fi scholar Dark Suvin puts it). And one of the fundamental principles of science is that a given concept or feature can be proved scientifically, through experimental means. Extro-science fiction, then, is fiction where experimental science as a concept or principle exists, but conducting experimental science is impossible. Essentially, the idea of a universe made through the laws of science is known and accepted, but within the story, those laws aren't just suspended, but fundamentally fail to hold. It's an interesting idea, and Meillassoux does a really impressive job of explaining this nonintuitive concept in an approachable, reasonable manner.

However, I have two basic issues with the book. First, I'm not totally convinced on the necessity or the value of this newly coined genre, as anything beyond a thought experiment. A world where scientific experiment is for some reason impossible as a foundation for knowledge is a world that it's kind of hard to tell compelling stories about. That's an interesting thing too; to what degree are the rules for making a narrative co-concurrent with the understanding of a scientifically consistent world? But that's not totally something Meillassoux is interested in, at least not here. Second, even if you do find this approach really interesting, it's hard to make the case that this is a book worth its price tag. About half the book is a reprinting of one of the texts Meillassoux references, the 1966 Asimov short story "The Billiard Ball." That means there's about 50-60 pages of actual argument here, which is about an extended chapter's worth of actual content. I like "The Billiard Ball," but at the end of the day, it's a50+ year old sci fi short story, and doesn't add a lot to the overall value proposition here.

It's a good, well-argued argument, and well translated too. But it more left me with a desire to read his other book, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, than appreciation for the book I just read.
(EDIT: Also, I have a lot of sympathy with the argument that comes up in a lot of the other reviews, that Weird Fiction and other speculative fiction addresses a lot of Meillassoux's proposed genre here. You can make a little distinction that these stories don't fully count as the same because they're set in worlds where the scientific principles still hold in some form, or never held, but that feels like quibbling.)
Profile Image for Biggus Dickkus.
70 reviews11 followers
January 1, 2022
ဒီစာအုပ်ဖတ်တော့ ရစ်ချတ်ဒေါ့ကင် က ကာ့ဖ်ကာ ရဲ့ metamorphosis ကို "bad sci-fi" ဆိုပြီး မှတ်ချက်ပေးတာကို သတိရမိတယ်။ဒါက ဘာကို ပြနေသလဲ ဆိုတော့ science ရဲ့ dogmatic ဖြစ်မှုနဲ့ ယနေ့ခေတ်ကာလမှာ science ဆိုတာဟာ ဘာသာရေး(religion)တစ်ခုလို ဖြစ်လာနေပြီဆိုတဲ့ အချက်ဘဲ
ဟိုက်ဒေးဂါး နဲ့ ဗုဒ္ဓရဟန်းတစ်ပါးအင်တာဗျူးမှာ ဥူးဇင်းက "ကွန်မြူမစ်တွေမှာ ဘာသာတရား ရှိသလား?"ဆိုပြီးမေးတော့ ဟိုက်ဒေးဂါးက "သိပ်ရှိတာပေါ့ သိပ္ပံပညာက ကွန်မြူနစ်တွေရဲ့ ဘာသာတရားဘဲ" လို့ ဖြေခဲ့တယ်
စာအုပ်ရဲ့ main theme ကတော့ ဒေးဗစ်ဟျုမ်းရဲ့ imaginary billiard ball game နဲ့ အေစီမော့ရဲ့ ဘိလ်ယက်ဘော sci-fi ဝတ္ထုတို အပေါ်မှာအခြေခံထားတယ်
အစဉ်အလာ sci-fiတွေက scienceရဲ့ တိကျသေချာမှု တွက်ချက်နိုင်မှု ရှေ့နောက် ညီညွတ်မှု ယုတ္တိဗေဒ probablity အစရှိသဖြင့် မှာ အခြေခံထားတယ်
extro sci-fi တွေက ရဲ့ စိန်ခေါ်မှုက တော့science ရဲ့ အထက်ပါဝိသေသ လက္ခဏာ မရှိတဲ့ ကမ္ဘာဆိုတာ ဖြစ်နိုင်သလား ဆိုတာကို မေးခွန်းထုတ်ထားတယ်။
လူတွေရဲ့ သိပ္ပံနဲ့ နည်းပညာ ယုတ္တိဗေဒရဲ့ ရှေ့နောက် ကြောင်းကျိုးညီညွတ်မှု မှာအလွန်အကျွံ မှီခိုနေခြင်း အပေါ် ဆန်းစစ်ပြထားတဲ့ စာအုပ်တစ်အုပ် လို့ မြင်တယ်
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
6 reviews1 follower
Read
July 23, 2019
This essay completely changed the way I interact with fiction and, moreover, revitalized any interest I had in reading fiction (whether it be for 'work' or for pleasure). Extro-Science Fiction is not just extro-science, as Meillassoux explicitly says, but I believe that Meillassoux makes the argument that XSF is also "extro-fiction", that speculative fiction takes the form of reality in a possible world.
Profile Image for Emi.
12 reviews
March 24, 2024
"La vida se experimenta mentalmente a sí misma sin la ciencia, y quizás, en esta divergencia siempre más acentuada, ella descubre algo inédito sobre sí misma o sobre la ciencia. Una variación eidética empujada hasta el punto de sofocación, una experiencia de sí en un mundo no experimentable. Una intensidad precaria, zambullida infinitamente en su pura soledad, rodeada por escombros en los que se explora la verdad de una existencia sin mundo".
Profile Image for Francisco Hernández.
33 reviews
January 12, 2023
Excelente

Se analiza el problema Humeano sobre la posibilidad de que una bola de billar vaya a un lugar aleatorio, un lugar al que la bola no debiese ir bajo las leyes físicas.

Pasamos por respuestas dadas por Popper, Kant, y demás pensadores que respondieron o pudieron ser aporte para el desarrollo de esta idea.

Meillasoux nos da posibles soluciones para el problema de Hume, estas pueden llegar a ser un dolor de cabeza porque es complejo imaginarlas, pero si te sientas a pensar en lo que dice, (según yo) tiene mucho sentido.

Preciso, conciso, y reflexivo, filosofía pura.
Profile Image for necla çelik.
1 review
January 2, 2023
sonluluğun sonrası'nda geliştirdiği düşüncenin, edebiyat üzerinden bir uygulamasını denemiş. rene barjavel'in Ravage'sini okumadığımızdan sonunda susmak düşüyor olsa da, sonluluğun sonrası'nı okumak için heveslendiriyor
Profile Image for Wei Lin.
76 reviews10 followers
April 3, 2023
Kind of a vague, anticlimatic conclusion which makes the essay feel somewhat unfinished.

Everything else was nice and clear up to that point, though.
Profile Image for Lector Colocolino.
24 reviews12 followers
August 26, 2023
Para interpretaciones así recomiendo ir a directamente a Hume nomás.

Lo mejor del libro es el cuento de Asimov al final.
Profile Image for Penguin.
14 reviews1 follower
February 2, 2024
Keď toho o literatúre veľa nevieš, no aj tak chceš niečo povedať. Celkom sladké.
Profile Image for CRISTINO.
319 reviews7 followers
February 13, 2021
"Por mundo extracientífico, entendemos a los mundos donde la ciencia experimental es, en principio, imposible, y no desconocida de hecho. Así, la ficción extracientífica define este régimen particular de lo imaginario, en el cual se trata de concebir mundos estructurados -o más bien desestructurados- de tal modo que la ciencia experimental no puede desplegar allí sus teorías ni constituir sus objetos. La pregunta conductora de la ficción extracientífica es: ¿cómo debería ser un mundo, a qué debería asemejarse un mundo, para que sea, en principio, inaccesible a un saber científico, para que no pueda ser erigido como el objeto de una ciencia natural?"
12 reviews
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December 29, 2024
Meillassoux może też nie do końca wie do czego zmierza i że fenomen, który opisuje już od dawna istnieje pod wieloma postaciami, żeby wymieć tylko new weird, ale sama lektura otwiera czytelnikowi nową niezagospodarowaną jeszcze perspektywę.
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