This is the second in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. Chapter 2 continues exploring the contemporary permutations of the host capacity account of humanity
Among the aspects of Serres’ paper that provoked the most animated discussion this morning was his contention, in ‘Information and Thinking’ and elsewhere, that human beings are not the only entities to think. The idea was articulated most powerfully in the snippet of the talk reproduced below: This thought returned in the final paragraph of the address:
On Saturday I will be speaking at the Reconceiving Naturalism conference at Swinburne University, Melbourne. I originally intended to address some aspects of Quentin Meillassoux’s Métaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-science, but with only 15 minutes there isn’t long enough to get into it. Instead, I’ve decided to think through Meillassoux’s critique of naturalism in “Iteration,