Consciousness is not the ineluctable starting point for self-understanding because there is a difference between being conscious and understanding oneself as a conscious being. The difference is between being in a certain state and knowing oneself to be in a certain state.
Ray BrassierIf nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing matters doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter whether anything matters or not, then there's no real difference between believing nothing matters and believing something matters.
Ray BrassierCorrelationism rejects metaphysical realism understood as the claim that the way the world is does not depend on how we take things to be. It also rejects the Cartesian corollary, i.e., the claim that the way the mind is does not depend on the way the world is.
Ray BrassierI was trying to develop a notion of "non-dialectical negativity" as part of a concept of extinction that would transform the understanding of death and time elaborated in phenomenology.
Ray BrassierPhilosophy ought to be able to give an account of rationality that is not wholly detached from science's account of nature, even if it is not straightforwardly reducible to it.
Ray BrassierPsychoanalytic categories such as "neurosis", "psychosis", "mania", and "fixation" have become part of our everyday psychological vocabulary and we now routinely interpret states of anxiety, excitement, or depression in terms of physiological factors involving levels of serotonin, adrenalin, or blood sugar. To say that the characterization of thinking has a normative function that is irreducible to neurophysiological processing is not to say that our extant classification of the forms of thinking is incorrigible.
Ray Brassier