Speculation, philosophy and the end of religion: Save the name 'God' and the folly of this name as the queen of the sciences or the jester of academia
In this article, Meillassoux and Laruelle were brought into conversation with Derrida concerning contingency, temporality, non-philosophy and God. The conversation between Derrida and Meillassoux focused on their respective views on trace and radical contingency, which opened towards reflections on God as either divinology (Meillassoux) or the endless desertification of language (Derrida), thus saving the name ‘God’ and keeping the name safe. One cannot think this desertification of language, ‘God’, without a reflection on khōra. This opened a conversational space with Laruelle’s non-philosophy. One of the major criticisms against Laruelle is that his non-philosophy has no worth in terms of the extra-philosophical (ethical, political or juridical) and the same could be said with regards to khōra and, specifically, Derrida’s interpretation of khōra. Therefore Derrida’s interpretation of khōra with its ‘unilateral’ relation to logos, the giving and receiving of khōra without giving and receiving anything and thus remaining indifferent, were brought into conversation with Laruelle’s unilateral duality. This unilateral duality, although indifferent to philosophy, makes all the difference to logos and thus to philosophy. The question is: what place is given to khōra and/or non-philosophy within academia? Derrida’s God can be interpreted as a kind of autodeconstructive divine violence or holy folly. What place is given to divine violence or holy folly within academia? What is the relation of non-philosophy to philosophy? Is it the non-foundational foundation that remains totally indifferent to philosophy as it does not engage in a dialectical relationship with philosophy and yet it is the theory or science of philosophy? Can academia afford to ‘give place’ to this holy folly, this non-philosophy, this khōratic theo-logic, but on the other hand, can it afford not to ‘give place’ to the queen and/or jester of academia?
Behold the Non-Rabbit : Kant , Quine , Laruelle
ion which, far from explaining them, simply reproduces the formal features of empirical generality at a higher leveL Consequently, the supposedly transcendental reciprocity between critical philosophy and the scientific mapping of experience is only operative from the perspective of the former. The trouble with Kant's transcendentalism can be summarized in the following way: in principle, the empirically immanent bounds of possible experience, its universal, law-like features as laid out iu the theories of Euclid and Newton, are supposed to be transcendentally girded, necessarily rooted in the constitutive structures of cognition by those forms of Cl priori synthesis grounded in the immanence of pure apperception, But in fact they are not, as the discoveries of Lobatchevski, Riemann and Einstein (among others) showed only too clearly, revealing to what extent Kant" s transcendental girding was tlimsy, makeshift, and expedient, its foundations far too shallowly excavated. It is only by presupposing science as empirically given that Kant is able to posit the Cl priori conditions through which the empirical comes to be constituted as given. Consequently, Kant's transcendental Cl priori ends up tloundering in extraneous metaphysical transcendence: neither rigorously transcendental, uor authentically immanent vis a vis the empirical domain of possible experience mapped out in scientific theory. 4 Kant, op. cit., A29S-6/B352-3, 5 Mikel Dufrenne, Gilles Deleuze and Michel FoucaulL have made this particular criticism almost ubiquitous in recent years, but Miklos Vetd reveals the extent to which it had already been more or less explicitly formulated by many of Kant's contemporaries and immediate successors: e,g. Haaman, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Cf. Vetd, De Kallt {/ Schellillg. Les deux voies de I'Idealisme allemalld, two volumes, (Grenoble: Jer6me Millon, 1998 and 2000). In view of the now elephantine proportions of secondary literature on Kant, many more names probably could be added to this list. 59 Ray Brassier
Training and maintaining the performance of dogs (Canis familiaris) on an increasing number of odor discriminations in a controlled setting
Abstract The number of substances detector dogs are trained to detect varies depending on the mission of the agency they serve. No studies have been conducted concerning how training multiple odor discriminations affects detection performance and refresher training requirements. This study used a controlled field setting to examine the effects of training dogs to detect multiple substances on their subsequent detection performance and refresher training requirements. Dogs were first trained to detect a single odor. Their detection performance was tested 10 days later and refresher training was then given to bring their performance back up to a predetermined standard. Following refresher training, detection of a new substance was trained, and approximately 10 days later the detection of both trained substances was tested. This sequence of testing, refresher training, and new odor training continued every 10 days until the dogs had been trained and tested on 10 odors. The detection of previously learned odors did not decrease as the number of substances trained increased. In fact, the amount of training required to refresh detection performance and to train new odor discriminations tended to decrease as more odor discriminations were trained.