13+ Ray Brassier Quotes On Objects

Ray Brassier is a British philosopher who is known for his contributions to speculative realism and nihilism. He is a professor at the American University of Beirut and is a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of London. He is best known for his book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, which explores the implications of nihilism for contemporary thought. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ray Brassier on life, love, objects.

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. — Ray Brassier

Like many, I suspect, I found the difficulty of analytic philosophy unglamorous and therefore less appealing. This is regrettably superficial but superficiality is characteristic of youth. In my late teens I became enamored of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Artaud. — Ray Brassier

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 Brassier

I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth. — Ray Brassier

Philosophy 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 Brassier

I think Enlightenment as an epistemic ideal involves rejecting the appeal to a fundamental stratum of non-conceptual self-evidence. — Ray Brassier

It was Kant who first rejected the Cartesian premise of the mind's self-transparency: the idea that when it comes to knowing our own minds, we just know what we are thinking or feeling, and do not have to learn how to perceive ourselves thinking or feeling. — Ray Brassier

Philosophers should resist the temptation to be publicly virtuous. Given an unjust society, from the vantage of what counts as the public good, they are corrupters, not edifiers. The desire to be seen to be virtuous, to make a positive contribution, is a deleterious symptom of professionalization. Philosophy's social utility is an ersatz for its duty to mount challenges to the entire social order. — Ray Brassier

Sellars's "myth of Jones" is deployed against what Sellars calls "the myth of the categorial Given": the idea that to be aware of something is to be aware of it as something. This short circuit between "awareness of" and "awareness as" inhibits the project of self-understanding because it perpetuates the assumption that there is a point where being and knowing coincide. — Ray Brassier

I 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 Brassier

Correlationism 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 Brassier

Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. — Ray Brassier

If 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 Brassier

Life Lessons by Ray Brassier

1. Ray Brassier's work emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and self-reflection, challenging us to think beyond the limits of our own preconceived notions.
2. He encourages us to be open to new ideas and to question the validity of our own beliefs, in order to better understand the world around us.
3. By engaging with his philosophy, we can learn to be more aware of our own biases and to think more deeply about the implications of our decisions.