Ray Brassier Quotes

• 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

  Real, Believe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Self Esteem, Philosophy, Opportunity

  27 Copy quote

• Psychoanalytic 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

  Thinking, Anxiety, Everyday

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution - his attempted overcoming of nihilism - consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such - all becoming, without reservation or discrimination.

  Ray Brassier

  Nihilism, Redemption, Overcoming

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Understanding, Consciousness, Oneself

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Mind, World, Metaphysical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Philosophy, Giving, Rationality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Assumption, Awareness, Short Circuit

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Philosophy, Youth, Superficial

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  9 Copy quote

• Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

  Ray Brassier

  Opportunity, Nihilism, Existential

  Ray Brassier (2007). “Nihil Unbound: Naturalism and Anti-Phenomenological Realism”, Palgrave Macmillan

  32 Copy quote

• 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

  Challenges, Temptation, Desire

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Negativity, Understanding, Trying

  "Nihil Unbound". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

  6 Copy quote

• I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth.

  Ray Brassier

  Believe, Nihilist, Stills

  8 Copy quote

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

  Ray Brassier

  Thinking, Enlightenment

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Feelings, Mind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

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