Interview with Ray Brassier by Leon Niemoczynski (2017)

Interview with Ray Brassier by Leon Niemoczynski (2017)

Ray Brassier is so far best known for his popular work, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; 2010), however he has since developed his philosophical project and moved beyond many of the positions he first articulated in that book. This interview first took place in 2012 but was updated in 2017 to reflect the many developments which have occurred in the course of Brassier’s philosophical project. 1. Leon Niemoczynski: How did you first become interested in philosophy, and what led you to decide that you’d like to pursue a career in philosophy (whether teaching or research)? How did you end up in your current position at the American University of Beirut? Ray Brassier: I became interested in philosophy when I was relatively young (13), but it took a long time for me to decide I wanted to pursue it academically. I did not enjoy school and had no desire to go to university, which was not an option anyway since I was a terrible student and did not have the requisite qualifications. I was 27 when I eventually managed to enroll for a philosophy degree at university. I decided to pursue it as far as I could simply because it was more important to me than anything else. But I had no career plan and am astonished I managed to get any sort of academic employment. I view my academic career as a wholly unexpected but very welcome piece of good fortune. I ended up in Beirut entirely by chance. I wanted to get out of London and was lucky enough to be offered a position at AUB. 2. LN: In a recent talk in Berlin, you mention Bergson, Deleuze, and Whitehead and how those philosophers have been recently appropriated within contemporary scholarship (I believe at one point you make reference to Iain Hamilton Grant, whose philosophy I also take a great interest in). How do you appropriate Bergson or other like-philosophers (you also mentioned Bergson in Zagreb), and how does his thought play out within your work? Is there a philosophy of life or anti-life, vitalism or antivitalism, a beyond or “after” vitalism, working within your perspective? RB: I’m very critical of Bergson and of vitalism more generally. Nevertheless, I think Bergson is an important philosopher who often asks the right questions, even if I think his answers are wrong. I’m not interested in proposing a philosophy of life or anti-life, but in querying the inflation of “life” into a master-category in contemporary philosophy, not just by overt vitalists, but also by phenomenologists, critical theorists, and enactivists.

I’m a great admirer of Iain and think our projects overlap in very interesting ways. I’m particularly interested in his work on “the physics of the Idea.” This ties into the question of Plato’s relation to naturalism, which is of enormous importance for me. The philosopher in whom this connection is developed in the most ingenious and unexpected fashion is Wilfrid Sellars, which is why he has become such an indispensable resource for my work. Sellars is a Kantian philosopher who also adumbrated a process metaphysics, which is why his thought is so uniquely challenging, both for Kantian anti-metaphysicians and anti-Kantian metaphysicians. He takes up themes from Bergson’s metaphysics of duration but subjects it to a Kantian transformation that renders it compatible with empirical science. 3. LN: In your Berlin talk as well, there is a lot of ground covered with Plato. It’s also known that you have an interest in philosophical naturalism. How does Plato fit into your philosophical naturalism—if at all—and what might we learn from Plato according to your project? (This seemed to be a major point of your talk.) RB: Plato is a key touchstone for me. I think his separation of truth from doxa, and of the idea from the sensible, is the inaugural and indispensable gesture of all philosophizing. He’s also the founder of philosophy as dialectics, which I’m interested in reaffirming, having overcome my long aversion to its caricatured forms. Basically, I’m interested in reconciling Platonism with naturalism by reconciling the dialectics of the idea with the dynamism of the sensible. This is also a way of reconciling idealism with materialism, which I think is necessary. Again, Sellars is the key inspiration here. 4. LN: To follow up on the question regarding your interest in Plato and how Plato may be of use within your own philosophical naturalism, I’d like to ask a question about location, particularly with respect to the perspectives of idealism and materialism as well as philosophical naturalism and transcendental philosophy. In a rather provocative quote you state, I consider myself an idealist, as opposed to a materialist, as I insist on the need to preserve the relative autonomy of thinking, and the cogency and the consistency of thinking, and of conceptual rationality, precisely in order to be able to adjudicate the relationship between thinking and reality, between theory and practice, and the conditions for practice […] If you try to fuse thought into material reality indiscriminately, I think that leads to an impotent short-circuit […] Not to put too

fine a point on it, so that you can maintain and generate a locus of rational agency. In other words, keep a space of subjectivation open that provides a prism for practical incision, a point of insertion. And that has to be done, and I think this involves re-examining the legacy of Hegel, and of Hegelianism […] I would insist on the need to preserve the autonomy of rationality as something that allows you to intervene, to cut, in the continuity. There is a lot here that I think reveals some of the trajectory we have seen in some of your most recent work. But I want to start with “the need to preserve the autonomy of thinking, conceptual rationality, so as to adjudicate between thought and reality or between theory and practice,” the “conditions” for practice, as you say. We spoke about Iain Grant whose dynamics of the sensible or “physics of the Idea” engages the Idea by reading Plato as a one-world theorist. This entails, he argues, that any naturephilosophy (here read in this question as naturalism) must “embed materialism within the orbit of Platonism” to rebuke any Kantian eliminativism that regards the Idea as a mere form of our understanding, a mere “categorial given.” And here Grant takes the Idea to mean an “agent of nature” (cause) although acting so in a non-sensible manner. My question is, there seems to be a tension between idealism and materialism, or between naturalism and transcendental philosophy perhaps more concretely, in the need to maintain the insertion point of which you speak, the insertion point for the autonomy of reason, conceptual rationality, a “space of subjectivation.” Without bluntly calling the Idea nature or nature Idea, nor without simplistically compounding the two, the most pressing question presented in this seems to be how we might account for the locus of the Idea within a naturalistic register—and how to do so without compromising its autonomy. To treat the locus of subjectivation strictly as a psychologistic cognitive affair (ideas or conceptual systems are merely “in” the mind unrelated to external spatiotemporal coordinates or even social practices) seems to run the risk of either the nominalization of truth or its perspectivalization (or at the very least it seems to compromise the integrity of conceptuality’s autonomy as much as it begs the question “where”); but on the other hand, by releasing the autonomy of conceptuality and subjectivation, rational agency, one runs the risk of an egregious transcendentalism in the name of transcendental philosophy; that is, supernaturalism in the form of Plato as two-world theorist or a kind of “myth of the given” for a priori processes of subjectivation that take on a

supernatural character whose existence in-itself is to be taken on faith (one reading of Kant). The question concerning the locus of the Idea seems legitimate if we are to maintain that nature is intelligible within a register of naturalism—which is to say, it seems we must understand how nature’s intelligibility is so if one is to maintain a commitment to naturalism at all. What are your thoughts concerning the locus of subjectivation and the status of the Idea within a philosophical naturalism such as the one you endorse? Even if there are physical or material correlates for the Idea it seems its activity must be accounted for given its objectivating structure. RB: I’ll begin with idealism and the status of the Idea then move on to the issue of subjectivity. By “idealism” in the quote you cite above I mean a commitment to the irreducibility of the conceptual. Whether or not this entails embracing realism about the Idea is a difficult issue. We’d have to get clear about the distinction between the concept and the Idea, which is not an easy task. My minimal definition of a concept would be Kantian: anything that can assume a predicative role. The predicative function is linguistically instantiated and so neither mental nor physical: reifying concepts as entities is a category mistake. Concepts have functional coordinates but not spatiotemporal ones. If the Idea is understood as some sort of integrated totality of concepts, whose structure is neither psychological, nor linguistic, nor even socio-historical, then the Idea transcends specific localization as well as determinate categorization. This is not to say that it is supernatural: refusing to reify is not the same as refusing to naturalize. The Idea would be the integrated whole presupposed by any system of functionally differentiated concepts. It need not be restricted to a regulative role, as it is in Kant. I’m even willing to countenance the salience of something like Hegel’s absolute Idea to make sense of the claim that concepts come in integrally differentiated unities, so long as the differentiation encompasses contradiction. The Idea as contradictory whole would transcend categorization and localization but then of course its self-moving character would swallow nature. Something dismembers the unity of the Idea beyond its own auto-generative contradictoriness. But I’m not sure I would call it “nature.” I’m uneasy about any metaphysical naturalism that identifies nature with physis in the pre-modern sense of “surging-forth.” Modern physics is the dismembering

of ancient physis: nature is not-one. I take this to be a non-negotiable cognitive advance. To be a modern naturalist is to admit that nature is replete with intelligible discontinuities, whose recognition reminds us not just that essentializing is always premature, but that nature works through the inessential, the accidental. So it’s not clear to me what it means to “situate” the Idea, whether in nature or anywhere else. Having said this, I am sympathetic to the suggestion that the Idea be understood as an “agent of nature” exercising a supersensible—which does not mean supernatural— agency. And I agree that any naturalism worthy of the name ought to explain how (if not why) nature is intelligible. I think these two commitments come together in the idea that the autonomy of the concept is indissociable from the autonomy of action. This is perfectly crystallized in Sellars’ dictum: “Inferring is an act.” Conceptual autonomy (which is ideal) abuts onto practical autonomy. Rationality is a condition of agency. This is where the issue of the subject and of subjectivation comes in. Here I think Hegel achieves a decisive advance over Kant in his conception of the subject as a gap or discontinuity in the positive order of being, or substance. Kant’s “thing that thinks” is not a substance, but the claim that its apperceptive function is realized by a community of knowers encourages a dualism of function and vehicule, or norms and causes. Transcendental synthesis, or the apperceptive function, is not a thing in the world, but its logical power must be causally realized by something in the world. Without this realization, it is nothing: an empty abstraction, a mere thought entity, or what Kant calls “an empty concept without an object.” Ideal function requires a real substrate. Were the concept capable of exercising its causal power independently of any physical substrate, transcendental idealism would give way to metaphysical idealism. The insistence on a distinction that is irreducible in one dimension (concepts ≠ causes) while being reducible in another (concepts are nothing over and above causes) threatens to turn into a dualism, i.e., an unarticulated distinction. I think this is what threatens to stymie even the most sophisticated forms of naturalized Kantianism, such as Sellars’ or Brandom’s (if one considers that Brandom’s Hegel is still very Kantian). So what articulates logical power and causal power, reasons and causes? I think Hegel saw that any attempt to bridge the gap from one side or the other leads either to dogmatic rationalism (“the ideal is the real”) or skeptical empiricism (“the ideal is not real”). Instead,

Hegel develops a vision where the gap between the ideal and the real is constitutive of the subject. The subject is no longer a transcendental form whose empirical anchoring defies analysis; it is the split that articulates the conceptual order and the causal order. I think subjectivation occurs through a mode of occurrence that requires an evental conception of time (I think this is what is most profoundly Hegelian in Badiou). I think Hegel’s “speculative revolution” vis-à-vis rationalism, empiricism, and (Kantian) criticism can be summarized in the five following points: 1) Speculation beyond representation: the contradictoriness of the absolute Idea allows us to think time independently of substantial movement (change as exchange of contraries; time as the number of motion with respect to before and after). 2) Speculative knowing versus absolute representation: not “we will know everything,” but “there is nothing we will not know.” 3) The whole is not completed actuality (i.e., consummated potency) but occurrent incompleteness: now-time (Jetztzeit), understood as the time that demands to be comprehended as ours, is the split between what has been and what will be. The absolute is the occurrent actuality (Wirklichkeit) of substanceless time: the contemporaneity that philosophy must comprehend. 4) Represented substance is conceptless exteriority: space-time as forms of intuition. So long as substance (objectivity) is represented, conceptual necessity remains extrinsic to substantial determination. 5) Self-reflecting substance is the subject as notional (conceptual) self-relation, i.e., indivision as division (essence as contradiction). The actuality of the absolute is substance-becoming-subject as temporal rupture. Absolute knowing is the effectuation of this rupture. From the claim that the absolute is the occurrentness of time beyond representation and intuition, a discontinuity in what is represented as being’s substantial continuity, there follows a conception of subjectivity as the comprehensive effectuation of this discontinuity; in other words, the rationalization of the irrational, or formalization of formlessness. This is the conception I am interested in developing. 5. LN: In your recently published article “Transcendental Logic and True Representings” you write that, “The goal of cognitive enquiry consists in incorporating ever more facts about the structure of representing into every represented fact. This would be the naturalization of the involuted spiral of absolute knowing. In this sense, spatiotemporal location provides the transcendental coordinates for our species’ collective world story. […] As it progresses, the history of what we know incorporates within itself more and

more facts about the empirical structure of knowing. The limit of this movement would be the point at which empirical (sigma-tau) facts about the structure of knowing are incarnated in the structure of empirical (spatiotemporal) facts.” As I read this two things came to mind: first, obviously Hegel in your allusion to the involuted spiral of absolute knowing; but second, C.S. Peirce and other pragmatic naturalists who possess an interest in scientific discovery, truth, and the development of natural science as a process of enquiry. In this question I’d like to ask you about another tension which often arises within naturalism, but this time between idealism and realism, particularly among the pragmatists who appeal to the accumulation of ever more facts within an incarnational story of knowing. The “spiral of knowing” of spatiotemporal facts, as well as the involuted knowing of the structure of knowing which knows fact, is in one sense unlimited regarding how one might interpret nature to be an unending complexity of spatiotemporal fact. In other words, there is a tradition which sees the cognitive enterprise as belonging to a story of knowing that ceaselessly and continually calibrates and re-calibrates itself to the structural infinitude of nature of which knowing and the structure of knowing is part. (And by structural infinitude what I mean to point to is the limitless diversity present in potential internal to nature itself; thus affording through evolutionary processes the ever-present opportunity to “surprise” mind with new fact.) My question is, do you believe the empirical structure of knowing is unlimited in the same way given that, as we might suppose (and according to Sellars, whom you cite at the beginning of your article) the “mind that gains knowledge of the world of which it is a part” involves “in its acquisition of knowledge […] [its] being acted on or ‘affected’ by the objects it knows”? Is cognitive enquiry in the long run necessarily a bounded venture given the potentially limitless evolution and activity of the objects we seek to know, coupled with the structural, nomic, and descriptive complexity found within the empirical structure of knowing itself? Perhaps more clearly, how are we to gauge the adequacy of our explanations, the veracity of our knowledge, the truth of our reasons given the prospect that the structure of knowing in this continuing story of knowledge may know no end? How does one gain epistemological traction in the story of incarnational knowing? Is there broader implication for an imperfectibility

of knowing? To close, I am wondering how this might relate to your thoughts about the process of cognitive enquiry with respect to science and the Enlightenment, the goals and aims of not only cognitive enquiry generally but science particularly, and whether you believe that some form of postulated normative ends might be necessary (as in Nicholas Rescher or C.S. Peirce, or Kant for example, the regulative ideal for the end of all enquiry; the regulative rationale for supposing a cognitive inexhaustibility of nature so enquiry could be said to move “forward”). RB: I would say the process of cognitive enquiry is unbounded in the long run. Although it incorporates radical epistemic shifts, my wager is that it is still possible to identify underlying continuities across these shifts; were this not so we would have to give up on the very idea of knowing as a continuous collective undertaking. My interest in Sellars’ work is due in no small part to his account of cognitive enquiry as a “self-correcting enterprise.” Cognitive evolution is a self-conscious process motivated by reasons, and not simply a mechanism determined by causes. This is to say by our self-consciousness about the scope and function of our concepts. The claim that there is no unitary thing called “knowing” is of course the basic claim of cultural relativism, which is particularly prevalent in the humanities nowadays. I reject it: however varied and multifaceted its manifestations, there is such a think as knowledge and it is the common resource of homo sapiens. 6. LN: Your insistence on rationality and its central importance within the speculative enterprise has drawn criticism from certain quarters (whom you address quite brilliantly, in my opinion) in the Postscript to Peter Wolfendale’s book published by Urbanomic in 2014. The charge is that any such insistence upon reason and rationality results in a “mindless rationalism” that propagates a “neurology deathcult” “brainwashing” those convinced (by argument, mind you) into becoming “rationalist mindslaves.” As Wolfendale summarizes the criticism, its language also takes on the various permutations in charging those who insist upon such a central role for reason and rationality as being “‘scientism’, ‘nihilism’, ‘eliminativism’, ‘pessimism’, in combination with sundry negative adjectives and faux-renegade imagery. [Your] modus operandi is to destroy all that is wholesome and good in Continental philosophy, through a combination of perfidious science worship and mellifluous brainwashing of

impressionable grad students.” The honor of being the target of this criticism has been shared by Pete Wolfendale himself, Terence Blake (a French philosopher of science and pluralism, speculative empiricism, and who is known for his work on the philosophy of Laruelle), and bizarrely, myself (considering my own insistence upon rationality as being required to indiscriminately engage in metaphysics-as-speculation, given rationality’s ability to free thought from constraints of immanence although not from all constraints; and in my case this charge is especially interesting considering my own axiological commitments which conceive of the natural world’s ontological integrity in quasi-pietist terms: the natural world is always capable of “overturning” even our most steadfast of beliefs, where humility before the natural world seems required, even within the sciences). Nevertheless, is an insistence upon rationality as dangerous as we are told that it is? On a related point, I should mention that my own thought has been that, if anything, it is only through the rational deployment of concepts that reason can indeed be utilized in its extrahumam capacity capable of extending beyond the human although encompassing of it, and this does nothing but aid metaphysical endeavor—and so one has not a powerful (merely) psychologistic tool but indeed a realist, metaphysical one. (It is for this reason that it seems to be that rationality, reason, is more inhuman than human.) On my view, it is the sheer power and scope of reason taken as speculative instrument—yet granting its autonomy as an instrument—that rationality can deliver a more adequate ontology capable of incorporating features of reality within a robustly naturalistic register, features beyond those limited to human experience so-called or the phenomenality of appearances to human consciousness (e.g., phenomenology). Again, rationality is part of nature and it is nature which we seek to know. The power, scope, and uniformity afforded the employment of rationality within one’s own ontology (under-girding any epistemology) seems therefore only to be a contribution to the stability and integrity of one’s metaphysics, not a danger. But perhaps I am incorrect. I wonder what your thoughts on the matter happen to be. What is the role of rationality in your project and is stress upon rationality within metaphysics somehow “dangerous?” Tongue in cheek perhaps, but is any philosophical emphasis on rationality a contribution to the destruction of “all that is wholesome and good in Continental philosophy?”

RB: If one were looking for a term guaranteed to draw the ire of Continental philosophers across the board, it would not be “realism” or “materialism” but “reason.” The reduction of reasoning to “calculation,” “instrumental rationality,” “logocentrism,” “identity thinking,” etc., is the common thread running through almost all 20th-century Continental philosophy. But my interest in defending rationality is not merely contrarian. Initially, it was sparked by my incredulity at the absurd caricatures of rationality promulgated within the Continental tradition, together with my growing awareness of a direct link between the demotion of rationality and the embrace of the ineffable, the incomprehensible, the wholly other, etc. I am not much moved by the pathos of the ineffable, although I find sophisticated expressions of mysticism philosophically instructive. But one needs to have understood a lot to be entitled to proclaim the limits of understanding and sadly this is not the case with most partisans of the ineffable. My conviction is that only reason is entitled to fix the limits of reason: this was Plato’s conviction, as it was Kant’s and Hegel’s. Anyone wishing to contest reason’s right to carry out its own critique needs to justify their appeal to an authority higher than reason and this is precisely what cannot be done since reason is justification: absolute exemption from rational justification can never be rationally justified (though of course certain claims or beliefs may be relatively exempt, depending on the context). The proper response to the claim that something transcends justification is simply to ask: says who? Whatever transcends justification has had that transcendent status bestowed upon it by someone: nothing has absolute authority in and of itself; this is the simple corollary of atheism; indeed, theism just is endowing some phenomenon or instance with absolute authority. The ruin of theism is prefigured by Socrates’ question to Euthyphro: “Is it right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right?” This is why those who claim that the premium on rationality is continuous with theism are mistaken. They are confusing rationalism as a metaphysical hypothesis, the claim that everything exists for a reason, which is indeed theistic, with rationality as a semantic constraint, the claim that you cannot mean or believe what you cannot give a reason for. Rationality in this semantic sense was espoused by Plato, Kant, and Hegel, even if it was not entirely disentangled from its metaphysical sense. It is the motor of atheism because it insists that to think

something or to say something is to give and ask for reasons for it: anyone who cannot or will not do so is not actually thinking or saying anything. What separates rationality as a semantic constraint from rationalism as a metaphysical postulate is the question of implementation, the focus on reasoning as an activity, rather than a supernatural faculty. With the shift from reason as supernatural faculty to reasoning as material practice, rationality is demystified. Turing’s mathematization of thinking—the equation of thinking with computation—contributes decisively to this demystification. It paves the way for a functionalist conception of thinking whose crux is the claim that semantic differences can be syntactically encapsulated. The question then is whether theoretical reasoning has explanatory priority over practical reasoning or vice versa. This is also the question of the relation between formal and material inference. Sellars makes a decisive contribution here because he overturns the subordination of semantic content to logical form and suggests that the former is rooted in the latter: material inference is the condition for formal inference, which allows one to say what one is doing when one engages in material inference. The primacy of material inference leads to a conception of language where semantic rules provide the framework within which logical rules serve to make explicit what speakers are doing when they make assertions. Logic becomes, in Brandom’s words, “the organ of semantic self-consciousness.” It plays a regulative role in our discursive activity by allowing us to say what we are doing when we say something. In other words, the development of logic allows us to reason about reason. The crucial point is that this reflexive reasoning, or self-conscious rationality, emerges out of everyday discursive practice. Overturning the subordination of semantic content to logical form allows us to understand reasoning as an activity in which we are “always already” engaged as soon as we think or say anything. Every challenge to rationality presupposes the resources of rationality: some of these challenges may help revise and refine those resources, but none will ever defeat them. Moreover, rationality in this semantic sense is the defining feature of homo sapiens only to the extent that homo sapiens instantiate it. Rationality is definitive of humanity; humanity is not definitive of rationality. There is nothing necessarily human about rationality: non-human intelligences or reasoners are perfectly envisageable. Developing a theory of general

artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting prospects opened up by rationalism. In this regard, inferentialism offers instructive correctives to standard computationalism by insisting that inference requires a grasp of content. However, insofar as it maintains the distinction between content and vehicule, inferentialism perpetuates Kant’s dualism of function and cause. The really interesting question is whether the inferentialist account of reasoning suffices to account for the most sophisticated varieties of philosophical rationality, as exemplified by Hegel’s own “speculative thinking,” which is notorious for proposing to exempt reason from the law of non-contradiction. Inferentialism overthrows the subordination of semantic content to logical form but it maintains the subordination of content to non-contradiction by insisting that contents are determined by incompatibility relations. This is a profound issue which I can’t hope to address properly here save to say I don’t think the crucial role Hegel allots to contradiction can be accounted for in terms of incompatibility. More importantly still, the controversy over Hegel’s rationalism is whether contradictions are real or merely ideal. I think the question may be badly posed insofar as Hegel’s point is that the juxtaposition presupposes an underlying continuity, but one that cannot be substantialized. Real and ideal are poles of a continuum whose fabric cannot be consistently grasped in terms of either. Contradiction is the marker of intelligible discontinuity, and as such it is a counter to metaphysical rationalism and a resource for naturalism. 7. LN: Given your recent success with the much-acclaimed Nihil Unbound, what are your reflections on that book now, especially as that book may relate to your research that will be appearing in the future? You’ve mentioned that you are working on a number of things right now, what areas of research (or theses) should we expect to see? Another book perhaps? What should we expect from you in the future—in terms of articles, another book, or upcoming talks? Please feel free to share any last words and end as you’d like. RB: I regard the book as a botched job. It contends that nature is not the repository of purpose and that consciousness is not the fulcrum of thought. The cogency of these claims presupposes an account of thought and meaning that is neither Aristotelian—everything has meaning because everything exists for a reason—nor phenomenological—consciousness is

the basis of thought and the ultimate source of meaning. The absence of any such account is the book’s principal weakness (it has many others, but this is perhaps the most serious). It wasn’t until after its completion that I realized Sellars’ account of thought and meaning offered precisely what I needed. To think is to connect and disconnect concepts according to proprieties of inference. Meanings are rule-governed functions supervening on the pattern-conforming behavior of language-using animals. This distinction between semantic rules and physical regularities is dialectical, not metaphysical. To evoke it is to commit oneself to a qualified version of anthropocentrism, which I’m quite prepared to defend. It’s of a piece with the distinction between sapience and sentience, which is fundamental for Sellars. I’ve been working my way through his writings since completing Nihil Unbound and my understanding of his thought has progressed considerably since my brief (and woefully inadequate) treatment of it there. His influence will feature prominently in the book I’m currently working on, tentatively entitled That Which Is Not. It will be about the reality of appearance, a topic which was not properly addressed in Nihil Unbound. The challenge of rationalism is to insist on the distinction between appearance and reality, or the sensible and the intelligible, while accounting for the reality of appearances, or the intelligibility of the sensible. This is a problem that goes back to Plato. It’s a question of understanding how every appearance has a kind of reality, but only insofar as it is split from within by what it does not reveal. This ties into the issues of the intelligibility of becoming and the structure of time. These are themes that were touched upon but not properly worked through in Nihil Unbound. My other longterm project is a book about historical materialism and revisionary naturalism. But it’s premature to talk about it right now since it’s still at a very early stage. 8. LN: Thanks so much for taking time to do this interview, Ray. It’s been a pleasure and I am even more curious now where your future work may be headed. If you would ever like to inform philosophical readers online of what you’re up to (especially talks—I missed your talk at Cornell because I just didn’t hear about it online until it actually appeared on Cornell’s website) then please feel free to email me and I can make an announcement informally on my website. In any case, hopefully we’ll have the pleasure of meeting one day in person. Best of luck to you and thanks again.

RB: Very good. Thanks for your kind offer, I’ll certainly bear it in mind.