Quentin Meillassoux

Quentin Meillassoux (born in Paris in 1967) is a French philosopher associated with the speculative realism movement. He is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux and studied with Bernard Bourgeois and Alain Badiou, with whom he co-founded the International Centre for the Study of Contemporary French Philosophy. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

His first major book, After Finitude (2006), with a foreword by Badiou, argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by correlationism, the view that the world cannot be thought apart from human thought. Meillassoux proposes that philosophy should again be able to describe a reality that existed before any human presence, which he calls the ancestral realm. Following Badiou's commitment to mathematics, he holds that mathematics grasps the primary qualities of things.

His best-known thesis holds that causal necessity does not exist and that the laws of nature are contingent. The world would be a kind of hyper-chaos governed by the principle of non-contradiction but not by the principle of sufficient reason. For this reason he accuses Kant of a 'Ptolemaic counter-revolution'. In 2011 he published a book on Mallarmé, Le nombre et la sirène, which finds a numerical code in the poem A Throw of the Dice. His work has had its greatest impact in the English-speaking world.