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Brassier - Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis (Chapter 3 from The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Miellassoux)
"Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis (Chapter 3 from The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Miellassoux)" is a longer route into Brassier's rationalist realism, making nihilism, abstraction, and anti-phenomenology legible through sustained argument.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.
The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.
That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.
How to read this text
Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.
Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 9
Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis 75 3. The Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis Like Kant, Sellars rejects modal realism, i.e., the metaphysical claim that necessity and contingency exist in things, independently of our representation of things. But Sellars subjects Kant’s transcendental account of modality to a pragmatist twist.
Definition · paragraph 3
Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis 69 3. Strong correlationism (Meillassoux has in mind post-metaphysical phi- losophy broadly construed: not only Habermasian, but Nietzschean, phenomenological, deconstructionist, and pragmatist): the speculative identification of the for-us with the in-itself is only for-us.
Definition · paragraph 13
Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis 79 that a universe without minds is unintelligible. Similarly, that the concept of physical necessity (i.e., law) implies exceptionlessness does not entail that contingent (non law-like) exceptionlessness is unintelligible.
Definition · paragraph 17
Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis 83 ‘language triumphant’ do they draw? It is difficult to say. What can be said is that the ideals at issue are not supernatural phantasms but injunctions to act, such that it is constitutive of the ideal that it be actualized in the real.
History · paragraph 5
Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis 71 different from given reality. That’s why, ultimately, I prefer to describe my philosophy as a speculative materialism, rather than as a realism: because I remember the sentence of Foucault, who once said: “I am a materialist because I don’t believe in reality.” (Meillassoux 2014, 19) Materialism ascends from the dogmatic to the speculative register by relin- quishing the metaphysical reification of materiality, whether as atom or force.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.