<nettime-ann> COLLAPSE - new issue

["matthew fuller" <fuller@xs4all.nl>]

.
COLLAPSE Volume II

The second volume of Collapse resumes the construction of a conceptual
space unbounded by any disciplinary constraints, comprising subjects from
probability theory to theology, from quantum theory to neuroscience, from
astrophysics to necrology, and involving them in unforeseen and productive
syntheses.

Collapse Volume II features a selection of speculative essays by some of
the foremost young philosophers at work today, together with new work from
artists and cinéastes, and searching interviews with leading scientists. 
Against the tide of institutional balkanisation and specialisation, this
volume testifies to a defiant reanimation of the most radical
philosophical problematics ? the status of the scientific object,
metaphysics and its 'end', the prospects for a revival of speculative
realism, the possibility of phenomenology, transcendence and the divine,
the nature of causation, the necessity of contingency ? both through a
fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and through an
openness to its outside.  The breadth of philosophical thought in this
volume is matched by the surprising and revealing thematic connections
that emerge between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.

? Ray Brassier (Middlesex University, author of the forthcoming Nihil
Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction) gives the first full-length
exposition and critical examination in English of Quentin Meillassoux's
important book Après la Finitude, which mounts a radical critique of
post-Kantian philosophy on the basis of its  inability to account for the
literal meaning of scientific statements concerning 'arche-fossils'
existing anterior to the possibility of their phenomenal manifestation.
? Building upon his thesis in Après la Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux (ENS,
Paris) proposes a reprisal of Hume's problem of causation from a radical
ontological persective.  By affirming the absolute contingency of natural
laws, Meillassoux argues for a revival of a realistic metaphysics which he
calls ?speculative materialism? and brings to light a powerful
new ontological concept of time.
? In an extended interview, Roberto Trotta (theoretical
cosmologist, Lockyer Research Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society at
the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University) describes in detail his
work as a scientist engaged in surveying the 'arche-fossil', and discusses
the ways in which the cross-disciplinary nature of the search for dark m

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