The Practice and Principles of Non-Philosophy

Abstract

In order to fully understand the practice of non-philosophy we need to examine the different forms it has taken through its development. These are called waves by Laruelle and by looking at the form each has taken with regard to the status of the fundamental axioms of non-philosophy we will begin to understand how non-philosophy is practiced alongside of principles rather than a law-bound method. I will then turn to a discussion of how Laruelle provides a model or philo-fiction, what standard philosophy may call both a metaphysics and a metaphilosophy, for understanding how philosophy and science may come together in a unified theory. While this may seem at first glance unrelated to the project undertaken in this work, a unified theory of philosophical theology and ecology, it is actually important as the work undertaken here benefits from the experience and mature formulation of the relationship between philosophy and science. Non-Philosophy provides the philo-fiction that allows us to treat these discursive fields as simple material, as an occasion for thought that is autonomous but foreclosed from the Real and this realization is liberating for thought as it breaks the transcendental hallucinations of standard philosophical practice, whether that practice goes under the name of scientism or vitalism.