Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy: All Thoughts are Equal

The wide-ranging theoretical project of François Laruelle offers perhaps the most radical and ambitious program in contemporary Continental thought.

All Thoughts Are Equal (John O Maoilearca)The wide-ranging theoretical project of François Laruelle offers perhaps the most radical and ambitious program in contemporary Continental thought. It purports to detail a rigorous critical theory of philosophy that is at the same time the instantiation of an alternate form of thinking called “non-philosophy” or “non-standard philosophy”, a form of thought provocative of and compatible with the creative proliferation of new practical and theoretical models for art, science, politics, and history, as well as philosophy itself. The long-simmering Francophone critical reception of Laruelle’s work was joined by attention from Anglophone scholars after the first full-length translations of Laruelle’s work appeared in 2010. Since then, Laruelle continues to be highly productive, and over a dozen of his books have now been translated into English, with more slated for publication. All Thoughts Are Equal appears, thus, among a burgeoning secondary literature on Laruelle that is now coming into its own. In the book, Ó Maoilearca, one of the first English-language scholars to examine Laruelle’s work, aims “to explain Laruelle’s strange image of philosophy” (4), that is, to introduce his distinctive notion of non-philosophy, and to do so in a way that instantiates, rather than merely represents, Laruelle’s non-philosophical way of thinking.

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Published in: Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy
By: Rocco Gangle