The Fossils of French Spiritualism. Quentin Meillassoux – a New Path in the History of Philosophy?

Alain Badiou, in his “canonical” foreword to Quentin Meillassoux’s major work After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence, 2006), claims that Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy. In my opinion, this claim is highly exaggerated. I argue that main ideas of Meillassoux's speculative materialism – such as epistemological optimism, the reactivation of discourse on the absolute, radical anti-Platonism, critique of the principle of sufficient reason, and the contingency of being – had already been clearly articulated long before him by representatives of French spiritualism, a highly influential but now almost forgotten philosophical current in 19th-century France.