Correlation, Speculation, and the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis - Ray Brassier

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:01

  on the theme of contingency, although, in a way, on the face of it, the Seloridian critique of Meisun is obvious. It's obvious to see what sorts of objections a Seloridian would make to Meisun. In fact, Dionysus already written a very elegant and convincing Seloridian critique of Meisun's arguments in . So I'm going…

• 00:11:18

  The non-existence of the correlation is not merely epistemically possible for us, but alethically possible. It's a real possibility. This alethic possibility indexes a pure ontological potentiality, uncoupled from the determinacy of substance. This is what Meillassoux calls super-contingency, or absolute time. And…

• 00:21:57

  But the unfortunate consequence, this is why mathematics is the only strictly rigorous science. It captures the pure facticity of things. The problem being that once description is decoupled from explanation, conceptual changes have causes but no reasons. I think this is an implausible, well, it just seems implausible…

• 00:34:31

  This is different from saying what you must be able to say to use another vocabulary. Branham is between saying and doing an elaborate investigation of all these distinctions. This is the final section, so the end is in sight. Saying and doing. The consequence of this is an interesting I think ramifications for this…

• 00:48:03

  I'm not sure if Sellers proposes to identify these regular principles because although he's a Kantian, but he also has... he wants to... he wants to say that the principles of the understanding and the ideas, the relative ideas, can't be... can't be reflexively identified in a way in which Kant thought he could do. I…

• 00:59:36

  of RDRD it's like Brandon's account of RDRD is okay as far as it goes but crucially he never asked like so so for instance might as well just spit out sentences right for all that he's concerned right but crucially when he's talking about classification you're talking about the application of concepts…

• 01:13:49

  And... So these are like ultimate kind of, you know, transcendental categories, because they're categories that are... That govern the functioning of all lower level, or more kind of determined categories. And it seems that if you understand the functioning of these categories, you can then establish... And…

• 01:28:54

  This is obviously something he shares deeply with this. And yes, I think that's another kind of way. But also, I mean, if you present it that way, it sounds like it's just a logic. It's a logically mature or sensible version of the revolution. Mature or sensible or revolutionary, whatever. It's epistemologically…