Introduction: The Philosophical Conjuncture | 1
Part I: Rationalist Empiricism
1. Absent Blue Wax: On the Mingling of Methodological Exceptions | 35
2. Althusser's Dream: The Materialist Dialectic of Rationalist Empiricism | 50
Part II: Speculative Critique
3. Hegel's Cogito: On the Genetic Epistemology of Critical Metaphysics | 73
4. Hegel's Apprentice: From Speculative Idealism to Speculative Materialism | 90
Part III: Science, Art, Structure
5. Hegel's Kilogram: Taking the Measure of Metrical Units | 125
6. The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier | 141
7. Where's Number Four? The Place of Structure in Plato's Timaeus | 166
Coda: Structure and Form | 181
Part IV: Theory and Praxis
8. Badiou after Meillassoux: The Politics of the Problem of Induction | 185
9. The Criterion of Immanence and the Transformation of Structural Causality:
From Althusser to Théorie Communiste | 204
10. The Analytic of Separation: History and Concept in Marx | 228
Conclusion: The True, the Good, the Beautiful | 249
Acknowledgments | 263
Notes | 265
Works Cited | 291
Index | 301

Rationalist Empiricism is a study of the dialectical relation between reason and experience in ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, engaging as well with political theory, the science of measurement, and experimental photography. Across these fields, it shows that coordinating the discrepant claims of rationalism and empiricism is the key to reconciling the speculative and critical vocations of theory and practice.

Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics.