Meillassoux, Non-contradiction, and Hyper-Chaos Time

This chapter retests Pyrrho and Aenesidemus’ instability thesis and their meteorology against Meillassoux’s rational and materialist take on time. Instead of pitching a radical instability against the fixity of “now-time” and durations, and therefore of the whole cohort of correlationist apperceptions of time (including time as inner-experience), Meillassoux rivets such an absolute instability right at the heart of the Principle of Non-contradiction. With him, the principle is no longer fixed by timeless predicates as in Aristotle, but by a hyper-chaos time that knows no breath. How does Meillassoux articulate this and what would the Pyrrhonians say about it? The argument of this chapter is to say that such a speculation is somewhat troublesome because in order to rethink Aristotle’s principle, Meillassoux has no choice, but to mortgage the autonomy of hyper-chaos to the chronological temporality it superciliously purports to do without. Once more, reasoned human logic wins the trophy of meaning, but fails in providing an adequate “apprehension” of time and reality because once again, it arrives too late.