For the English-speaking reader, the force of Meillassoux's polemic against correlationism requires some explanation. In order to see what he's getting at, it is necessary to appreciate the way in which French philosophy has been dominated since the 1930s by "les trois H": Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. The correlationism of Hegel's idealism might appear obvious, but Meillassoux's real target is phenomenology.

Husserl's entire enterprise is based on the idea of a correlation between the intentional acts of consciousness and the objects of those acts, the distinction between what he calls noesis and noema in his later work. Although the intellectualism and Cartesianism of Husserl's phenomenology is heavily criticized by Heidegger, the latter's project of fundamental ontology is also profoundly correlationist. The central proposition of Being and Time is : "Dasein (or the human being) is being-in-the-world". Although the world that Heidegger describes is what he calls "the work world" of everyday things in a practical context, which has led some contemporary pragmalists to find parallels with William James and John Dewey, the world is simply a correlate of Dasein. Without Dasein, there would be no things and no world.

The pervasive influence of Heidegger's critique of Husserl is obvious to anyone familiar with French philosophy from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty through to Levinas and Derrida. But what exactly is the problem with correlationism ? Well, it is twofold. First, by denying thought any rational access to primary qualities or things in themselves, correlationism allows that space to be filled by any number of irrational discourses, such as religion. In a powerful critique of the theological turn in French phenomenology, for example in the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Meillassoux shows how the flip side of correlationism is fideism, that is, the rather vague discourse on the numinous that one finds in many followers of Heidegger, but also - it should be added - in Wittgenstein's curious remarks about the mystical towards the end of the Tractatus. Such is what Meillassoux calls "the religionizing of reason".

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