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Worthwhile philosophy is like building matchstick galleons When Lewis says that all possible worlds are just as real as this one, or Chalmers says that a thermostat is conscious, or Parfit says that there is no persistent self, or Plantinga says that belief in God is no more unreasonable than belief in other minds, these are assertions of fantastic intellectual audacity – but only because they have been raised up out of close reasoning and incremental advancements   In general, continental philosophers prefer to operate outside these constraints, and are therefore also denied these satisfactions They have sex before marriage, so they don’t get a wedding night The closest thing to audacity that continental philosophy can ever manage now is when, for instance, Žižek says something tasteless about Josef Fritzl, and even then no one is genuinely offended, because they already know and love Žižek   But one exception has recently emerged   ‘What is it that happened 456 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?’ That shouldn’t be an electrifying question, but it is, at least in the context in which it is posed: a short book by a brilliant new philosopher who is also a practising Frenchman Let’s assume that we respond to it with what Quentin Meillassoux would call an ancestral statement: ‘Yes, the accretion of the earth did happen I wasn’t there myself, but it definitely happened’ As Meillassoux writes in After Finitude, ‘What distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher in this matter is that only the former is capable of being astonished by the straightforwardly literal meaning of the ancestral statement’ If you’re not quite sure how anyone, even a philosopher, could be astonished by ‘The accretion of the earth did happen’, then you obviously haven’t spent much time reading continental philosophy (My warmest congratulations on your good fortune) In continental philosophy, that statement about accretion would be regarded as naïve, obtuse, old-fashioned, meaningless, and/or fascistic For example, here is one writer’s response ‘Let’s pretend it’s the late 19th century and phrenology is accepted as a science And someone like Meillassoux comes along and