Theory of thresholds

There is a problem philosophy has not solved in twenty-five centuries, partly because it almost never saw it as a single problem: the passage between orders that do not resemble each other —sound and sense, matter and psyche, the qualo and the logos. Faced with it, thought usually takes one of two false exits: reduce one world to the other, or fuse them into one. Theory of Thresholds proposes a third: articulate. When two domains are irreducible, the passage between them is not explained by reduction, but by studying the threshold that makes it possible.

A companion to Qualic Metaphysics, this book gives a name and an architecture to something that was everywhere without being thought. It defines the threshold —the philosophical form of the between— and its triad (habence, threshold, trace). It describes its operation (transduction, which in human beings becomes creation), its features and its topology. It follows its major cases —the qualic threshold and the phonic threshold— and lets Gödel, Luhmann and category theory teach how to think the passage between systems, without turning philosophy into mathematics. Finally, it founds an ethics and an aesthetics of the threshold. Philosophical, poetic and rigorous, it is the first treatise of a science that does not yet exist: the science of the passage between worlds.