German philosopher Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer developed an early approach to philosophy called non-philosophy.
[2] Japanese Kyoto school philosopher Hajime Tanabe advanced another early notion on non-philosophy in his 1945 tome Philosophy as Metanoetics.
Examples from the history of philosophy include Immanuel Kant's distinction between the synthesis of manifold impressions and the faculties of the understanding; Martin Heidegger's split between the ontic and the ontological; and Jacques Derrida's notion of différance/presence.
[6] Brassier also defines non-philosophy as the "theoretical practice of philosophy proceeding by way of transcendental axioms and producing theorems which are philosophically uninterpretable".
In this sense, non-philosophy is radically performative because the theorems deployed in accordance with its method constitute fully-fledged scientific actions.
"By problematizing what he terms 'The Statist Ideal,' or the 'Unitary Illusion' - be it negative (Hegel) or positive (Nietzsche) - Laruelle interrogates the 'scission' of the minority subject, which he contends is a “symptom” of the Western dialectic practice.
According to Laruelle, the decisional character of philosophy makes immanence impossible for it, as some ungraspable splitting is always taking place within.
Thus, non-philosophy is also related to Gnosticism and science-fiction; it answers their fundamental question — which is not at all philosophy's primary concern — ‘Should humanity be saved?
"[8]Numbered amongst the early members or sympathizers of sans-philosophie ("without philosophy") are those included in a collection published in 2005 by L’Harmattan:[9] François Laruelle, Jason Barker, Ray Brassier, Laurent Carraz, Hugues Choplin, Jacques Colette, Nathalie Depraz, Oliver Feltham, Gilles Grelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, Gilbert Hottois, Jean-Luc Rannou,[10] Pierre A. Riffard, Sandrine Roux and Jordanco Sekulovski.
Since then, a slew of translations and new introductions have appeared from John Ó Maoilearca (Mullarkey), Anthony Paul Smith, Rocco Gangle, Katerina Kolozova, and Alexander Galloway.